Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

52

Gerry lowered himself down a dark stairwell in a part of the ship he hadn’t been to in weeks. Funny that, they’d been here less than a month and he had routines, routes he took, places he stayed. Despite the relentless boredom, he no longer explored the ship. Now it was obviously wiser to stick to one’s territory, but even before the raid on the galley, when there was no war on the ship, he had found a rut.

He had the gun in his belt, in back. He knew how to use handguns. He was in a state of bloodlust. He wanted nothing more than to kill someone. In the dark stairwell, he could not stop from seeing the back of Corrina’s head, her face tucked into his shoulder.

She was shuddering as she spoke.

“He was young. He had a baby face. Big eyes, big lips. He had a red striped t-shirt and he smelled awful, like vomit.”

He wasn’t one of the Atrium crowd. He might be in a room, but most of them came out to the Atrium eventually. Gerry couldn’t remember a red striped t-shirt on a boy like that. There were three places where he’d most likely be.

The bar. Travis had told Claude about it, Claude had told Gerry. Gerry had seen a few guys over the weeks that took their own carts of food, obviously okayed by Hesse. So Gerry figured that’s where those guys went; the rest must just stay put and get the food brought to them.

Second would be the solarium. The Theater peace freaks. Gerry had asked around and learned where they were camped out.

Finally, the Theater. That would be the last place to try.

Gerry knew he was at the right deck from the stairwell. There was a smell here unlike anything else. Vile. Rotted. “He smelled awful, like vomit.”

There was light in the portholes along the hallway, and there was the bar. The stench was more intense yet as he approached the yawning entrance. It was quiet, but not silent. There was noise of movement. When Gerry came around the corner to see the full bar, he saw dead and living mixed at the tables. The flesh of the living, or moving, was as discolored and rotted as the dead. There were flies. He wondered where they came from. Life feeds on life, but it thrives on death.

There were medical vials and needles on some of the tables. Hard liquor bottles.

“Hey,” a man said as Gerry stepped past his table.

The man was hunched over, his head on the table, his arm flopped on the table as well.

“Hey,” the man said and Gerry stepped over to him.

“Food?” the man said. “Dave is dead. We need food. Dave is dead.”

Gerry stepped away and continued his tour of the place. Others reacted, raising their heads and regarding him. Some of them smiled. Others still half-asleep. But there was no crying here at least.

There was no red t-shirt.

He looked behind the bar. A young woman lay dead. All the shelves were empty.

Gerry turned and walked past the tables to the door.

“Hey,” the man near the door said.

Gerry turned but did not stop.

“I’m a doctor.”

Gerry stopped then. His long frame doubled over, his head dropping towards the man, staring at that near dead face, the yellow eyes and grey skin. This was the man Travis had worked with, all those weeks ago. This was that handsome, strong, assured man.

“Yes,” Gerry said. His hand went on Dr. Conrad’s shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“Awesome,” Conrad said.

Gerry was frozen there, staring at that zombie face. Then he backed away with his feet, so that his hand fell off Conrad’s shoulder. He turned and left and did not slow his pace until the stench was behind him.

The anger was still an engine within him, but he had many stairs to climb to the solarium, so his pace did slow. He saw the back of her head again in the dark.

“He was young. He had a baby face. Big eyes, big lips. He had a red t-shirt and he smelled awful, like vomit.”

He walked through dark hallways, all his muscles tense, expecting anything. As he had as a boy out too late, trying to make his bedroom without disturbing his mother, passed out on the couch in front of empty wine bottles and a lipstick smeared glass. As he had as a teenager, robbing the corner grocery store with the cheap lock on the rear door. As he had as a young teacher, carrying on an in-school affair with Deirdre, the girl with the off-the-shoulder sweaters. As he had just two years ago, staying over in Corrina’s apartment and sneaking past Darren’s bedroom before dawn, and four weeks ago, exploring the halls of the Festival of the Waves after the pirates had smashed their engines and killed the millionaire.

When at last he arrived at the solarium, his eyes had to adjust to the light, even the grey light of this day. He saw a room covered and walled in filth. He vomited. He kept his hands to his knees, holding himself from falling into the mess. As he recovered, he heard voices.

He followed a clean path across the floor to the restaurant, where sick individuals sat haphazardly and clutched at their stomachs. They looked dirty and messed up. Many were in bathrobes or underwear.

Some of them turned and saw him. Some smiled. He knew they knew he was not one of them, but he felt welcomed. Then he saw a red striped t-shirt.

The young man was about fifty feet away, across a tangle of others and several restaurant tables. Gerry walked a wide path.

The boy was with an older woman. Gerry could see the two, see it was his mother. He had a baby face. Big eyes, big lips.

These two weren’t wet or in underwear or bathrobes. They were new. The more he saw the boy, the more he hated him and wanted to kill him.

A moment behind everyone else, Gerry looked to the far side of the room. Even behind the group, Gerry had no problem seeing Adam Melville, nearly a head above everyone else. Adam Melville spoke and everyone listened.

“Things are going to start happening,” Adam Melville said. “We need to talk about these things.”

“Those we left have taken the food from others. Hundreds of people are starving to death in one place, while another hundred are starving more slowly in the other. One side has a gun, the other side has desperation. The conflict is inevitable, and it will be complete.

“Things are going to get very bad on this ship. And you have to ask yourself, why would God put us here in a lose-lose situation? Now, we’re sick and pained, and all I can think of is a dog with an electric collar that shocks to get him to stop doing something. I think God is telling us what he wants us to do.

“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ Jeremiah. God does not want his servants to die in this furnace. My God is for the strong, strong enough to face the truth, not run and hide from it like rats with bloody claws. We have to see, and face, that all those things that we see and touch are unreal and temporal, and that what is invisible is all that is real and eternal.”

There was an energy in the air. Gerry felt this. This giant’s voice was like an electromagnetic field, attracting all it touched. Gerry wanted to dismiss him as nuts, but he couldn’t deny. There was something about Adam Melville that made him seem special: touched. A conduit to something. Gerry’s cynicism softened. Just enough to want Adam Melville to be special, to have a message for them. But it was a daydream ended again with the sight of the boy, and no voice outside could still the one inside that demanded life’s blood.

“We had to suffer to be saved. But God doesn’t want us to keep suffering. God wants us to come home,” Adam Melville said.

The boy and the woman clasped hands. All he had to do was lift the gun and press it against the boy’s back and shoot. His hand tensed on the gun, and he felt his whole body as a weapon. His mind was burning. The woman leaned her head on the boy’s shoulder.

A great struggle took place within Gerry. In an instant, the fight was over, the gun replaced in the waist of his pants. He wiped his eyes, tensed his body one more time to rid himself of the fighting spirits, and regained his calm. He wouldn’t shoot the boy now. He had him. He’d have the chance again. He didn’t have to kill him in front of his mother. The rage listened to reason within him. He would have him alone soon.

Yes, God wants you to come home, Gerry thought. I can help.

53

 

Blue skies

Smiling at me

Nothing but blue skies

Do I see

Blue birds

Singing a song

Nothing but blue birds

All day long

Never saw the sun shining so bright

Never saw things going so right

Noticing the days, hurrying by

When you’re in love, my how they fly

 

Travis had Darren in his lap. Corrina sat in the chair to Travis’s right. Claude Bettman played piano and sang. Travis didn’t know if Claude knew what had happened to Corrina. Actually, he knew Claude knew, but he didn’t know if he’d been told. He once again felt warm towards Claude, as a healer, as a safe place. The song could have been sung to make it an insult. It could have been bright and happy and made Corrina quite mad. But Claude played it so that the piano was a meditation, walking above the line between happy and sad.

He sang it with the anguish in his voice of someone who had been on this cruise ship. It was a lament of the Israelites in Babylon, a picture of beautiful Zion sung in an honest voice that told how away Zion was. To Travis, it was an embrace of Corrina that he couldn’t give her. He didn’t know if Professor Claude knew she loved Irving Berlin music. But he knew enough.

Travis had considered searching for Gerry, but he’d realized the futility of it quickly. Gerry wouldn’t be long, and Colonel Warrant’s mission could wait another hour. He had all night to get in position. Travis wondered if Gerry had gone to the Theater. They might have lost both Gerry and the gun. Or Gerry might have made Warrant’s mission obsolete.

So Travis stayed with his family and waited. Nothing to do but wait and listen to the music.

Blue days

All of them gone

Nothing but blue skies

From now on.

The door from the deck crashed open and with it the sounds of the wind howling. In the grey silhouette was Lee Golding with Colonel Warrant over his shoulders. Lee Golding bent and jerked and tossed Warrant off to the ground. He stepped in over the body and his wife came in behind him. There were the usual handful of groups and solos spread around the lounge, and they reacted with one long, loud wordless exhalation

“That’s your Army boy,” Lee Golding said. “He wanted war. Well, he got it. For God’s sake, the rest of you be smarter than Army boy.”

Travis was on his feet moving in when he realized he was the only one.

“Take it easy, man,” Professor Claude said.

“You’re sick!” Travis said. “You’re worse than the pirates! You’ve never felt so good about yourself, have you?”

Lee Golding held the gun up, but casually.

“Note that I could kill you. I could kill your kid and your wife. Note that I do not. Yet. It will be for all of you to decide. You can stay here, and live as best you can as long as you can, and hope. If you want to kill yourself, the ocean’s out there. Don’t drag everyone into your suicides.”

A shot came from elsewhere in the salon, and the wall-length window behind Lee Golding exploded. Screams came from the two score refugees here who dove for the ground, or burrowed into the hidden couches in their booths.

Travis was on the floor and crawled on his belly back to his booth, wrapping himself over Darren and Corrina on the floor. Lee Golding was on his knee, looking for cover and the shooter. Jessica crouched behind him. He had his gun up. He didn’t know where to fire. He began to back up out the door, pushing Jessica behind him. He switched the gun to automatic fire. He rose to his feet, one arm grabbing Jessica, the other holding the gun up behind him. He fired a burst randomly. The other gun fired again, a distinct voice in the room. Lee Golding screamed as he disappeared from sight.

Gerry sprinted across the lounge, past his wife and her son, and Travis. He went out the door, scanning the deck.

The room was immediately colder as the wind filled it through the open window. Heads popped up between the booths. Gerry returned.

“He’s gone,” Gerry said. “We’d better get down to the Atrium. He could come back.”

With the howling wind, the group seemed silent as they gathered themselves together and quickly made their way from the room that had changed so quickly from a shelter to a corrupt and dangerous place.

Gerry and Claude and Travis looked at each other, and turned and went back to throw Colonel Warrant’s body to the sea. Claude and Travis picked him up while Gerry covered them with the gun. Darren and Corrina waited by the door. Darren did not cry now.

Lee and Jessica ran along in that wind, astern. The ship had grown much more dangerous for them. There was another gun. Lee Golding was no longer super-powered.

54

 

Brenda White never knew of Warrant’s plan to kill Golding. She knew only her work.

Brenda had been, for weeks, a Dr. Frankenstein, working in a dim windowless lab, more and more isolated and alone. She was a tourist on the cruise, and she felt like a tourist in this lab. Communications and power generation were far from her expertise. She was writing freshman Kirchhoff diagrams trying to get the best bang for the buck from the emergency generators. It wasn’t much.

She wondered if the there was a Nobel Prize in Foraging and Scavenging Unknown Technology.

After the initial epic work on power and water, she’d devoted herself these several weeks to communications. Here the equipment had been pasted together from the remnants of the original radio room. It had been painstaking, working out methods to bypass or recreate destroyed circuits had been a devil’s task. After days of frustration she’d changed tactics, working out her own equipment from first principles. The ship had had two distinct physical systems for satellite communication, one for the on-board phone and data connections, one for Internet use. Brenda combined the systems, and where she found broken elements, she bridged them from scratch rather than attempting repairs.

Brenda worked long hours again. She’d begun talking to her tools and equipment. She’d built special relationships with her multimeter and soldering gun.

She had been in this room a long time, but now she would go back to the Atrium, because she just might have a working receiver. For the first time, she felt her work might save them, might get them off the ship.

Brenda turned the cabinet of electronics on with a switch. Her headphones crackled. She felt electrified: she’d done it. She’d made a connection. No one but her, of the thousands aboard, could have done this.

The voice of the satellite was there:

THIS SERVICE IS DOWN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER.

THIS SERVICE IS DOWN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER.

Brenda’s knees buckled and she fell to the floor, sliding the headphones off.

She was an engineer and she saw the world as problems to be solved. Now, she knew the problems were bigger than any solutions, and their rescue had never been in their hands. She sobbed, and her body quivered on the ground in front of the great wall of wires she had devoted her efforts to.

When she finally arose, she looked at that wall as she gained control of her breathing. She grabbed her chair by the backrest and swung it smashing at the electronics until the lights in the wall were dead, screaming all the while.

55

“Golding killed Warrant,” Travis said.

Hesse did not speak. His eyes opened wide, then his face hardened.

They couldn’t go to Hesse’s office. Everyone was yelling at Hesse, if they had closed a door, someone would have knocked it down.

Travis and the others from the lounge had arrived in the quiet Atrium. The amount of time it took for Travis to reach John Hesse was the same amount of time it took for news of Warrant’s death to spread around the room.

That trust in Hesse and Colonel Warrant, that combination each had of charisma and projected competence, had kept all these desperate, starving people from challenging them in any way. Now Warrant was dead. The trust in Hesse was shattered.

As the news spread, the shouting started.

“Hesse!”

“Hesse!”

“We’re lost! Where are you taking us?”

“I’ll kill him,” Hesse said.

“No way,” Travis said. “I have the gun, Hesse.”

“Hesse!

“We’re watching them kill us!”

“Where are you going to find him? He’ll have sentries, you won’t be able to get near him.”

“Hesse!”

“What are we doing?”

Hesse snarled at the crowd

“Can you all be quiet? For God’s sake, I need a minute to think, then I can tell you what we should do, and you all can tell me to go to Hell or we can fight back. But I need this minute.”

He turned back to Travis.

“He knows about the gun now. We need to flush him out. We’ll cut his power. He’ll be out, and you’ll hear him in the dark. He won’t even be able to see you.”

“If he’s in the dressing room, he’ll go out the back, he’s got sentries right there, he’ll think its safe. I’ll wait there, around the corner. You get to Brenda and tell her what to do.”

Hesse turned away from Travis. Travis slipped through the crowd, which had tightened around them. Hesse climbed on to his speech-bar.

“We’re going to have to fight,” Hesse said. “We only have a few days food left, and we can’t just let him kill us as he pleases.”

He didn’t want to tell them about Travis and the gun, but they needed to begin preparing in case Travis failed.

The crowd was shouting back at him.

“He didn’t kill one of us, he killed one of you.”

“We have to fight!” Hesse said. “We have no food. And what if he finds our communications work? We could be in touch with the world in a few days.”

“Why don’t we just wait then?”

The crowd overtook Hesse, arguing over fighting now or waiting for satellite communications. Hesse let it play for a minute. When the level and frequency of shots slacked, he spoke.

“We can’t wait for someone to save us. Every day we wait, we get weaker. Every day, he will be working to improve his own defenses.”

“What do we do, Hesse?”

“We need to get ready to fight. Golding has spies. We caught one. But because he has spies, we can’t just openly talk about our plans.”

“THIS ONE IS! THIS ONE IS A SPY! THIS ONE IS A SPY FOR THEM!”

“What?”

Heads turned to look. The Atrium was considerably sparser of bodies than when Hesse had first climbed the bar weeks ago, so that he could easily see the speaker, and the man he was pointing at. He knew both men. Both had families.

The man being pointed out squirmed and looked around.

“I followed him! I saw him go to the Theater, talk to the sentries, then Golding. I followed him a second time and the sentries let him right in!”

The man ran, but was summarily grabbed in a number of hands and arms.

“Please! I just needed food for my family! My son is sick!”

He was enveloped in blows. More tried to join than could get into the space around the man.

“NO!” Hesse yelled.

He ran into the human shell around the man.

“Please no! NOOOO! Albert! Albert!” a woman cried.

“DADDY! DADDY!”

Travis came in after Hesse.

“Stop! For God’s sake STOP!”

With each man, their peeling him off the scrum seemed to break the spell and their resistance dropped.

Albert was dead.

Hesse was stunned for a moment. He then grabbed two of the men who stood over the body still.

“Get his body out of here!”

Travis staggered. At once he understood what had happened: they had killed a father for sacrificing the group for his family. Something that they all would do themselves, to one degree or another. But you couldn’t make that play and fail. The violence of the group awaited.

“There’s nobody out there!”

On one of the open staircases electrical engineer Brenda White shouted at the group.

“Sorry everybody! Didn’t mean to get your hopes up! No one home! No answering machine!”

The Atrium wail. It had become part of life.

Brenda stumbled like a drunk down the stairs. Her husband and girls came to her and hugged her.

Brenda White straightened up and found her way to John Hesse with her family trailing and grabbing at her.

“It’s time to use my powers for evil,” Brenda said.

“We’ve got a job for you,” Hesse said.