Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

47

Travis left them and went to get food. Colonel Warrant and Hesse were not around, so Travis returned quickly to feed his group. After, he would return with the gun.

Only Travis ate. Some kind of fish stew with bread. There was something wrong with the bread, he thought. They didn’t have the right ingredients anymore. He couldn’t guess what it might be. He didn’t know bread. But it wasn’t right.

He slipped back into the hallway. He found Vera’s stateroom and let himself in. She was asleep on the couch. She didn’t sleep in the bedroom anymore, and she was always sleeping. Travis let himself into the bedroom, finding it quietly in the dark.

When he came back out and shut the stateroom door from the hallway he again had the emergency lights along the floor to give him at least a general sense of his surroundings. Travis sensed someone else standing just by him.

He was punched in the face then thrown against the counter.

Travis had his arms and knees up in an instinctive protective posture before he even registered that someone was attacking him. He was rained on with blows in the dark. He was bent over double. The sounds were a cone of heavy breathing, grunts, clothing rubbing and fists thudding into his ribs and shoulders and cracking his face and head.

Travis drove himself into the man, getting his arms around his waist, moving towards the wall. But the angle was bad and Travis’s head hit the wall along with the man’s ribs. Travis went down, but he took the man with him. Travis saw him as his face came close to the emergency lighting. It was Gerry.

Gerry was on top of Travis while Travis was still dazed from the wall. Gerry frantically grabbed around Travis’s waist and groin and Travis felt him retrieve the gun. Then only the metal of the gun reflected enough light to be seen, so it seemed a free-floating gun was pointed at his head.

“She’s my wife!” Gerry said. “She’s my wife! I’ll kill him!”

He trembled violently, got up and fell back against the wall. For so many years he’d kept that ball of red violence hidden inside him, and now he had let it come up, he wanted it unleashed, he wanted satisfaction only blood could bring. When he came for the gun and found Travis there first, he knew why. He knew Travis wanted the blood that was his. The rage commanded his actions.

Travis could make out the gun as Gerry lowered it. He understood that even the right to defend the woman he loved was not his.

“OK,” Travis said. “You’ll kill him.”

Gerry couldn’t respond. He tried to wrestle back down the rage, tried to calm his breathing.

“How did you know about the gun?” Travis asked.

“I found it,” Gerry said at last. “I was looking for something for Vera.”

Travis came next to Gerry, both their backs against the wall.

“We’re going to kill Golding,” Travis said. “That’s why I came for the gun. You’ve got three hours. Then I need it back.”

Seven bullets, Travis thought. How many would they have to kill in the end?

It was a short walk back to the piano lounge. He approached Corrina and Darren. He wanted to stop time then, forget Golding and just stroke his babies. He got closer and saw that Darren was crying into his mother’s shoulder. Time didn’t stop quite; it slowed. It felt like a long journey to get to his family. Then he was next to Corrina, and Darren was turned to him, Travis’s arm heavy across Darren’s back.

“Don’t, Daddy,” Darren said. ”Don’t, Daddy.”

“Don’t what honey?”

“Don’t leave me, Daddy.”

Time stopped.

48

 

It was a plague upon them and they wondered why. A bacterial infection passed within hours through all Adam Melville’s group, and they were all sick. First they became weak and cramped. Then, unable to move, they vomited and shit themselves in the solarium. It was a nightmare within the nightmare.

They rolled on the floor and moaned in agony, feeling a depth of depression and lowness few had experienced before. They could not focus on anything outside themselves and their pain. The sickness felt like a path to death, and many wished for that, but it did not come.

Adam felt a burning shame that he could not control his body, and show strength to his followers. He wondered that all those around him could live through this same pain. He began to see a great fireball in the center of his pain, and then visions began to spin across the flame, so quickly that he could not grasp them, only feel something.

He was grasping at these images, seeing them in familiar computer guises. He felt his point-of-view spinning in some computer data-space, with encrypted information he could see but not decode fast enough as it spun by. The data spun around his head like a cyclone. He felt he was going mad.

Hours went by, and the sickness of his mind was so great he no longer felt the sickness of his body. He lost touch with his body altogether. His brain broke into fragments, and they each spoke with different voices, over each other and unintelligible.

Hours went by, and then others began slowly to regain control of themselves.

As the flashing lights left their eyes, they saw themselves and their place, and they wept, and others began to emerge from their sickness. The cramps continued, they all cringed with the pain in turns, but they were no longer isolated within themselves. They began speaking again to their neighbors on the floor, whether they were part of their group they’d come on board with or strangers they’d come to know in the Theater or since leaving the Theater.

Adam finally stumbled to his feet, as filthy as the floor.

The visions were gone. The voices were gone, and his brain was coming back into a whole. The floor was sturdy and the room was solid again around them.

He looked around and cried at the pain he saw in these people trying to be good. He dried his eyes quickly.

“All of you who can walk, follow me,” Adam said.

They helped each other, ten of them in that first group, following Adam, who carried a woman himself. Adam took them down a difficult dark flight of stairs into a hall, down the hall and to the spa. There were windows and the grey light came from outside. Adam led them through the change rooms, and to the great pool.

He stood beside the statue of Poseidon at the edge of the pool. He jumped in. From his fouled bathrobe and clothes came a diffuse cloud of his own mess.

The others followed him into the pool. All the while Adam tried so hard to focus on his people, he could not stop his mind from reaching back into his memories, searching for the visions, the voices, the data, to review them again in this new sobriety.

They took more down to the pool. Some stripped out of their outer garments and washed themselves in their underwear. Others threw out all their clothes and took bathrobes. The pool got dirtier and the people got cleaner. Over the next hours, the bug ran its course and the last of the group became able to stand and make the trip to the pool. Adam’s mind began to find fragments of the things he’d seen and felt during his sickness. Biblical quotes and references, fitting together as lines of a computer program.

The dead face of the man he had shot kept appearing too, haunting him.

Over those hours of walking and carrying the sick, as ideas coalesced in Adam’s mind, the unintelligible sickness visions began to have some meaning. Themes and directions emerged. Central to it all was Suffering.

He wondered if he should tell his people about the voices. They would think he were mad. But how could he make them believe if he didn’t tell them? What would he tell them? He didn’t understand himself, he felt a veil of reality melting away but couldn’t quite see what was behind it.

As they returned, they abandoned their room under the solarium glass, and took the adjoining restaurant. There was no joy in the change in their personal cleanliness or the cleanliness of their room. The pain was too powerful. The tears and wailing flowed.

Adam stood in the restaurant, his massive body bent strangely, but his face strong.

“I remember a joke.”

He tried to smile, to calm himself.

“Its weakness is that it’s not very funny, as a joke. Some young fish are swimming in the ocean when an older fish swims by. ‘Morning boys,’ he says. ‘How’s the water?’

“One of the young fish turns to the other and says, ‘What’s water?’”

Adam looked around.

“Yeah, nobody ever laughs at that one, but I like it.”

Slowly, they sat themselves up and comported themselves like people.

“God is in everything,” Adam said. “Hundreds of years from now, people will look at every event on this ship and wonder what God meant by it.”

“Excuse me,” came a woman’s voice, strange to them.

They all turned and saw two women, one old, one middle-aged.

“We heard about you,” the old woman said. “We were in the Atrium. But… can we join you?”

Adam smiled. Even a few of the others smiled.

“Welcome,” Adam said.

He didn’t need to talk about the voices in his head. He was the voice in theirs.

49

 

The spy was in a chair. He was not tied. The only other person in the room was John Hesse. Hesse’s knuckles were bloody. The spy’s face was broken. Hesse leaned back into the breakfast bar of the suite and readied his pen and paper.

The spy spoke with broken teeth, and Hesse had a pretty good idea how the Theater was guarded.

They’d take precautions, Hesse imagined. They’d guess the spy might talk. The information might be meaningless. Everything they did might be meaningless. But there was great satisfaction here. So he beat him further, then carried him in a fireman carry up and outside to the promenade, where he tossed the spy to the deck.

The spy appeared before Lee Golding, terrified of returning, terrified of staying away. His face was unrecognizably beaten, but Lee Golding knew who it was.

“They…” the spy stammered. “They… they…they are many. And we are few. That’s what he said.”

50

 

“You have to be strong now,” Jessica said to her husband in the Theater dressing room. “It is a question of strength now, which of us will win.”

“Yes,” Lee said. He leaned against the counter, the gun in his lap. “But smarts too. The gun’s an advantage but it’s not a nuclear bomb. There’s still much more of them. The gun can’t be everywhere. I can’t be everywhere.”

“That’s why defense is suicide!” she said. “What are you, now? Do you choose death like Melville? For God’s sake Lee, open your eyes. This world is full of cowards and children who won’t see. What are you, now?”

“Their numbers are a sleeping dragon!” Lee responded. “Do I want to wake it? Do I want to give them no choice but to fight?”

Smarts had always been his secret. He was so imposing physically; he always knew that his size was a double advantage, because it made them underestimate his smarts. This was a thin line they walked, he and Jessica. To survive each day longer, for one more day’s chance at rescue, he had to make every decision correctly.

She did not see it that way.

“Lee, Lee,” Jessica said. “I’ve always believed in you.”

She stood to face him, then turned and stepped away.

“I stood by you through all the mistakes you made, all the missed opportunities, because I believed that somewhere at your kernel was a strong man who could protect me. Has our life been a lie?

“You have the gun! You! Won’t you use it while it can still do us some good? If you won’t protect yourself, don’t you have the pride to protect your wife? If we keep reacting, we’ll die. We need to step outside the script. The world before was never big enough for our story, our love, Lee. This is where it should be.”

They had not had sex in weeks; in the absence of bathing, the prospect had disgusted her, and Lee had given up asking. He did not ask this time, he took. Jessica responded as physically and urgently. The huge man and the thin woman everywhere at each other with their mouths and hands, clothes coming off, forming to each other’s forms into the corner space between the couch and the counter, onto one and then the other. They were the last couple on earth. The rest were dead to them. It was an intoxicating commitment.

While they embraced and reached for each other they flew from the ship, from the war, from the flood. For the first time, they both were off the ship. It was such an unconscious relief that their passion soared, perhaps as a protection against that world breaking back in. They felt like titans making love, a mythic pair existing in ether with the great lovers of all time. They had transcended their fate and their worlds.

At some moment, the world broke in and they fell from the sky. They lay on the couch and moved slightly away from each other. It was impossible to ignore the smell. He dressed and she tried not to look at him, slick, discolored, slimy.

She recaptured a vision of the two of them, all alone and safe on this great empty ship, with enough food to wait as long as it would take. She felt happy. She admitted to herself that this was her happy ending: herself and Lee, alone surviving. A King and Queen of the ship.

“I’m going to save us,” Lee said.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“You stay here, and stay safe,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to see this.”

“No,” she said. “I want to be by your side. You’ll be stronger with me.”

They dressed. He picked up the gun, and pocketed the extra magazines. Had he been destined to be here?  Had he been meant to be a man of instinct?

Lee had targets in his mind. He wanted to explain his thinking to Jessica but felt more powerful assuming her trust in his decisions. He wondered how that gun had come to his hands; but it hadn’t come to his hands any more than the other hundreds in the Theater. Lee had taken it. There was proof of what he was.

It was exhilarating, as much as it was exhausting, nerve-wracking. Life mattered to him again, here. The stakes mattered. He wanted to be the last man to keep his wife alive and un-raped. He would protect Jessica. What was the matter with that?

But who was he going to kill? Hesse, or that Colonel? He had realized he’d have to kill someone since she’d said those words. He didn’t know who, but he knew he had to kill someone. He’d killed before: the pirate he’d taken the gun from. The night of the lifeboat drill, he’d probably killed a few then, though he never knew for sure. But those were things that just happened. Instinct, again. This was different. It was planned and he was overthinking it.

Exiting their room they passed the sentry with a nod, and turned towards the Theater. Did he want to address everyone? Did he trust them? What did they need to know? To do? No, he would keep this simple. He would trust the hard things to himself.

On the stage, Jessica stayed back in the shadows. The dark, really, as the whole Theater was in shadow. Rick wasn’t in the room. Jessica wondered if he were on duty somewhere.

They were all alive in this room, she thought. Men, women, children. The dead have piled up elsewhere on this ship, but those who made the right decisions – and had the right luck – were here. They were weak, sick, and dirty, but not the walking dead Lee had described of the other groups. Some had left, over time. But no one that mattered, at least since Adam Melville’s group. Fewer mouths. Fewer to protect.

She shivered with an understanding. What a risk these people were! Why was Lee protecting them? This room, these people were not his army, they were his shackles. Even if Lee struck at those in the Atrium, could they ever be safe with these shackles?

Lee was watched whenever he was in the room. When he called the group to attention, the focus did not increase significantly.

“We’re in lockdown. The Atrium is planning an attack. That’s all we know. I’m going to find out what I can.”

He held up the gun.

“I can go places no one else can. I’ll find out what’s up. Jessica will watch my back. I’ll go fill in Dumas. He’ll be in charge of the sentries and anything that comes up. The sentries know everyone, you all know the sentries. No one else gets in. Any questions?”

There were never any questions. That’s why he asked. Lee had a way of saying friendly things while holding the gun that let you know not to ask questions.

Back into the tunnel, past Jessica’s dressing room and the larger dressing room that served as the bathroom, holding the porta-johns. She wondered how they went about the emptying from the Atrium? It was an undertaking in itself here, and it always required the gun. She imagined they were overflowing in their own filth by now. They weren’t a group there, she thought, they were just those that weren’t in the Theater.

Lee thought a few things through on the walk. It had to be Hesse. Hesse slept in the Atrium, along with so many others. But Lee knew a habit. Lee knew where he took his fresh air. Lee had seen him once, and after one of his sentries had reported it too, Lee had followed up with some snooping. Hesse was on the port-side walking deck usually a couple times a day. Rain or shine, though there had not been much shine. So he had opportunity. Then, although the Colonel might be more dangerous, Hesse was clearly the leader. So if he wanted to make a statement, there was none bigger than Hesse. So he had motive.

Motive, opportunity… I must be the killer, Lee thought. Plus, he hated Hesse.

He thought of his championship matches. The grueling night his stardom began, the pain and sweat and that big finish, lifting the 400-pound Moondaba and slamming him through the table. His arm raised, with a separated shoulder, at the center of 70,000 screaming fans at the Houston Astrodome.

When he reached the Italian restaurant, where Rick Dumas waited, there were five other men there, with several more in sentry positions nearby. When they didn’t have the gun in the restaurant, they had some numbers at least. They also had a system: each next sentry was close enough to hear the one before him, all the way down to the Theater. So the gun was really always at hand.

Lee had his hand on Rick’s shoulder. He had resisted Rick’s forays into personal friendship for a long time, but at some point Lee found that Rick had earned his trust. Still, he kept Rick in his place. Lee did not have friends as equals.

“I’m going to make sure they stay scared,” Lee said. “Keep the sentry plan we’ve got, I won’t be long.”

“Why don’t I come with you?” Rick said. “You don’t want to bring Jessica into this. I can help.”

“There’s no extra danger in coming with me, hero,” Lee said. “If I go down, everyone here does too. Get some meat for dinner.”

Even in the battle for their lives, there was something in Lee’s words, the voice, that cut Rick. As if Lee were mocking him in front of all the sentries, the Theater, and his wife. He may not have been as strong as Lee, and sure, Lee was the leader and protector. But Rick was no coward, and Lee would have been dead a long time ago without his help.

51

After the incident with the spies, the Colonel rethought his assassination plan and decided he needed to improve the odds. Golding had a far more powerful weapon than he, but Warrant had two advantages:

Lee Golding didn’t know about his gun.

They controlled the electrical grid.

He would visit Brenda and arrange a new tactic: At midnight, Brenda would kill the power everywhere around the Theater. The galley, however, would be lit up. This wouldn’t require new work: they had secured power to all the galley circuits, only most were kept off to conserve energy. Brenda could turn those lights on.

Killing the other lights, in the Theater and hall, while leaving the galley powered would be a challenge, and possibly a dangerous one. Mostly, it would take time.

So Colonel Warrant didn’t wait, he went unarmed to get Brenda started.

Warrant had a route that he had considered safest in evading unwanted notice, but he was always on guard. There weren’t any safe routes to the aft of the ship. The lighting was dismal. Through the service corridors there was no emergency lighting, and only the low level lighting from the few stairwells broke the darkness. Warrant counted out those breaks.

As he passed one, a vision appeared in the space of the opening. Then the monster was upon him, a hand at his throat and three hundred pounds of body weight forcing him against the wall. Warrant knew who it was. He wondered why he hadn’t been shot. His hand went to Lee Golding’s face, but the bigger man pulled back and slammed him into the bulkhead a second time.

“Kill him!” he heard a woman’s voice whisper desperately.

Warrant couldn’t fight.  Lee Golding was on top of him, crushing his lungs. He felt how weak he was. He grasped and struck at the monster in the dark, but to no avail. The breath escaping his mouth he knew would not come back in. The blood coming up his throat, coughing out, was life leaving him. His body had rarely failed him before. His had been such an effective machine: a body always able to manage the tasks assigned to it, a body that could be trusted to perform. He knew he could not sustain the effort he needed. He’d been starved for weeks. Now he was dead.

Lee Golding sprung back to his feet from the body, his knees unsteady. He spun and landed against the wall. He could hear his breath echoing in the space. His breath. His life. The other one gone.

“I killed the Colonel,” Lee said. “I did it.”

The wall seemed to lean, like he was strapped to an almost upright operating table, moving through strange angles. He regained his balance and was loose in the space. He felt weightless, bouncing.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t shot him. It had happened so fast. They’d heard the Colonel and stopped in the stairwell. When he saw the Colonel, the Colonel turned, and he sprung at him. Instinct, again.

“How will they know?” Jessica asked.

“Jessica, I did it,” Lee said.

“I know, Lee. I know what you did. But how will they know? His people? What good is it if they don’t know? Lee – you’re hurting me.”

He saw he was squeezing her arms.

He wiped his hands on his pants and realized they were slick with blood.