Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

40

“Travis,” Rick said.

Rick was holding the M16. He had spotted Travis approaching the restaurant.

Travis had given a special hug to Darren before leaving that morning, knowing he would be facing that M16. Travis had made his way around the Theater, from a distance. He’d spotted sentries at some open doors and ducked away before they’d seen him.

He wanted to learn what he could of the layout around the restaurant and galley before he presented himself to Lee Golding to talk. But Rick Dumas had seen him first.

“No soup for you,” Rick said laughing. He had his hand on the pistol grip of Lee’s rifle.

He showed no sign that he would fire it, and Travis inwardly ticked off a sigh of relief at surviving the first checkpoint.

“I want to talk to Golding,” Travis said.

Travis could see into the darkened galley. Although it was daytime, there was very little natural light seeping through. There was some kind of light around a corner that provided a glow over the parts that were in Travis’s field of vision.

Although he couldn’t see any food, he could smell it. Something had been cooked recently, it smelled good, and he realized he was very hungry.

Rick saw the nostrils flare as Travis first felt that aroma.

“You know, I had this one shore excursion booked,” Rick said. “A culinary excursion in Helsinki. A wine and dine in a Finnish farmhouse. Reindeer steaks. Roast moose sausages, and pastries and berries. Bet that sounds pretty good to you right about now.”

“You talk a lot, don’t you?”

Rick paused. He chuckled.

“Let’s go see Golding,” Rick said. “Frisk him,”

A man came out of the shadows and roughly patted down Travis from his ankles to his armpits.

“Cruise security has been tight since 9/11,” Rick said. “You know how it is.”

Rick picked up his cell phone from the counter.

“What does your GPS say?” Travis said as he shook himself loose from the pat down.

“Wish I knew,” Rick said. “Phone’s only good for taking pictures now. Someday I’ll invite you over for the slideshow. Let’s go.”

The Theater was beneath them. Rick and the gun and two other men walked with Travis down the stairs. They went into the Theater through the back entrance, to the dressing rooms behind the stage. There was more security: other refugees Travis had seen around the ship. They exchanged pleasantries with Rick and the other men. One of the two guards stared hard at Travis, the other looked around him and through him as if he didn’t exist. They walked down a hall and around a corner.

The Mighty Lee Golding was asleep sitting back on a bench. His feet were on the floor, his legs straight and crossed at the calves. His arms were raised and his hands clasped behind his head against the wall, his enormous belly vibrating in snores with each in and out breath. They stopped in front of him.

God, you slept well when your side had the gun, Travis thought. He wondered what Lee Golding dreamt of; what was his perfect outcome now? Rescue? A safe and sane world to come home to, where he would be charged with murder? Did he dream that there was another gun?

Travis looked at Rick and the other two who still made no move. Travis kicked Lee Golding’s feet, knocking one off the other and uncrossing the legs. His security detail tensed around him ready to take him down, but did nothing. Lee was quick to his feet. Not long to come from sleep to fight, this one.

The fight in Lee Golding died down as quickly and he said calmly, “What?”

“I’m making a quiche,” Travis said, “Could I borrow a cup of milk?”

Lee Golding laughed, Rick laughed, the other two men laughed. Finally Travis chuckled.

“Hey, you never wanna lose your sense of humor, am I right?” Rick said. “I knew I liked you. Seriously, Lee, we oughta adopt this guy, he’s good people.”

“Seriously,” Travis said, “we’ll starve.”

“Seriously,” Lee said, “I don’t give a shit, and I’m not adopting you. But I appreciate the levity. These are hard times.”

“It’s gonna get a lot harder,” Travis said, “when all those people in the Atrium and the cabins get hungry enough, and you’re stuck here in one little room on a boat, with one gun.”

“It’s an M16 buddy,” Lee Golding said. “So you just pick which few dozen volunteers want to get shot first, and then bring it on. By the time you cowards are hungry enough to fight, you’ll be too hungry to fight. This is a defensible situation we got.”

“Yeah?” Travis said, “We’ve got a goddamn Army colonel, and an electrical engineer who has the whole ship figured out.”

Lee went into the Mighty mode, with his full stage voice and face: “It ain’t helped you so far!”

“Yeah,” Travis roared back in a spot on impersonation, his eyes just as big and angry as Lee’s, his voice as bombastic and self-important, emphasizing and slowing odd syllables. “And think how safe you’ll feel with a thousand enemies outside your walls with no options but killing! And you’re here touching up your goatee!”

“Is this how you ask for milk?” Lee said. “What the hell? You risked getting shot just to come here and tell me I’m not well liked?”

He turned to Rick and grabbed the gun from his hand, Rick letting it go like it was hot. Lee lifted the rifle, switched the safety, cocked it and checked the chamber for a round. He held it to Travis’s face, nonchalantly with one hand. Travis stared up the barrel, down the arm to Lee. He studied the wrestler’s face and saw in it some kind of question. Lee didn’t know what to do. Travis turned to Rick and saw that the small man seemed drugged, coked up. His face was flush; Travis could see his neck throbbing with his pulse. On Rick’s face was written: DO IT!

“How many rounds you got left?” Travis asked.

Lee lowered the gun, and then handed it back to Rick who had the unmistakable look of disappointment, of adrenaline unused.

The Alabama Assassin’s hands came up more quickly than Travis could have imagined, crossing each other to grab the sides of Travis’s head just as Lee’s body spun and dropped, and Travis’s head came down fast and hard over the big man’s shoulder. Travis’s limp body bounced up and back to the ground.

Travis lay absolutely still on the floor, his arms and legs flayed in snow angel form.

“Oh yeah” Lee Golding shouted. He made a V and wagged his tongue at Travis through it. “Golding gonna getcha!”

Rick stood over Travis’s head and focused his cell phone camera.

“Cheeeeese.”

41

A snake coiled across his dreamscape and looked at him.

“Smile,” the snake said.

The snake opened its mouth and swallowed him.

Travis woke on the jogging track up at the Resort Deck. They’d carried him a long way, he thought. It was still daylight, barely. His head pounded, his jaw felt like it was broken in pieces. He lay still staring at the grey sky, a cold drizzle in his face, returning to the reality of where he was. He rose and in doing so saw a measuring cup on the deck next to him. It was filled with milk. He lifted it and smelled it.

It smelled a bit off, but it was white and swirled in the cup like milk. He drank. It wasn’t too sour. It spilled down the jaw line, off his chin, and then he felt something lumpy and slimy go down his throat. He dropped the cup and ran to the railing and vomited. The milk was gone quickly and then he shook and convulsed as his stomach tried to force up stuff that wasn’t there.

Lights came on and off in twinkles orbiting his face.

42

Jessica Golding had her own dressing room, the only individual dressing room. The star’s room. Well, they had been booked first class after all. Lee didn’t stay there too often. He didn’t like being cut off, not knowing what went on beyond the walls. Lee was her eyes and ears, he told her everything.

Her husband had always been a strong man, but she had never seen him so intense, so self-assured. He had the gun. He’d killed the pirate. Most importantly, he’d been the one to decide that it was lunacy for everyone to die. He had turned this Theater into a haven.

He was her eyes and ears, and her hand in action. He was doing everything to protect her, damn any other casualty. She looked at herself in the mirror. If you die here, you deserve to die here, she thought.

She had never been beautiful, but there was something very alive in her that had made her attractive. She had long blonde hair that was frazzled and dead looking. On this ship, she had long since run out of, and anyway lost interest in, hair spray. The lines around her eyes and her mouth, the open skin pores of her cheeks, were no longer masked under makeup. They now defined her face. Her lips were still full and red, her eyes still intense.

She’d once cultivated flirting relationships with other men as a way of controlling Lee, but that had been lost to her since the flood. She had control of Lee now; that was undoubted.

Years gone by now, she had learned of an affair of Lee’s with a fitness instructor at one of his gyms in Atlanta. It had been bold and offensive, carried out in front of mutual acquaintances in addition to Lee’s business partners. The insult was so great her sister had implored her to end their marriage. She had not.

Lee’s actions had been so blatant, like a child flaunting authority, that ending their relationship seemed no victory to her. Using the incident to increase her own control over her husband was fitting and just. Her husband was a strong man, and that made the victory all the greater. She loved him more since she’d flipped their power structure.

He came in to the dressing room with the gun. She knew he had a guard at the door, one at the end of their hall, and another at the back entrance, which led to the backstage area. They owned the Theater and the restaurant. But the halls and stairs in between were no-man’s land. It was a nerve-wracking thing having only one gun with so many places to be, but what mattered most, in the end, was themselves. So Lee erred on the side of holding the gun if he was unsure.

He collapsed on the small couch. Since the war started, he’d been throwing himself down in exhaustion. She could see new lines in his face and knew his nerves were getting to him. That gun weighed heavy in his hand, and she knew, as she put her hands on him, that he was her hand but she was the blood that coursed through it. He was her muscle, but she was his strength.

She curled up with him. He took the couch all up himself, and she nearly had to sit on him. The gun was standing upright in the cushion behind his right shoulder. He put his huge hands around her thin neck and began to rub her shoulders.

“You look stressed,” she said.

“Nah,” he said.

This was his sanctuary. She was his sanctuary. But still she held herself stiff in his hands. The big hands were not at all gentle, working harder to soften her out. They hurt, but still she showed no sign, and he rubbed deeper. He was distracted.

“What happened?”

“They sent an ambassador,” Lee said. “They’re begging.”

“They couldn’t be that stupid to think after all this we’d just share.”

“I’m telling you,” Lee said. “The guy went up to the kitchen to beg for scraps.”

“What did you do?”

“I knocked him out. With the Mighty Head Mash, baby!” Lee laughed.

“They’re trying to find the gun,” Jessica said. “They’re probing you.”

“Nah,” Lee said.

He sat upright and moved her legs off his lap.

“You think?” he said. “What do you think they’ll try?”

“Do you want to wait to find out?” she said.

“What can I do?” he said, “I already took all their food. I’ve got the gun. I’ve set up guards, rotations, alarms.”

“And now you’ll just sit back and wait?”

“Time is on our side, baby. They have no food, and they’re getting weaker by the day.”

He got up and stood, shifting from one foot to the other, rubbing his hands together.

“They know that too,” she said. “Do you think they’re just going to roll over and die for us? They’re backed into a corner.”

“What more can I do?” he said, “What do you want me to do? I haven’t got enough bullets to kill them all, you know.”

“Do you need to kill them all to stop them?” she said.

He stopped moving, one hand caught in the other.

“No. No, there’s just… that Hesse. The Colonel. And this Travis Cooke. Maybe the engineer. But what am I supposed to do? Just kill them for no reason?”

“You shot at them in the lifeboats,” she said. “You took their food to kill them all slowly. But you won’t kill them fast? What are you scared of?”

“I need to know what they’re up to,” he said. “I need spies.”

He left.

43

 

Travis was in the stern when he awoke with his milk. He stayed outside just a few strides before picking a stairway that was exceptionally dark. It was never hard to find dark spaces on the ship with the electricity so drastically rationed. Mostly though, they all sought the light, and all that was active was in the light. Travis wanted the dark. It was relaxing, and there was something hypnotic of descending into it, imagining a place lit up on the other side.

He went down several flights without seeing anyone, then looked and listened for over a minute before venturing into the halls of one of the cabin decks. He was still in Golding’s domain.

He found the abandoned cabin in the dark. His gun was where he’d left it, between the mattress and box spring of the untidy bed. He had guessed that he would be frisked. If he had brought the gun, he’d be dead now. He couldn’t explain why he’d hidden it here, closer to danger than safety, except that he wanted it close at hand. What circumstances could have led to his being able to retrieve it if he had been in pressing enough danger to need it, he couldn’t imagine, but he’d wanted it close at hand just the same. He knew there was a time for guns. He had felt they weren’t there yet, yesterday.

Today, as he replaced the gun in Vera’s bedroom closet, he thought he’d be using it soon.

He met up with his group at breakfast in the Atrium.

“What’d you find out?” Claude said.

“I don’t know, not much. They seem like they don’t have any plan either.”

“What did you expect? Them to be working on a space ship?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just hoped that someone had a plan for getting us out of here other than just fighting over who starves last.”

“Well,” Claude said, “I hope you like fish.”

Breakfast was sugar, a thin slice of frosted cake and a quarter of a mushy fruit. Corrina kept quiet, smiling as she handed down Darren’s napkin with the food. Darren did not smile back, and he too kept quiet. He was not well, Corrina thought. He’d borne it all so well when it happened, even the shooting of Norman, and she’d expected that first shock to be the worst of it. Bit by bit, the stabbing of the dead man by Vera, the shootings during the lifeboat crush, the continuance of everything, had turned him into something else. Darren was far away. He was a dirty, smelly automaton, more and more withdrawn, except perhaps in the playroom or while sitting with Claude. This day, his head still ringing from the Mighty Lee Golding, Travis tried harder. He began by forcing his own smile.

“Guess who has a birthday coming up?” he prodded the boy.

“I forgot,” Corrina gasped.

“Do you want a birthday party?” Travis continued to Darren.

“How do you even know the date?” Corrina said.

Darren didn’t answer for a moment, he withdrew into himself and his imagination, but then he looked up at his daddy.

He remembered his birthday party. His daddy and mommy and Gerry were all there, his cousins and the kids from his class, and the girl down the hall, and everyone was happy, and his mommy made a dragon cake. They had a treasure hunt. When he blew out the candles on the dragon cake he wished for more birthday parties with his daddy and mommy and Gerry all being happy.

“How?” he said almost inaudibly.

“We’ll go the games room,” Travis said. “They’ve got board games, and foosball. They even have Hungry Hippo. We’ll invite your friends. And your dad and mom and Gerry will play with you as long as you want. We can do a treasure hunt. And your dad might just know where to find a band looking to do a show.”

Darren smiled. His imagination took him to that place. Travis felt a hand on his shoulder, and peeked sideways to see Corrina smiling at him.

After breakfast, Travis stayed to talk with Hesse. The others walked back towards the lounge. Gerry spoke with Claude quietly. They told Travis they were going to take a look at the remaining lifeboats, and see if any could be repaired.

Corrina offered to go with them but Gerry had shook his head no, and spoke low so Darren couldn’t hear.

“I’m worried about that psycho with the gun getting the same idea. Take Darren back to the lounge.”

The way back, up the stairs, down the corridor, up more stairs.

“How come we’re able to live with Daddy here?” Darren asked.

“Things are different now,” Corrina said. “We want to be all together.”

“Can we still be together after?” Darren asked.

“I don’t know, honey,” she said. “Don’t ask about that now.”

She knew how much it hurt Darren to be apart from Travis, however much he now loved Gerry. She knew also how much it hurt her to be apart from Travis, however much she loved Gerry. All that pain was still because of Travis. She wondered, was she strong for denying her love for him? Or just scared?

Corrina held Darren’s hand. The corridor on the Penthouse Deck was walled in, not opened up to the Atrium, and was completely dark except for the thin track of lighting along the floor.

Corrina was grabbed with an arm across her throat so fiercely it knocked the breath from her and choked the air off before she could scream. The man shook her viciously, pulling her back on her heels and through a door he pulled opened with his other hand.

She heard Darren crying for her and running in after them into the room. It was brighter in here, the curtains were drawn across the windows, but there were some little slivers of light slicing the room. She heard Darren running and crying and the man pushed her down against a counter and turned. In a sliver of light Corrina saw the man’s fist come across Darren’s face so that the boy was thrown back into the darkness she could not quite see into.

“Run,” she screamed.

She had a moment’s freedom in the man’s grip, and she turned to punch at him, connecting with his face, but the man didn’t seem to notice it and pinned her wrists and pulled her into the living room, down onto the floor, tearing at her sweater, shirt and bra.

She screamed again for Darren to run, and was distracted by the thought of Darren seeing this. She went out of her body, and could see herself there, thrashing and trying to find air while the man held her throat and pulled at her pants. All she thought of then was the prayer that her son not be there to see.

He became more violent and it became more painful, and she began to cry. She blinked her tears away and saw the attacker’s face for the first time as she adjusted to the darkness. He was just a boy, she thought. He could have been one of Gerry’s tenth grade students. The boy didn’t seem to see her, though he was looking right at her. Her eyes became full of tears again so that she could not see him anymore.

“I’ve been watching you,” the boy said, panting. “You’re so beautiful. I’ve been waiting. I’ve been waiting for this so long.”

When it was done, the boy pulled up his pants and was gone. Corrina cried as she rolled over on her side, holding one hand around her bruised neck and one hand squeezed between her bare thighs. It hurt to cry. Everything hurt.

When she opened her eyes she saw at the same time as she seemed to first hear, Darren on the floor crying in the corner of the living room. She crawled towards him, pulling her pants up but undone. Coming closer she saw the blood on his lip; she remembered the fist hitting Darren’s temple, and it occurred to her that he’d possibly continued trying to fight, until perhaps giving up, and she might not even have noticed.

When she reached him she embraced him, pulling him to his knees, she on her knees, and they joined together in crying to a synchronous beat.

When their crying stopped, a great silence came up around them. She pulled Darren to his feet. Her baby. She was overwhelmed with the idea that his life was broken and irreparable. They walked back to the lounge. They found their spot around a lounge-chair table unoccupied, and uncrowded by any groups at nearby tables, and they sat there quietly.

In a way it didn’t happen. No one around her knew anything. No one was there to see that it had happened. There were no police to report it to. The only mark, its only history and existence, was the pain.

All her life she had spent overcoming her beauty. As if she had the power to do that. It was all just a joke. Any man could take from her whatever he wanted at any time. She’d felt so strong, as if she’d learned the secrets how to deal with the world on her terms. No, she thought, she never had learned to protect herself. She’d fooled herself into believing the world’s protections were her own invention.