He jumped out of his rack, quickly stepped into his uniform and jammed his feet into his boots, furious at himself. He jumped through the curtain of the berthing compartment and into the fluorescent passageway, half expecting to see Chief Zimmerman charging toward him.
He nearly tripped over a dead body at his feet.
Further up the passage way, he saw another.
The ship’s machinery around him hummed with electricity and purpose, but he couldn’t hear a human sound of any kind.
“Hey!” he yelled, hoarse from sleep. He cleared his throat and yelled again. “Injured man!”
No one responded.
He walked carefully forward, stepping over each body in turn. He passed another berthing area where he saw a man hanging halfway out of his bunk, his face contorted in pain.
He reached Crew’s Mess and saw more dead men than he could count. Chief Zimmerman was in the center of the space, sprawled in a chair, a coffee cup spilled in front him, a brown puddle at his feet. His eyes were wide open, and looking right at him, as if angry at him for missing his stint in the scullery.
He fought off a growing tide of panic. Was it a nightmare? He only wished he was still sleeping. He fought the urge to return to his rack, the last place he’d felt safe. Was it radiation? He remembered guys at bootcamp who had exchanged stories about the hazards of nuclear power, how it would make your testicles shriveled and their hair fall out. At sub school, these had been countered by bland praise by engineering officers on behalf of nuclear power, stories of its harmlessness that were only slightly more convincing. Had the ship run out of air? Had they been attacked by some exotic weapon? None of these made sense, none explained why he was still on his feet.
Staring at the dead bodies of his shipmates, he tried to figure out what to do. Like most of the new men, he was supposed to report to the Crew’s Mess for all manner of alarms and battle stations; the space was now filled with their bodies. Should he now go to control? If there were men alive anywhere, he thought, that’s where they might be. Could they radio for help? Is that something they can do underwater? It occurred to him that he didn’t even know for certain that the ship was underway.
That seemed like a vital piece of information. Maybe this disaster had befallen them pierside, and he could just climb out of the boat, into safety. He pictured a team of scientists topside, men in spacesuits with Geiger counters, trying to determine if anyone was alive on the Boise. He’d open the hatch, or at least bang on it until a rescuer heard him. He wondered: would he be a hero? Would they make him go to sea on another boat? He closed his eyes to try to sense if they were moving. Encouragingly, the ship seemed completely motionless.
He ran forward to control, trying to avoid looking any more dead men in the eyes as he went. On the ladder to control the XO was blocking him, his gaping mouth showing missing teeth. Is that a symptom of something? Didn’t high radiation make your teeth fall out? Winn fought the urge to reach into his mouth and feel.
Up the ladder and into control.
Bodies were everywhere in the cramped space. Two dead men in their seats, the helm and lee helm. The Diving Officer was strapped into his chair with a large hole between his shoulder blades. On the floor near him was an enlisted man Winn knew: Diaz. In Diaz’s seat was someone Winn didn’t recognize. He must be a nuke, he thought, those guys kept to themselves in those rare times they weren’t in the engine room. But why would a nuke be on the helm? Control had the look of a fierce struggle that had been frozen in time. Winn smelled the tang of cordite in the air, a recent gunshot.
“Hello?” He shouted to no one.
He turned to see the Officer of the Deck, sprawled on the ground, masked in an EAB; Winn walked over to get a better look. The mask was half filled with thick, congealing blood. The OOD’s hand was extended and Winn followed it with his eyes; he saw the .45 lying on the deck.
He picked it up. It gave him an odd sense of comfort, even though he couldn’t imagine what good the weapon would do him now. But the pistol was, after all, one of the few pieces of equipment on the boat that he’d been trained to operate, in two sweaty days at the range at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. He stuck it in his belt.
When he stood, his eyes caught the red digital numbers of the bearing repeater. One hundred and fifty feet, five knots.
He sighed with despair at the confirmation. At some level he’d so vividly pictured himself along the pier, climbing to his salvation, that it took him a disorienting, crushing minute to comprehend again that they were in fact underwater. He pictured 150 feet of ocean above him, an infinity of water in every other direction.
He would have blown to the surface right then, on his own, had he known how. He’d heard of the “chicken switches” that would fill the main ballast tanks with air and bring them to the surface so fast that the ship would actually broach, and leap out of the ocean. He’d been promised that they would do it early in their patrol as a training evolution, and that it was one of the more thrilling things that could happen on a submarine.
But control was covered in valves, and switches, and buttons, and he had no idea which would bring them to the surface. He realized that he might just as easily, in his ignorance, throw open valves that would sink them to the bottom of the ocean.
As he searched the control room, methodically looking for the fabled chicken switches, he wondered for the first time why he had been spared. Maybe he was just genetically fortunate, immune to whatever it was, like one of those lone survivors in any of the many zombie movies he’d watched back in the real world. More likely, he thought, it had something to do with him being asleep during those first few hours. He was the only man on the entire crew asleep then, it had taken the direct permission of the captain to make that happen. Perhaps asleep, breathing slowly in the confines of his rack, he had somehow escaped the most dangerous phase of whatever the hazard was.
He was starting to despair at the number of valve handles and switches in control, all labeled indecipherably, when he stood between the two fallen planesmen.
Fuck it, he thought. I’ll drive us up.
Like shooting the .45, it was something he’d actually been taught, in the ship control trainers at Sub School in Connecticut. He pushed the dead nuke, gently at first, and then harder, as he made room for himself. He cringed when the man’s head hit the deck with a harsh thud. He sat down, put both hands on the wheel, and said a silent prayer before he slowly pulled the wheel toward his chest.
The stern planes indicator immediately showed the motion, a red arrow on a dial that moved up. Soon after, the ship responded, and began to move upward. Winn whooped for joy as he watched the numbers of the ship’s depth indicator decrease as he drove the ship toward the surface.
They accelerated as they got shallower, then the boat leveled off. Winn actually heard waves against the side of the ship; they were on the surface! He’d done it. He jumped out the chair and ran toward the hatch that led to the bridge.
He climbed the ladder and studied the hatch, eager to figure out how to open it. As he was looking, he felt the ship take a down angle.
Without his hands on the stern planes to override it, the ship’s autopilot and reasserted itself, and drove them downward.
“Fuck!” said Winn. He jumped down the ladder and back to the stern planes. He grabbed the wheel without sitting down and pulled it forward again. Again the planes and ship responded. But as soon as he let go, the ship wanted to drive itself deep again. Winn had no idea what the autopilot was, or that the button to disable it was just inches away from him.