Titanic: Voyage Of The Damned

Chapter 8: The Aftermath

A collective wail of anguish erupted from those who escaped Titanic's vortex as her remaining smokestack buckled. The deafening groan of rupturing steel plates reached across the water as the stern lifted further, propellers slicing nakedly at the night sky. Transfixed survivors bore witness to ghastly deaths being meted out indifferently.

Onboard, Jack and Rose clung breathlessly to each other and the mahogany door floating between swirling eddies. Behind them, the last wailing vestiges of a dying golden era awaited inhuming two miles below. No earthly power now slowed the flood consuming Titanic's bones.

"This is it, darling," Jack murmured, drawing Rose tighter within his cocooning embrace. She pressed her cheek harder against the thunder of his heart, memorizing its cadence as they drifted atop their wooden tombstone. The magnificence of Titanic's requiem stirred neither terror nor awe in them anymore - only perfect love and acceptance exhaled in liberating breath. Having overcome separation and near dissolution, the lovers swayed gentle as babes in womb, embracing their fate as one. Such abundance of joy muffled even the horrific din of Titanic's death march sinking round them.

In collapsible Boat B, Molly Brown gripped the gunwale with enough force to forever brand the oak. Her haunted eyes recorded the full horror like a camera etching frames onto vulnerable filmstrips in her skull. No spirits left earth that night without searing wounds that would never heal.

Around her in stunned multitudes sat faces of women and children consigned to replay the next minutes infinite times, captive to relentless memory films. They alone had earned front row viewing for this unholy mess now climaxing yards away in cracked explosions and human screaming. Lucky bastards spared such visual scarring, Molly reckoned...those far gone below already, freed from this nightmare tableau where hell mated with heaven under the indifferent gaze of circling stars.

Molly longed to tear her eyes from the towering stern as it reared up autocratically, determined to execute its own coups de grâce. But magnetism of deepest horror gripped her harder than her frozen hands clenching the lifeboat rail. In abject revulsion she watched, her soul no less trapped than scores of helpless victims clinging to theShip of Dreams now Dead Ahead plunging them all into scorching nightmares worlds apart from logic. Sometimes karma swung savage as a wronged pendulum coming to exact its full due.

"Farewell, old girl," Molly choked out, bile rising in her throat. She averted her face finally from Titanic's swollen underbelly gleaming like a monstrous pallid slug heaving itself onto a killing shore. Those still aboard hardly qualified as men now - only shrieking vermin, insignificant microbes writhing on the lip of a sinking steel petri dish epic-scaled. Their collective death wail pierced Molly deeper than all the burgundy wine she had wept over her own romantic losses at sea. She clamped her stinging eyes shut, willing herself to keep steady breathing as the noises intensified.

Molly Brown, who had talked down bandits and scandalized Denver society before deigning to marry its moneyed royalty, now longed to clap hands over ears like a mewling babe. Anything to mute the awful keening of metal and men surrendering to the sea. But such comfort exceeded human capacities to barricade against suffering. So she sank teeth to tongue instead, jolting herself alert to the gruesome final act. Molly reckoned every wasted second seared into memory would punish her later with searing accuracy.

Amidst it all, she registered the904 souls aboard five ill-equipped lifeboats assigned to rescue work. Even supposing the vanishing prospect of locating that stricken hull miles deep, how should their frail wooden fleet salvage more than a fraction of lives before mass casualties claimed all? Grim acceptance of their own impotence smothered voyagers who could scarcely ensure their own survival, let alone rescue the thousand-odd others blindly relying on that promised salvation.