Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

58

 

The ship was aflame.

Brenda White returned before Travis could, and warned Hesse.

After the pirate attack, fires had been contained in fire-resistant sealed sections. That time there had been an organized response led by the Festival’s trained fire crew. They had now to organize something similar, with a half dead army. The indefatigable John Hesse had quickly put together a fire brigade, but they had been directed by Brenda’s understanding of the fire as emanating from her electrical sabotage a level below the Theater.

When Travis came back to the Atrium he felt like a bear returning from a winter in a cave. The sun had just come up, and the light in the Atrium made him squint. Travis noticed his clothes were splashed with new vomit and blood and he wondered from whom they came. He was a killer. He felt like he should tell someone.

He saw his son and ran to him. The boy watched his father across the great floor, fixed to his spot. Finally, when his father’s arms came to him and lifted him to his chest, the boy smiled. The mother watched and smiled too. She had been wasting away, draining out physically and emotionally. Her smile now was real and solid, on the face of a ghost. Her smile had been Travis’s favorite thing at one time. Seeing it now seemed a final gift.

Travis stayed in that embrace with Darren, shutting his eyes. He wished they could die this way. Finally he put his boy down to find Hesse.

Real sunlight made the Atrium beautiful again. The pillars and statues shone, the long drapes seemed bright and bold. Only the people, sick, coughing, lying down in filthy clothing, were still gray.

Travis found Hesse.

“They’re all dead,” Travis told him in the office.

Hesse took it in dumbly.

“That Golding, his wife set fire to the Theater. Locked them all in. They’re all dead, except Golding and his wife.”

How long they sat there, while the sun shone into the Atrium.

Finally Hesse said, “You couldn’t kill him?”

As if the story would change and there would be a better ending.

Hesse told Travis about the firefight. Travis shook his head. The firefighters were sent to the wrong level. Even if the fire from below had been contained in the stairwell, the Theater fire would have spread. He knew at least that backstage door of the Theater had been left open. The fire would have spread from the Theater.

They were quiet a while. Then it was Travis who brought them back to the ship, and what had to be done.

“He’ll be in the galley,” Travis said. “It’s the only place he can be, unless he wants to take whatever won’t rot and move off the grid. He thinks I was in the Theater. In the fire. He thinks he has the only gun on the ship again. But he’ll still be waiting. He’ll be in the galley and if he’s not he’ll have destroyed whatever food he couldn’t carry.”

“Do you have any bullets?”

“Three.”

“Give me the gun, I’m going to end this,” Hesse said.

“No,” Travis said. “Don’t ask again.”

They were in no rush to talk. The sun on their faces was an irresistible distraction. There were spaces between each communication.

“If he’s gone from the galley,” Travis said, “how will we find him? And what good will it do us?”

“If he’s gone from the galley, he’ll have food stashed. The perishables are irrelevant, there wasn’t much left. But he’ll have bread, flour, and clean water, and he’ll have it hidden somewhere. It doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter what it means, what it helps, if it gains us anything. We have to kill him.”

Travis agreed. Killing Golding was a need now. It gave meaning to their lives.

“I need some time with my family,” Travis said. “Let’s talk later.”

“Wait,” Hesse said. “Travis. How did we get here? What did we do wrong?”

“I don’t know. There’s only so much difference your choices can make when you don’t control anyone else’s. Maybe some games are built to lose.”

Travis left Hesse; Hesse went back into his office.

Back near the grand staircase, Travis rejoined Gerry, Corrina, Darren and Claude. Claude had said nothing on Travis’s return. Travis felt no animosity towards Claude. He was glad he was still around; still felt that it was more shelter for his son to have Claude there.

Gerry took Travis aside. They walked towards a closed off staircase. In privacy, Gerry said simply, “Any bullets?”

“Three.”

He handed Gerry the gun.

“Get it back fast, and with a bullet left,” Travis said. “I aim to put it in Golding.”

Gerry took the gun. This time he wouldn’t come back without firing it. He went up the stairs; Travis went back to his group.

It was a long walk to the solarium. Gerry was in no hurry. He stopped at the first of the exterior decks, and took in the sun. Was he a violent man? Claude had asked. Yes, he was. He had lied to Professor Claude. He had always been violent. He’d hated it, shamed for it, bellowed it, rode it and used it as a threat at various points in his life, but it had always been there. There could be no greater testimony to that beast inside him than the lengths he had gone through in his life to get beyond it. Poetry. Yet in poetry was passion and violence too. It was a false cover. His life had been shaped by violence.

“If I kill, let it be for love. But let me kill.”

He went back into the dark, ascending.

Professor Claude sat with Darren by his side, but felt a chasm between them.

“Flood myths are just about universal,” he told Darren. “Every culture, every religion has a story of a great flood that wiped away all the earth, all humanity. No one knows if these stories are based on facts, or whether there is some deep human urge or fear of this kind of idea: wiping out everybody, even all history, and starting fresh.”

“That’s what God should do,” Darren said.

He had no more power than the boy, the professor thought. Helpless, but to watch as whatever life had in store came right at them. He was a history professor and had at times imagined himself as a fly on the wall in some dramatic era; he’d wondered what it felt like to watch great events unfold, powerless over the direction of your own existence in the face of such forces. He was the same as the boy, now, tossed about in the sea of history, at the mercy of fate or the actions of some small handful of men.

There were hundreds of them still on this boat, and there was this bond between them, one that stretched across eons of human life; the bystanders, the victims, of history. They were the mob that lived sometimes with the illusion that they controlled their own condition.

When Gerry came into the light it was into a forest of corpses, hanging from above, swaying ever so slightly. They already smelled.

Gerry stopped at the sight. The meaning of what had happened here was obvious, but so shocking, and so overwhelming, that Gerry’s brain simply stopped for a moment. Then he saw it again, and knew what had happened. He cursed their disdain for this life and this world.

He walked the rows. There was the mother. The boy in the red shirt was not there.

Perhaps he wasn’t so eager to meet his judge.

“Why”

The voice was so quiet Gerry imagined he’d imagined it. But it came again.

“Why”

It came like a breath. If there were a place for ghosts, Gerry thought, this was it. He stepped softly towards where he imagined the voice to have come from. A fly buzzed around his head. He parted the bodies like curtains.

At the end of the row, the enormous, bloated body of Adam Melville hung, the fingers flexed and open to the ground.

“Why” the bloated purple face said through lips that seemed not to move at all. Two flies buzzed around his head.

The body swayed just so. Adam Melville blinked.

59

Lee Golding’s galley was abandoned, not a trace of food was left, save the spills and splashes dried and scummy over the counters, floors and stoves.

In the days that followed, Hesse and Travis went together searching for him. Gerry again ventured to join them but Travis again chose to protect a father for his son.

The ship was large, even now, with more and more of it shut off to keep the fire at bay. They had always to tread quietly and with great care. It occurred to Travis that they were hunting a man with an automatic rifle, while they held one pistol with three bullets. It was suicidal. But he didn’t think of stopping. When Travis was home, Hesse was hunting, so the gun never was at rest. There were no more locked cabins on the ship then.

They ate mostly fish, stretched in soup, bread and with rice.

On the second day, Travis explored some of the crew quarters that had not been flooded. In the living room there was a cell phone on a desk. It still had battery power. He turned it on. No signal. He scrolled through pictures. It showed a young woman, taking self-shots with friends in ports of call around the world. Home shots, with her parents and sister and dog.

Travis felt his knees go. He hadn’t slept in days. He steadied himself and went into the bedroom. There were two bunk beds. One of the beds was still perfectly made. It was like an artifact of another planet.

Travis lay down. I’ll just rest my eyes. I can hear the cabin door.

He remembered working in his dad’s shop at twelve years old, the year before they lost it, cleaning the basement store room and being so tired he took a nap on the boxes until his dad knocked his head to wake him.

He held the gun, pointed at the closed bedroom door. He closed his eyes.

He dreamt of the Festival, so that when wakefulness came it seemed like a dream. His body stayed asleep and he fell back into his dream.

He heard a crack. He shot up in bed. It was dark now in the room. The sun had set and though it was still daylight out the window, the room was shadowed.

He listened and heard nothing. He swung his legs down from the bed and came to his feet. He heard nothing. He waited, with his ear against the bedroom door. Nothing. He opened the door and looked out into the living area. The cabin door was still shut. He tiptoed across the floor, and listened at that door. This time he only paused a moment before opening the door and leaping into the hallway, his gun up, his head swiveling to take in both ways. The hallway was lit by the emergency tracks and empty as far as Travis could see, as the hall melted to darkness 30 feet in either direction.

Travis returned to his group. After the incident in the piano lounge, they had moved into an abandoned suite.

“How you doing, champ?” Travis said to Darren.

“I’m bored,” Darren said.

Travis’s head twitched at the answer.

“You want to go swimming with me later?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” Darren said.

“OK. I gotta go down to the Atrium to talk with John Hesse.”

“What do you talk about?” Darren asked.

Again, Travis was taken aback. Darren had not been asking such questions, had not been exhibiting interest or hope, since long before the rape.

“How to get us out of here,” Travis said.

“I want to go home,” Darren said.

Travis hugged him.

“Good, honey,” he said. “That’s really good. We all have to really want it to make it come true.”

Soon, Travis passed the gun to Hesse and returned. They never went swimming. Claude had taken a cabin on the same hall, but sat with Darren that night. The skies were clear and the night sky so bright that they opened the balcony door and looked out and the stars shone as if they were just out of reach.

“My favorite mythology is Vulcan,” Professor Claude said. “You know, Star Trek. Mister Spock’s people. Such a beautiful founding myth. The crowning glory of Vulcan culture is peace. Their legends tell that that peace grew out of the most violent of histories. But one Vulcan sect sacrificed their own blood to end the wars. Surak, the greatest of Spock’s ancestors, sent ambassadors for peace. They were killed. He sent more, and they were killed. But he didn’t give up; he didn’t stop. War is a perpetual motion machine, running on blood and always making more. Surak’s people sacrificed their blood for their enemies. Finally, the blood of the peaceful ran through the machine. The pump of violence lost its prime.”

“I wish we could beam off this ship,” Darren said.

“Well, it’s all make believe,” Claude said. “But it’s nice to imagine.”

60

The seas turned again, and the fish disappeared. Their hunger grew awful.

Each day another deck, room by room, Travis and Hesse read the remains of the ship itself: the infrastructure built by the ship’s company, the detritus of the tourists and survivors, and even the dead and the living that still existed throughout. Each day they’d return to the Atrium, where those that cared to continue living came for the poor nourishment that remained, and the fresh water of Brenda White’s rainwater supply. What was being eaten now would not have been food off the ship. The ventilation was out again, as were the toilets, and the air grew worse.

Death passed through the ship with a heavy hand. The last patients in the medical clinic weren’t getting better anymore, and Travis and the few nurses stopped taking new ones. There were no doctors, no morphine nor whiskey left for them as they wasted away.

Corrina never told Brenda what happened, never went back to the playroom. She slowly began to speak again around her family. She fought to recover that. She had tried, for days, not to exist, but she couldn’t. She and Darren had to exist for each other. She didn’t leave the new room, but she could exist there.

Vera died. The baby died.

Adam stuck to himself, mostly. The open wound all around his neck was in danger of infection, but no one was practicing medicine anymore. He hunted too, though what he looked for no one knew. His mind had broken into pieces again, and the voices returned. He wandered the ship, inside and out. He haunted the ship, and the people of the ship haunted him. The living were ghosts to him, and he walked past as though they could not harm him. Gerry wondered if he was somehow with his disciples after all. Gerry never saw the boy in the red shirt. He raged at himself. He had let the rapist go. Time went backwards, cause and effect inverted. He had let her get raped by not killing her rapist. The shame overwhelmed him so that he almost could not look at her.

The fire was spreading, they heard every day. It took out each barrier with time. Time was on the fire’s side.

On the eighth day of searching, they found each other by the fire: Hesse and Travis, Lee and Jessica, each out to learn how small their ship was becoming.

Travis fired first.

Lee was quickly in front of Jessica so that Travis saw only the single silhouette at the end of the corridor.

Lee fired back, single shots, one, two, three. Hesse and Travis backed into the same stairwell they had come out from.

The Mighty Lee Golding pressed the attack, firing through the wall he knew they cowered behind. Travis and Hesse escaped up the stairs. There was a moment’s respite, and they heard only their breath and heartbeats as they waited for Lee to come after them.

Two bullets left. But what chance would be better than this? Travis rolled over and sat up at the top of the stairs, completely exposed, for a clear shot when Lee opened that stairwell door.

The door never opened. Lee had retreated. By the time Travis went down the stairs and after him, they knew they wouldn’t find him.

Gerry Adamson sat on the promenade deck and looked out and finished his note.

The end of the world came

And we no longer asked, who by fire and who by sword

We all died by water

In a fragile craft on a disinterested sea

We dreamed, loved, bled and hungered

For more time, when great things would occur

And then the water rose

And went over us,

And our dreams did not float, nor loves, nor blood, nor hunger

 

61

“Don’t let them win,” Jessica said.

She lay across Lee’s legs, on the floor of a room they had sheltered and hidden their food stores in. She bled out her back onto his pants.  He had carried her back after Travis Cooke had shot her.

Now he could not speak. Tears streamed from his tired eyes and his great frame shook with the effort to hold in his cries.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

Her face was white, even the deep red of her lips faded.

“Don’t. Don’t regret,” she whispered.

Her eyes were still open and she looked up into his.

“You were my hero,” she said.

She died on his legs and he bent over. The tears flowed freely and he opened his mouth. For a moment nothing came, then an animal wail shook him and shook the room.

He allowed himself some minutes to cry. Then he knew he had to let her body go. He would not allow them any chance to defile her. He would not allow the indignity of them seeing her dead. He carried his broken love, he cradled her like a baby in his arms, the gun still held in his fist under her back. He was not cautious. He felt no danger, no fear this time, just a growing void, as though his universe was disappearing from inside him.

This cabin had no balcony, but a level up was the Resort Deck with its exterior promenade. He carried her up the dark stairway, then in the hallway felt his knees weaken and his shoulder bounced off the wall before he straightened himself. Tears came slowly in tracks down his cheeks, disappearing into his beard.

The air was calm, the sun bright but cool as he walked to stern with Jessica. At the rail, he looked down at her and kissed her pale lips. He kissed her eyes and forehead and her face was wet with his tears. He dropped her over the railing and there was no sound back to him as the body disappeared in a white puff far below.

Back in the room, he took out his cellphone. He had to see her again. He saw that he had four text messages, and his battery was almost dead.

The messages were from Rick. The dead man begged to be let out of the fire.

62

Travis woke late in the morning and Gerry and Darren were gone. He sat up on the couch. Corrina was up, and came over. She had a small bottle of water, and she gave him a drink and she had one. He got up from the couch and followed her out of the cabin.

They walked up the stairs to the open air of the Resort Deck and the sun. The sun, so rare they’d forgotten about it. It was warm. Travis took off his coat. They walked astern but still neither spoke. Travis took off his shirt. It clung to his skin so that he had to be slow to prevent it tearing. He wondered how he would get it back on, but he immediately felt cleaner and healthier with the warm sun and air on his skin.

There was a cushioned wood sun lounger. Corrina took Travis’s hand and pulled him down with her onto the bed. They kissed. His right and her left hand mixed finger after finger. It was time, because there was no more time. She wasn’t going to allow the rape to define her final days, the story of her and Travis. She could still make the choices while she breathed and moved.

He pulled her shirt up. She stopped him with her hand. He grasped her back under the shirt. Her flesh was thin and he could feel her bones. She gave him a kiss with three years in it.

Three years he’d wanted her touch, three years he’d been tortured by her presence and absence, three years he’d been in his personal hell hoping that he could have one day of life back in the paradise her love had been. He remembered the last time they’d made love. Two weeks before he’d gone to Sudan. They’d been fighting, and it was a passionate, desperate sex. They fought more afterwards, and when he left for Sudan two weeks later, that night remained the last. They were as passionate, as physically desperate, for each other now. It was the same stage play with an altogether different meaning.

They did not move a long time after. The sun made them so comfortable. Finally, she worried for Darren and stirred.

Travis sat up. The most important thing in his life had just gone right. If it meant nothing more than this moment, it was infinitely better.

“We’re going to get off this ship,” he said. “And you’ll go back to your life with Gerry, and Darren will grow up great. And I’ll be happy we had this talk.”

They both smiled. Still they did not move.

“If we get through this life,” Travis said, “and meet on the other side, can we be in love again?”

“Oh, Travis,” she said.

Days of quiet searching followed, each day a scorecard of survivors and dead.

Hesse seemed never to rest now, between searching with Travis and maintaining somehow the structure and organization their lives depended on.

The sun stayed out mostly. It was cool and pleasant. There was a basketball game occasionally, the oppressiveness of time called for it. Never did Lee Golding or Travis Cooke play. There were still some, like Travis and Hesse, that the flood had found in the fullest strength of their life. They could still function physically, though not well. The games were lethargic, the players weak and clumsy, but there was a joy in it, of life escaping death for the moment. Sometimes there was an audience of survivors drinking in the sun on deck, so that more and more of the sun loungers knocked over by the waterslide flood were over time set back upright.

In those days, they didn’t talk much at all. They were all thirsty, their mouths sticky and the more their mouths were open, the drier their tongues and lips became. They guarded every drop of moisture in them.

Days after the gunfight in the stairwell, Claude spoke quietly to Travis’s group in their new cabin.

“I found Golding’s food. Some canned stuff, crackers, nuts, water. There’s not much, but for us it’ll be enough.”

”Enough for what?” Corrina said. She sat on the couch with Darren sleeping against her shoulder.

The three men were quiet, shocked Corrina had spoken.

“To go,” Claude said.

“Where was Golding?” he said.

“He was in the bathroom, I could hear him. She must have been with him. I know you got the gun. We gotta go back and get that food on the lifeboat. That lifeboat will work, Travis, ask Gerry.”

“It’ll work,” Gerry said. “We’ve been working on it. It’s all shot up, but the only actual damage was a gas line. We patched and stole some gas from another boat. The davit’s good too. We rigged it so you can drop it right from the door, but it’s gonna be a hell of a drop.”

“There’s just the one boat?” Travis asked.

“There’s one other lifeboat with a working davit, but it won’t start,” Claude said.

“How many people can we get in the boat?” Corrina asked, siting up straight.

“There’s not going to be any other people in that boat,” Claude said. “She sails soon, and there’s not enough in Golding’s stash to spread around. You want to go around and pick who gets on and gets off? And try and keep that quiet?”

“You know how to get it down?” Travis said.

“Yes, we looked at the cards,” Claude said.

“We can’t choose our own lives over others,” Gerry said. “We can have a lottery.”

“I’m the only one who knows where the food is,” Claude said, “and I’ll tell you we aren’t picking any names out of a hat. I already did it, and I picked you. Don’t betray that. We’ve got to get the rest of the food before Golding finds out. We’ve played real nice since this all started, and we’re either damned lucky or just damned to still be alive. This is the only chance we’re gonna get, and sharing it isn’t gonna work. It isn’t gonna happen.”

Travis looked down at the polished table. There was his reflection; a dirty, hairy old man he didn’t recognize.

“I’ll go back with Claude and get the food,” Travis said. “I wish we could all stick together right now but it’s too dangerous with Golding around. Give us a half hour head start, then come meet us at the lifeboat. Gerry, Claude – you both can find it again?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Darren opened his eyes and looked up at Travis with a smile. Travis gave Darren a high-five. He touched Corrina's shoulder for a moment. He took a look around the Atrium. He'd risked his life for weeks for these people. Or had they been incidental all along? They were going to die and he was going to live. There was no way they could all live. If they had another rush on the last lifeboat, it would go as badly as the last one had.

Goodbye.

He and Claude Bettman ascended again into the darkness.

“Is there a piano on the lifeboat?” Travis said.

“No.”

“We’ll have to tell jokes then,” Travis said.