Row Charon Row: Part Three
Her paintjob had bubbled up and flaked off. Her lights flickered. Her hatches were dead stuck or opened with a scream of hopelessly rusted mechanisms. Patches of green algae spread like decomposition over portholes and walls. Morrigan was slowly coming to her senses, floating dead in the water as the dawn neared and with it the torpedo strike. Like her crew, she was remembering.
The piece of polished metal used for a mirror in the bathroom had gone dull. A tiny silver fish lay dead in the sink.
Dean leaned closer to the mirror, squinting at his unfocused reflection. He touched his temples, ran both hands through his hair, pulled his eyelids down. He wasn’t gushing blood like Leigh but his face was just as pale, just as bloodless. Even in the bad light, his lips were dusky blue. The carotid lay silent if he pressed down on it. He pulled off his coat and sweater, lifted his shirt and pushed up the legs of his jeans until he found them - deep purple bruises along his calves and up in his thighs as well. They were the marks of blood breaking through the veins and filling the tissues under the pull of gravity when his heart had stopped beating.
“Lividity,” he said, pressing a finger against them. It didn’t hurt. “Great.”
They went on a hunt for a monster neither of them knew anything about, in a little walnut shell of a boat in December. Sam got dragged out of the boat and Dean killed himself trying to get him back. Well, he thought, well, no shame in dying while doing what you love.
Sam, someone had scratched into the wall by the mirror. Sam Sam Sam Sam. He touched his finger to the letters of his brother’s name. He must’ve left all the other messages, too, and forgot it.
“Hey Dean.”
Sam was hovering in the hallway, looking so goddamn sad, like somebody died. Oh wait. Dean smiled at him, thinking that he should share the joke. He already opened his mouth to say it and stopped. Sam still wore those wet clothes, and his hair had dried in ropes and was a real rat nest. His nose and the tips of his ears were red from the cold. Can’t have a red nose without a heartbeat.
“Are you not dead?”
Sam shrugged, like “sorry”. Dean was out of the bathroom in a split second. He grabbed Sam by the front of his coat, resisting the urge to shake, and pressed two fingers to his pulse. He looked for it for what felt like ages. There. Sam’s carotid bumped against his fingertips - once, again, again, and Dean was suddenly lightheaded.
Sam caught the side on his face with one hand, rubbed a thumb under Dean’s eye with Dean’s fingers still on his artery. He looked so sad, and Dean hated that, to be able to see this part of being gone. Sam leaned forward and pressed a kiss against Dean’s mouth, just a soft touch of lips that felt feverish hot with the living blood flowing through his veins.
Dean smacked him on the shoulder.
“Ow! Goddammit, Dean, what was that for?”
“No goodbye kisses, you fucking necrophiliac.” Sam smacked him right back. They were back on track. “Where did you go? I thought the sea monster got you.”
“You flickered out again, like earlier in the sick bay. I went looking for you. I ran into the captain on the second deck just now - he told me you were back up here.”
“Okay.” Dean still felt a little lightheaded with relief, a little unsteady on his feet. Or maybe it was the lack of heartbeat catching up to him. He sat down with his back to the wall, and Sam followed. It was good like this, just to sit there and not think of what came next.
Nevertheless, there was the whole question of next. He glanced down at his watch out of habit and froze for a moment. Would it even show the right time? Or would it, like in dreams, show the time he was dreading? But the second hand was making its way around the face, like usual. It was ten minutes past three - less than five hours until the sunrise.
And Sam was with him. Dean smacked him on the shoulder again, got smacked back.
“Cut it out.”
“What are you doing on this ship, Sam?”
“You’re here, asshole.” He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Which, Dean supposed, it was. He would’ve done the exact same thing.
Last time they were on a hunt all the way on the Washington coast, Sam deliberately provoked a ghost to get dragged under a shipwreck with Dean, not knowing if they’d be able to get out. They got out - to get trapped on another shipwreck a few months later.
“I’m getting you out,” Sam said.
“You’re not. You’re going back to the shore.”
“No, Dean. I know where your body is. I’m going to get you back in there.”
The dizzy feeling was back and with it the dull pain in his chest. Dean put his head down between his knees and took a few deep breaths, slowly. He thought, I know why Leigh smokes so much here. This place was so goddamn cold. Leigh rolled up the sleeves of his uniform shirt and claimed it was hot but Dean saw the way he cupped the lighter, the way he kept his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulder and drew in the smoke with a little ecstatic roll of his eyes. Dean saw it all now once again and understood it. The cold was freezing up the muscles in his hands, making them ache. It was seeping through his chest, reaching for his heart again.
Sam poked his side. “Have you seen any reapers yet?”
Dean shook his head. Deep breaths in and out. Pain came like a thick hot spike through his heart, sudden, making him twist reflexively, making his eyes water. He braced for another one but after a few moments, still none came.
“Dean?”
“It fucking hurts. What’s the point of being dead if it still hurts?”
Sam pulled his head in and pressed his nose against Dean’s temple, and it felt good. It felt hot - the tip of Sam’s nose like an ember. It felt like something that, if he had to give it up forever, would drive him mad - if he remembered this and could never have it again.
“Okay,” he said after a minute, after the mental pat-down, making sure he was intact and not shamefully falling apart anywhere. “What’s the plan?”
“I don’t really have one.” Sam moved away a little to reach into his coat’s pocket. He took out the ugly seashell, green and grey and very old, covered in calcified growth. Sam cradled it in both hands like something fragile, even though the thing looked like it could probably break a man’s skull. “Bluebeard has a nest on the bottom - this fucked up thing made of shipwrecks. You should’ve seen it. He keeps your body down there, stuffed inside a fridge.”
Thinking back on the lividity bruises, it made sense. Dean put a hand on his thigh automatically, seeking out under the fabric what he knew was there - the purple stains that didn’t hurt anymore. By the distribution of those marks, his body was in a sitting position somewhere.
“Wait,” Dean said. “I’m down there with the octopus dude?”
“Would you quit it with the tentacle porn?”
“I can’t help it.”
“Whatever. Bluebeard wants this ship for his collection - this is why he’s been coming closer to shore.”
“And the kidnappings?” Dean said.
“He needed a human to go on board. I don’t know why other monsters kidnap people.” Sam held up the seashell and let Dean take it from him. It felt strangely heavy. “Bluebeard says I’m to shut off her engines and release this.”
Long ago, down in Florida where the sea dragged the oddest shells onto the beach at sunrise, Dad had told them that seashells never forgot the ocean. Dean thought of that now, holding the twisted thing in his hands and remembering that beach from many years ago and the shells he and Sam collected - the deep cranberry red and softer raspberry hues of them, the yellow of lemon sorbet, the vibrant color of oranges. They must’ve been low on money then, for him to think of all the food, though he didn’t remember one way or another. Press the shell to your ear, boys, and you’ll hear the ocean inside. No matter how long the seashell’s been on land, it never forgets.
He lifted Sam’s seashell to press it to his ear, like he hadn’t done since he was a child.
“There’s a hurricane inside,” Sam said. “Don’t drop it.”
Dean pressed it against his ear. The thing inside didn’t sound like the soft whisper of the waves - it sounded as if a monster was tucked deep within the spiral canal of the shell. It howled and it screamed. Dean heard masses of water colliding somewhere far away, wherever it was that Sam’s Bluebeard had kidnapped the hurricane from.
And through the distant howling of wind, he heard the sound of a gun being cocked.
He hit the deck together with Sam, half-dropping, half-rolling the seashell out of his hands. Gunshot was deafening in the narrow hallway. Dean saw the seashell with the trapped hurricane roll away and hit the wall, and he was already climbing over Sam to shield him from the next shot, forgetting for a moment that he had no body to block a bullet. But Sam did touch him, kissed him, hit him earlier.
“Leigh, what the fuck?”
The captain standing at the open hatch had his gun raised and pointed at Dean’s chest and at Sam crouched behind him. His face had stitched itself back together again, safe for the pallor and the blood running from his ear and out of his left eye.
Sam said, “How does that gun still work?”
Dean elbowed him in the ribs and felt it connect. “Leigh, what are you doing?”
“I heard him. Bringing the ship down, the torpedo at dawn, sushi earlier.”
“Sushi?” Dean’s mind went blank. “What sushi?”
“Jap sympathizer.”
“Shit,” Sam said behind him. “Did you break the shell?”
Dean raised his open hands in the air, staring into the muzzle of the gun. “The war is over, remember? We’ve won. Remember?”
The gun quivered a little. Dean caught Leigh’s eyes and held it there, securing attention on himself and away from Sam. Gradually, Leigh’s face relaxed, and then, as if to mark a breaking point, his left eye slipped in its socket and rolled up just as he lowered his gun to point at the deck.
“I forgot.” He rubbed at his temple like the headache was bothering him again, glanced down at the gun and put it away. “What the hell now?”
“Go into the light?” Dean tried. Leigh gave him a disgusted look.
“The gun works,” Sam said, resting a hand on Dean’s shoulder. When Dean turned around, he had his seashell cradled in the crook on one elbow like a baby. “The gun works and I can still touch you. Dean, I think it’s the ship. Bluebeard kept saying she dreams about the torpedo. She dreams, she believes, she remembers.”
“What are you saying? The ship believes she’s whole?”
“The crew, or the ship, or both, I don’t know. Bluebeard said I had to stop her engines and release the hurricane before dawn, while she still believes. He thought it would make the death stick.”
Make the death stick. Dean shook his head. “The engines aren’t running.”
“Sure they are,” Leigh said.
“The engines rusted through and fell apart about seventy years ago.”
“But can you hear them?” Sam said
Dean had opened his mouth to argue but then heard what Sam was talking about - the low rumble he felt in his skin and in his bones through the floor more than he heard it with his ears, the constant noise he had grown accustomed to over the course of the night and had learned to ignore. This, he thought, this is how she came to answer his SOS. Morrigan believed in her engines, or her captain and her corpsman with the pretty smile believed, Talley and the sailors sleeping below and manning the guns believed, down in the machine shop and up in the radio tower.
“This is how she jumps around,” Sam said. “This is why he wanted me to stop the engines, so she couldn’t escape the hurricane.”
“I was going to wake up the men,” Leigh said. He was starting to get that distant look again. “I couldn’t find the XO anywhere. I forgot.”
Dean scrambled up off the deck and caught Leigh’s arm before he could leave. “Maybe your XO survived, and that’s why he’s not here.”
“That’d be nice,” Leigh said. “He has a small daughter.”
Sam got up as well, still cradling the seashell hurricane. “Maybe we could try something here.”
~~~~
The fog was thinning. It wasn’t entirely gone but Sam could see the moon now high above the radio tower, full and ripe, the gentle color of a honeydew melon. Somewhere back on the beach, the tide must’ve been especially low tonight. If Sam closed his eyes, he could see that beach and the wet stretch of sand and stones where the sea retreated. An image kept intruding, of a bad dream he had back in summer, the last time they were here: the coast covered with fog, the old man digging for his brother’s bones, the seagulls and the crabs and the starfish opening and closing their mouths in unison, waiting for their food. Sam closed his eyes and drew a full chest of the cold air. It felt like crushed glass. The goddamn dream was coming true after all.
The ship’s PA came to life with a crackle, taking him out of his thoughts. “…How does the ocean rock the boat? How did the razor find my throat?”
Sam shook his head and took the searchlight’s handles again, sweeping its beam over the waves. There was nothing but swirls of fog. They had four hours left before dawn - four more hours of the thinning faith of the dead sailors and their dead shipwreck, before the sun rose and turned everything back to smoke and rusted metal.
“…And I will think of this when I’m dead in my grave,” Tom Waits drawled on the PA.
“I guess you really like ‘Alice’,” Sam said and patted the railing wet with rain. “Good choice, old lady.”
He moved the shutters on the searchlight again, blinking out “Come”. Up and down, up and down. The shutters wore a touch of rust, like everything else on the ship by now, and they groaned with every move and became stuck, making the message stutter. The PA coughed again and fell quiet. Sam was left with no sound but the screeching of old signal light, the soft splashing of waves and the rumble of engines deep within Morrigan’s belly.
With the way this night had been going, the goddamn Coast Guard was going to see the signal and show up to check it out.
“No sign of him?”
Sam jumped. Dean stood right behind his shoulder, looking wet and dead and apologetic. Sam looked down quickly, studied the clasps of Dean’s jacket instead of looking at his face, at those blue lips and grey skin that were bringing up more bad memories.
“I didn’t hear you behind me.”
“Well,” Dean shrugged. “I’ll rattle my chains next time or something.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Sorry. You want a smoke?”
He fished two cigarettes out of a pack of Lucky Strikes, lit both and handed one over to Sam. Sam held it for a moment, looking at the strip of paper over the filter where Dean’s lips touched it, thinking, It’s okay. (It wasn’t.) He though, Would you have kissed your brother’s dead mouth? (He had.) He put the cigarette between his lips quickly and drew in the smoke. It tasted like fog and, faintly, like seawater.
“Are these Leigh’s cigarettes?”
“Mine are in the car,” Dean said and made a face, just a quick twitch of his mouth that told Sam he was thinking about the Impala. “I bet ghost cigarettes don’t count toward your lung cancer. Neat, huh?”
Something seized painfully in Sam’s throat, making him choke on the smoke. He turned back to the searchlight, moving the protesting shutters again. Come. Up-down, up-down. Come. He was wasting the precious time he had with Dean with this sulk.
“Sam.” A hand on the side of his neck was cold as the metal under his fingers. “Sam, you look sad.”
“What the fuck do I have to be happy about?” He said it to the night, to the black water that went as far as the eye could see, to the moon the color of a melon.
“Sam.” The hand brushed against his neck again, a thumb touched his jaw, pulled at the corner of his mouth. Sam licked his lips - they, too, tasted like seawater, briny to the point of bitter. “Sam, come on.”
He turned his head, following the tugging of that hand, looked Dean in the face. Dean touched a cold finger to his lower lip, shot a quick look toward where the nearest gun mount stood half-shrouded in fog, and moved his finger to the tip of Sam’s nose instead. He used to do that when they were little, pretending that Sam’s nose was a car horn and making noises to go along with it. Sam wondered if he remembered. He stood still with one hand on the railing, letting the ghost cigarette smolder in it, with his brother’s dead cold fingers on his face, another hand held uselessly by his stomach, clenching and unclenching. Dean stroked along Sam’s eyebrows, one and then the other, pulled on his earlobe and on a strand of hair. None of it was too gentle but all of it was slowly breaking Sam to pieces.
What if Bluebeard wasn’t watching? What if he couldn’t read Morse code and wouldn’t care to check it out anyway? Sam asked himself if he’d abandon the plan and just do as he was told, stop the engines and release the hurricane and let this ship go down with all hands again, let them all be trapped forever in Bluebeard’s nest. He recoiled from the thought, unable to answer it. If he did that, he thought, if he did that, the sea monster would most likely keep both of them in his palace of shipwrecks anyway. Dean would never forgive him if he let Bluebeard take the ship and imprison the ghosts. How would they ever escape back to the surface?
He couldn’t tell if he’d do it. Desperation was clawing at his chest.
“Seen any reapers yet?” Sam said before he could start blubbering like a little kid.
Dean dropped his hand and took a drag of his cigarette. “No, no one.” He shifted his eyes away, and Sam was suddenly overcome with bad feeling, and it also tasted like seawater in the back of his throat.
“What? Dean, what?”
“I think it sucks that you and I get to come back, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Over and over again. Why are we so special? None of these guys get to come back. I bet they’d want to.”
“You say it like it’s a good thing.” Dean shrugged, beginning to turn away, and Sam knocked the cigarette out of his hand. It winked and disappeared overboard. “Nobody is coming for us, Dean. No reapers. No Heaven or Hell for us. I think we pissed off everybody. When we die for good and have no more bodies to come back to, you and I are going to be like these guys, only without the cool destroyer.”
Dean was looking him straight in the face now. Sam had a vague suspicion that the fucker was beginning to smile.
“We’ll never see our dad again,” Sam pressed on. “No replay of sweetest memories and no eternal torture either. It’s just going to be the two of us.”
“But can we haunt the Impala?”
Sam blinked at him, realizing suddenly that he had been yelling and that his eyes were tearing. Dean was smiling like he loved the idea.
Dean said, “I’m okay with that. If we can haunt the Impala, that’d be fine.”
“It’s like you don’t care.”
“Sam. Heaven, Hell - the fuck do I want with those dicks anyway? The fuck do you want with them? Come on. Will you haunt the Impala with me?”
Sam sighed. “Okay. We can haunt the Impala.”
“Damn right we will. Now wipe your nose and keep sending those signals. I’m going to check on Leigh and his guys, make sure they’re still ready. They forget sometimes. Keep at it.”
He left just as noiselessly as he came. Sam wiped his nose. He went back to moving the shutters.
He was getting sleepy, lulled impossibly by the sound of waves, the late hour and the soft almost imperceptible sway of the deck, when the sea monster showed. Sam saw him a few feet away as an irregular disturbance in the water, something large moving very fast toward the ship, and in a sleepy moment he was afraid that it was the torpedo. But then a wet head showed, followed by massive shoulders and the tentacles, so many of them they made the sea look like it were boiling. Bluebeard latched onto the railing, pulled himself up by the tentacles and found a comfortable position there next to the searchlight, throwing one arm over.
Sam took a few steps back and closed a hand over the knife in one pocket, and touched the seashell in the other, for luck. It was buzzing a little under his fingers.
“Here I am,” the sea monster said. “Why do I still hear the engines running?”
“I’ll shut them off once you bring my brother back. I want him up here, with me.”
Bluebeard snorted. “No. I get my ghost ship - you get your brother.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, that’s just too damn bad, isn’t it?” Bluebeard folded his arms on the railing and rested his head on them. “I gave you my word.”
“And you had your tentacles crossed.”
A flash of anger rolled over the sea monster’s face. “I did not!”
“You did.” Sam took a deep breath and scooped the seashell up in his palm inside his coat pocket. “Look, where are we going to go in the middle of the ocean?”
“That’s not the point. We’re going to do this how I said.”
Sam took two steps to the side, standing closer to the railing and mostly out of Bluebeard’s reach, who was watching him intently. Sam pulled the seashell out and held it in his outstretched hand over the water. The sea monster shifted at the sight of it, readjusting the grip of his tentacles.
“Have fun hunting hurricanes down south,” Sam said. He licked his lips which had gone dry. “What is it, five months until the next hurricane season? How many years did you say it took you to trap this one?”
“Morrigan has been drifting since the war.” But he said it carefully, slower than usual. “I have time.”
“That’s provided you can find her again.” Sam moved his hand just a little, careful not to drop the shell, and the monster jerked. “I’ll fucking drop it.”
Sam could see the anger breaking out in Bluebeard’s face again, that same quick wildfire rage that made him so much like those guys he reminded Sam of, the ones who liked to smack their wives and girlfriends around the house. The contours of a thick vein were starting to show in his forehead, and Sam gripped the knife tighter in his pocket. Several long moments passed with Bluebeard darting his eyes back and forth between Sam’s face and the seashell. Finally, he raised an open hand, mirroring the gesture with several tentacles.
“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I’ll go get your brother.”
“I mean, where are we going to go?”
“Right. Put the shell away.”
He disentangled the tentacles from the railing, pushed off and dropped back into the sea - a huge mass of flesh, his lumberjack’s torso dwarfed by the lower half three times its size. Sam backed away until his shoulder blades hit the wall, and he slid down along it and sat there with his head between his knees, taking deep breaths.
When he looked up, the double-barreled silhouette of the 20mm Oerlikon gun pointed over his head stood out against the black sky and the stars.
“I believe in ammunition,” Sam said to himself, a quote from some movie he couldn’t quite remember. He crossed his fingers for good luck, on impulse, in case it would add some power. A sailor peered at him from the gun mount briefly, hearing the words, and ducked down again. Sam couldn’t make out his face, just the big-eared shadow of his head.
It took a long time for Bluebeard to return, and Sam had bit his thumbnail down to the quick and was running his tongue over the tender strip of skin when he saw the surface of the sea break again. Bluebeard had Dean’s body slung over his shoulder. Sam jumped up to his feet and grabbed Dean’s jacket to help pull him onto the deck before the sea monster even latched on comfortably.
Dean was just as grey and pale as he was when Sam was talking to him earlier, only his face was slack and completely expressionless, like a horrible mask Sam had hoped to never see again. He had Dean laid out on deck and was kneeling over him when a tentacle suddenly wrapped around his throat. Sam gasped and grabbed it, fumbled for the knife in his pockets only to have Bluebeard catch both of his wrists. The pressure was building up in his head again, like it was going to explode. But this time, the sea monster only let it go on for a few moments before loosening the grip.
“No more fucking around,” he said.
The tentacles slid off, wet and leathery. Sam dropped to his hands and knees, a hand on his throat. “No more. Just bring him back.”
Bluebeard heaved himself over the railing and fell down onto the deck with a smack like an enormous fish. “You have three hours left before dawn,” he said. “Once the engines are off, release the hurricane. It’s ripe, so it’ll overtake her quickly. But make sure those engines are off. The winds are bad for hurricanes up here. It’ll fizzle out within an hour maybe, so she’d better not be able to run.”
“Got it,” Sam said. “I’ll be quick. But you’re coming to get us out of here? Both of us?”
“Both of you.” Bluebeard leaned over Dean’s body. He was starting to make strange rolling motions with his jaw, and Sam could hear his circular rows of teeth grinding. “You know, it won’t be hard to bring him back. I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has any claim on him.”
“Yeah. I figured as much.”
“It’s been a long fucking night,” Bluebeard said. Then he opened his jaws full of lamprey teeth and fell down on Dean, latching onto his mouth. Sam saw blood. He gasped and lunged forward, and suddenly Dean’s chest shuddered and moved. Blood was trickling down Dean’s cheek from the corner of his mouth. With a low growl, Bluebeard let go and pulled up, and Sam saw blood on his beard and something between his jaws. It’s Dean’s tongue, he thought, and, Oh fuck. But Dean was trying to take shuddering breaths, and the thing between the sea monster’s teeth was black and long and sleek like an eel, slipping out of Dean’s throat. Before Sam could get a good look at what it was, it was gone, swallowed down by the sea monster, and then Dean rolled over and vomited what looked like half of the Pacific onto the deck.
“Easy, hey.” Sam grabbed his shoulders, holding him up. A strong shudder was starting to pass through Dean’s muscles as he continued retching. Sam snuck a glance at the sea monster who had climbed back up on the railing and was sitting there comfortably, rubbing his belly and looking satisfied. “Dean?”
Dean gave him thumbs up with a hand that was shaking like an electrical current was passing through his body, and fell over on his side.
“Your turn,” said Bluebeard.
“What the hell was that you pulled out of his mouth and ate?”
“Don’t you mind that. Now, the engines.”
Sam slowly got up to his feet, noticing that they felt a little shaky. He took another look at Dean who was breathing, looking at him from under half-lowered eyelids from where he lay by the wall. Sam found the seashell again in his coat pocket, felt the way the hurricane inside was crashing against the walls of its prison. He took several steps toward the stairwell leading down to lower deck and to the engine room. It took him close enough to the side of the ship and out of Bluebeard’s reach. Then he turned around.
Bluebeard was still sitting on the railing, tall like two grown men. “Now, Sam,” he said.
“Catch,” Sam said and tossed the seashell overboard.
It made a splash that Sam saw but didn’t hear for the sound of Morrigan’s 20mm guns coming to life for the first time since the Second World War. Sam clamped his palms over his ears as soon as he dropped the seashell and rolled toward the wall. It still felt like the sound was going to crack his teeth. In the flash of igniting gunpowder, he saw Dean curled up on the deck a few feet away, with his hands over his ears but his eyes trained forward. Sam was watching Dean and didn’t see the anti-aircraft rounds pierce Bluebeard’s body but he saw the splatter of green land on the deck. He thought the flash was messing with his color vision. He was still watching Dean when the gun fell quiet. He felt more than heard something huge crash into the sea. Dean looked back at him then and smiled. There was green on his face and in his hair, and his smile was the most beautiful thing Sam had seen all night.
It was three hours before dawn.
~~~~
Dean was back where he started - on his old cot in the sick bay, minus handcuffs. The place had a distinct smell of machine oil and rot to it now. Spots of corrosion covered the walls. Holes and dents had been appearing as well, which Dean assumed were left by flying debris and exploding ammunition. It seemed that every time he closed his eyes, when he opened them, there was a new hole.
There wasn’t a single part of his body that didn’t hurt, so he lay still and let the corpsman work. He figured, this was what happened when you didn’t have Zachariah to hand-pick the buckshot out of your lungs and heart. His last time was with Zachariah. No, he though, wait, there was that medical resuscitation with Dr. Roberts. No wonder the other side wanted nothing to do with them these days.
Everybody had been awfully quiet for the past hour. It was awkward as hell.
“Am I going to live, Doc?” Dean said, just to break it up.
The corpsman had been poking at the bruises on his thigh. “I don’t know. You’re my first resurrection.”
“Fair enough.” He looked up at the ceiling again, and there was another long gash that hadn’t been there before. It was better to look at the ceiling than at the ghosts. He felt indecent looking at them, like he was rubbernecking at an accident site.
“I can give you some morphine.”
“Your morphine is about seven decades old, and we have two hours to sunrise. It’s probably not such a good idea.”
The corpsman smiled at that - still had enough of his face left for the smile.
Leigh, quiet until now, pushed away from the wall he’d been leaning against by the head of Dean’s cot. “Doc, why don’t you go talk to Sam? Write a note for your sister back home. I’ll stay here.”
When the corpsman left, Leigh pulled up his chair and sat down by the bed. Dean turned to look at him - past the blood and the torn flesh, the bone fragments and the blown eye socket. Dean probably looked only marginally better than a ghost himself. He let that sympathetic twist in his gut come and go and he let himself see the face of the man he’d spent this night with, underneath the horror show.
“That was a good idea you had,” Leigh said, “to take messages to people back home. I suppose a lot of wives and siblings won’t be alive anymore. Maybe the kids are around.”
It wasn’t about the living receiving the messages, he thought, it was about the dead being able to say goodbye. Maybe it would let them move on, and maybe it wouldn’t. But it was their best shot, without any bones to burn.
He tried not to look at the words scratched into the wall over his cot - his own goodbye letter.
“There is a woman, Sarah,” Leigh said. He looked like his mind was somewhere far away from the ship and the sea. “I bet she hasn’t changed one bit.”
Dean cleared his throat. “Darren. Thank you for your service, man.”
Leigh smiled crookedly as he searched through his pockets. He came up with his crumpled pack of cigarettes, where three still remained. He took out one and lit it. “I took a head count. Twenty seven people are missing, including the XO. I can’t find the ship’s cat either. Looks like Morrigan didn’t go down with all hands after all.”
Dean nodded. “We’ll look you guys up, back on shore.” Twenty seven people - that was something. Twenty seven out of three hundred and twenty nine, and one cat. Still, that was something.
“Sorry I gave you shit about Sam. It’s none of my business what you guys do. You know, you really pass for brothers. I believed you there for a while.”
“Thanks,” Dean said. “We try.”
“It’s time to go. Are you good to stand?”
Morphine would’ve been awesome. “We’ll find out.” He tried to take Leigh’s offered hand but couldn’t quite get a grip on it. His hand didn’t quite go through but kept slipping off, and what he felt on contact wasn’t skin anymore but water. “It must really be time to go, huh?”
This time, when they stepped outside, there were dead everywhere. They stood and sat on deck, up by the gun mounts and on the bridge, a parade of bloody, burned and drowned ghosts slowly dissolving into fog and saltwater. No one said a word. Sam was sitting on some pipe on the deck, looking pale and a little green.
Leigh said, “You talked to everyone?”
“Everyone who came to talk to me.” Sam gave a little wave with a pocket notebook.
“What are you going to tell people? That you ran into their husbands’ and brothers’ ghosts out at sea?”
“We’ll think of something. We’ll get the messages delivered. I promise.”
The borrowed motor boat was still tied behind the ship, with their hunting bags inside. Looking down into it made Dean a little seasick. The sea was calm, but where a destroyer was rocked slightly, it probably wouldn’t take much to overturn the small boat. Sam went down first. Dean took his time, feeling how weak his body had gone, how stiff and reluctant to move. He gripped the net and clenched his teeth and hoped his fingers wouldn’t slip. It wasn’t a long way down. Leigh watched from the ship. He had tried to help but his hands were like water.
Dean made it into the boat without losing his grip but was shaking by the time he reached it. He sat down and hid his hands in his pockets and let Sam start the engine and steer them away. The ghosts waved from the ship. He waved back. There was a rotten feeling inside of him that wouldn’t go away.
They took the boat far enough from Morrigan to lose her in the dark and the remaining fog. There were no working lights on her anymore to give her position away with a brief flash, and no light in the sky to make her stand out against the horizon. Dean wasn’t sure what would happen when the torpedo came, if the explosion would be felt by the living, but he and Sam agreed that it was best to stay away. When they couldn’t see the ship anymore, Sam shut off the engine to conserve gas. There was no point of trying to move anywhere until they could see where they were going, or until they were far enough from the ghost ship’s interference to get the navigating equipment working again.
What if the sunrise came, Dean thought, and they found that there was nothing but water for as far as the eye could see around them? They were low on gas and way, way out of range for a tiny boat like theirs. Then what?
“I hope we don’t get stuck haunting this boat,” he said. “That’d be so fucking embarrassing.”
“You just came back from the dead. Are you in a hurry to go back?”
He still looked pale and a little green, like the night was finally catching up to him or like maybe the rocking of the boat was getting to him. Dean put a hand on Sam’s knee, hooked his fingers behind it and smoothed his thumb over the side of his kneecap. It felt good - a tiny promise of warmth, a closer contact. There was no one alive around but tuna. They were alone at sea for who knows how many miles. Dean pulled Sam’s head in and Sam went quietly, leaned forward and rested his forehead against Dean’s chest.
They spent what remained of the night in silence, pressed close together for warmth, watching the deep inky color of the sky turn to graphite grey as the stars grew pale. The sunrise was coming. Dean kept his eyes on the spot where he knew Morrigan to be. Sam had his chin propped up on his hand and was looking toward the ship too, waiting. Dean nursed his many pains and aches quietly and let the little cropped thoughts run through his head, like tails of unwritten messages for Sam. It’s okay. I’ll never leave you like that again. It’s okay.
Maybe when the sun came up, Sam would believe that he was real and come out of his funk.
The fog was finally gone right before dawn. At some point, when it was still too dark to tell the difference between a cloud and a ship, a sound came - groaning of metal and rushing of water. But they heard no explosion and no shouting. Moments after, a series of high waves almost flipped the little boat over.
The dawn finally came, quiet and not terribly picturesque. There was no ship on the horizon. But there were, in the opposite direction, distant columns of stone sticking out of the sea, crowned with pines.
“You think she’s gone for good?” That was the first thing Sam said in almost two hours.
“I hope so.” He pointed to the sea stacks. “Do we have enough gas to get back there?”
“Probably not. We’ll have to call the Coast Guard and tell them we got drunk and went too far out last night.” Sam suddenly grinned at him and went looking through his pockets. “Wait, I forgot. I got something for you.”
“Is it a hurricane in a seashell?” Dean said.
But it was a pair of Twinkies in faded, unmistakably old wrappers.
“They are from Bluebeard’s nest. I found them inside a ferry that sank about seven years ago. I knew you’d like them.”
Dean looked up from the Twinkies to his face. Sam’s smile was wide and full of teeth and beautiful. He’d gotten Dean a couple of nasty old Twinkies. It was a touchingly sweet gesture.
“Don’t eat them now,” Sam said. “At least wait until you’re better.”
Dean hid the Twinkies in his pocket. The ocean was slowly changing colors from black to gunmetal grey as the sun rose behind the thick blanket of clouds that had covered up the sky in the last hour. Dean looked down into the water and imagined for a second the abyss that lay beneath them - the fish and the seaweed, the canyons and the mountains, the shipwrecks and the sea monsters. The ocean had swallowed a destroyer with three hundred ghosts on board - no trace of them left. It had swallowed larger ships and tiny boats, so many of them. They were down there now, in the dark. Dean imagined the shipwrecks sleeping below and Morrigan settling down among them, into her soft bed of sediment. Fish and octopuses would come into her empty dark cabins and hallways. There would be no ghosts to scare them off. Like the other ships on the bottom of the Pacific, Morrigan would sleep.
~~~~
Dear Miss Sarah B.,
I hope this letter finds you. You don’t know me; my name is Sam. My brother and I are divers. We’ve found something last week that we believe was meant for you - a message sealed in a bottle. It was badly damaged, so I’ve rewritten it for you below.
Sam W.
MASTER POST ... FIC NOTES