The Alex Crow Read Online Free PDF

and make an attempt for Saint Michael, their home.
    Now Captain Hansen has armed guards watching the native men and their dogs. He has instructed the guards to shoot them if the dog drivers attempt to leave. The situation grows worse with each passing day.
    This afternoon, an inspection revealed stresses on two of the hull’s reinforcing beams. Before departing San Francisco, the
Alex Crow
had been refitted with new boilers and massive crossbeams below decks in order to withstand the tests anticipated on the journey.
    Nobody could rightfully foresee our five-month imprisonment.
    Today, while I was rewrapping Mr. Warren’s crushed hand, Murdoch said to me that he had been his entire life at sea, but had never endured such a predicament as the one we find ourselves in at this moment.
    â€œThe ship will be eaten by the sea,” he said. “I know the ship will break apart, and we will all of us be buried in ice.”
    F RIDAY , F EBRUARY 13, 1880—
A
LEX
C
ROW
    The hull of the
Alex Crow
gave in last night.
    Murdoch came up from below and woke me by pounding on my cabin’s door.
    â€œDoctor! Doctor!” he cried.
    At first I believed there was some kind of medical emergency that required my attention, but the commotion of men as they scrambled to remove whatever could be taken from the
Crow
and off-loaded onto the ice that trapped us here confirmed my worst fears.
    The
Alex Crow
is sinking.
    - - -
    It was when he was eighteen —a legal adult in the Land of Nonsense—that Leonard Fountain answered an advertisement to participate in a paid study by a company called Merrie-Seymour Research Group. Leonard Fountain didn’t really understand or care about the aim of the study, because a thousand dollars was a lot of money to an eighteen-year-old kid from Idaho.
    Unfortunately for Leonard Fountain, the study—which was the first round of such experiments involving the implantation of audio-video feed tissue-based “chips”—was directly linked to schizophrenic hallucinations among the majority of the participants. Merrie-Seymour Research Group decided to go back to the drawing board on newer generations of non-schizophrenia-inducing biochips.

MRS. NUSSBAUM, LARRY, AND THE SNORE WALL
    Larry was the only inhabitant of Jupiter who’d slept much on that first night.
    But since the incident with Bucky Littlejohn and the field-point arrow through the foot, Larry was more than a little stressed out by the four boys of Jupiter. He looked as though he might toss and turn in his non-plastic bed.
    After they packed up Bucky in an ambulance, Larry gathered us together and said, “I’m calling a cabin meeting. And right now.”
    Max and I learned at “orientation,” an absolutely senseless meeting where we filled out the name tags we were required to stick to our chests at all times and counted out our socks and underwear and toured the dreaded lightless, spider-infested communal toilets and showers, that at Camp Merrie-Seymour for Boys, “cabin meeting” times were usually reserved for group sessions with the camp’s therapist, a frazzled old woman named Mrs. Nussbaum. During our six weeks, Mrs. Nussbaum ultimately came to the conclusion that at least three of the Jupiter boys were particularly troubled, and trouble for her—I never answered her personal questions, while Cobie Petersen and Max seemed to not fit in with the other planets of campers.
    She happened to be waiting inside Jupiter when Larry marched the four of us in for our scolding about suicide attempts and such.
    Our first session went something like this:
    We sat on our beds while Mrs. Nussbaum eyed each one of us, almost as though she were trying to decide which unattractive and mangy puppy to save from the euthanizing chamber at a dog pound. Ultimately, I got that all wrong. Mrs. Nussbaum had other intentions as far as the fate of her boys was concerned.
    Mrs. Nussbaum touched the