By Blood We Live

The gun cracked behind me and I spun; there were still crewmen in the corridor but none were between me and the emergency-ladder from which Miss Paxton had just emerged and not a single one attempted to stop her. I don't think the mad bitch would have cared if they had. Maybe her tales of my perfidy had spread widely among the crew: maybe they had a better idea of what was going on below our feet than the passengers or I did. The fact remained that she had a gun and a clear shot and I knew that even a glancing wound from it could prove fatal. I hadn't drunk the blood of thousands of grimy peasants, factory-workers, prostitutes and street-urchins over the course of fourteen decades to let myself be put out of the way by an enraged middle-class virago.

I did the only thing possible.

As she fired I fell against the rail, tipped over it, and dropped straight down into that seething jade-green seawater hell.

It was every bit as cold as I'd been led to expect.

My mind seemed to fracture, to go numb. I screamed, and my mouth and lungs flooded with water-it's a damn good thing I'd quit breathing many years previously. I remember staring up through the green water and seeing Alexandra Paxton looking down at me, gun still in her hand.

I was conscious, but I felt my ability to act at all-to summon my limbs to obey my disoriented mind-bleeding out of me like gore from a severed femoral artery. I couldn't move until she left, until she was convinced that I was dead, and she seemed to stand there-gloating, I expect, the miserable cow!-forever.

Then she spit at me, and turned away.

It took what felt like minutes of slow, clumsy thrashing before I could thrust myself to the door into what I think was F Deck. My fingers were like cricket bats and I don't know how long I spent simply trying to get the door open. My brain was like a cricket bat, too, trying to fish a single wet noodle of orientation-where the hell was the stairway up to E Deck?-from the swirling maelstrom of horror, shock, terrifying weakness and nightmare panic.

And I knew with blinding certainty that, watertight compartments be damned, the ship was going down.

Voices, impossibly distant, came to me from all parts of the ship.

Voices that said, "She's sinking by the head."

Voices that said, "You must get in the boat, Mary. I shall follow later."

Voices that said, "Get back there, you. Women and children first."

Nearer, feet thudded amid a frightened yammering of Swedish, Gaelic, Arabic, Japanese: third-class passengers trying to find their way up the maze of stairways to the decks above. Crewmen shouted at them to go back, to stay in their cabins, they'd be called when it was time for them to get in the lifeboats. But I'd gone to sea, God help me, as a living man all those years ago, and I knew jolly well how many people could fit into a boat the size of the mere sixteen that were in

Titanic's davits.

I had to get up to the decks before they started letting those foreign swine take up boat-space that I'd paid for with my first-class ticket. And I had to get there before the foreign swine realized that there wasn't going to be enough room for them in the boats, and took matters out of the crew's hands and into their own dirty paws.

The struggle was literally Hellish: I refer specifically to the Fifth Circle of Dante's Hell, where the Sullen bubble in eternal stasis in the mud beneath the waters of the River Styx. I can only assume that the Styx is warmer than the Atlantic Ocean in mid-April. Water at a temperature of thirty degrees has exactly the same effect on the UnDead as it would on the living, only, of course, more prolonged, since the living wouldn't survive more than a few minutes even were breathing not an issue. Beyond the paralyzing cold, there was the sheer hammering disorientation of ocean water-living water-itself. For long periods I became simply immobilized, my brain shrieking, fighting to make a hand move, a foot thrust against the metal walls that hemmed me in; it was like trying to remain awake in the final extremities of exhaustion. I'd come out of it, twist and thrash and wrench myself to push along a foot or so, then sink back into an inactivity I couldn't break no matter how frantically I tried.

Those periods got longer, the moments of clumsy, horrified lucidity shorter and shorter. And around me I could feel the walls, the hull, the decking tilting, tilting, as the weight of the water in the bow doubled and quadrupled and quintupled, and I hung there helpless, aware of the sheer, horrifying

depth of the ocean below.

I wonder I didn't go mad. Not with fear that I would die when that final hideous tipping-point was at last reached and the ship began her lightless plunge to the bottom: with the appalling certainty that

I would not and could not.

Ever.