Read Online The Fire Ship by Peter Tonkin - Free Book Online Page B

Twostrides took her up the length of him and she grabbed him by the shoulders. “Wake up!” she called. His headband was crushed into his long right hand like a child’s security blanket. His curly hair fell forward in a cowlick into his restless, sleeping eyes. “Come on!” she insisted, shaking him with all her might. “Wake up, damn it!”
    And his eyes flew open.
    She had never seen anything like it in her life. The eyes opened, deep blue and every bit as fathomless as the waterspout outside, sucking at something inside her with the same relentless intensity.
    His hands were on her shoulders just as hers were on his, shaking her as she was shaking him. And he was screaming at her as well, screaming as his body shot upright. She had never seen such a look in anyone’s eyes. “Who am I?” yelled Weary at her.
    There was no knowledge in those eyes, no recognition. Nothing. They were the eyes of a terrified child, one who does not even know why it feels fear. “Who am I?” Weary screamed. And Robin was stunned, rendered completely helpless by the shock of it.
    Weary was sitting completely upright now, shaking his head from side to side. The hair flew out of his eyes to show his forehead, high, white, pinched in impossibly at the temples.
    No. Not pinched in. Crushed in.
    She was unable to tear herself away from his demented gaze. The last thing she saw before Hood hit her, out of the corner of her eye, was Weary’s left temple, caved in to a shadowed hollow, starred with bright red scar tissue.
    As soon as Robin leaped into action, Richard turned, too. The lifeboat began to pitch severely as soon as theboathook was free, hurling itself back against the bow rope like a willful puppy fighting a leash. The movement made it hard for him to work, but he refused to give up even now. Brutally, for time was too short for him to show proper respect, he heaved the sternmost bodies away, uncovering the lockers. His eyes still busy among the filthy, oozing, twisted pile for any scraps of information, any telltale personal possessions they might have brought with them. More than one dead fist clasped a worn Koran, but that was all. He heaved them aside and tore the doors open. The stern lockers revealed nothing more than a bilgelike well reaching down to the keel, full of seawater, blood, and excrement. He straightened.
    The great white whiplash of the waterspout seemed to leap toward him as he moved. The wind howled louder, plucking back stinging spray from the white horses that suddenly surrounded him, its strength roaring up the Beaufort scale with inconceivable rapidity. Hell! Where were Weary, Hood, and Robin?
    He turned, spreading his feet to gain stability, and then a hand grasped at his leg.
    Hood hit Robin in a sort of American football charge, knocking her back onto the seat. Then he was sitting opposite Weary where she had been. He was saying something in a repeated, gentle monotone, voice lazy and hands busy. “You’re Doc,” he was saying. “It’s okay. It’s cool. You’re Doc and you’re all right.” As he talked his fingers loosened the Australian’s grip on the sweatband, easing the bright elastic toweling free.
    “It’s fine, Doc. No sweat. You are Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen…”
    As soon as the sweatband was clear, he began tostroke Weary’s hair back as a mother does with a child, as a horseman soothes a frightened foal. The forehead he revealed was huge, bone white, almost false.
    Jesus Christ! thought Robin, it’s…
    And then it was gone. Hood was fixing the sweatband round Weary’s head, hiding the hideous scars at his temples, concealing the huge bulge of that forehead. And suddenly there were two voices reciting the simple catechism, “Albert Stephen William Weary, born Sydney, Australia, November fifth, nineteen forty-eight.” And Hood was turning toward her while Weary’s hands went to that huge, wounded head of his.
    “What’s