But Richter turned around and went back to work; he was the kind of guy, Harley knew, who would plan to go down with the ship.
Harley didn’t need that right now. He waded through the icy water, crabs nipping at his boots and thighs, and grabbed Richter by his bony shoulder. “I’m telling you to go on deck—now!”
“You shoulda let me get these serviced before we left port,” Richter said. “I told you they needed work!”
Another wave hit the ship broadside, and Richter tumbled into the water. His hand shot up, and Harley snatched it. He dragged the Old Man onto his feet again, but there were crabs all over him already, their pincers grasping at his wet clothes, or snapping furiously in the air. A big one, pink as bubblegum, was crawling up his chest, and Harley batted it off.
“Get out,” he screamed at the Old Man, “or I’ll drown you myself!” With a hard shove, he sent him toward the stairs. And then he sloshed through the debris to the coffin, still lashed to the conveyor belt. With fingers so cold they were almost numb, he fumbled at the ropes, but then gave up and chopped at them with the axe. The ropes and tarp fell away, and Harley took aim at the rusty hasps holding the lid closed. It took him several swings to knock each one loose, but when the last one went, he stuck the blade of the axe sideways into the groove and pried the lid up. It came up slowly, with a groan, and Harley had to push hard before it opened all the way and fell of its own momentum into the water. There was a splash, then the lid was bobbing like a surfboard around the hold.
The water was up to Harley’s thighs, and he was beginning to freeze. The lights flickered, but they stayed on. Inside the box he saw what looked like a mummy—a petrified face, all teeth and hair, grimacing with empty eye sockets, the hands folded to touch its own shoulders. Still, it was recognizably the corpse of a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty, and dressed in what looked like the frozen remains of a woolen tunic, with a rounded, Cossack-style collar, and black sealskin coat. But around the young man’s neck he saw what he had come for. It was one of those old Russian crosses, the ones with three sideways beams of different lengths, but embedded in it there were several old stones, glinting green in the dim light. He tried to pull it loose, but it was still on its chain. Much as he loathed the idea, there was nothing to do but reach down and lift the corpse’s head. Touching it felt like touching a bag of old shells and crumpled paper; the skin rustled and the skull weighed on his hand like an empty, fragile egg.
But the cross still wouldn’t come loose.
The chain was entangled in the boy’s long brown hair, and it was only after he had yanked at it several times, hard enough that the head was nearly severed from the spine, that it came up and over the crown.
He stuffed it deep into the inner compartment of his anorak, then zipped the pocket firmly closed. A couple of crabs had already clambered over the end of the coffin and spilled onto the corpse. Their claws were shredding the remains of the fabric and probing the hard flesh. One was worrying a toe and would have it loose in no time.
Let ’em have it, Harley thought, and the sooner the better. The water was still rising. It was up to his waist now, and the ship was so canted over that he could barely keep his balance as he reached for the stair railing. He hauled himself up, hand over hand, as the water surged behind him, and as something—hard and persistent—batted at his calves. Glancing back, he saw that the coffin lid, carved with the saint or angel or whatever it was, was floating up the stairs with him, like a faithful hound nipping at his heels.
On deck, everything was chaos. The howling wind was ripping at the lines and the pots, and the lifeboat had already been launched. Fuck you, too, Harley thought, looks like it’s every man for himself tonight. He wondered who had made it on board and who hadn’t. A flare went up from the water, and in its dead-white glow he saw the lifeboat, cradled between two mighty waves off the starboard side. The deckhands were trying to put some distance between themselves and the Neptune, lest they be sucked under when it sank. Harley thought he could make out Farrell at the tiller and Lucas clinging to the oarlocks, but over the wind blasting in his ears he heard a voice—Richter’s—shouting from somewhere down the deck.
The Old Man, in an orange life vest, was clinging to the mast.