Piranha

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The steamer SS Roraima was sailing toward the Apocalypse.

From the bridge of the Canadian cargo and passenger ship, First Officer Ellery Scott peered through a gray snowfall dirtier than anything he’d seen during a sooty London winter. Although it was 6:30 in the morning, the light from the rising sun could do little to penetrate the ash drifting over Saint-Pierre’s harbor. The outline of “The Little Paris of the West Indies,” as Martinique’s commercial center was known, resembled less a thriving city of thirty thousand and more a blurred Impressionist watercolor recently fashionable in the Caribbean town’s namesake.

Scott absentmindedly stroked his silver whiskers as he turned toward Mont Pelée, the volcano looming above the harbor. Although he normally bore a jovial demeanor that made him well liked by officers, crew, and passengers alike, today he could manage nothing better than a wary frown. He’d been a sailor for twenty years, aboard every kind of cargo vessel, at sea through murderous gales and towering rogue waves, but the stout old sea dog had never seen anything as ominous and foreboding as the mountain only three miles to the north.

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