Sea of Lost Souls Page 3

  The proportions of rank were wrong, too. There were a great deal of lower enlisted sailors, but almost no chiefs. It was ten minutes before we passed another officer, a young ensign in a uniform I’d only seen in movies, with tan shoes instead of black. He caught sight of Commander Hollander and saluted. “Welcome aboard, sir. I’ll see you later in the officer’s mess.”

  Commander Hollander saluted in return, his face betraying the exact same confusion I felt. He looked over his shoulder at us. “That man was dressed like my grandfather was in his service portrait.”

  Peggy didn’t seem to hear us. Instead, we went up three flights of stairs, and then she pushed open a large steel door. We stepped onto the flight deck—and gasped in unison.

  We were definitely on an Essex-class carrier, complete with airplanes that looked like a squadron straight out of a World War II epic. Hellcats, Helldivers, Avengers, and Corsairs glinted in the sun on the deck, their crews happily chatting while they cleaned, waxed, tightened screws, and tossed tools back and forth to each other.

  Three planes flew over in formation, and I stumbled backward as I craned my neck to follow them with my eyes. Two more flew in a different direction, so low that I could see their large payloads.

  There was no mistake—they were armed for war.

  And now that I knew what to look for, I could see that the Saint Catherine had indeed seen war. Scorch marks marred the hull, and men were cleaning the guns and crew-served machine guns, chatting away as they worked. Wooden crates sat here and there, some marked ORDNANCE.

  “What is going on?” I whispered.

  I turned around where I stood, searching for the lie. All of these planes were the stuff of childhood models and vintage collections. I knew for a fact that some of them were on display at the National Air and Space Museum Annex in northern Virginia. None of them were in service. They were all propeller planes, for heaven’s sake.

  Moreover, we were on the tell-tale flat, straight runway of an old aircraft carrier. Only new ones had the angled runways. More sailors were visible now, and all of them attended to their work while wearing the dated uniforms. One seaman took a drag from a cigarette while a lieutenant walked past, and the lieutenant didn’t even blink.

  If this was a dream, it was a trippy one. If it was a hoax, it was on a scale heretofore unfathomable to me. But it was all so real, so lucid and tangible. It couldn’t have been a dream. The cool salt spray of the ocean would’ve woken me as it blew over my face and teased wisps of my hair. The leather bomber jackets and scratched goggles worn by the aviators were too lived-in to be costumes. Those were real people attending to those planes.

  Torres grabbed my hand and yanked me toward the rest of the group. “Your mouth is open,” she said. “Let’s try to act natural.”

  Dot opened yet another steel door, and we all stepped into the cool darkness of a large passageway. With no further ado, she rapped on a door to our right, which bore a brass placard that read:

  Captain Edward Gorman, USN

  Commanding Officer

  A man’s deep voice replied: “I’m busy!”

  Peggy managed to make even her eye roll delicate. “Sir, it’s—”

  Someone ran to the door and opened it. An older gentlemen with a commander’s braiding on his sleeves began to usher us in. “You should’ve said it was you right away,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. “So much to do, so little time, come in, come in, please take a seat. Thank you, nurses. That’ll be all.” His nameplate identified him as Commander Muree. He was tall, graying, and clean-cut, like an old lawyer in the courtroom dramas I loved to watch.

  We were not in a stateroom, but rather a conference room. The mahogany table was covered in nautical charts and instruments. The warm wooden paneling along the walls lent the whole compartment a noble quality. The velvet upholstery on the chairs was finer than anything I’d ever seen in the enlisted spaces. A decorative ship’s wheel, also mahogany, was mounted on the wall. Large portholes let in streams of bright sunlight. I’d been in a conference room just once before, and this one matched the one on the Taft.

  However, the map on the far wall did not. I failed to recognize the ocean displayed thereon, nor the vast array of islands and small landmasses. It was marked merely Oceanus, a name that, while familiar to me from mythology, didn’t make actual sense. What on Earth?

  Dot and Peggy gave us sad parting smiles, then shut the door behind them.

  None of us had taken seats around the large oval table, on the far side of which sat the most exhausted-looking man I’d ever seen, with gray hair and eyes, an Edwardian beard, and wrinkles on every inch of exposed skin. He looked up at us after a second, and I was taken aback by the weight of the years I could see in his eyes.

  “Captain Gorman, I presume,” said Commander Hollander. “My name is Lieutenant Commander Arthur Hollander, United States Navy. I’m an aviation officer aboard the USS Taft. You are the commanding officer of this vessel, are you not?” While he spoke, he gestured for the rest of us to stand along the bulkhead behind him.

  “I am, Commander. Please, sit. All of you, make yourselves comfortable. You’ve come a long way.”

  Commander Hollander straightened. “Captain, I—”

  Captain Gorman stood, every action appearing deliberate in its slowness. Yet, he exuded the effortless authority that only age and experience could offer. He raised his chin, his face almost serene, and leveled a polite expression at Commander Hollander. “Commander Hollander, take your seat.”

  The words were electric, coursing through me like an iron rod jammed down my spine. Indeed, all of us stiffened as he spoke. His voice hadn’t changed, but it had. His simple statement carried in it a thread of instinctual command: I am in charge. It wasn’t scary. It wasn’t threatening. It was compelling in the fullest sense of the word. I did not want to find out what happened to people who disobeyed that voice.

  Commander Hollander sat.

  Commander Muree smiled wryly and gestured at the other chairs, which the rest of us hastily filled. He took the remaining empty seat and folded his hands on the table.

  Captain Gorman returned to his seat. “I rarely have to use my captain voice, Commander, and under the circumstances I will forgive the situation. I know you have questions. I know you all have questions. Since it’s protocol for you to speak for subordinate sailors in a situation such as this, I will address you alone unless I have reason to do otherwise.” He took a deep breath. “Commander, what is your last clear memory before you woke up?”

  Commander Hollander paused and nervously tapped his fingertips on the table, apparently weighing his options. After a few seconds, he said, “A training mission. I had just lowered the wheels for landing. I was speaking to air traffic control about the landing conditions on the deck due to the inclement weather. They were guiding me in.”

  Captain Gorman nodded. “Yes, last night was a particularly bad storm. Is that where your memory ends?”

  Commander Hollander frowned. “I… there’s something else. I suppose ‘sensation’ would be the word. Something happened, but I don’t know what.”

  Tender pity swam in Captain Gorman’s eyes for the briefest second, then he nodded. “I need to speak to your sailors now.” He looked at Bickley, who tensed. “Petty Officer, what is your last memory?”

  “We were all at muster for a man-overboard alert, sir. We were waiting for Chief Swanson to return so we could go back to bed, or watch.”

  Torres and I murmured assent.

  Captain Gorman didn’t look surprised. In fact, we must’ve confirmed something for him, because he nodded with immense soberness. “It doesn’t surprise me that you don’t remember anything. It was all so fast. I visited the scene myself once I’d heard what had happened.”

  “What was fast?” Commander Hollander asked.

  A gunshot exploded through the quiet room, sending us all to the floor with shouts alarm. We all floundered to get to our feet and away from the
maniac: Commander Muree.

  Commander Hollander clutched his chest and braced himself on the table, completely silent but for the sound of the air leaving his lungs.

  Commander Muree holstered his smoking pistol, smirking. “Settle down, sailors. He’s fine.”

  Commander Hollander moved his shaking hand and uncovered the hole in his flight suit. It was directly over his heart. After a second of staring down, he unzipped his flight suit a few inches and pulled his collar down.

  There was no bullet wound.

  “How?” he whispered. He shrank away from Gorman and Muree.

  I’d grabbed Torres and thrown her into a corner, where I shielded her from Commander Muree with my arms spread wide, and hopefully a look of stony defiance on my face. Bickley and I glanced at each other. Could we take them? Bickley was ripped, but Torres and I were tiny. Gorman and Muree were two old men, but one of them had a gun. This could go either way.

  But the captain just surveyed us all with his usual tiredness. “There’s no need to rip me limb from limb. Commander Hollander is already dead. In fact, all of you died last night.”

  3

  “You flew your aircraft into the stern of the USS Taft, Commander. The sensation you all felt was merely that of your bodies being destroyed in a fraction of a second. Truly, it’s remarkable that you felt anything at all.”

  There was total silence in the conference room. Waves lapped gently against the hull of the ship, and the gentle creaking of the vessel provided a pleasant nautical melody that clashed sharply with the conversation within.

  Commander Hollander slowly lowered his hand from his collar. “This is all a sick joke. This has to be a sick joke.”

  “You were coming in for landing, were you not? Considering the movement of the ship in the storm, and the late hour, is it so hard to believe that you made an error and crashed?”

  “You’re accusing me of killing myself and three other people,” Commander Hollander ground out. “This is beyond the pale.”

  “Twenty-five other people, actually,” Captain Gorman said mildly. “The others have all gone to their final rest. It appears that the Saint Catherine, on the other hand, desires a nuclear team and an aviator. Your arrival couldn’t have been more timely. We have several operations going on at the moment, and the ship is well past due for an upgrade.”

  I could feel my heart beating against my rib cage. How could my heart beat if I were dead?

  Commander Hollander narrowed his eyes. “You are aware that this all sounds like the ravings of a lunatic, don’t you? And isn’t it convenient that our bodies were destroyed? How do we know that this… this isn’t some kind of…” Words seemed to fail him, as they’d failed the rest of us.

  “The bullet was a blank,” Torres blurted. “Yeah, it was a blank, and there was already a hole in his uniform. That’s easy enough.”

  I cleared my throat as I dug the bullet out of the wooden paneling along the wall. It had missed my head by less than six inches.

  Commander Muree sighed. “Like I said before, we visited the scene immediately afterward. Petty Officer Goldstein was thrown from the compartment, so her family may have remains to bury.”

  Like a car crashing headfirst into a wall, my thoughts stopped. No, absolutely not, abort mission, no way in hell was any of this happening. Hannah and Mordechai Goldstein were not the parents of a dead child. They were not going to sit shiva for their twenty-one-year-old daughter. I was not dead. I was not dead. I. Was. Not. Dead.

  I closed my eyes, the analytical, annoying part of my brain not playing along with the emotional part. That cursed part of my mind jumped into action and began to parse through the absurd words, traveling backward to the previous night. Torres had heard Rollins speaking to us from somewhere near, yet far away. A ghost would’ve qualified, separated by the veil of life and death. And Rollins had been so injured when I’d found him. He’d bled out, and been so still…

  Like a match igniting in the darkness, my analysis and my emotions combusted into a tiny, growing internal flame. The first possible truth leapt up, a brainchild born of Occam’s razor: we were on some kind of ghost ship. Who was I to say that such things didn’t exist? No other possibility seemed remotely sensible. It was the simplest explanation, if the weirdest.

  “Rollins died in the engine room, didn’t he?” I asked, not caring in the least if I was breaking protocol by speaking to Gorman. “That’s why Torres could hear him. He was already on this ship.”

  “Be quiet,” Commander Hollander said, still sharp. “I’ll speak.”

  The man who had killed me dared to tell me what to do?

  My fists clenched, and I stomped up to him. “No. You killed us, sir, and my contract died with me, so shut the hell up. You’re not an officer, I’m not a petty officer, and as far as I’m concerned, you’ve done enough.” My voice was mottled by fury that coursed through my veins like magma.

  “I didn’t mean to!” Commander Hollander’s shout contained an equal venom.

  “So you’ve accepted that you’re dead,” Captain Gorman said. “You can already feel it in your bones.”

  “Can it, old man,” I snapped. I whipped my head back toward Commander Hollander. “I swore to my parents that I’d be safe in the Navy, and you just—”

  He held his hands up. “It was an accident!”

  He didn’t mean to. It was an accident. Excuses, all of them.

  The rest of us were closing in around him, a rippling energy coursing through me... and into the others. And from the others. I could feel their fury as it grew in each one of them, distinct from mine. Like an invisible iron cable, our anger and resentment yoked us together, feeding itself. My emotions braided with theirs, circling, yearning for more.

  Their thoughts and feelings raced through my own mind, blending with memories of my childhood, where I’d been held aloft on the shoulders and dreams of my doting parents. In the space of a breath, it had all been snatched from me, and that one truth began to pour forth new truths like pus.

  I’d never get married in my childhood synagogue to the elusive “good Jewish boy” they’d always hoped I’d meet. My father would never apologize to me. He’d never tell me he was proud of my achievements.

  I’d never again get to tell my parents that I loved them. That I was sorry I’d broken their hearts. That I was still their little girl. That despite temptations and flirtations with the world, they’d raised me well enough that I’d kept our faith and our ways.

  And I was privy to my friends’ losses and rages, too.

  Bickley wanted to kill Hollander all over again for taking him away from his family. He was never going to see his little sons grow up, nor reconcile with the ex-wife he still loved. Torres thought of her father, the Master Chief, and remembered how proud he’d been when she’d enlisted. Her twin brother had died in infancy, and now her parents would have to say goodbye to their remaining child.

  There was something more to Torres’s thoughts, an additional level of understanding. She was furious about something else, too.

  She was staring at Captain Gorman, her face as calculating as it was cold. “You knew,” she said quietly, her voice almost dangerous with the force of her anger. “That’s why you sent the warning on the chalkboard. You knew what was coming.” She balled her fists—and a large crack appeared in one of the portholes.

  “It wasn’t me! Stop!” Captain Gorman commanded, again in the voice that would not be disobeyed.

  But we disobeyed, and the world turned red as the cycle of sorrow spun out of control.

  The table flipped up by itself, tossing the two old men against the bulkhead. Bickley and I shoved aside the table and tackled Gorman and Muree, our fists flying. Torres jumped on Hollander. Rage poured out of us like a hurricane, tearing apart the curtains, upholstery, and even the carpet, all by itself. The portholes began to shatter, causing shards of glass to rain down on us as we tussled. Some of them froze in the air like lethal rain drops, then flew outwar
ds as if they were blown backward by the chaos, embedding themselves in the walls.

  The door flew open and several sailors jumped into the fray, pulling us off of the officers. Male shouts and female shrieks mixed to create complete pandemonium. I swung wildly for any face my fist could connect with.

  Everything began to swim together in front of my vision, all the confusion and pain from my own heart mixing with the others, beating wildly through my core like drums in the very center of my soul. I’d lost everything, lost everything, lost everything…

  I’m so sorry.

  The words, more breath than speech, whispered in my head. They were as soft as my mother’s kiss, yet solid enough to sever the connection between myself and shipmates. The speaker’s sincere condolences washed over me, breaking my heart and freezing the raging inferno that had fueled my meltdown.

  I stumbled away from the two seamen who’d put up their fists, challenging me to a fight. “What? Who said that?”

  “It was the ship,” Captain Gorman said. He was sitting up against the bulkhead, his uniform torn and scuffed in places, but otherwise unharmed. Commander Muree was in Bickley’s chokehold. Bickley made a face and pushed him away.

  Torres backed away. “What do you mean, it was the ship? What’s going on? What just happened? What is this place?!”

  The door banged against the bulkhead as I sprinted from the room.

  I’m dead. I’m not dead. I’m dead. I’m not dead. My heart was beating double-time, my blood pounding in my ears. How could this be? How could I still feel and think and hear if I were dead? How could I have a heart to beat and blood to bleed?

  A blond sailor seized my shoulders, making me stop in my tracks. “Hey, slow down there, shipmate. You’re new, aren’t you? Are you okay?”