Three Fates Read Free

Her heavy skirts sloshed in the water, and blood smeared over the glinting stones on her fingers. “You have to be brave. Don’t let go of Mama, no matter what.”
    He could see the boy, no more than three, cling like a monkey to his mother’s neck. Watching her face, Felix thought as he strained for another inch of height, as if all the answers in all the world were printed on it.
    Deck chairs, tables, God knew what, rained down from the deck above. He dragged her another inch, another, a foot. “Just a little farther.” He gasped it out, without any idea if it were true.
    Something struck him hard in the back. And his hold on her slipped.
    “Missus!” he shouted, grabbed blindly, but caught only the pretty silk sleeve of her dress. As it ripped, he stared at her helplessly.
    “God bless you,” she managed and, wrapping both arms tight around her son, slid over the edge of the world into the water.
    He barely had time to curse before the deck heaved and he pitched in after her.
    The cold, the sheer brutality of it, stole his breath. Blind, already going numb with shock, he kicked wildly, clawing for the surface as he’d clawed for the deck. When he broke through, gasped in that first gulp of air, he found he’d plunged into a hell worse than any he’d imagined.
    Dead were all around him. He was jammed into an island of bobbing, staring white faces, of screams from the drowning. The water was strewn with planks and chairs, wrecked lifeboats and crates. His limbs were already stiff with cold when he struggled to heave as much of his body as possible onto a crate and out of the freezing water.
    And what he saw was worse. There were hundreds of bodies floating in the still sparkling sunlight. While his stomach heaved out the sea he’d swallowed, he floundered in the direction of a waterlogged lifeboat.
    The swell, somehow gentle, tore at the island and spread death over the sea, and dragged him, with merciless hands, away from the lifeboat.
    The great ship, the floating palace, was sinking in front of his eyes. Dangling from it were lifeboats, useless as toys. Somehow it astonished him to see there were still people on the decks. Some were kneeling, others still rushing in panic from a fate that was hurtling toward them.
    In shock, he watched more tumble like dolls into the sea. And the huge black funnels tipped down toward the water, down to where he clung to a broken crate.
    When those funnels touched the sea, water gushed into them, sucking in people with it.
    Not like this, he thought as he kicked weakly. A man wasn’t meant to die like this. But the sea dragged him under, pulled him in. Water seemed to boil around him as he struggled. He choked on it, tasted salt and oil and smoke. And realized, as his body bashed into a solid wall, that he was trapped in one of the funnels, would die there like a rat in a blocked chimney.
    As his lungs began to scream, he thought of the woman and the boy. Since he deemed it useless to pray for himself, he offered what he thought was his last plea to God that they’d survived.
    Later, he would think it had been as if hands had taken hold of him and yanked him free. As the funnels sank, he was expelled, flying out on a filthy gush of soot.
    With pain radiating through him, he snagged a floating plank and pulled his upper body onto it. He laid his cheek on the wood, breathed deeply, wept quietly.
    And saw the Lusitania was gone.
    The plate of water where she’d been was raging, thrashing and belching smoke. Belching bodies, he saw with a dull horror. He’d been one of them, only moments before. But fate had spared him.
    While he watched, while he struggled to block out the screams and stay sane, the water went calm as glass. With the last of his strength, he pulled himself onto the plank. He heard the shrill song of sea gulls, the weeping prayers or weeping cries of those who floundered or floated in the water with him.
    Probably freeze to death, he thought as he drifted in