A FORGOTTEN STAR
Chapter Two
Silence. The true sound of fear.
An utter absence of sound, broken only by the crackling moans of the ship as it
tears itself apart. The deck inclines downwards, slowly at first, then steeper.
Silence breaks. Screams rip through the air as people grab onto anything they
can, the unlucky few sliding down the wooden planks in a gruesome parody of a
roller coaster. The salty odor burns people's eyes, noses, throats already raw
from screaming.
A priest, holding tightly to a
table, preaches in a shaking voice. His eyes are fixed not on his desperate,
crying audience, the hands, clammy and trembling with fear, that clutch at his,
but the black, gaping maw of the impatient sea. The frenzied violence of before
is gone, gone with the last of the lifeboats when they sailed away. Now, there
is only one route of escape for those trapped on the drowning monster.
Bodies fall, jump, and dive over
the edge, flinging themselves into the sea's icy grasp. Shuddering, wailing
screams sound as mothers throw their children over before jumping themselves,
landing with a spray of white water. Suicide. But to their panicked minds,
driven to the very edge of sanity by utter terror, anything is better than
remaining on the dying ship, where cables snap and the hungry sea creeps ever
closer.
Suddenly, like a monstrous spine
snapping, the ship's hind parts disappear into a roaring maelstrom of foam. The
bow jerks sharply upward and hovers vertically. As it strains at every seam,
people fall like rotten fruit to explode as they hit the waves. The remaining
survivors cling to whatever they can, whatever is left, screaming as their
shoulders and arms burns with the strain, screaming as they drop and bounce and
roll down to where the malignant sea waits.
The End.