Текст книги "The Flood"
Автор книги: David Sachs
Жанры:
Постапокалипсис
,сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 22 страниц)
56
Travis Cooke kneeled by his son.
“I gotta go, buddy, but I’ll be back soon. You just remember Daddy loves you.”
He was going to kill a man, or be killed. There were still hours before sun-up, and he was going to kill him this night, just as they’d intended with Colonel Warrant. Brenda White had been sent to her work, to disable the power in the Theater.
He remembered playing basketball with the Mighty Lee Golding, the thrill of teamwork with that larger-than-life man. If things had been different, they would probably have been friends. Only the situation revealed what Golding really was. He wondered about what friendship could mean: in a different place, a different story, you’d be trying to kill each other.
Travis stood and looked at Corrina. She met his eyes for the first time since the rape. She was sad for him.
With one look back he captured his son’s face in his mind and went away holding it there. Gerry and Claude Bettman walked by his shoulders, up a dark set of stairs.
“What were you doing with the gun, Gerry?” Claude asked. “If Travis found it, and Warrant was going to use it, why were you carrying it?”
“It’s a phallic extension, Professor,” Gerry said. “It makes me feel confident.”
“Huh. You’re funny, Gerry,” Claude said. “You’re a terrible shot. That man is 350 pounds, standing broadside and you couldn’t get him.”
“Yeah,” Gerry said.
“You a killer?”
“I always thought of myself as a man of peace,” Gerry said. “I’m not rash, I’m pretty patient and calm. Even keeled.”
“But you lose your temper sometimes.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see our friend here as a man of violence,” Professor Claude said. “In fact, I think he’s very poorly cast for this role.”
“I’m not looking for any critic’s awards,” Travis said.
“You know what kind of movie this is? A tragedy. And on this Ship of a Thousand Wrongs, you’re making the mistake of this whole cruise,” the Professor said. “Golding doesn’t want to fight. You’re bringing the Reaper closer for everyone, not farther away. You have a son back there, and you’re walking alone into a machine gun and three hundred haters. What is the matter with you? Look we’ve had a lot of yucks these last few weeks, but you’re going to orphan your kid.”
“Shut up, Claude,” Travis said.
“Or what? You’ll shoot me? Having a gun doesn’t make you the hero, partner. This is not the movie you think it is. This is the one where a boy’s mom gets raped, then his dad gets killed.”
Travis grabbed Claude by the shoulders of his jacket and rammed him into the wall. The jacket tore, the two of them tumbled down the stairs, to a landing.
Claude and Travis disentangled from each other and stood quickly.
“I’m the one trying to protect Darren, not you,” Claude said. “Go ahead and kill yourself.”
Claude started down the stairs and Travis started up.
“The unbearable lightness of Darkness,” Gerry said, walking a step below Travis.
“I’d rather go alone from here,” Travis said.
“I’m going with you, Travis,” Gerry said. “I can’t let you go in there alone.”
“We’ve got one gun. An extra set of hands isn’t going to help. I need to be small, get in, and get out.”
“You’re not going alone,” Gerry said.
“No. Gerry, if I don’t make it back, Darren will need you.”
Step. Step. Step. The breath of the men was their only communication.
“I’ll take care of your son,” Gerry said. “And I’ll take care of Corrina.”
“I trust you,” Travis said. “You’re a good man.”
“The other day Claude and I went to check the lifeboats,” Gerry said. “One of them needed some repairs, but we can start it now, and the davit isn’t too bent. And there’s another one, the boat won’t start but it seems seaworthy and I think we can get the davit to work. We’d just drift. But we’ll be off this boat. I wanted to talk with you about it before, but I didn’t know how we’d get any food. Now, I think anything’s better than staying on this boat.”
Travis nodded in the dark.
“Get off this ship,” Travis said. “Tell Darren how much I love him, and tell him I said to be brave no matter what, and if he wants to make me happy, to live. When he’s old enough, tell him how sorry I was for what I did.”
“I’ll never remember all this, Travis, you’d better just survive, thank you,” Gerry said.
“Forget it,” Travis said. “If you get off this ship, get off this ship. Be a whole and complete dad. You don’t need a ghost over you and neither does he. Just forget everything I said, and take care of him.”
Travis walked off, and Gerry’s breathing slipped away.
“Save a bullet,” Gerry said at last.
Travis knew the halls well, which would be black and which merely twilight. He picked his way aft, then up to the Penthouse Deck, one of the top two enclosed levels still open for the whole length. He crossed over the closed-off compartment, and again disappeared down a dark stairwell. It was a long walk made very slowly, carefully rounding each corner, stooping to peer down each stairwell, listening at each closed door. He would wait at the lower Theater exits. The top exits were barred. At the lower level there was one open exit to a side hall, as well as the backstage exit to the small lower lobby. He had to be able to monitor both exits.
He gripped the pistol tightly. He knew he was getting close, knew where the sentries were supposed to be. He also knew everything might have changed since Lee Golding’s killing Warrant. So Travis took his time. He had arranged for a long lead-time with Brenda. Brenda would be in danger too. The power could only be cut directly below the Theater. If Travis heard shots down below, he’d have to improvise.
He heard his own breathing, slow and controlled, the hush of his step rolling on the carpet, his shoulder brushing a corner. He sometimes imagined he could hear his heart beating as well. It was almost pounding in his chest, but he kept his breathing slow and controlled, listening for all other noises. This last hall was lit along the floor, but not well enough to see more than 20 feet ahead.
He expected sentries soon so he gently opened a door, let himself into an empty room, and waited in the dark for the lights to go out.
Twenty minutes later, he heard screaming. Panic. He put his face to the crack in the door. Brenda had done it. The hallway was completely dark now, the low-glow emergency track lighting shut off. He waited for any dangers to pass. The shouting went on, a reaction to the sudden loss of light in the Theater.
He came out and made his way forward into the heart of the dark and the dangerous.
He made his way quietly but quickly. Where he expected sentries there were still none. Then he heard two men talking:
“One of us should go in and find out what to do.”
“Just let him finish and see what he says.”
Travis realized how close he was to the Theater. He could hear Lee Golding’s voice, loud enough to echo through the dressing rooms into the hall where Travis crouched.
“This is not an accident! They’re flushing us out! If we go, we’re dead. We’re safe in here, we have the lower doors locked from the inside, and sentries outside to get me if they have to. We are in lockdown, and we stay in lockdown. If they want to come to us, it’ll be the last mistake they make.”
They don’t know you don’t have the only gun, Travis thought. But you do. That’s why you want to stay in there. So now I have to come after you.
“FIRE!” came a shout from one of the sentries nearest Travis.
Travis saw them moving towards another corridor; he saw them because there was a glow coming from out there somewhere.
Somewhere below, Travis thought, Brenda must have touched together some wires that shouldn’t have touched.
“FIRE, STAY IN THE THEATER!” a sentry yelled.
Will do, Travis thought.
As he slid behind the two sentries, he saw the fire, spreading from an open stairwell, a good twenty feet from the door backstage. He could make out the door now and found the handle. The door shook, locked from the other side.
“Who is it?” a voice said nervously.
Travis did his best Rick:
“It’s Dumas you idiot, hurry,” Travis said.
The door opened a crack. Travis saw eyes. Eyes saw him. Travis fired the gun, and the sentry fell inside. Travis grabbed the door and let himself in. There was renewed screaming from the Theater in reaction to the gunfire. Travis was out of the glow of the fire now, again in the dark, moving himself forward in the hallway quickly.
Now he was a killer. He didn’t let himself think of the man he stepped over, but he felt the label written on himself permanently.
“Everyone stay put,” Lee Golding was shouting. He was close, in the backstage hall.
He could hear Lee Golding’s footsteps, then he heard the sentries calling from out in the main hallways.
“We got the fire door closed! The fire is contained!”
Lee Golding repeated the shout back to the Theater: “The fire is contained. Everyone stay put. We have someone in here. We have someone in here who doesn’t belong.”
There were tense minutes. Travis had made his way towards the Theater itself. He expected Lee Golding’s attack each moment.
In the dark, he felt, heard, and smelt the presence of three hundred humans and knew he’d entered the open space of the Theater. Travis moved in the dark space, keeping the gun protected in his belly as he touched bodies on each side. One of these would be Lee Golding. He was so close.
Say something again, Travis thought. Show yourself. Open that big mouth and listen to yourself sound so heroic. I’ll shoot a hole right through you.
He felt the size of the man he bumped into, heard the quiet exclamation and lifted his gun. Before he could fire his arms were gripped. The gun was pointed away.
Lee Golding squeezed him tight. Golding couldn’t let go, Travis thought. If he took a hand off to go for his own gun now, Travis’s pistol would be quicker.
“You’ll die here,” Travis said.
“Maybe,” Lee Golding said, “but you’ll die here today.”
“LEEEEE!” came a woman’s voice.
“LEEEEE! LEE HELP!”
The voice was hysterical.
Travis’s head snapped back as his nose burst open, and pain shot through his brain. Lee had head-butted him. He rolled away into the protecting darkness, his world illuminated once more by red star bursts in his eyes, coloring the searing pain. Lee Golding’s loud footsteps went away from him. Travis struggled to his feet.
“What’s going on?”
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?”
“Stay put!” Lee Golding shouted from somewhere, “Stay put everyone!”
Travis was off after the voice. Stumbling, bouncing off others, Travis made the dressing room hall.
“LEE! HURRY!”
“I’m coming!”
Me too.
Around a corner, and they were backstage. There was light. A line of fire; a fiery tongue in the mouth of the backstage hall. Somehow the fire had beaten its containment by the sentries. There was a line of fire along one wall right out the door at the other end, and in the light there was Lee Golding’s wife, halfway to the door.
“Hurry, Lee!” she cried.
“What is this? How did this happen?” Lee said.
“Just come on!”
The two rushed down the hall together. Travis raised the gun and fired at them. They kept moving, Lee fired back and Travis flattened against the wall. I’m being shot at, he thought, with a sudden feeling of how far his life had changed.
Then the door was opened and closed. He ran for it, and for a second time the door held him fast. He heard the screaming behind him. The fire had reached the Theater and it was spreading. Travis went at the door with his body. He gave it everything, and the door moved just a hair and Travis knew it had been blocked with something. The fire was filling the hall behind him. The screams had reached a new pitch from the Theater. Travis was burning. The smoke was trapped. He struggled breathing. His asthma took hold; his chest tightened. He held the door with one hand, the gun with the other and tried to stay on his feet.
The screaming behind him was hysterical now. Some were surely in the flames.
The door shook from the other side.
“Help,” Travis croaked and he wondered if he could be heard.
“Hold on, I’ll move this!”
He heard the clanging of heavy metal objects.
“She did it! She spread the fires!”
The door swung open and Travis tumbled out, into the hall. There was again a weak glow in the hall from the fire. The fire stretched from the backstage door across the hall to the stairwell Travis had seen it in originally, where the sentries had supposedly contained it. The fire doors were closed, and Travis wondered if White had caused a second fire.
“I saw her do it!” the man who had saved Travis yelled at him. He was one of the sentries.
He stood by a heavy bench, and a tumbled over statue.
“I tried to stop her, but there was a wall of fire. She screamed for Golding, and I had to hide.”
Travis tried to regain his balance, clear his mind. The man tried urgently to explain what he’d seen.
“She opened the fire door! She had gas or something and she spread the fire right into the Theater!”
Travis was bent over and could not see the man. He could hear the voice above him. His breathing was getting worse. He felt quickly sapped of strength, but his eyes slowly began to resolve images, and he made out the shape of the man standing over him
“Wait. Who are you?” the man said.
The man moved. Travis shot. The man screamed. He staggered back and fell to the floor on a section of wisping flames and glowing ash.
Travis staggered backwards. The man didn’t move. Travis’s breathing came again.
Travis fell to his side against a wall, listening to the screams in the Theater. Every once in a while they came closer as some made their attempt down the hallway, and then the pinnacle of horror as the blazing fire there penned them in.
Travis toppled as he tried to stand, then he tried again. He made it, in a crouch with his arms out for balance, like a drunken surfer. He slowly straightened his knees and gained his full height. He went looking for Lee Golding.
Back in the dark, Travis struggled upstairs quickly. The screams still came. He found the hall he wanted and turned towards the Theater rear exits. It was hot.
He heard their voices.
“I did it,” she said. “When I heard of the fires I knew it was our chance to be free, really free. I ran to the kitchen and got the cooking oil. I used it to spread the fire. It was dark. No one saw it. I came around and blocked the last door with a bench. Then I saved you, Lee, just you. I knew if you heard me screaming you’d be the first one out of there.”
There was a glow over them in the hallway, emanating from some small window at the back of the Theater. There was a racket like the world ending against the barricaded six double-doors. The two of them stood listening to the screams.
“We can’t just let them die,” Lee said.
“Why?” Jessica asked. “Why? Why? Why? Are they our children? Do we owe them anything?”
“I was protecting them,” Lee said.
“You were protecting us!” Jessica said. “What did you always say our weakness was? The gun could only be in one place at a time. Now we don’t need it anywhere but with us. Think about the food!”
Travis steadied himself to shoot. His breath was again constricted as smoke slowly filled the hall. His eyes clouded. He could not see them anymore. He panicked. What if they were approaching him even now? What if they were about to fire?
He was bent over, trying to steady himself against the wall. He fought for just enough breath to live at each moment. The screams never ceased, nor quieted in those minutes. It seemed like Hell.
He wanted to free them, but he knew Lee Golding stood there with his gun. He wanted to kill Lee Golding, but he could not stand or see or breathe.
He fell to the ground. In the cacophony from the Theater, Lee and Jessica did not hear it.
Somehow one voice came out above the others. It was Rick Dumas.
“HELP ME! LEE! I’M IN HERE! HELP ME!”
Travis’s eyes were shutting, two seconds, three seconds.
“I’M STILL IN HERE! LEE!”
Lee turned from the Theater and walked quickly into the dark. Jessica chased after him. The cellphone in his pocket buzzed for a text message. He knew who it was. He and Rick had learned they could send text messages directly to each other’s cell phone. It had seemed a great power at first, trying to guard the Theater and galley with one gun, but they’d found the communication range too limiting for that distance. He felt that phone buzz in his pocket and knew it was from the Theater.
The doors shook mightily but the barricades held them tight. Travis heard the screams in his nightmare. That’s how he knew they lasted so long. When he woke, everything was quiet. The fire was likely still burning in the Theater, but there weren’t any more people.
Travis made his way back through the darkness and twilight lighting to the Grand Atrium.
Most of those in the Theater died of smoke inhalation or from crushing under the panicked mob. Rick Dumas burned for his sins. The Theater fire doors held a long time so that the fire consumed everything within it.
57
All they had been through had been about Suffering. Adam didn’t take the voices during the sickness as authoritative. He knew it had been a madness. But it was a clue, and he studied on it until he knew it was the key. Suffering led to Jesus. It led to Revelations. It led to Job:
Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.
To Abraham, Genesis chapter 22, the sacrifice of Isaac. It led Adam Melville, in his mental frenzy, bible pages flipping quickly between his fingers, finally to Judas, Jesus’ betraying disciple, who suffered so much for his killing sin, as Adam suffered since killing the pirate. Matthew 27:5.
Adam’s followers were starved, weak, traumatized and insulated from the old world. They had only Adam to follow and they clung to his vision and hopes for them. They parted from each other just once more, each to find where they had left their wallets and purses. They came back to the restaurant and walked together out onto the Sunset Deck where they removed every piece, money, cards, pictures, phones, and threw them over the railings.
They returned to the solarium.
On a cruise ship, they had chairs and ladders and rope. The solarium had three metal tracks along its glass ceiling, through which rope could be looped.
“We have been chosen,” Adam said. “God reached into our lives and said, you need to be on the boat. You’ll be spared from the Flood, but you’ll be tested. We were attacked, so that we couldn’t return to the failed world. A gun was left, to bring violence among us. Count your days! God said. Know your lifetime.”
He stopped talking. He got up on his own chairs. He had two, as the chairs were small and might collapse or topple under his weight. The sun had come out at last; the clouds had parted like a curtain, revealing the great sun and the blue that had been hidden so long. Like Superman pulling open his shirt and jacket, the universe wasn’t really grey; that had been only a costume to hide the magic and majesty. The universe was revealed, anew.
All that life, all that strife, all that yelling and screaming, hoping and dreaming. What a ride! What an idiot’s ride his life had been. He laughed.
The others were all up on their chairs.
Life was a greater joke still, God a more honest comedian than Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks or George Carlin. Adam had been so sure of himself all his life, the power of his mind and his form. He had believed in God, but he had only worshipped himself.
San Francisco, they’d danced naked in the park as the sun rose. He was so young, so full of energy and he felt so close to God. Perhaps that was the closest he had been to a prophet, to righteousness. Then came failed marriage, disillusionment, worship of money and technology and the power of man and mind. He had thought it was all a path, an honest consistency running from Golden Gate Park to Silicon Valley. Layers were being revealed to him now. He was learning more of his own life in these last few moments of it than he had in sixty-five years of living it. He knew there was something beautiful in it. He knew he had been special and blessed and it had guided him, off the path and back, to be here. Abraham had been asked to sacrifice his son. He felt hungry now to sacrifice himself to fill some place in God’s plan. He’d been born for this, run away from it, been led to it.
When he opened his eyes he had to squint from the sun. It felt so warm on his face, the first warmth in so many weeks.
“We didn’t have to wait to go to God. God came to us. God came a long way. Now he’s shut all our doors, and waits just out the window. We just have to take one step to meet him.”
Matthew 27:5.
And Judas cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
He stepped off his chairs, knocking one of them over. There was a symphony of clanging chairs going over on the tile floor, and muted grunts. A chorus of fifty righteous, 1illful deaths.