Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

28

The power went out in the Theater.  Lee sent a few of his men to check the ship, to find out if there was power elsewhere, but Rick returned before they did.

“They’re going for the lifeboats,” Rick said. “I could hear them all in the Atrium. They were raiding food and everyone’s panicking and trying to follow them before it’s too late. It’s chaos, and it’s black everywhere.”

Lee ran out of the Royal Theater with the rifle and a flashlight.

They couldn’t do this, he thought, bounding up the stairs. But there was no law to stop them. Hesse had said as much. Hesse and the Colonel’s control was a joke, but he had the gun. So he’d be the enforcer. Golding’s Law.

The lifeboats and life rafts were at the Atrium level. From the Italian restaurant, Lee had to climb four flights of stairs, run down the dark Penthouse Deck corridor, and down four more flights. The adrenaline surge was in him, and he hardly slowed. At the Atrium level, he forced open a door and went into the rain, walking solidly in the wind. He was familiar with weapons, and he worried that the gun would jam in the rain. This had automatic and semi-automatic options, which was good. He didn’t quite know what he’d do. If they were leaving, they damn sure couldn’t have the food. On the other hand, the more that left without extra food, the more food would be left for those remaining. How could that work?

Still, he had the gun, which was good. There were so many of them, and it was so hard to see in the dark, through the rain. He’d have to make liberal use of bullets to frighten them away from the boats, but how would he get the food? Their screaming came to him over the echoing rain from down the walkway.

He reached the first lifeboat with his heart beating in his throat. His only animal thought was that they were taking his food. He began firing above their heads in single shots, trying to get their attention. The crowd around the first boat turned.

“Give me the food!” the Mighty Lee Golding shouted holding his gun above his head so they could all see.

Only the first few at the edge of the crowd could hear him, the rest just stared, waiting.

This was the mob. The same that screamed and lost themselves in their screams at the arena. They were one monster with a thousand heads. He fired above their heads again and waded into the crowd, as some fought to get away and others fought to get into the boat. The sea of bodies parted around as he marched quickly towards the boat, firing a few more shots in the air. He got to the door, throwing a smaller man off the steps. The lifeboat was already beyond capacity.

“Give me all the food,” he screamed in the closed hull. He fired through the roof.

Nobody moved. Something made the lifeboat buck, and Lee fell hard against the wall. A man jumped at him. Lee caught his jaw with his big elbow, then smashed the stunned man’s face with the butt of the rifle. Screw it, he thought. There was a console– he shot it. He stepped back out of the lifeboat and shot up the davit control boxes and soft spots. There were the loud pings of ricochets, and Lee knew he couldn’t let fear of that stop him.

When he got to the next boat, more of them just scattered, which made it easier. But he couldn’t see any other way – he couldn’t stop them from taking the food unless he stopped them from going. He should have organized first, he shouldn’t have gone alone. He shot out mechanisms and controls for the next boat, and repeated that, so that hundreds had scattered before him. There were too many boats. Some of them had to be in the water by now. He switched the rifle to fully automatic. It made everything faster. The sounds of the ricochets came over the gunfire, but Lee didn’t see anyone get hit. The rain picked up suddenly and he was drenched as if in a waterfall. He looked up at the heavens and saw the spotlight, the only light on the ship. He felt a kind of ascendance, as if he were rising above this crowd he fought.

The living mass around Travis’s group propelled them in jerks. The sound of gunfire pierced the storm, and the living mass held its breath and stopped convulsing. The sound was unmistakable, through the rain and wind. It came again, single shots. Then a burst, coming closer, and they heard screams, and reverberations of the fire against the ship.

“Daddy?” Darren said. “Are they back?”

Lee Golding, Travis thought.

“No,” he said.

Was he trying to get on a lifeboat? Or was he trying to stop them, as he and Hesse had tried to stop them in the galley? With that he realized he was now with the same group he had been fighting less than half an hour earlier; he recognized several faces that had appeared in the flashing of lights around the galley. The madness of it. He was struggling, competing and cooperating with the ones he’d thought monsters minutes ago, while another man with a gun threatened them all.

There was a loud sound like a machine breaking down as the mass again surged forward, and they all waited for the next sign of the gun. Why hadn’t he brought his gun? Travis thought.  He’d been to Vera’s room and never thought of it. He would kill Lee Golding if he came near his family. But he had no gun. There was thunder that blocked everything out, and then the noises of gunfire and metal percussions were all around them, like the gunfire was part of the swirling tempest itself.

The gunfire was not heard in the piano lounge far above. The lounge had returned to its calm equilibrium. Those who were staying were staying. Only the sounds of the storm now.

Professor Claude Bettman stood and walked to the piano. It was dark, no one noticed. He began to play a nocturne of Chopin. It was not loud; the rattling of the glass all around them was loud. Only those in a few of the spots closest to the piano could hear.

A woman yelled for Claude to be quiet. A man, holding a child, shouted back to play.

It was not a technically difficult piece, but one that, with the right touch, rang out with subtle flavors. Professor Claude played fluidly, just louder, just softer. It was a sad piece, but, here and there, hope, in bright chords. Then gone, as if it had not been there at all.

It was a good piano, a Bosendorfer concert grand. He’d wanted to play it for days. Why not? He lost himself then in the music. It seemed to him the most beautifully he’d played in his life. God, he’d always wanted to play a Bosendorfer, why had he let this one sit here untouched?

Chopin on a Bosendorfer in the storm, as though each note were itself a drop of liquid gold.

When he finished, he could hear the applause from all the spots that could hear. He had a wet hand on his back and turned to see Travis, and just about in the darkness, Gerry, Corrina, and the child. Travis was breathing loud and slow.

29

He couldn’t keep this up, Lee thought. He’d have no bullets left. He’d be left behind on this ship, and he’d have no bullets. He shot out another boat’s engine and davit mechanisms and moved on.

He fired again, single shots here and there, at the boats or davit mechanisms. Up the deck he walked, past each lifeboat, scattering the mobs but not waiting for them, trying to disable the boats as quickly as possible, hitting the engines, the hulls, the davit mechanisms, but bodies tumbled from the shots. There was the other side still. They’d still be evacuating. There were so many more boats, running off with the food. But he was too worried for bullets to keep trying to stop them. He’d stopped many but he couldn’t stop them all. He had to get out.

He knew he could never blend in with the crowd. He was too big, even in the dark, to mistake. He stormed through a gangway into an inner hall, his gun ready. He knew that just a short side hall separated him from the Grand Atrium and a whole bunch of people who would now want him dead more than each other.

He found a stairway and hurried towards the Theater. Up four levels, across the dark Penthouse Deck, and then back down a stairway astern of the closed compartment. He felt safe, insulated from the madness and violence left behind. His legs finally began to twist under him. He rested against the wall and caught his breath. Now the gun had been used, and violence was in play. He had only stopped a fraction of the lifeboats, a fraction of the stolen food. He thanked God he had the only gun.

The Theater was still dark when he arrived. He wondered how many here had left. He’d have to wait till morning to find out.

He broke the taboo against speaking in the overnights and shouted out.

“It’s over. Every lifeboat that didn’t get away already has been shot up. And so have a lot of them that tried to take food. Get some sleep, we don’t know what we’ll be facing tomorrow, but there’s going to be some angry, bleeding thieves out there.”

There was noise in the dark in reaction, quickly ebbing.

He found Jessica. They often slept in the dressing room, but they also had a place by the stage they’d made relatively private, and they stayed there sometimes when they were nervous of being cut off from anything. He lay down with her, and as the Theater returned to sleep, he couldn’t. He peered into the darkness, imagining shapes, black against black, and the only sound was the rain. The spectral shapes moved and he replayed the vision of thieves filling the lifeboats and saw himself shooting at them. He saw a woman hit by a bullet, falling in to one of the boats. Had he seen that? Or had he just imagined it?

When sleep finally came, its arrival seemed to slide right into its departure. He opened his eyes, and light was in the room through the small skylight, not a real sunlight, but a grey light, a shadow light, through the cloud and lighter rain.

It seemed most of his Theater group was still here; Jessica had disappeared.

He found his wife backstage in the dressing room.

“I shot them,” he said. “I don’t know how many.”

She was muted by the event. In the dark she stood and grabbed Lee and kissed him.

“Calm down,” she said. “Calm down. Lee, they asked for it.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. I might have saved all of us, who knows how many could have gotten away. But all them I stopped, how will we find their food? How will we ever get it back?”

“That’s not your problem,” Jessica said. “You stopped them. Get Hesse to clean up the mess.”

“How many of ours went?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessica said, “not many.”

“There were hundreds of them out there, maybe thousands,” Lee said.

“All from the Atrium,” Jessica said.

“Maybe it’s not too late for us,” Lee said. “I shot up the boats, but maybe we could find one that works. We could get some food and just get out of here.”

“Lee, think,” Jessica said. “Those lifeboats will never reach land. We’ll be floating with two armfuls of food. Which boat do you think will be found first? Here we have a huge kitchen and the gun. You did the right thing, Lee.”

Lee said, “I need to see Hesse. I’ll get Rick.”

Lee thought about bringing Adam, but while he could be sure of Rick’s support, he didn’t feel that way about Adam Melville anymore. Walking the long distance between the Theater and the Atrium, Rick and Lee could see what the night had done. They still passed individuals or small groups here and there, but they were not like people now. They were furtive and quick, like animals. They either knew what had happened, or what was worse, they knew only that something bad had happened but not what.

In the Atrium, some power had been already restored. Lee was struck by the quickness of the repair with all that went on that night. The emergency track lighting glowed in the dim dawn let in from the glass ceiling above. There were much fewer here than before. Fear and hatred appeared on faces here and there that recognized Lee, or his gun.

They found John Hesse. He was in his office, with two women. Hesse saw them through the window, his face grave. He waved Lee and Rick sharply to wait.

It was not long before the women wound up their business and left. Lee and Rick entered.

Hesse looked at them strangely. He was standing, they sat.

“They found a girl. Raped. Sixteen years old,” Hesse said.

Each let out an expression and then waited.

“In a bathroom,” Hesse said.

Lee and Rick sat motionless. Hesse stayed standing, by the counter.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Lee said.

“I don’t know,” Hesse said. “Last night, a lot of things went down. We have dead bodies, dead bodies, bleeding kids.”

Hesse stopped there to see Lee’s reaction. They stared at each other in silence. Finally, Lee spoke.

“I did what I had to do. And I have an M16 and you don’t.”

“Fine,” Hesse said. “You have an M16, and I don’t. So you can watch your own back. But with all this mess, here we are this morning, and everyone still has one ship to live on. So all I care about is how we survive from here. Now there’s this rape. Anybody who has a woman on board that they care about needs to worry about this.”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “So how are you going to deal with it? You couldn’t stop your own people from stealing food.”

“We need to find this guy,” Hesse said. “We’ll figure everything else out, but we can’t let this go. Those women, it’s one of their daughters. They’ve been staying here in the Atrium. She says the girl had never seen the guy before, so he’s probably from the Theater or in a stateroom. But she could describe him– and if he’s a refugee he’ll be in the same clothes.”

“So, the first step would be to check for someone like that in the Theater you’re thinking,” Lee said. “And you’re just offering a truce with me to get that.”

“I’m not at war with you,” Hesse said. “We don’t need more blood. We want to feed everyone, and get everyone off this boat. Those folks that stole food stole it from us too. We can still get back to normal, Golding. But everything falls apart if rapists are unpunished and everyone knows it.”

“Are you blind or stupid, Hesse? It’s already fallen apart. You’ve got people who tried to steal our food, and you’ll go right back to keeping them alive, but you’re mad at me for trying to stop them? Do you seriously want to sit here and waste time worrying about one girl? Wake up. We have thousands of lives hanging by a thread now. I let you have your little podium up there and let you get on with organizing and running things. Now look. The food's gone.”

“Not all of it,” Hesse said. “There’s quite a bit left, maybe a week’s worth, maybe more with the Italian leftovers. We don’t really know how many of us are left yet, or how much we can get back from what was stolen, so it’s hard to say exactly how long the food will last, but we’ve got a while yet.”

“And how is it you have power back and we don’t?” Lee said.

Hesse rolled his eyes.

“Our engineer and her men were up all night getting the generators running again. And guess what? They’d blown because of the circuit powering the Theater. So they had to disconnect it to get power back here.”

“Who are you to decide who gets power? It’s pitch black in there at night.”

“Look, we have thousands of people getting their food or living here.”

“You had thousands, looks like a lot fewer now. Guess you didn’t really inspire a lot of faith did you?” Rick said.

The Mighty Lee Golding stood.

“I trusted you,” Lee continued. “All our lives in your hands. I said, when I first came down here, he’s got things under control, he’s already got things going on. So I let it stand. This is the result. From now on, I call the shots.”

He leaned over the counter, his gun hanging behind him. Hesse could have gone for him then, and grappled with Lee before he could get his gun in hand. Lee hoped he’d try.

“No,” Hesse said. “No one here’d put up with that, not the Colonel, not the staff, not the people out there.”

“They’d put up with it if I killed you.”

Lee pulled back and grasped the gun by his side, holding it underarm, not lifting it to aim at Hesse but threatening with it.

“If you kill me,” Hesse said, “they’ll kill you.”

“Who?” Rick said.

“Anyone,” Hesse said. “We all know what you did last night. No one will make anything of it because last night a lot of things happened that we can’t do anything about now. But if you kill me you won’t have a moment’s rest on this ship. The moment you kill me, you’ll be marked. Someone will get you. We’ll get power back to the Theater. It’s still a safe place to use as a hub. Trust me. No one wants to see you here in the Atrium again.”

Lee laughed.

“Are you for real?” Lee said. “You threatening me to stay away? You stay away from the Theater. If I see you, I’ll kill you, and I guarantee no one there will be bent on vengeance. Get our power back, or I’ll be back. Send the food, or I’ll be back. And I’ll know if you’re shorting us, I’ll have eyes in here checking your rations. You got anything to say to me, send someone else to say it or bring me down. I’m telling you, stay away from the Theater. I don’t like you.”

30

In the morning, as they had every morning, the groups from the piano lounge went down to the Atrium for breakfast, joining a steady stream of tourists and squatters from the staterooms.

The crowd was significantly smaller than it had been. There was coffee. The food was late.

Hesse came up onto the counter top.

“I think you all know something about last night. There was a lot of food taken. There were people hurt. All the lifeboats are either gone or shot up. I’ll get into that in a second but first I know you are all wondering about the food.”

The longer he spoke, the more he regained his strength.

“We’re going to be fine,” he continued. “We need to stick together. We’re going to have to cut down the rations again, but we can still last well more than a week, eating decently. We’ll have two meals a day now, skipping lunch. The portions, like I say, will be a little smaller. If we have to change again in a few days, we will, but I think everyone should still be getting enough now. The food’s just going to be a little late today.”

“What about the guy with the gun?” someone said.

“He’s from the Theater,” Hesse said. “He went to save our food. He’s just like everybody else. He just wants to survive. Last night some of us went a little crazy. It isn’t going to do any good now to try and figure out who did what last night. We all know it didn’t go well for anyone. If everyone just trusts each other, and no one tries to steal our food, there won’t be any more violence.”

Hesse looked slowly over the crowd.

“The professional wrestler with the gun just wants to survive,” Claude said. “Like that’s not a scary motivation, right?”

He fixed a look at Travis. “What would YOU have done if you’d had a gun last night?”

Travis was stunned. Did Claude know? It was impossible. But why hadn’t he taken his gun last night, after all? What would he have done with it? Would they be on a lifeboat right now? What would he have done with the stolen food?

“That guy’s bad news,” Gerry said. “Have you spoken with Hesse about him?”

“No,” Travis said.

Would he use his gun? Travis wondered. Would he trust it to another’s judgment or was it his choice alone to make?

His whole life he’d wondered how to live right. He tried, but it was like chasing a phantom. Working hard meant being less of a dad. His emergency work abroad meant being less of a husband. He never really felt like he knew how to live right, but he tried.

He’d wonder if he really was good, or just acting at it.

Now, again, he wanted to do right. He wanted to help. He didn’t know how.

“I know some of you tried to get away last night,” Hesse said. “I know some of you tried to steal food, and I know some of you were there in the galley when I was attacked. But there is no way we can survive if we don’t turn the page on last night. There are no more working lifeboats, so our only option is to work together to live here until we’re rescued.”

“How are we going to get off this ship?” someone yelled at Hesse.

“We just have to be patient– there’s no doubt that, eventually, there will be rescue efforts. After the flooding in Indonesia, there were sweeps of the ocean within days. It’s obviously been a major catastrophe, but eventually, people are going to come looking for the thousands and thousands who will be lost at sea.”

“Man is smoking crack,” Professor Claude said. “Indonesia, it was the rich countries helping. Who helps when the rich countries get it?”

“The other thing,” Hesse continued, "is we think we can get the communications system working. We have some good people who know what they’re doing and we think that’ll be ready sooner rather than later.”

“What’s taking so long?” someone said.

“For one thing,” Hesse said, “the satellite dish was structurally damaged. It’s taking some time to get that in working condition. The rest of it is electronics, and I can’t tell you what’s involved. It’ll take what it takes. They’ve only been working on it a few days. The first priority has always been getting more power and redirecting it where we needed it to survive. We couldn’t do both things at once.”

The food came at last, but it was slower in coming than in days before. It was another hour before Travis’s group ate. A half-cup of scrambled eggs, a thumb of sausage, a small slice of melon. It wasn’t so bad, Travis thought. Some of the chefs must have stayed.

Rumors of what had occurred in the night filtered in to the Theater as well. Men and women went in and out of the Theater freely, and the events of the night had spread across the ship.

When Lee came back from the Atrium, he was something beyond a leader and protector of the group. He was a force.

There were no announcements here. There were no arguments.

Adam watched Lee sitting up on the edge of the stage, talking with his wife and Rick Dumas. He felt sick and went for fresh air.

He liked being outside on the ship and took a circuitous path around the Sky Deck before returning to the Theater. A strong wind blew through his long hair. It was cold and dark though it was the middle of the day; the ocean was steel grey, kicked up into large swells. The storm was preparing to return. We haven’t things bad enough, he thought. He looked up at the great spotlight and followed it as high to the heavens as he could make it out.

As Adam came back in from the fresh air he was struck by the smell of the ship. The consequences from the toilet overflows over a week ago, thousands of unwashed live bodies and dead bodies left to sit too long, the poorly managed porta-johns, and a dead HVAC system. The air was heavy. It made him queasy.

As he opened the great door at the bottom of the Theater and looked into the hundreds in their lounge chairs above, the smell overwhelmed him. It rushed down over him, flowing out the open door. He thought he would vomit. He turned from the scene quickly, rushing back through the hallways, not seeing the faces of those he passed by, although, striking as he was, all eyes always turned to him. He felt better as he got out of that Theater air, but he kept moving.

Adam Melville’s life had been a quest, and the clues always had come to him. He was one of those men who felt fate in their life, and he’d never run from it. But here, there was the greatest mystery and no clues. So many people were in so much pain, and he knew it was much more than the silly practical issues Lee tried so hard to resolve. If it were Adam’s fate to help here, he could not see how.

He found an empty stairwell. He shut the door and fell to his knees and prayed in the dark. There he had a religious experience.

Dear Lord, he said quietly, his hands covering his face, rescue us from our fear. Let us understand your plan. There must be a meaning to it! If this is punishment, show us a way out. I know I’ve been lost to you for many years but I’ve tried to do right things in my life. Please.

Adam knew, in the end, this was all there was to prayer. Please. It was obvious what they needed. Please. However many sinners there were on board, or anywhere the flood had hit, there were innocents too. Please. In the Bible, God showed himself so that the people could look on his miracles and know He had touched the world. Please.

He asked God to let them live, or, if they were to die, that God would show them how. So that, if it were God’s plan, they could die without suffering, and in such a way that they would have a better life to come. He prayed for all those aboard the ship, he prayed for those off the ship. He prayed with such intensity that his flesh grew red behind his grey beard, and sweat came from his cheeks and his fists bruised his forehead. Show us the way to live, or the way to die.

He stopped praying and stood. He understood, not everything, but the outlines of something. He knew he was where he was for a reason. Something needed to be done that only he could do. He returned to the Theater.

Adam’s hair was wet with rain; his clothes wetly hugged his enormous frame. The man entered at the bottom of the stairs by the Royal Theater’s left aisle. He walked along the front row, making eye contact through the crowd as he walked. There were people on the stage, it had been home to a couple of dozen. Adam walked onto the stage, and even in the dark, his presence was tremendous. He found an empty spot, fell to his knees and entered into prayer.

A wave of quiet propagated from the front rows out. Soon, all eyes were on the giant on stage, on his knees, his head held up, eyes screwed up tight, his big hairy fists up in his beard. For minutes it went on, and many wondered how long they would watch this man pray.

A man and his wife on the stage came over to Adam. They knelt next to him. An old lady went up, then a man.

Several more joined Adam on the stage, others fell into prayer where they were. Rick felt himself laughing nervously in the buzz of several dozen quiet prayers.

No one stood until Adam did. The spell broke. He looked around; the sounds finally came to him. He smiled, turning to those who had knelt next to him. They shook hands smiling. More came to him and shook his hand, thanking him for bringing God onto the ship.