It’s been a fortnight since the crash, and by the time afternoon rolls around there’s an uneasy suspicion blanketing the Narwhal. It’s spoken about only between the closest of confidants, the nearest of allies, but there’s a bubbling new fear. Eyes dart to the shadowed corners of the room at the slightest pretense. Heads turn at the tiniest sound. In just a day, a paranoia has gripped the submarine’s residents, and the stress is quickly exhausting them.

In the mess hall, few eat. It’s not even the nausea anymore, most have adjusted to pushing through that for the sake of keeping weakness and starvation at bay. Today, it’s nerves. Their muscles are in a permanent state of tension and won’t allow them to keep food down. Their instincts are pumping them with adrenaline at every moment, waiting for the need to run.

A fork hurdles across the mess and out the door into the hall beyond. It bounces off the wall and tumbles onto the metal floor, clattering with a lasting echo. Max stands at his seat, arm raised over his head. Those who are in the room with him, a few sailors along with Lewis and Charlie look first to where the fork now lies, their eyes alert, then, seeing nothing but the piece of tableware gleaming in the dark, look to Max instead. His eyes flash between each of his spectators.

“I--fuck it, I saw something out there,” he says.

“Yeah?” Lewis asks. “Somebody else wants lunch so we throw our silverware at them?”

“Not a goddamn person, Lewis.” Max swallows then sniffles in the damp air. “You know what I mean.” He adds, quieter.

“Oh?”

“Don’t you fucking ‘oh’ me you piece of shit. We’ve all seen it. I know you have too. We all look like a bunch of damn rabbits, we're so tense.”

Lewis shakes his head, but he knows exactly what Max refers to. Since Bill came to him to report on the strange fog behind the counter, he’s noticed things in the corner of his eye. Movement that vanishes just before he can focus his attention on it, shapeless shadows cast from things that aren’t there, wisps of fog that slip into pipes and down drains before he can investigate. He has no explanation, no reassurances, and struggles to decide how to address the rest of those on board.

“I think we’re all just a bit tired,” Lewis says, “and the dark’s playing tricks on our eyes.”

“You saying we’re hallucinating? Fuck off. I and everybody else that still has half a brain know that’s horseshit. We’ve been down here for two goddamned weeks, and now we’re seeing this shit? Just now, coincidentally right the fuck after that thing got inside?”

“We ain’t having this conversation.”

“Oh? And why not? Maybe if we just keep lying to ourselves it’ll just magically go away?”

Lewis grunts. “Cause throwing forks and knives is gonna help us so much.”

“Jackass,” Max mumbles, but he’s lost the energy to keep fighting. He sits back down and stews in his anger instead.

Lewis would rather not fight either but can see it plain in Max’s face that he was far from done. He stands up and decides to find Bill. Max was his guy, his college buddy, so he hoped he could get some advice on dealing with him. That and he also needed to know how they were going to handle the latest crisis. Hallucination or no, the effects of what they were all seeing were real enough to cause real problems.

And as if on cue, as Lewis steps out into the hall, Julia taps on the hull again. The rhythmic thumping reminding him that these new terrors were just the latest added to the ever-growing pile of troubles they had to contend with. She’s finished by the time he reaches the bunks.

He walks carefully but confidently through the darkness, knowing the ship in the way most know their homes. Finding Bill’s bed is easy and waking him easier.

“Bill,” Lewis grunts.

He doesn’t bother keeping his voice down, speaking a regular tone of voice. He doesn’t imagine Bill’s actually asleep and applies that same logic to everyone else as well. Nobody gets regular rest anyway, as evident by the sounds he hears around him. There is no light snoring in the bunk room, nor the comfortable rustling among the sheets. Instead, there are groans of aching sickness and the labored breathing of the diseased. It sounds more like a hospital ward than a collective bunk room. And the smell is worst of all. Though Lewis spent much of the earlier days sleeping here as opposed to the private captain’s quarters the ship had just for him, the smell alone has pushed him to use it more frequently as the stench of vomit and unwashed bodies has grown.

“Yeah?” Bill whispers.

He rolls over to face Lewis. Feeling more than a little queasy, he was trying to stay in bed until it passed, but hearing Lewis, he sits up and fights back the lurching feeling in his stomach as he does so.

“We need to talk,” Lewis responds.

“Private?”

“Mmhmm.”

Lewis leads them down the hall to the end of the forward compartment and waits as Bill stumbles, trying to keep up.

“I need to know how to get a handle on Max, but more than that, we need to figure out what to do about...the things people are seeing.”

Bill nods. “Can’t do anything about it, Lewis. That’s my honest opinion. The time for empty and dishonest explanations is gone. None of us can explain what’s happening, and the more we act like we can, the more we erode trust.”

“I just don’t want more people to give up, thinking they’re facing something beyond them.”

“Lewis, we are facing something beyond us. We can’t stick our heads in the sand and expect everyone else to follow. If we wanna keep people going, they need to know that we’re all on the same page.”

Lewis sighs. “I just feel like we’re on the edge of an unraveling point. I don’t wanna push us to that.”

“You’re the captain. But they’re not children, they’ll think for themselves with or without you. Something to think about.”

Lewis nods but remains unsure. “I’ll think it over a little longer.”

“Alright. I understand. I’m gonna lie down a little longer, then I’ll try to talk to Max, see what’s eating him.”

“Sure,” Lewis says. “Feeling like shit today?”

“You can say that again.”

“I hear ya. Your hair falling out? Noticed my beard’s started thinning.

“Yeah.”

“Radiation’s a real bitch.”

“Mmhmm.”

Lewis sighs.

Bill just about turns to leave but picks up that Lewis has more to say. “What?” he asks.

“I hate to add another worry to your plate. This ain’t something we can talk about a solution for neither, but you oughta know.” Lewis leans in closer and whispers to Bill. “Food’s getting short.”

Now it was Bill’s turn to sigh. It was an inevitable piece of news, but that doesn’t help to soften the blow any. For as long as they knew rescue was going to be a slow process, they knew they were going to have an issue with food stores. Had the expedition gone as planned, they should have been home by now. Bill can just about imagine himself back in his apartment, typing away as he turned his research into a new paper. But that reality is long gone. They’re already fasting, and though nobody had much of an appetite, a shortage would only worsen the already terrible condition on the Narwhal. Hunger would become another ailment to add to the list alongside radiation, stress, darkness, and paranoia.

“Perhaps, this one would best be kept between us,” Bill admits.

“I think that’s for the best,” Lewis says. “We got enough left for a little longer, few days, maybe a week. All we can do is pray that they get to us in time. But we’ll talk later; go, rest up.”

Lewis returns to the control room, and Bill to the bunks. Though he tries to rest, his conversation with Lewis keeps him up and he starts to get the head-spinning feeling that often comes with a nasty hangover, so he gets up and decides to find Max. When he does, he pulls him aside to speak privately.

“This is about the captain isn’t it?” Max asks right away. “He wants you to talk to me for him?”

Bill clears his throat. “You’ve been butting heads, I get it. We’re all under a ton of stress. But we need to stick together, be cohesive, otherwise, we’re just making a bad situation worse.”

Max grumbles. “Tell him that. You know I hate dishonesty. We’ve all seen the shadows and shit, so why’s he gotta pretend like he doesn’t? It ain’t helping nobody.”

“But you know why he’s doing it, Max. You know he’s just trying to keep up appearances, to look strong for all of us. I’m not saying I agree with him, I’m just saying that everything he does, he does because he believes that it’ll help us keep our heads on straight. Getting into fights with him over how he leads isn’t helping anybody either, you know?”

Max sighs, staring at the floor. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’m not asking you to like him, or agree with how he leads. I just want you to trust his experience and remember that he’s in charge for a reason.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Max shambles off to the bunks without any other parting remarks and Bill hobbles back to the mess hall. He sits down, breathing heaving, having exhausted himself in just this short time up and about. The dizziness, headache, and nausea come in waves, but the time between those waves was lessening, their length increasing, and their severity worsening. The radiation was slowly destroying him and everybody else. They couldn’t hold out much longer and their torments seemed to grow by the day. In the hours when the dizziness abated enough for him to think clearly, he tried, still, to rationalize what they were seeing, but always found himself at the same conclusion, one that shed more darkness than light. It was part of her somehow, the strange fog, the shadowy figures, it all connected to Julia, it had to be so. But that told him nothing, other than that perhaps some of what Jessica spoke of was true, that maybe Julia was intentionally molesting them. But that only left him with more questions than he started with.