“Allow me to explain something,” I said as I held Seaman Bradford against the wall with one hand, his feet dangling almost a foot above the floor and his back pressed against the glass-fronted berthing bulletin board on the white-painted bulkhead. “I have been through this too many times to count. You see an easy mark, a big guy that’s easy to tease, to make you feel better about being a loser. The way this usually plays out is, you make jokes, you insult, you fool with my stuff, take cheap shots at my back, and occasionally kick or push me like you just did.”

I sighed, shaking my head slowly at his terrified expression. “And I do nothing. I let you get away with it until finally, you go too far and I hurt you very very badly. So, what say we just jump to the end and pretend I hurt you so I don’t actually have to do it. You don’t have to feel the pain, and neither of us loses rate, takes permanent damage, or gets kicked out of the Navy."

"You ignore me and let me do my job, I ignore you and don’t break any of your body parts, and we just act like we have settled this without the blood and pain?”

“Y….yeah…” He choked out, “Okay...” He was red-faced and both of his hands were struggling against my arm, but I could tell he wasn’t really hurt or bruised, mostly just scared.

My arm was a bit tired, but I knew I could hold him there as long as I needed to. He was fairly tall, maybe 5’11 and 150 lbs or so, but compared to my 6’3 and 235 lbs hardened by two years of hard labor as a deck ape in the Navy’s amphibious fleet, as well as bracing him against the wall, it was light work.

I shook my head and dropped his feet to the deck, where he crouched for a minute, glaring hate mixed with fear at me as he regained his footing and stood up. I knew that he was going to try something again to try to make himself feel better, bullies always do, but at least I had given him a chance.

It would play out exactly like I had said it would, but hey, at least I got to feel like the good guy… Being bigger than most, and a loner by nature, meant that a lot of guys felt uncomfortable around me… and for a lot of guys, that meant I was a natural target because I rarely reacted emotionally to anything anyone else did.

I leaned back against one of the bunks, watching him as he stood and pointedly cracking my knuckles. I think that maybe one of the reasons I was a target was because I was large enough to scare some guys and because I seldom responded emotionally to anything, I came across as slow-witted and an easy mark. Or maybe it was just something about my face, I smiled a lot and had a soft sort of face, went out of my way to never insult anyone, and had a little bit of extra fat.

Or maybe it was the freckles.

Beats me. Still, I had hopes that this time, at least, this particular wanna-be wit would learn from this experience before both of us were explaining why he had a broken jaw in front of the XO. The situation, although with various sorts of damage other than a broken jaw, had played itself out on my prior ship 4 times. This was why, even after 3 years at the age of 22, I was still an E-2 seaman apprentice and a little worried about getting discharged from the service.

“Let me tell you what I am going to do,” I said, as he cursed under his breath, looking past the beds towards the berthing door. “I am going to go let Zettlemoyer know that we had a little issue, but ask him not to do anything about it. That way, if I have to go to the Captain after the inevitable happens and I hurt you, Maybe the fallout won’t be so rough. You don’t want a big chicken dinner and neither do I, you heard the Master-at-Arms, They are giving out bad conduct discharges for fighting now. So just get over yourself and I’m out.”

I stepped through the door, leaving the sleeping quarters behind and crawling up the ladder to the main deck. I ignored the large gash in my coveralls and the trickle of blood down my leg from where I had gashed it on a bunk.

Bradford had ‘accidentally’ stuck his foot in front of me while I was lugging one of the broken bunks out of the berthing, and headed out of the wind tunnel… a large tunnel in the superstructure that allowed cargo and armored vehicles to be driven from the foredeck to the aft deck when we were fully loaded.

Making my way over to the starboard boat winch, I squatted next to Petty Officer Zettlemoyer where he sat on the rough, gravelly Non-skid, laying out and checking the cables from the Boat Davit after an ‘issue’ we had last time we dropped the Captain’s gig, a small speed boat attached to the side of the ship.

“Hey Bran Flakes,” he said, looking up at me and peering through his glasses, a shock of blonde hair between his left eye and the glasses making him blink rapidly. I hated that nickname, but Zettlemoyer was pretty good people, an E-5 that was technically my direct superior in planned maintenance, even though the reality was that I was doing an E-6’s Job due to a lack of manpower and he mostly wound up doing the maintenance work I was forced to assign to him.

“Hey, Z, fair warning, Bradford tried to push things again, and he wrecked my coveralls.” I gestured to the gash in my leg, and then shrugged a little, “So I am going to have to bum another pair from the engine because the store still doesn’t have my size.”

Z sighed and shook his head, still hand-checking the cable he was working on that I knew I was going to have to grease later. Since he was still checking it, I assumed he hadn’t found any wire breaks, which was great because measuring out and attaching fixtures to a new cable of that length was miserable work that would take at least three people and hours to complete, or more likely, 1 person, me, and it would take me at least a day and a half.

“I have no idea how you do it. I mean, you are the biggest and strongest guy in deck department, you never bother anyone, you work your ass off and keep your mouth shut, and yet you attract jerks like Blanders attracts brass.”

Petty Officer first class Blanders was a constant, unrelenting screw-up, and both looked and sounded like ‘reverend pimp daddy’ from a Damon Wayans movie. He constantly misused rare 5 syllable words like ‘perpendicular’ referring to sailors that accidentally break local rules while on shore leave in foreign ports, or ‘diagnostician’ to refer to a simple leveling tool.

The worst part was, every time he screwed up he somehow spun it as him being the hero, and getting a medal or frocked to a higher rank for it. The guy was dumb as a bag of hammers but somehow got to E-6 without being able to pass a single Boatswain’s mate test, and it showed. He was the E-6 whose job I had to supervise, simply because I understood how, and we were too understaffed to spare another E-6 that the position called for.

He strutted around trying to act like a marine drill instructor towards the bootcamp-fresh seamen in deck department, while even the utter newbies fresh out of boot camp tried to avoid snickering at his constant mispronunciations and misuse of multisyllabic terminology at every morning quarters rant. Or his 'morning sermon', as most of the recruits referred to it.

“If I knew, I’d stop it.” I said simply, smiling a little, to which Z replied, “No you wouldn’t. You make friends with every washout and loser and protect them. That’s one of your problems, you try to be too nice… You still hang out and play cards with Cooney and Parnell, even though everyone knows that Cooney is a butt pirate and Mike is…. Well… Mike.” He shook his head a little, “Hell, you even hang out with me, and I am not exactly popular in the department.”

“Cooney isn’t gay, that’s just something Hardman says cause Cooney’s a little guy and Hardman’s a dick.” I said, shaking my head. I was truly pretty sure that he was actually gay, but the Navy Policy was ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ and I didn’t want to get Chris into trouble. It didn’t exactly matter to me, since Chris never made a pass at me and we had fun playing cards and occasionally going for a drink in Tijuana.

“He was wearing a purple silk shirt with bumblebees on it, leather tight pants, and was drinking at a gay bar. Heck, he even dragged you and Mike to the bar with him, and you didn’t even realize it until Mike dragged you home."

"MIKE realized it and you didn’t. Mike says 2 guys bought you drinks, and you just bought them drinks in return and never even realized that they were hitting on you. That’s probably why you are a target, though.”

I shook my head. The whole evening had been confusing, but the bar had been kind of fun. I didn’t drink very much because even a couple of shots would make me sick and woozy and I hated not being able to think, but there had been a cute girl there too. Girls don’t go to gay bars, right?

A Loud barking tone from the signal tower buzzed three times, and I looked up to see petty officer Randall hurrying towards us.

“Zettlemoyer, Winterborne, We have to get this up right now!” he said loudly, as a soft-spoken 3rd class he kinda had to yell all the time or no one on a loud ship could actually hear him, so he was in the habit of yelling pretty much all the time. “The Deck Officer said that we cannot outrun the Hurricane that just hit Florida, so the skipper’s turning us into it."

"You need to lock down the boat and get this cable and stuff off the deck since operations is saying we are going to be in it in less than half an hour. I got the rest of the guys securing the deck, and Winterborne, you are the only qualified rigger and crane operator that we can spare, I need you to hurry up with this and secure the port boom. Blanders says It’s unlocked right now, so I need you to muscle it down or we will lose it.”

Randall wasn’t really the pulling rank type, so the three of us wrestled the cable into rings, ignoring the grease getting all over our coveralls and dungarees as we lifted and carried the 400-pound coil into a maintenance room on the port exhaust stack. It didn’t fit well, and the room wasn’t intended for storage and the grease all over the grey room would require a hefty clean-up, but it was an emergency and at least we could lock down the tiny room’s watertight door.

We’d deal with cleanup after we got through the storm, but Our ship, an amphibious landing vessel with a giant ramp and stern gate that supposedly could beach and deploy marines, was flat-bottomed… which meant the next couple of days were going to be REALLY exciting. Anything heavy that was not locked to the deck was going to be flying and causing damage, guaranteed, since the ship rolled around like a cork in a flushed toilet on anything resembling rough seas.

As I headed back to the stern, I saw the rear watchman with his sound-powered headphones coming around the gate control panel, my friend Mike, moving up to the ‘smoker’s cage’. The smoker's cage was a red-lit, fenced-in area behind the tower where he could take shelter from the storm while still keeping stern watch and smoke freely at the same time.

The deck had started rolling and the wind had picked up as I headed to the 20-foot long ‘boom’, a sort of Crane that could be used to move cargo and vehicles on and off the ship from a pier. It had a single winch attached to a block and tackle that could lift loads up and down, but needed crews of muscle-powered deckhands to swivel it around once the winch lifted the load to deck height, about 15 feet above the waterline.

Once again I cursed Blanders as I noticed he had cut loose the boom, unfastening it from the smokestack it was normally locked to. Instead of completing the maintenance he had left it unlocked, smashing against the stack at waist height, while he went to ‘do something more important’.

Typical.

The Boom wasn’t terribly heavy, but it was LONG. The two strips of steel that would hold it in place, were loose, but I had no time and the thing HAD to be locked down or it would likely damage both of the stacks as well as itself, expensive repairs that could screw with our mission. The lock had two giant wingnuts that would hold the boom against the side of the stack, and the metal bands were flopping in place.

The wind was getting worse, and I was trying to figure out a way to lock the thing down, when, as usual, my mind went into the ‘zone’.

That’s what I called it when everything seems to slow down while I give things a good, hard think. That’s why I was able to put Bradford up against the wall without hurting him and was one of the reasons I was on the emergency teams. While in the zone, I seemed to have all the time in the world I needed to think something through, apply logic, and decide the results.

When I didn’t think things through in the zone, I tended to make very, very stupid decisions. The dichotomy between my time in the zone and my normal thought processes was so extreme that my folks had sent me to a number of psychologists growing up, all of whom had different explanations for the phenomenon.

The zone was why I could ace almost any test I took, almost knowing the answers in school to things I had never heard of before just by analyzing the test itself. School had been insanely boring, and I couldn’t focus enough to avoid failing most of my classes.

Somehow, though, at the last second, I had always managed to pull out a C average by absolutely acing easily any test or quiz placed before me. The zone was also why, when I got into fights, I would always apply the necessary amount of force to stop the altercation and not a bit more. Well, at least starting in high school, that is.

Before that, I refused to defend myself in any way because all of my teachers and my parents insisted that as the biggest boy around if I fought back against people that bullied me, I would be the bully instead because they were all smaller and weaker than me. Thank God a coach in High School had called attention to the absurdity of it.

After I started fighting back, High school bullies suddenly realized that there were a lot of other targets that hurt considerably less than a broken wrist. That and 6 years of boxing training under my old scoutmaster.

The problem with the zone, however, was that it was hyper-focused. When I was thinking of a problem, I literally could not think about anything else until it was resolved and things sped up once again.

It was not like some sort of superpower or anything, I didn’t move any faster than usual, but knowing exactly what you were going to do and how to do it in the next 3 or 30 seconds meant, once I got out of the zone and applied it, my actions were almost always successful.

The docs had all called it by different names. One doctor had called it attention deficit disorder and tried to treat it with pills that made me sick so I buried them. Another had explained it as a sort of high-functioning autism.

The autism guy was probably closest to the truth, since a few additional symptoms I had, like having to ‘learn’ what human facial expressions meant rather than just knowing, and having to analyze things that other people took for granted. I HAD emotions, and They were very strong, but I seldom felt the need to trot them out from behind the mental walls I had built to keep them out of my way.

I never understood why some people were supposed to ‘snap’ when they bottled up emotions for too long, because for me, if I kept them behind my mental wall, they faded and pretty soon I forgot what I was supposed to be emotional about. Build up or not, the one time I had let out my rage as a youngster in a fight I had almost killed another kid on a playground. Even at 6 years old I was picked on and was bigger and stronger than other kids. Nope.

In my zoned state, I decided to climb a few steps up the ladder on the side of the stack. Then I would reach sideways to grab one of the padeyes where pulleys were mounted to control the stack when it was in use, turn my back to the stack, step on the brace, and then neatly slip the metal band over the boom the moment the ship’s roll swung it back into the groove.

Two turns of the wingnut later, and I could just swing down and tighten them up perfectly.

The action played out the same as it had in my head, which I was used to. Step, climb, step, swing, grab, and then slip the metal brace over the boom, drop the hinged wingnut into place, two quick twists to put it into place, and then slide to the deck.

The entire assembly was rattling, but with both hands, I grabbed the nut and started to twist it tight. I heard a crack above me, extraordinarily loud, and suddenly my eyesight started sparkling and narrowing while my hands lost all strength. I was flying, the boom smashing against my waist and whipping me towards the opposite stack or worse, the thin black lines along the edge of the deck, and I couldn’t change direction.

It didn’t actually hurt, which was weird, but I was zoned almost instantly and realized that some part of the stack or boom must have been hit by lightning. Yes, I was wearing rubber-soled boondockers, but a half-inch of rubber steel-toed boot wouldn’t be enough to completely dampen the effects of the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity rushing along the metal boom and deck. I giggled that the movie reference and realized that I must be really messed up to be making jokes while hurtling, electrocuted, across the deck.

A sudden impact to my shoulder made me realize that no, I probably hadn’t been electrocuted. That HURT, but one of the advantages of my weird zoning thing was that when I had nothing else to do, I could sort of make pain feel distant. I caught a glimpse of the control panel for the boom that had a bright red light lit on it and realized in my thinking state that the crack had NOT been from lightning, that son-of-a-bitch.

Blanders had logged out the power system WITHOUT actually disconnecting it. The crack had been the short-circuit of the winch as it activated, broke the boom free, and the pulley system, without direction and locked down from below, had broken free and impacted the back of my head. This was a small consolation as I tried to think of what to do.

The only thing I COULD do was wrap my arms around the boom and hang on.

Which I promptly did, right up until the damned thing cracked against the opposite stack and broke off. It flung me nearly ten feet above the deck clutching a chunk of the aluminum boom in my arms, right over the safety lines at the edge of the deck, and into the frothing, angry ocean below.

The 30-foot drop was enough time for me to notice that floating almost exactly where I was likely to land, there was a large body face-down in the water. It was wearing the exact same kind of engineer coveralls as I was, had a large red stain spreading from its head on the water, and was clearly bigger than any of the engineers that worked on the ship.

My size exactly, in fact. The coveralls even had a ripped leg in just the same place mine did. Then the Darkness claimed me. I didn’t even feel myself hit the water.

Map of Alandia: