Ten after midnight a Japanese torpedo exploded the starboard bow of a heavy cruiser, puncturing the bulkhead of a berthing area, and killing fifteen men instantly. The ones that didn’t die from the explosion died when they were sucked out into the Philippine Sea; their lungs filled with water before they cried out.
The ship’s cries afterward reverberated throughout her hulls. Her shakes reached a port aft berthing area where Marc and Kevin slept: Kevin on the top bunk with his right hand draped over the side and Marc with his hand on bended knee. Every night, they were The Creation of Adam. Fingertips a breath away from kissing. The torpedo knocked Kevin and Marc from their racks, along with all the other sleeping sailors. The alarms for battle stations sounded and people scrambled to dress. Kevin checked Marc, making sure he was OK before dressing.
Another torpedo slammed into the amidships hull and exploded the ship’s oil tanks. Alarms switched, and everyone readied to abandon ship. Thirty seconds later Kevin, and Marc were dressed but without life jackets, all were taken by quicker men. In the main passageway, the current of men fleeing was like a stream of salmon and as loud as a waterfall. Over a thousand men flooded the way to leave while the ship shrieked with little explosions everywhere. Three minutes after the first torpedo she listed hard to starboard from water filling in compartments. Kevin and Marc still had three decks to climb to reach topside.
The increasing list made balanced walking impossible, slowing their escape. The cold-water bit their ankles. Pounding came from closed hatches. Hatches Marc didn’t try to reach and pry open, focusing instead on keeping himself alive. Kevin didn’t seem to notice it at all. He was busy helping every sailor near him that fell. Trudging like the titan Atlas, he tried to carry each burdened soul on his shoulders, but more realistically he had as much success as Sisyphus when each sailor pulled up to his feet was negated by a shove from the frantic horde.
The water rose to their knees.
Marc grabbed Kevin and left the main passageway for a portside hatch just after the mess deck. It was an uphill climb, but the water shallowed. There, on a table by the hatch, was a lone life jacket: abandoned, wrapped around a table’s leg from when it slipped from a sailor’s hand. Kevin ripped it from the table as they ran. Once topside and on the starboard railing, Marc and Kevin looked into the black ocean. Erratic men flailed furiously. Thirty feet to their right, a sailor dropped his life jacket into the water, then prepared to jump as he’d trained, but the life jacket was snatched up by ten desperate men—piranhas fighting over a scrap of food. Kevin took the prized life jacket and put it around Marc. Marc was relieved. He’d always been afraid of the open water. The only reason he joined the Navy was to get far away from home. The plan was to be on top of the water, not in it. Kevin put his right hand on Marc’s shoulder and the two jumped into the abyss.
The life jacket buoyed up first, shooting them up like a slingshot. Both men were covered in inky oil bled from the ship. It burned their eyes as they fought to scrape it off. Fifteen minutes after the first explosion, Kevin and Marc, along with the other 900 survivors, watched 300 of their fellow sailors drown as the USS Indianapolis sank to the bottom of the Philippine Sea.
~~~
There was no sign of the command. The people in sight were low-ranking and enlisted like themselves. Even if there were an officer or chief around, no one would be able to tell. In the darkness of night, coated in the blackness of oil, they all looked the same. Scared. Marc was relieved to be alive and with Kevin, but the fear of the water and what might lurk in it outweighed any relief. His eyes scanned for signs of shore or ships. There was nothing but debris, men, oil, and water.
The Indianapolis sank so fast that only a couple of lifeboats dropped. They were quickly over-flowed by people. All were trained to not swim after abandoning ship, conserve energy, and just float, so most survivors formed clusters of about twenty. Black rings moving with the current. When the adrenaline of escaping death dropped, the cold penetrated. The night was bitter, the wind coming off the water chilled their eyes, and made tears drip as their bones soaked.
“I don’t know if I can tread all night, boys,” Kevin said through chattering teeth.
“Don’t worry. Just lean on me,” Marc said.
“Glad to see you two made it,” a voice called out.
“That sounds like Dennis, the best cook in the Navy,” Kevin said.
“You know it. Good thing I was up late baking peanut butter cookies for you all. I was one of the first topside. Didn’t know if I’d see any of my friends alive again,” Dennis said.
The men chatted for a bit as a defense mechanism and to buoy spirits. They guessed who’d be in charge and how long they’d be adrift until rescue. Optimists said a day. The anxious, like Marc, said nothing, not able to talk in a time like this. The chatter died down after an hour when some of the men closed their eyes.
Marc wasn’t sure how he’d fall asleep. Even if he wasn’t lost at sea, it would be hard. For months, the last thing he saw before bed was Kevin’s calloused hand. He stared at it with false closed eyes and imagined interlocking fingers with him. Holding him. Now he actually was holding him and he felt alone. Vulnerable.
“What are you going to do when you get home?” Kevin whispered to Marc. “It’ll be soon, I’m telling you.”
Kevin asked Marc this every other day, but Marc never tired of hearing it. Looked forward to it even. It calmed him. Kevin’s way of getting through the war was to picture its end. Usually, Marc answered with some sort of quiet life scenario. On this night though, after surviving death, it felt like the time to be honest. It felt like the time to finally come clean with his best friend. That there was no plan after the war. That he knew the military wasn’t for him, but he had no home to go to. That his mother had kicked him out. She thought her son was disgusting when she learned who he really was, so he escaped to the Navy. The Navy that wouldn’t have taken him if they knew who he was, who he loved. And if Kevin knew everything, he might not see his friend the same way.
Marc rubbed his right cheek where a scar lived. A tight cluster of four tiny divots leading to little scratches a centimeter long.
“Oh, you know, go back home and get a job. Maybe work in the same factory my dad did before his heart attack,” Marc said.
There’ll be other chances to speak the truth, he hoped.
“Me, I can’t wait to get back home on the beach. I’ll continue school and become a teacher. But for a couple months, I just wanna stay at home with my mom and paint,” Kevin said then gave Marc a light punch to the side. “You know you’re always welcome to come visit us. If you’re in Virginia.”
Marc turned to look at Kevin and was disappointed in what he couldn’t see. With him covered in oil in the cover of night, Marc couldn’t see Kevin’s open-field green eyes, his tanned face with freckles splotched on his pointed cheeks, or his square jaw with a cleft chin. The only thing he could make out was his thick mustache that resembled a wet otter.
“You two lovebirds mind keeping it down? Some of us need to get some sleep tonight,” a sailor Marc didn’t recognize said.
The two hushed. Kevin put his weight on Marc and relaxed. Without turning, Kevin pictured Marc’s small frame, his deep brown eyes, stubbled round cheeks with a small scar on the right side that resembled four close, tiny cat scratches.
Once Kevin slept, the rise and fall of his breathing resembled a wave crashing and receding. Marc drifted to sleep soon after.
*
Three hundred yards away, machinist second class Hart had no life jacket. The men around him didn’t either. His fear of drowning made him kick harder and faster than needed. A couple of hours later, his legs locked from cramps and his body stopped from exhaustion. He closed his eyes for a short spell and let his body sink down into the sea for a bit, only for a bit, then he’d return for air. That never happened. Men around him assumed he had drowned.
~~~
When Marc woke, the number of survivors reduced from 900 to 870. Most didn’t notice. Those who counted a sailor missing chalked it up to drowning. As the sun surfaced, Marc smiled again. It was freezing in the dark of night, and they needed warmth. Two hours after the sun rose, Marc and the survivors cursed the damn thing. The black, sticky oil on and around them trapped in the heat. No matter where they swam there was heat. Ducking into the water just applied more oil. As the heat grew so did the dehydration.
With the sun at its meridian, Marc desperately needed to drink. His lips chapped by the second and his throat was sand-dry. Just a handful of water to swish around to cool off and quench his thirst would do him good, he thought. Marc cupped a tiny bit of the sea and oil water and brought it to his mouth.
Kevin slapped it away.
“Don’t. You’ll just make yourself sick. We’ll get fresh water when we’re rescued soon, so don’t worry,” Kevin said with a hoarse voice.
“I’d kill for a cold shower and an ice cube to suck on,” Marc said.
“Give me a hot bath,” Dennis said.
The nineteen men around him shook their heads and booed. A great debate started on how one could want a hot bath when they were in a bath of hell water.
“I’ll end with this, I never had hot water growing up. I’ve earned it now,” Dennis said.
“And all I’m sayin’ is you’ll never find ol’ Gene here swimming in the ocean again. This war will be ending any day now. I know that for sure. Then Imma be land-locked for life.”
Marc recognized his rude voice from the night before. The man’s face was as ugly as his voice. Weathered and scarred by heat and steam from years of engineering. His face held jagged yellow teeth that smiled often.
“Yeah, Gene, how do you know that?” Marc asked.
The men hushed, surprised that someone stood up to Gene’s big talk. Kevin was surprised more since Marc never stood up to anyone.
Gene looked around then shrugged, “Ahh fuck it, ain’t no officers around anyhow, and ain’t like they gonna Court-martial me now. Remember that package we delivered a couple of days back?”
Men nodded.
“Well, I thought it was suspicious how it had special guards and all that. So, during cards with my chief, I pressed him. I pressed him and he told me what it was.”
“What was it?” Kevin said.
Marc never heard Kevin so interested. His brows were fixed tight, his body leaned in.
“Alright, I’ll tell ya. They said they were parts for a bomb. Uranium I think he said. For a really big fuckin bomb. And that they’ll be dropping it on the Japs any day now. And once that thing falls, a whole city will be gone. The Japs will have no choice but to surrender.”
“My God, that’ll kill thousands,” Dennis said.
Gene laughed, “Good, better them than me, ay boys?”
Most men nodded, but not Kevin, he was still. Contemplative. Fearful.
“So, you’re saying this was actually a secret mission we were on, Gene,” Kevin said.
“The most top-secret kind,” Gene said.
“The kind of secret mission that wouldn’t give out our location, meaning people wouldn’t know when and where to look for us if something were to happen,” Kevin said.
Marc’s world plummeted as the hope he kept afloat sank. There would be no quick rescue. The only people privy to their stranding were the Japanese that sank their ship. Marc no longer wished to see a ship appear from the horizon. Didn’t want to find out what being a POW to a losing country was like. All he could do was look down into the blinding oil water. The other men did the same. Even Dennis and Kevin, the epitome of looking on the bright side, were blinded by the truth of their situation.
The rest of the day went on in scorching silence for the twenty men. Other rings of floating men seemed in good spirits, laughing and joking in between cursing the boiling heat. Their good training kept them mostly intact. Marc and the other men didn’t spread the word of their impossible rescue. They let the men enjoy their ignorance.
As the light dimmed to dawn, a man a hundred yards away screamed. A long, frightened scream that lasted as long as his dried throat would allow. Marc and the others looked in his direction. All sure the enemy had returned.
“Shark!” the man yelled out.
Marc’s heart stopped. He’d never seen a shark in person. Just the wide bone jaw of one hanging on a shop wall. It scared young Marc to the point of paralysis. Not even his mother could get him to move. Little Marc stood frozen as he pictured what could fill out the jaw, what could carry those sharp teeth, and what would it feel like to be eaten by it.
“No way. In this sea? Don’t sharks stick to the open ocean?” Kevin said.
The men shrugged. There was a great commotion from the rings of men as they tried to see what the yelling man saw. Men splashed at the water to look past the oil and see past their feet. No one saw anything but the dark ocean that got darker with the emerging night. While most men tried to sleep, cooled from the lack of sun, Marc floated, eyes alert. An hour later he started to sleep, felt a phantom tug at his feet, and jerked awake. His breathing hyperventilated. Eventually, he focused on Kevin’s quiet, rhythmic breath. White noise that soothed his anxiety. Marc pictured the low sound waves taking shape, forming fingers, and interlocking them with his own. And drifted off to sleep.
~~~
When Marc awoke to daylight, the number of survivors had dropped down to 800. There was chatter in the air about the dwindling number of men.
“All I’m saying is sharks or no sharks we can’t do nothing but survive anyway. Nothing’s changed,” Dennis said.
“Our odds of survival changed,” Kevin said.
“I’ve been swimming from sharks my whole life, they’re just real this time,” Dennis said. “We’ll get through this, if we give up or let fear win then we won’t.”
“Are we sure they’re really sharks around?” Marc said.
A sailor a hundred yards away unleashed a sharp yell that lasted so long one could hear the bloody scratches form in the man’s dry throat. It penetrated everyone around as they watched him lift up the shredded, bloody life jacket that had once been on the man next to him. Without thinking about it, Marc kicked his feet harder and faster, trying to get out of the water he was stuck in. His breathing turned into a struggling wheeze. Kevin put a hand on his chest.
“Stop!” Kevin yelled.
Marc’s feet froze, but his wheezing increased. He wasn’t used to Kevin distressed.
Kevin took a deep breath before continuing. “I mean, slow down. You’ll tire yourself out and might attract sharks here. I don’t want to die here. I don’t want you to die either. So, focus on your breathing and you’ll be fine.”
Kevin didn’t say it, but there was fear behind his eyes. He was holding it together for Marc, but he wouldn’t be able to forever. For Kevin’s sake, Marc slowed his breathing while counting backward from 100. Concentrating on something else helped.
“I’d like to see some shark bite ol’ Gene. I’ll punch him right in the nose. You all do the same. Don’t die without a fight.”
The oil that previously covered the surface of the water thinned and gave way to clear patches. With the sunlight shining again, Marc looked down and for the first time could see his feet and past them into the void of the sea. And it looked back at him. Black as the oil surrounding them, black as the cold night. Two soulless eyes of a tiger shark.
The shark swam away, deeper, camouflaged by the dark water. Marc wanted to scream but froze, wanted to shout his fears but wouldn’t speak them. He was resolute in not breaking down on Kevin. He wouldn’t make him angry or drown him with his despair.
Kevin saw it too and spoke for him. “Don’t panic, everyone. Let’s stay afloat and not drop down. They’re waiting for us to sink down.”
“Use your knives if you’ve got ’em,” Dennis said.
On all the life jackets were small survival knives. There hadn’t been a use for them until now. Marc forgot it was even there. He pulled it from the left shoulder, examined the blade, his hand trembled as hard as his breath, then tried to hand it to Kevin.
Kevin shook his head and spoke just loud enough for Marc to hear, “Don’t be afraid, you’ll use it when the time comes.”
Marc pictured those dark eyes of the shark and how he’d plunge the knife in them if it came near Kevin. Five other guys along with Gene and Dennis examined their knives. Marc was starting to like their odds of twenty men, eight with knives, against one shark.
The sunlight intensified, as did delirium. Men who succumbed to their thirst became delusional from the toxic oil and salt water. Some tripped out and saw mythical creatures, others danced with movie stars, while a few got violent trying to attack sea beasts. One man stabbed at the water trying to cut a leviathan. While he swung and stabbed around with his knife, men had no choice but to isolate him. Screams of fighting his imagination curdled as he was eaten from the toes up. Men tried to rescue him, but when they got close, he slashed. The man hallucinated the whole of his death, which lasted a long twenty minutes thanks to a timid shark afraid of live humans. The man cried out for his wife in the end. Called her name, and finally died of blood loss before his torso was dragged under by sharks more comfortable with dead bodies.
Blood was thoroughly in the water.
Hearing people die became common as 150 more men died before nightfall, dropping the survivors down to 650. The number of sharks swimming around grew to the hundreds. Some attacks were beaten off with stabs and punches by men with the same idea as Gene. Marc counted five new sharks under their circle of twenty men as the sun dipped past the horizon, turning the sky a brilliant scarlet.
“Lady luck is on our side, boys, we got a sailor’s sky tonight,” Kevin said.
The night brought back the chill along with the blanket of darkness. Marc wasn’t sure what was worse, the blistering heat or the bitter cold. Seeing the demons below or not knowing if they were there at all. As long as his knees would allow it, Marc brought his legs up and formed a ball. Every time he stretched his legs down, he was sure that was it, they would get eaten off.
Very few men slept. Throughout the night someone would scream, and every man was on alert. Some were false alarms, others weren’t. Marc waited to hear Kevin’s soft breathing of sleep, but it never came, he stayed up all night. So did Marc.
As a child, Marc loved wind-up toys. The little metal kind found in stockings on Christmas day. By and large, his favorite of them all was the chattering teeth. The first time he saw the suspended teeth outside of a mouth, just walking and chattering away, he lost it with laughter. His mom watched with delight as he wound it up and giggled as it wobbled around the room. Marc will never again like the sound of chattering teeth after hearing the incessant echoes of shivering teeth clinking together in the night. The loudest teeth being his own, like Rosie’s rivet that never stopped. Marc cursed the sun eight hours ago, but he prayed for it to rise again.
Before it did, hungry sharks ate the first sailor in Marc’s circle. It happened so fast. A yelp. Gurgle. Silence.
~~~
At some point Marc nodded off, against his will, but was shaken awake by Kevin surrounded by an orchestra of screams.
“They’re coming back!” Dennis said.
“Sons of a bitches saw us,” Kevin croaked.
“Didn’t I tell ya they sounded American?” Gene said.
In the sky were a PV-1 Ventura and a PBY-2 Catalina. Two American planes. Marc wanted to cry from relief, but no tears came, his body preserved what little moisture was left. Kevin nodded at him and squeezed Marc’s hand as he did. Marc didn’t mind the wrinkly ridges of Kevin’s waterlogged fingers. They were firm when they interlocked with his own. Finally.
For a moment, the heat from the sun didn’t bother the men. It was temporary. They would be saved soon. They would all be getting their wishes, even the weird request for a hot bath.
Dennis was hooked to Gene and another engineer when a shark swam right up to the surface of the water and chomped with vacant eyes. While men screamed and froze, Gene stabbed the shark with a quick left jab of his knife. The shark dove off, and the men breathed again. Then Dennis’s right leg was pulled down with a strong and sudden force that unlinked him from the engineer to his right. Gene held on tight as the circle of men broke to try and keep their friend alive. Marc held his knife, but his legs locked up. He wanted to swim over and fight, but his body wouldn’t budge. Fear and exhaustion immobilized him. The sharks nearby rushed to the taste of blood. Minutes later, Dennis was gone.
Two hundred more men died in the next hour in a frenzy. The survivors dropped down to 450.
~~~
The planes returned with backup to drop rafts while two ships were en route. To ensure no man would be trapped under the rafts, the two pilots dropped their payloads three football fields away. It didn’t seem far to the pilots.
All of the men that could still swim started for the rafts. Every circle broke up to swim to safety. Marc and Kevin unlocked their hands and swam. Sensing their food leaving, the sharks got bolder still, jumping up and latching onto anyone they could drag down. The distance to the rafts tripled in Marc’s head. The muscles in his arms ached, he could hardly slap at the water. Lack of hydration and sodium caused his legs to cramp. Marc tried to push through the pain for freedom and safety, but asthma stunted his breathing. His chest ached.
Kevin was several feet ahead when he turned back to see Marc stopping and relentless shark fins continuing. He swam back, grabbed Marc’s arm, and whipped him to his side.
Kevin could barely talk from dehydration, all he managed was, “Just breathe.”
Kevin interlocked his hand with Marc’s and swam with one arm, while kicking ferociously. Marc did the same. With his strength renewed, he focused on the yellow rafts, the floating lemon drops of protection. He felt Kevin’s firm hand and heard his breathing, his rhythmic inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Marc focused on the in and out and matched his breathing the best he could. Soon, he was listening to his own in and out as he felt the continued strength of Kevin’s hand. The screams of the people around him and behind him slipped away. The yells from the people in rafts muted. He heard nothing. Felt nothing. There was only forward. Even when it felt like he wasn’t moving at all, he still only focused on what was ahead. He didn’t hear Gene yelling about a shark right behind Kevin, and Kevin had no voice left to scream. All there was, for Marc, was the raft, and then an extended arm. Gene was halfway out the raft shouting to Marc, encouraging him to keep going. Marc continued to feel Kevin’s hand and knew he was safe.
When Marc finally grabbed Gene’s hand and turned around to help Kevin, he saw nothing but sharks. Gene lifted Marc up a second before the sharks could take a bite. Marc felt Kevin’s hand. His strength. Marc looked down. In his lap, still intertwined with him, was Kevin’s hand that extended down to an arm, to an elbow, and shortly after that it stopped with torn bloody strings of flesh and broken bone. Marc turned to cry out and saw the concealed survival knife, unused. Clean. His face crumpled like a balled-up piece of paper. A man thought he was helping Marc by trying to throw the arm off the raft, but Marc refused to let go. Gene came over and held him up and let him rest on his shoulder. Marc scrunched into a ball.
The men in the raft looked around at everything but the crying sailor and the severed arm. All on the raft knew what it was like to lose a friend. Knew the pain. Gene knew the pain more than others; his brother died in Italy a year earlier. One man in the raft knew the exact pain Marc was in but remained silent.
~~~
Marc knocked and focused on his breathing. Wanted it steady when he saw her. Hoped his throat wouldn’t close up. The door opened and there she was, with the same open-field green eyes and cleft chin. Kevin’s mom looked at the man in uniform before her, studied the bag he carried and the sorrow in his eyes.
“Why don’t you come in?” Grace said.
While sitting down in a quant kitchen by the ocean, the two drank tea. It took ten minutes before someone spoke.
“I was close to your son, ma’am,” Marc said.
Grace raised a hand to stop him. “I know who you are. Kevin wrote about you often.”
A tear dripped down Marc’s cheek and he tried to cover it.
Grace patted his left hand, “It’s alright, son, no point in hiding your feelings. You’ll make yourself sick that way.”
She handed him a fresh handkerchief and the two talked. Not about Kevin’s death, but about everything lovable about him. Marc opened up and told Grace everything he never told Kevin. His mother’s rejection. His scar on his cheek from a diamond ring and backhanded slap. His escape to the military. Even his asthma. The two talked until dusk.
“I should get out of here and find a place to stay. Can you recommend a hotel and cab service?”
“I’ll do no such thing. There’s a free bedroom upstairs. You’ll stay there and we can talk about your future in the morning.”
Grace shooed Marc away from the front door and up into a bedroom on the second floor. Marc knew about the spare bedroom that they sometimes rented out. Heard about its vacancy often. When he turned on the lamp in the room, he saw it wasn’t the vacant room, but Kevin’s. All around the walls, the shelves, the desk, the bed, were pieces of him. A painting of the beach with his signature. Books by H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe with worn spines folded by an engrossed teenager got lost in. A stack of pristine Action Comics on the desk. A quilt on the bed passed down from mother to child. Kevin was an open book, but there were still chapters left to read.
Nightmares plagued Marc since his rescue a month before. Sometimes he heard the screams of people being eaten, the chattering of freezing teeth, or the heat from the sun. But always, he sensed a shadow behind him, lurking. Biting.
Marc awoke in a sweat. Felt a heavy life jacket around him. An albatross that swooped down every night. It shouldn’t have been him that wore the jacket. Kevin would have used the knife. Maybe both would be alive.
The bedroom was still dark. Marc wiped his brow with the bed sheet then got up to open a window and let in the summer breeze. He went to the desk and took a black glove from it. When he laid back down, he interlocked the glove’s fingers with his own, heard the rhythm of the waves crashing and receding, and felt Kevin again.//
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Heck (he/him) is a writer and Lecturer in Creative Writing at ODU. He graduated from the MFA Creative Writing program at ODU with a concentration in Fiction. His work has been published in As You Were: Military Review. Dan won the 2020 Jerri F. Dickseski Fiction Prize and in 2022 he won the Excellence in GTA Teaching: New Teacher Award. Dan lives in Chesapeake, VA, with his fiancée, Gabby, and son Bruce.
About the Author
