Sea of Lost Souls Read online

  I shoved him away and kept running down the narrow passageway, once more sprinting past huddles of sailors who pointed and whispered. I had no idea where I was running, but if I followed the leaking pipes overhead, maybe I’d find a place of safety.

  I burst through a door and tumbled onto the flight deck, where the aviators were still attending to their vintage planes. My chest heaving, I sidled alongside the hull and slunk into the shadow of a lone Corsair. I clutched the landing gear, then kneeled on the rubber tires. Sweat, and a few tears, dripped off of my chin.

  A man with orange paddles hurried past me to an open section of the flight deck and raised them, his paddles moving in the intricate movements of air traffic control. Indeed, he was staring at the sky beyond the stern of the ship. I squinted against the glare of the late-morning sun, and sure enough, a silvery plane was coming in for a landing.

  The plane neared, its mechanical drone drowning out all other sounds. Finally, it touched down on the deck and bounced once, the tail hook catching on the rusting cable. Flight deck workers ran out and greeted the pilot, who gave them a friendly wave through the glass.

  I couldn’t help but watch the team as they worked to bring the plane in and begin routine maintenance, and as my heart settled back into its normal pace, the analytical side of my brain won out again.

  Everyone looked so happy and normal here. Adjusted. The happiness automatically struck down the possibility that I was in a place of eternal torment—so was this the place of eternal peace and rest? I’d spent little time studying the afterlife in shul. I’d been told that I would be “gathered to my people” when I died, and perhaps meet Hashem, whose true name was so holy that we didn’t dare to speak it.

  But everyone was working here, and the officer wielding a gun didn’t exactly hint at eternal peace. I wasn’t surrounded by scores of Jews, from what I could tell. Nothing I’d seen hinted at the near presence of deity, either.

  This was all very disappointing.

  The door I’d come through opened again, and my shipmates came out, their heads turning. Torres saw me and opened her mouth, but I put a finger to my lips. She nodded, tapped Bickley on the shoulder, and pointed to me.

  They rushed over and hid with me in the shadow of the Corsair. After everything that had happened, I wanted to hug these two. However, I just swallowed and glanced around us, then gestured for them to huddle around me. “What happened back there?” I whispered. “I had to leave. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Bickley palmed his face. “I don’t know. The other sailors cleared out after you ran, but Hollander got into a shouting match with Gorman and Muree. We ran out as soon as we could and followed you.”

  Torres squeaked. “How do you think they did it? They really did shoot him.”

  The Corsair that had just landed taxied past us, and the flight deck crew walked in the other direction. Their loud masculine laughter was relaxing, in a way. Familiar. The military I was from was full of happy people at work, teams of buddies who worked together like a well-oiled machine. The people around me had been part of my own team.

  I closed my eyes, straining for even the tiniest recollection of my final moment on the USS Taft.

  A sound.

  A sensation.

  Nothing.

  Fingers brushed mine. I opened my eyes to see Torres peering at me, tiny wrinkles appearing between her eyebrows. “Are you okay?” she whispered. “I heard your thoughts in the conference room. I heard about your parents.”

  I leaned against the Corsair. “Yeah, and I heard about your dad and your brother. I heard all of that stuff. We had some kind of mind-meld woo-woo mojo thing going on for a few seconds. If anyone has any—”

  “We’re spiritually connected,” Torres said.

  “Excuse me?” Bickley said, a sigh in each word.

  Torres stood her ground, pulling back her shoulders. “I’m not going to let you guys make fun of me this time. I really am psychic. I woke up to the sound of someone telling me she was happy to have me on board, and now I know who it was. The ship was talking to me. Back there, when we all went haywire, we were feeding into each other’s emotions. We became, like, poltergeists.”

  She blushed pink. “I think I was the catalyst for that. I was so angry. I had all these thoughts running through my head, and then suddenly I could see a little bit of the history of the people in the room, and the ship was there, its own entity. I made the porthole glass crack, remember?”

  Bickley shook his head. “No. It’s too ridiculous. We’re not dead. I can feel the heat reflecting off the flight deck right now. My hand still hurts from punching Hollander. We’re alive. Back there, something happened, and I don’t know what, but we’re not dead. Maybe we’ve all been given LSD.”

  Torres and I exchanged a doubtful look.

  He took in a steadying breath, then exhaled heavily, clearly thinking hard. “Okay, that sounded far fetched. The way I see it, we’re in some kind of fantastical mess. I’m an open-minded guy, right? I can accept that there are forces at work here that I didn’t know existed. But we’re not dead.”

  Torres rocked back on her heels. “They kept saying that they’d visited the scene of the so-called crash. Maybe we can, too. That would be hard to fake. Wanna ask the nurses? They seemed friendly.”

  Bickley nodded. “Stay here. I’m going to ask that guy how we got on board.” He pulled back his shoulders and stalked off toward a lone flight crew guy who was taking off work gloves several feet from us.

  Though I’d never say it out loud, I was glad Bickley was taking charge.

  We all watched as Bickley spoke in a low voice to the man, who replied inaudibly. After a few exchanges, they both walked over to us. His uniform identified him as Seaman Stanholtzer.

  Stanholtzer smiled from ear to ear when he saw Torres and me. “I’d heard there were real women sailors aboard, but I didn’t believe it. I think I was born in the wrong decade.”

  Torres offered her hand. “And what decade was that?”

  “Born in 1921, ma’am. Died 1943.”

  I paused, then offered my hand to the dashing brunet. “You, um, look good for a dead man.”

  Stanholtzer laughed while he shook my hand. “I could say that you look good for a dead woman. Was it the jet? That’s what they were saying down in berthing.”

  I couldn’t help a blush. Nobody liked to hear a qualifier after “you look good,” supposedly-dead or not.

  “We were kind of hoping you could tell us a bit about what happened last night,” Bickley said, a thread of imperative in his tone. “You mentioned that we got here through ‘weak spots’ when you were talking to me a minute ago. What are those?”

  Stanholtzer must’ve heard it too, because he stepped back and deflated. “They’re the holes in the fabric of reality. Like a curtain on a window, sometimes the fabric has a spot that’s more worn than the rest of the fabric. Some are large enough for a ship to pass through, while others are very small, no bigger than a few feet wide. In the world of the living, there are people who can sense those spots, or at least sense what comes through. In my day we called them fortune tellers, soothsayers, and things like that.”

  “Psychics,” Torres murmured. “That’s another term.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that one, too,” Stanholtzer said. “We have a psychic on board, actually. Seaman Wayne. He foresaw the crash and…” Stanholtzer stopped, apparently picking his words. “…he claims he wanted to warn you all. The way I heard it, though, he actually was going back and forth between the ships and mucking around on the living ship, causing trouble. He got caught last night when he was sneaking back onto the Saint Catherine, and the Master at Arms tossed him in the brig. He’s lucky, though. There are many weak spots around these parts that pirates use to chase down ghosts like us. He could’ve easily ran into one of them.”

  “Causing trouble,” I repeated. “Like, maybe, throwing chem lights overboard?” My stomach tightened. If that man-overboard hadn’
t been called, Torres and Bickley wouldn’t have been in the reactor office with me. They probably would’ve lived.

  Stanholtzer shrugged. “Can’t say I know what a chem light is, ma’am, but it sounds like something Wayne would do.”

  Bickley gulped, and I saw the pain and anger in his eyes. “One last thing. Where is the weak spot that Seaman Wayne went through to get to our ship?”

  Stanholtzer paused, and a grim look overtook his features. “Oh, I know where this is going. You can’t go back. You have to understand that. You’re dead, Petty Officer. All of you are. I’ve had this talk before. There’s nothing to be found but trouble on living ships.”

  “Where is it?” I repeated.

  Stanholtzer’s eyes flickered over to a corner of the hangar bay, then back to us. “I have to go,” he said in an undertone. “If—no, when you get caught, you never talked to me, okay? It’s not worth getting dumped in Port des Morts.”

  “Right,” we all said. I didn’t care enough to ask where Port des Morts was. I wasn’t going there.

  Stanholtzer hurried off, throwing a dark look at us once before disappearing through a doorway.

  Bickley slammed his fist against the Corsair. “Did I just hear that we were all in that room together, and thus died together, because some asshat on this ship was throwing chem lights overboard as a prank?”

  “That seems to be the measure of it,” Torres grumbled. “And we’re obviously not in Heaven. I wouldn’t say this is Hell, either. Ergo, Purgatory. We’re being purged of—”

  “Shut up, Torres!” Bickley’s shout caught the attention of several passerby, and we retreated deeper into the shadows. “Knock it off,” he hissed, quieter. “Can we just…quit it with the afterlife stuff? I don’t think we’re in any kind of afterlife any of us has heard about.” He shot me a quizzical look. “What did you learn in shul?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, gee. Right after the part about how to clean the temple, there’s this long description of Hashem’s instructions on how to build a ghost ship, and He gave it to Noah’s cousin Brad, who—”

  “Enough,” Torres barked. Her hands were on her head, and her stricken expression, with tears on her cheeks, was enough to make me regret my sarcasm.

  I pulled her into a hug, and let her sob unrestrainedly on my chest. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “We’ll figure this out.” Tears spilled over on my own cheeks, and we wept together, just Marisol and Rachel, two friends lost at sea.

  Torres hiccuped. “I can feel it.”

  “Feel what?” I said dully.

  “The weak spot that Wayne went through. It’s definitely right over there. It’s billowing out all this… energy, I guess. Like an open window allowing a draft to come in.”

  I couldn’t feel anything.

  “Everyone, act nonchalant,” Bickley said in a low voice. “There are people over there.”

  We walked into the enormous, shady hangar in which planes were stored. We weren’t bothered by anyone, since most of them were absorbed in their daily tasks, probably uninterested in whatever the newbies were doing.

  In the corner of my eye, I saw a few men begin to unload crates of ordnance from a cargo plane. Why was there so much ordnance? What did this crew expect to happen?

  I gave my head a little shake. I didn’t care, because it didn’t matter.

  Torres guided us to a spot near the corner. “It’s right here.” She craned her neck and looked around, then held out her hands. “I can see the opening. It’s all intuitive for me, like I was born for this. Grab on.”

  The door Stanholtzer had gone through opened up, and he came back out—this time with the Master at Arms and two of his deputies. He pointed toward us.

  “Hey!” the Master at Arms yelled. “Get away from there!”

  “Now!” I shouted.

  We took her hands, and her eyelids fluttered. My body fell through an invisible gauze, as thin as gossamer. The entire world receded into blackness as I descended into a well—no, a chasm—of nothingness.

  Above me, at the entrance of the well and getting farther and farther away each second, the Master of Arms held out his hands, horror etched onto his face.

  4

  I could see the result of the wind that whipped through the charred room, but I could not feel it. That was the first shock.

  A stiff sea breeze blew continually through the enormous gaping maw in the side of the USS Taft, causing ashes and charred bits of detritus to flutter along the ruined deck plates, but not even the hair on my arms stood up. Instead, I drifted through the ashy space, soundless, and stared at everything.

  It was so quiet. Unnaturally quiet.

  Why wasn’t there any noise? Certainly the two men down the passageway should’ve made some, since their mouths were moving. The waves that crashed against the hull below should’ve sent up roars of sea spray and hissing. The helicopter that hovered nearby should’ve drowned out everything with its thud-thud-thuds.

  But all I could hear was my own fake breath. Fake—because I was a ghost floating through where I’d died. There was no denying it anymore.

  The room where we were was more of a “space” now. Our cause of death was childishly easy to suss out: Commander Hollander’s aircraft had exploded upon impact with the hull of the ship, blasting open the side and filling the reactor office with flames fed by jet fuel. The ceiling, deck, and bulkheads had melted in the heat, creating a cavern that stretched five levels.

  We hadn’t burned. We’d been vaporized. That was the sensation I’d felt in my last moment, and for the first time, I was grateful that my memory stopped there. I was dimly aware of Bickley and Torres floating nearby, but I couldn’t see them. In fact, I couldn’t see myself. I was merely that, an awareness.

  The carcass of the F-18 had fallen through the deck into the room below. I drifted downward and gasped when I saw the twisted, destroyed wreckage: racks. Sailors had been sliding back into bed when the accident had occurred, and many wouldn’t have had time to escape. A burning plane, and the deck it landed on, had collapsed on them. Liquid fuel, so hot the flames would’ve been invisible, had poured down onto the terrified sailors in their last moments.

  Captain Gorman had claimed that my shipmates, those poor people in the compartment below the reactor office, had gone to their final rest… but not us. The USS Saint Catherine had snatched three nukes, and the aviator that had caused all the trouble, and tucked us securely into the sick bay.

  But why? What could we possibly offer to a ghost ship from World War II? I drifted around the space, alone and bodiless. There were no answers for me here, but then again, what did I expect?

  A low, animalistic growl made me turn around, but there was nothing there. “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  But I wasn’t alone. Eyes were on me. I drifted away from the wreckage, the echo of cold trickling down my neck.

  “Rachel… bravest woman I ever met…” A female voice called me to itself.

  I thought about answering it—and then I was there. I had no recollection of traveling from one end of the ship to the other.

  I was in the ship’s chapel, a place I’d only been in once or twice. Sunlight leaked through the bland stained glass windows, illuminating the face of a young woman I knew from the reactor department. Her voice came in and out as she spoke to a crowd of sailors.

  A memorial service.

  I drifted forward and looked over my shoulder at the assembled faces, then froze. It wasn’t just any memorial service, it was a department memorial service, comprising my former colleagues.

  I had no idea who was speaking about me. Regret and shame twisted inside, and I bowed my head. She was brand new to the ship, I knew that, and I’d said hello to her once or twice in the passageway. But goodness, she looked cut up about poor, dead Rachel Goldstein.

  Dang it, what was her name?

  She was still speaking. “…when Lieutenant Murphy told me that she’d dragged Petty Officer Rollins all the way to the
reactor control room, I wasn’t surprised.” She laughed through her tears. “Petty Officer Goldstein always made sure to say hello to me when she saw me. I guess she knew I was new, and…”

  Had I always said hello? My mother had always accused me of being too lost in my own head to ever acknowledge when she was talking. Maybe I had grown up a little in the Navy.

  Portraits were lined up behind the woman, no doubt hastily printed off in a yeoman’s office. My portrait sat between Bickley’s and Torres’, while Rollins was on the far right. The remaining picture was of Chief Swanson, who was actually smiling in his portrait.

  The nuclear navy had taken a heavy loss, indeed.

  It made sense that the nukes were holding a private, departmental memorial service; nobody from the rest of the ship would’ve known who we even were. Nukes were always relegated to the bottom of the ship, behind heavy doors and stern keep-out signs. We were a close-knit community whose lives revolved around the reactors. The ship-wide memorial service would be larger and fancier, but this was the real one. This was the one where people were truly mourning me.

  I went through the aisles of seats, taking in every single face.

  The Reactor Officer, the highest officer in the department, was crying. He’d always made sure to visit us during long night watches. His wife had liked to send in home-baked treats for us when we were in port.

  I kissed his cheek and whispered words of thanks.

  Lieutenant Murphy wept into a lace handkerchief, and it occurred to me that she was probably aware that she was the last living person to speak to me. In fact, she’d been unfortunate enough to call the medical emergency for a dead man just minutes before.

  I kneeled down in front of her. “Hey, I’m okay,” I said as kindly as I could. “Rollins is too, I think. We didn’t feel any pain.”

  “Speak for yourself, chick.”

  I spun around.

  Rollins, still in his bloody uniform, was leaning casually against the bulkhead. He gave me a little wave. “You went poof in that crash, but I banged my head. Hurt like hell.”