100 Fathoms Below

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Jerry hobbled slowly across the torpedo room, holding on to the torpedo trays for support. He couldn’t put any weight on the smashed knee, or the excruciating pain would drop him to the deck. And if he fell again, he wasn’t sure he would ever get back up. He maneuvered himself out of the torpedo-room hatch, grunting with pain as he stepped over the raised lip at the bottom. In the corridor outside, he found that leaning against the bulkhead as he walked helped some.

He paused at the foot of the main ladder. He dreaded the thought of hauling himself up with a broken knee, but he couldn’t stay down here alone. He took a deep breath and put his hands on the highest rung he could reach, then pulled himself up enough to hop up with his good leg on the bottom rung. Then he repeated the process, getting both hands on the next rung and hopping up. The dragging leg hurt like hell, but by now everything did.

Normally, he would have climbed the ten-foot ladder to the middle level in a couple of seconds. Now it took him nearly three excruciating minutes. When at last he pulled himself up onto the middle level, he lay on the deck, breathing hard. He glanced up at the reactor-room hatch a few short feet away and thought about calling for help, but it was unlikely anyone who was still inside would hear him through the thick steel and over the engine noise. He was going to have to bang on the hatch if he wanted anyone to know he was out here. Gritting his teeth, he began to pull himself along the coolant-slick deck.

Shouts of alarm from the control room above made him pause. Then came a scream and the sound of someone crashing into a piece of equipment.

Shit!

He turned around and used the ladder to pull himself up onto his good leg. Bracing for more pain, he started up the rungs, using the same method as before. By now, he was perspiring heavily.

It felt like an eternity before he reached the top of the ladder. He pulled himself onto the top level and tried to stand, but with the broken knee his balance was shot. He managed to get up on his good leg while leaning against the bulkhead. At the end of the short corridor that led away from the ladder, he could see that the control room had been rigged for red. They had battle lanterns too—lots of them, from the look of it—and enough light bled into the ladder space that he should be able to find the bucket of coolant he had left there. But it was gone.

He heard three gunshots and then another scream. Shit! There was no time to waste. He hobbled away from the ladder, toward the control room. In the short corridor between the two, he found a dropped wooden stake on the deck. He bent down painfully and picked it up. He didn’t know what he could do in his condition, except maybe die. But if he had to die, he was sure as hell going to take one of those bloodsucking assholes down with him.