Captain Forbes was shouting for David to report what had happened. He’d moments before been saying something about the hydraulic tools and jacks available to the divers just outside now as they’d moved the work-station just outside the hull where they believed the two men had located the autos. “Welding tools to cut large enough holes into Titanic’s side to remove each vehicle one by one,” the captain was saying at the moment of Mendenhall’s terrible passing.
“He’s dead!” shouted David in return. “Jacob’s dead—imploded! Killed by one of those damnable cars! Check my feed! I saw the whole bloody thing.”
In point of fact, David realized that miniscule pieces of Mendenhall floated before his eyes as he spoke. Topside, the cheers and laughter had long since subsided as no doubt someone upstairs had a clue as to what’d just happened—Entebbe, no doubt as he could see that Mendenhall was registering a zero across the board made up of red, green, and blue lights. Entebbe now pronounced the time of death.
“Damn it!” David shouted. “There’s nothing left of Jacob; nothing to even bring up! He’s been reduced to nothing, I tell you!”
In David’s ear via the com-link, Forbes, too was screaming Mendenhall’s name. David wondered how many of the other divers could hear this, and he wondered most if Kelly was hearing this. He only now realized that nothing black or sinister had come spewing forth out of the implosion, further proof that Jacob was never the thing Kelly hunted—and this left Lou Swigart.
“David, David! Step back! Get out of there. Nothing more you can do there now.” It was mix of Entebbe’s concerned voice and Captain Forbes’ orders coming over his com-link. “Locate Swigart and Kelly, David. Do it now.”
They knew how horrible it was to watch a man implode before one’s eyes, and they had witnessed it via David’s camera lens via replay. It’d happened so fast and unexpectedly that no one, even those monitoring had seen precisely what had caused the implosion.
David turned to leave, feeling terribly alone inside Titanic at this moment, and he thought of the last time he’d broken bread with Mendenhall, late the other evening in the galley. Jacob had gotten excited then when the subject had turned to the lost Renaults and other motorcars aboard Titanic. He heard Jacob’s voice in his head as he made his way from what was now Mendenhall’s eternity.
“Of course, we must find them!” Jacob had said. “Think of the salvage dividends for those perfectly preserved vintage babies!”
“That’s the big question—what kind of condition are the cars in after a hundred years under such pressure?” Will had asked.
“They may be the size of matchbox cars by now!” David agreed.
“You’ll all be singing a different tune when we get the first one aboard,” Jacob had replied.
“Think we can crank one of ’em up?” Will said, laughing.
“Laugh and make jokes, Bowman,” Mendenhall then said, his eyes turning morose. He had brought a book with him, and he shoved it to Will. Bowman passed the open pages around—shots of cars from that era, one after another. Jacob then said, “If the cars remained sealed or even in one of those dead zones where nothing can live, you know like the areas where they’ve found 2000-year-old wooden boats intact? Then why not these cars?”
“Yeah sure… your cars and not so much as a tinge of rust on ’em,” Will Bowman continued to tease.
“As the ship plunged, the seals to any air-tight compartments would have compressed and leaked, Jacob,” David said now, “a true dead zone might exist but it’s a big if because of all the elements that would have to converge.”
“But suppose the door held. It is a monster of a door.”
“It must’ve been like a battering ram hitting the door, the impact when she hit bottom,” David said with a shrug. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.”
“But we don’t know; the door may’ve just been torn from its track, perhaps warping but still intact, which would mean—”
“Which means you’ve given this a hell of a lot of thought,” said David, and at the time it’d made him even more suspicious that Mendenhall was Kelly and Declan’s creature, and that the man cared not a whit about the autos but was in fact brooding and surmising about his—or its—spawn, those damnable eggs also dead for certain if not in a dead zone where they might lie dormant.
“If the door’s blown, Jacob, it’s left the compartment open to wood-eating and rusticle-forming organisms—even microscopic organisms—which if in this area—” but his words fell on deaf ears as Jacob talked over him.
“A true dead zone. An absolute rarity—on the way down, the water coming in is full of organisms not suited for life at two and a half miles down… so they die off before they can do much damage.”
Now David knew that even with the seals imploding when Titanic took her dive, that the door hadn’t blown. That through some quirk of fate it’d managed remain on its track, although warped. This explained why the family of four in the one auto still had fleshy faces with eyes intact, looking like so many zombies. No organisms could get at them. Furthermore, to add to the trauma of seeing Jacob implode before him, David feared the same fate, and perhaps an even more sinister fate awaited Kelly if Lou was indeed being controlled by the monster.
David realized only now that his entire body was shaking like a leaf in the wind, so traumatized had he been on seeing Jacob die as he had. At the same time, he worked to force himself toward his next destination—the freezer unit down here somewhere, and hopefully to locate, as Captain Forbes had ordered, the two remaining dive partners he had left alive.
David must find Kelly, now. He swam as fast as he could, leaving all thought of any treasures in his wake. As he did so, he muttered, “Damn you, Mendenhall! Why couldn’t you have been patient! They had a hydraulic jack down here for us already! Right tool for the right job!”
But David was talking to himself; Jacob and his impatience, obliterated now along with his humanity, appeared all too human. Besides, if Jacob had been controlled by the creature, he would not have gone crazy over a cargo hold of shiny antiques, and so Kelly was alone with the monster somewhere inside this ship that seemed bent on killing them all, what with Lou and Kelly cut off, missing, and Jacob dead.
Meanwhile, David felt as if all the pressure around him was about to turn his head and body into so small a piece of remains as to fill a sandwich baggy. He felt horribly alone now inside Titanic. He gave a thought to the divers at the aft section of the derelict ship. There were freezer compartments there, too. In the original design of the ship, there had only been freezer holds at the aft section and not here below the stokers’ and crew’s berths; some 860 crew from maids to firemen lived on board. Below their quarters at the very bottom were the huge cargo holds—as with the automobiles. The final design placed additional freezer compartments for perishable supplies below at both ends of Titanic, the freezers ironically separated along her hull by successive stores of coal working boilers, and reciprocating engines, turbine engines, and below all this at the keel line, three shaft tunnels for the propellers and rudder.