Chapter 3 - Scene 8

Three explosions ripped the pylons apart, blasting away the crane’s concrete supports. The platform bowed, cracks splitting outwards through the planks. Sall and the others were bowled by concussive blasts reducing the floor around them to rubble and woodchip.

Sall landed on his back in the mud. His brain sloshed, head ringing, smelling acrid smoke and heat. Three of the pylons were destroyed, leaving only twisted metal rebar and a few hardy clumps of concrete supporting the creaking crane slowly collapsing through what remained of the rig. The diving pool was a messy, gaping wound.

The other two pylons were badly damaged. Concrete sheaved away from concrete and went tumbling into the pool. Metal scaffold snapped and plinked as rivets popped away. Sall raised himself up on his elbows, hearing now the alarmed voices of those around him as the ringing in his ears faded.

‘Get back!’ Marshall. ‘Back!’ With one arm under each shoulder Marshall was dragging Florence and another fisherman towards the mud shed. The crane’s tilt shifted.

Rattling joined the metallic screeches. A few feet of chain ran free before jamming. The diving bell dropped and came to a sudden halt. The chain’s bitt stuck, but the weight of the massive bell was too much. It tore through the bent scaffold and the bell went plummeting into the pool, bringing a tall wave washing across the splintered platform, bringing mud, debris, ferals and humans, alive and dead, along on it. The wave carried Sall and broke against the wall of the mud shed. He spat salty water and gasped. It washed off him.

A feral’s dismembered arm sat in his lap. Sall made a face and tossed it away, watching it land at Florence’s feet. She seemed unhurt, but there was a scratch across her forehead where debris had clipped it. Marshall checked the cut and asked if she was okay. She nodded and looked up at the crane.

The scaffold and those last two broken pylons couldn’t possibly support the heavy frame for long. Though the bell was loose, by now probably sunk all the way down to the sea floor, the crane itself weighed tonnes. It was a massive construction of reinforced iron protruding a hundred feet into the air, supported and ballasted by dozens of smaller structures around the mooring. It dominated the sky above them, but now the rig was breaking the whole platform it sat on was sagging at its middle. Water gushed up through the planks.

Marshall was back on his feet, as were several of the surviving ferals. Men still fought them in the chaos of the crumbling scaffold, fighting for their lives as the mongers who feared nothing came surging ahead of the blustering clouds of smoke. Sall could see the bonfire made of the Midnight through the collapsing rig. Its flames reached as high as the crane, and the smoke off it was obscuring the sun. An eerie, overcast pall came through.

They had to get away from the crane before it fell, and aboard the Bitter End as quick as they could. It was more important now than ever. The mooring was destroyed. Their only chance now was to get off it, but it seemed Marshall had other ideas.

He went barrelling past, racing to the rescue of a sailor in the direct path of the falling crane. The sailor had fallen on a broken leg. Marshall dropped the pipe wrench, leaped over the stricken sailor and kneeled at his side to scoop him up.

The crane juddered. Florence froze, watching the structure tilt. Marshall hefted the sailor onto his shoulder. It was too late. Sall looked at Florence. There was that look in her eye again, their greens flashing as she saw more ferals creeping up behind her father. Half a score of them, at least, picking through the debris, and the crane was about to fall between them. She was going to go after him. Sall saw her bunch up and get ready to move.

‘Behind you!’ Florence said. Sall grabbed her arm. She tried to break out of it, but Sall’s grip was too strong. Marshall stood, straightening, holding onto the sailor’s legs. The crane dipped further in a chorus of horrible metallic screeches, whines, and Sall knew the rig was done.

The ferals closed in, kicking him in the back of the legs to bring him down. Another came across and struck him in the back of the head with the hilt of its cutlass. Marshall’s head lolled. They pulled him away. Her father was lifted away and lost as rickety tiers of bent metal came toppling, wrought iron snapping away beneath the crane.

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Florence screamed, ‘No! No!’

Sall’s grip weakened. Florence slipped from his grasp. She took only a short step forward before stopping again.

The crane fell across what remained of the rig and sent up a wave that engulfed them. The heavy slap knocked him away, and he lost Florence in the wash. Its fall caught loops of cable and pumping equipment, bringing all of it down in a tangled mess.

Several cables snapped and whipped through the air. The platform’s bowing foundations emitted a discordant, juddering creak, and more water came gushing through fractured and broken sections of the floor. It was sinking.

The rig was coming apart at its seams. The mooring shook as a section of rig collapsed into the water. Sall and the others had no time to react.

Now the walls of the mud shed finally split. Thick brown sludge filled it halfway and now the walls bulged and broke. For Sall, Florence and the others stranded at its far end, the groaning, sloshing collapse was a final note in the terrible oeuvre.

They were caught in a sagging flow of soft mud that swept them gagging towards the channel. There was a low safety fence there to keep men stumbling over. Sall wrapped an arm around it and grabbed hold of Florence sweeping by. She grabbed a fisherman, and they were all swept together into the fence. The wave subsided as mud flowed into the channel below the wall. Sall let go and gasped for air. He slipped all about, finding hold on the fence and shrugged upright.

The crane was completely toppled in front of them. For now the wreckage barred the way for the feral mongers, but he had no doubt they would be coming through it soon.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sall said to Florence, knowing it was a lame thing to say. Florence didn’t react. She climbed out of the mud and wiped her face, her eyes, clearing it from her nose, wiping it off her arms. They all did the same, and checked nobody was drowned in the slide.

A chorus of quick Ho!s and they counted up. None of the fishermen had died, neither in the battle nor the flood. Sall told her where the pirates had gone.

‘Good,’ she said. Florence was deep in thought, her eyes fixed over the collapsed crane, a ridge emerging from the wreckage of the scaffold, at the bonfire raging at the wall beyond. The mongers they could see were all dead beneath it. More whoops and snarls sounded from all directions, though, and were coming closer. No doubt they were already working to scale the ruin.

She grit her teeth, keeping her gaze averted from his. ‘We’ve lost the mooring. We should take one of the junkers and make around.’

Florence moved between her mudsodden crewmates. She shook off her boots and looked back, over the crane. The lines of her face were drawn in embittered arches around her mouth. ‘There’s no way through to the harbour now.’

In the channel behind the mud shed useless debris from below was loaded onto rafts and driven by men with long bargepoles down the channel and through to the harbour. From there they ferried the scrap out to sea. Now abandoned, those rafts could easily take them past the bulk of the fighting.

To get there they’d have to go through the fallen crane, which had come down through the small flotilla of barges and gouged a raking claw through the wall on the other side. He could see the horizon distant.

Sall didn’t like the idea. ‘We won’t move everyone fast through there,’ he said.

‘It’s a mess,’ Florence agreed, blowing grot from her rifle stock. She put it over her shoulder and jumped onto an empty barge. It rocked slightly. ‘Coming?’

Sall looked up at the crane. It lay crosswise across the entire mooring, bent and twisted, bound by tangles of cables and pipes dripping mud across the rig. Much of it had sunk, but the rest was suspended where it was for now by what remained of the shattered platform. There was already movement there, figures climbing through the debris. More ferals. ‘I’m coming,’ he said, and jumped aboard. Florence took her rifle strap and skipped ahead with a practiced grace.

The fishermen followed them aboard the grimy junkboats and stepped with Sall and Florence from raft to raft, and pushing along where there was open water. The water lapped at the trim from the weight of their passage, but they were made to carry tonnes of scrap and were stable.

The channel’s mucky green was rendered brown by the mud still flowing off the edge of the rig. They neared the crane. Where it had gouged the wall it was bent into the long, wicked shape of a hook. The rafts beneath it had been smashed to pieces and lay half-submerged around it. One of the fishermen took a bargepole and prodded their raft onward. It lapped along with the current.

A hard crack sounded nearby. Shot plinked the water and drove Sall, Florence, and the fishermen down to the floor of the raft. The shot came from the wreckage. Ferals burst from the smoke swirling across the rig, charging them down the crane’s fallen boom.

Florence’s hand went to her stock. ‘Get to the other side! Now!’ she whipped the rifle off her shoulder and lined her shot through the iron framework. The mongers’ mad rush had them coming down on all fours to move across the uneven ridge, shrinking her target. She looked down the sights, exhaled, and pulled the trigger. The lead feral took the shot in its shoulder, punching it sideways. It went tumbling into the wreckage, landing with a hurt shriek. She hopped through to an empty raft and reloaded.

Mongers sent the wrecked crane rattling beneath their feet as the fishermen climbed through to another raft. Sall stepped up into the crane, seeing the Bitter End a length down the channel. They weren’t far now.