Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

63

The Mighty Lee Golding poured water over his arms, scooped from a toilet’s basin. The ghost of his wife rushed to him, laying her hands forcefully on his body.

“Stop,” the ghost cried.

“I have to get this off,” he whispered.

“That’s good water!” she said.

“I can’t stand it,” he said.

He rubbed at the blood on his arms, Warrant’s, old and dark, smeared with Jessica’s, fresh, red and vibrant.

“I’m getting crazy,” he said. “I can’t stand being cooped up. How could he have escaped the Theater? I tell you, it was the same one! They only have one gun, but he won’t die!”

Her face scrunched as she prepared the words in reply. Lee stopped her.

“What’s that?” he said.

He put up his finger to silence her.

The bathroom door was open just a crack. Lee slowly, quietly pushed it forward. The gun was ready. He stepped out onto the carpet but could not help making a sound, as the floor creaked just enough. Lee threw himself around the corner to a view of the stateroom. There was no one there. He ran to the door and peered into the hall. In the darkness he could not see anyone, but he heard footsteps, running away.

“Someone’s been eating our porridge,” Lee said, regarding the pile of cans, boxes, sacks, and plastic bottles in the kitchen. Something had indeed been disturbed.

He looked at the ghost against the dim light of the drawn drapes of the big windows. He knew she was dead, that she was not here, but he spoke aloud.

“It’s over,” he said. “I can’t keep moving all this food with me. They’ll never let me sleep. They’ll hunt day and night.”

He looked up, where the ghost had been.

“I haven’t enough bullets to kill them all, they’ll win in the end.”

His face went down into his hands.

“They’ve already won. They took you.”

He looked at his hands and still saw the blood. The gun was on the floor at his feet. He stood straight and looked right at those dimly glowing drapes.

“Why fight? I don’t want to stay in character anymore. The winners are picked. The moves are staged. There’s no one watching us battle and scream and pound our chests, play heel and face, good and bad. I can’t care any more. You’re gone. They’ve taken everything from me, and they know it! Each moment I live is a humiliation. I’m lying on the mat, they’re raising their arms above me and mocking me, and they won’t let me leave. I just lie there on the mat.”

He picked up the gun and studied it as if there was a secret in it to decipher.

But for that pistol, they never could come against him. They never would dare dozens of them slaughtered, even with the fire heating the air around them.

The ghost was silent, and he looked at her and ached in his heart at the accusations in her eyes. His heartache turned to rage, as it had all his life.

“I won’t let them gloat over our bodies,” he said. “That can’t be the end. I have enough bullets to kill your murderers. And then I’ll kill the others until my last bullet and when I blow my own brains out, they’ll know what I did everything for, and no one will think they beat us.”

“Yes,” she said.

They went into the darkness. Towards the Atrium. The fire had spread beyond their expectations. He could feel it behind closed doors.

They were close to the end.

64

Two bullets and a sudden hope, that he and Darren and Corrina might live, might see each other off this ship. That he might see Darren grow.

It was an agonizing walk to Lee Golding’s hiding spot, fearful each moment of Lee and of opening the wrong door and finding the blaze. Claude led Travis to a stateroom near the top level, so that it cooled as they got closer.

It was quiet in the dark hall. No emergency lighting. They were silent. The door was closed, but the bolt had been crashed with a kick so it was not secure. Travis motioned Claude to stay back. He put his hand on the door, crouched as low as he could to the side of the door, pushed it very slowly out of the doorframe.

Travis stopped and waited. He slowly pushed the door open. He waited. He heard nothing.

They waited by the door a full two minutes. When they heard no sound, Travis walked in real low. He stayed behind the entryway wall, counted down from five, and spun around the corner, gun held high.

The room was illuminated by sunlight through the open balcony drapes. It was empty. The food was still there.

Silently, they gathered what they could. Travis used his jacket to fashion a sack, holding the bottom band out and flipped up with one arm. He added a few smaller items to his pants pockets and folded some into his elbows and arms.

They were out again. Carrying as much as they were, they could not move so delicately and quietly returning in the darkness, but they met no disaster until the last door revealed the sunlit deck.

The few remaining boats were so damaged, it seemed impossible one could still function. When Travis saw the one Claude stopped at, it seemed the more unlikely. The davits were badly bent, and bullet holes dotted the bow.

“It’ll work,” Claude said. “Why aren’t they here yet?”

Claude opened the door and stepped up and in. He dropped his load of food and water and sat at the controls. He turned a key, and Travis saw the navigation lights switch on. The motor started with a cough as Claude tested that too for just a second before turning it off. Travis heard a mechanical clang, and the davits shook. Claude came back to the door.

“Why aren’t they here yet?" he said.

Travis took of his jacket and wrapped it tight as a bundle around his food and drink. The sound of gunfire answered Claude’s question. One shot, then two more. There was no screaming that could penetrate the distance from the Atrium, but Claude and Travis imagined they heard it anyways.

“We’ve got to go back for them,” Travis said. He had already slipped several steps from the lifeboat.

“We’re not going back into that,” Claude said.

“I can’t leave Darren,” Travis said.

“I can,” Claude said.

He slammed the door shut.

Travis knew his last chance was going in that boat and he leapt back to the davit, searching for a way to stop it. There was a loud clang and the davit shook. The boat dropped, but for one moment, Travis saw Claude through the window. They’d known each other thirty days, they’d seen each other every day for those thirty days, they’d seen intimately how each lived and thought and acted under the greatest pressure.

Their eyes connected, an intense final examination, and Claude was gone.

There was another gunshot and Travis’s turned away without hesitation and ran back towards the Atrium, leaping several lounge chairs as he sprinted. His Darren, his Corrina; he would leave this body lifeless before he would leave them.

He raced up the walking deck. The real screams sounded in his ears as he got closer.

65

 

Adam saw Jessica Golding and Rick Dumas sometimes. He knew they were ghosts, and that he was in a state between worlds and could consequently see everything.

He walked through staterooms, looking for things.

Sometimes while he walked forward he walked backwards through time. He was in No Time, and everything could happen around him at the same time as all of history in the flesh and blood world.

He walked through jungles, across tundra, above mountain ranges, and watched gods and spirits, heroes and villains, and the spirits drifted in the air all about him, eagles, snakes, bears, jaguars, apes, wolves and spiders, and monsters that never roamed the Earth, but he couldn’t ask them the Why that haunted him, Why he had not been allowed to go to God with the others.

He was immortal. Worse, he was immortal in all time and had to see everyone suffer.

He knew the ship was ablaze, but he didn’t only walk on the ship, he walked through Rome as it burned.

He found himself in the ship’s casino, as Jesus flipped the gambling tables.

Then the voices in his head all came together in a chorus, and he was called.

66

“Don’t move,” Travis could hear Lee Golding’s voice above the screaming. “You move, I’ll kill you.”

Travis chose a closed stairway so that he could look in at the Atrium from a hidden position.

Amid the massive wood and gold columns, the cowering groups of survivors, the dead fountains and flower boxes, he couldn’t see his family, nor could he see Lee. He saw that an always-open hallway was now shut off by a double fire door and he knew the fire had reached this refuge.

Then John Hesse came into sight. He walked like a titan through the refugees crouched along the floor. Lee Golding came to meet him. They were by the bar Hesse had made his first speech from. Near them was the marble statue of the great fish, diving into the water. Everything around it had deteriorated, while that statue was as Travis had first seen it.

“Where’s Cooke?” Lee Golding said.

“I don’t know,” Hesse said.

Lee Golding pointed the gun at Hesse’s middle.

Travis aimed and fired first. The Mighty Lee Golding shuddered. He spun sideways. Hesse jumped on him, as Travis ran from the stairs and others came to their feet.

The second gunshot echoed in the cavernous Atrium. The back exploded clean out of John Hesse and he fell over, against the statue, bleeding out.

Hesse’s cloak of invulnerability had sheltered everyone to some extent. John Hesse had been a man of magic, made of something different than other men, something other than flesh. The flesh was destroyed and the magic was gone. Everyone stopped at the moment Hesse was killed, as though the ship itself was expected to fall in on them.

Hesse’s life flashed before Travis’s eyes in one beat of his heart: memories of that incredible athlete on the rugby field, saving that little girl when the pirates attacked, hopping on that bar and getting everyone to come together, organizing the medical teams, meetings in his art shop office, asking Travis to clean up the suicides, hunting Golding. Travis knew nothing of Hesse’ life off the boat, but felt the contour of it: a life knowing how to behave, how to be happy. The life Travis had always wanted.

With Travis’s next heartbeat, Lee Golding was back on his feet.

He lifted the rifle, steadied it with his left hand and fired at Travis, but he was hurt by Travis’s shot, and the gun went off awkwardly. Travis had already crossed the Atrium to his family.

With an enormous noise, a roofed section of the Atrium near the double doors came down. Smoke filled the chamber and Travis lost sight of Lee as all were on their feet now. Travis grabbed his family and they ran with the crowd to the exits to the exterior promenade. A stairway came loose and tottered, and then just fell to pieces in the air, raining down slabs of metal and wood. He had seen Brenda White and her family below the stairway. Now, Travis could not see the people screaming in the cloud of smoke and debris.

Travis and his group came out the door and onto the deck, and now no one was sure which way to run at all.

“The boat’s gone,” Travis told Gerry, “Bettman’s gone.”

“Follow me,” Gerry said. “We can lower the other one.”

Fire had reached so many parts of the ship that people scrambled to escape each dead end. In the open of the deck, it was chaos. Survivors filled random disabled lifeboats, or crowded the railings waiting to jump.

Gerry led them to the one lifeboat he had found earlier that still might let them off the ship, and Travis found his jacket-food bundle where he’d left it and returned quickly to the others. One davit was bent, so one end of the boat tilted precariously. The boat looked so broken that others ignored it for the moment, sprinting past as Gerry opened the door. He came back to the davit.

“Get on,” Gerry said. “I have to open the brakes here.”

“How will you get on?” Travis said.

“I’ll have to jump, it’s the only way,” Gerry said.

“No!” Corrina cried.

“I can do it! Just get Darren on the boat now!”

The fire now was prominent everywhere they could look.

Gunfire sounded and Travis saw Lee Golding far down the deck running at them. The gun was on automatic now. Travis scooped Darren up and held him at his shoulder, by the door. Now, others saw Lee cutting them off and they turned and pushed past Travis to get on the lifeboat.

Travis had one bullet left. He fired and missed.

Lee kept coming.  Out of a cloud of smoke came Adam Melville, behind the Mighty Lee Golding, chasing him down.

Adam knew he had to kill the Mighty Lee Golding. He was meant to. Through Lee Golding lay peace.

Adam closed on Lee Golding as though Lee were not running at all, and then tackled him around the shoulders. The two men went down.

Flames tore through the windows and doors from the ships interior.

“Get on!” Gerry shouted. “I’ve almost got the brake open!”

The crowd now getting on crushed them, and Corrina was pushed away.

The two giants came back to their feet, but Lee had lost the gun. Almost engulfed in flames, the two men wrestled. They fell back into the burning wall, and through it.

The fire roared in Lee’s ears, as he hit the ground. He was pinned, unable to move under Adam’s weight. He’d lost, and he heard nothing but cheering.

Flames crawled upon them. They burned in each other’s grasps but Adam’s spirit had left the body and its pain was harmless to him.

Hands and bodies struggling to get through pierced the open space in the lifeboat doorway. Travis’s arm holding Darren was trapped in with those bodies. Corrina was separated from them by other bodies.

With one arm holding Darren, Travis reached across the shoulder behind him to grab for Corrina.

Darren screamed for his mother.

Travis took her wrist and nearly snapped it as he struggled to pull her through the bodies behind him as he pushed through the bodies ahead of him, trying to get Darren through the door.

There was a shift in the Festival. Travis caught a glimpse of Gerry at the davit’s controls. An explosion roared above all other noise. The ship shuddered; the lifeboat jerked. Travis lost his grip on Corrina and fell back into the lifeboat with Darren, a flash of orange light in his eyes.

“Darren, I love you!” he heard Corrina scream.

The davit released with a loud clang, the cable let itself out and the lifeboat fell away; all aboard bounced weightless for a moment as they fell. Darren and Travis screamed out for Corrina.

The lifeboat dropped three decks, hitting the sea with tremendous weight, the bow cutting into the water first, so that the open door in the boat’s stern was highest. Still, water flooded in, then the boat’s dive stopped and it rose again, steady with an inch of water on the floor.

Travis came to his feet first. He found Darren quickly and snatched him to his chest.

Some on the lifeboat were injured from the fall and cried out. Travis ran to the lifeboat’s open door holding Darren. They looked out at the Festival, thirty feet away, looming high above them and filling their visions.  It shifted, leaning further away from them. They could look up at the railings of the deck they had fallen from, but they saw only flames.

There was no sign of Corrina, no sign of Gerry. The world they’d lived on so long was crowned in flame.

They waited, and Travis watched for someone to come plunging into the water, but no one crossed the flames.

They stayed at the door watching, no one spoke. Others were at the windows. The Festival shifted again. Who knew how much time went by before it shifted a third time, toppling almost sideways.

Hours they watched. The sun ran its course and went away. They still had light, the ship still burned. No life ever emerged from the ship or the sea. The lifeboat was dead and had drifted already hundreds of feet.

Travis was never conscious of it happening, but he must have come inside with the boy and sat down, because the next thing he was aware of was waking up on one of the bench seats with Darren in his arms.

Darren had already been awake.

He was looking forward in the boat. Two men and the woman were still asleep. Near the bow was a teenage boy, with a baby face and a red-striped shirt. This was whom Darren watched.

Travis looked at Darren. Darren saw and nodded at his father.

Travis walked forward. The teenager looked up at him.

He said nothing until Travis was above him.

“What?” he said.

Travis grabbed him by the throat. He pulled him up and smashed his head into the window, which shuttered but did not crack. The others on the boat awoke. The boy grabbed Travis by the throat and each of them turned purple, starving of oxygen. Travis smashed the head again into the glass, and again. The boy did not let go of Travis’s throat. Travis pressed his thumbs tighter and came up onto the bench, over the boy. Somewhere in his mind he understood Darren was watching, and he felt some satisfaction that he could show Darren that he could fight for the family, that there was someone strong to protect him. The boy was pushed down into the seat then, and Travis was on top of him until he was dead.

He stumbled to crawl back off the bench and the body, then fell backwards into another seat. He regained his feet. He went to the body of the baby-faced boy and dragged him to the stern, and dropped him out the door.

The body drifted away slowly, so that they could see it for hours, just as they moved so slowly away from the ship.

By nightfall, the fire began to burn itself out. By daybreak the fire was gone, and the hump of the ship was in the distance, and the water around them was black and shiny with oil and fuel and littered with flotsam from the ship as far as they could see.

Travis held Darren and they mourned the loss of Corrina. As dehydrated as Travis was, he still had tears, and when they were gone, he just stared down into Darren’s eyes, and Darren stared up into his. The most beautiful girl in New York had loved him, and the pain of losing her again was incredible. It didn’t matter if there were a God, or karma or just a cold universe, it was cruel.

It was all so random! Here were just dozens alive out of thousands on that ship. And what qualities, what actions, what plans had determined who would be here? How were souls chosen, which to be born to live in those protected bubbles, and which to inherit the low ground?

After all that fear, pain and loss, Travis and Darren held each other and felt as lucky as they were sad. What was the nature of the world, that this felt lucky?

Travis remembered the night before the flood, when he’d taken all those sleeping pills. He wondered again if he had died, and this now was heaven, and everything else had been something he’d had to go through to get here. He hoped the real Darren might be sleeping in his bed, dreaming of his daddy.

Travis kissed Darren’s head until they fell asleep. The boy and their love for each other seemed like a beautiful, shimmering flower in a wasteland.

No one spoke on the lifeboat. They floated for days, and those on the boat slept mostly. Travis relived his life with Corrina, minute by minute. He was amazed at how powerfully his memories came together, how slowly he could play them out in each detail. He reimagined the first and last nights they made love and thanked God that they had connected one more time, and that she had died with no anger between them. What had his life been about, in the end, except that one relationship and the child of it?

Darren never spoke much. He didn’t seem withdrawn to Travis, but stoic and watching. He wasn’t broken, Travis thought, he was fixed. He’d witnessed everything that could be. If the goal was wisdom, Darren was the winner!

How did they manage, in other places, Travis wondered. How did they handle it?

At night Travis would wake Darren and share secrets with him.

67

A fishing boat discovered them.

The men came onto it guessing that these were some others who had been caught in the flood. As everyone had been.

“There’s one alive,” a man said.

He pulled Darren up. Darren woke and saw the men and said nothing. He was so weak.

The others were all dead. Their mouths and faces cracked and disfigured by dehydration.

“It’s a miracle you’re alive, boy,” one said as he handed Darren to another man on the fishing boat.

“Look at here,” another man said.

He opened Travis’s jacket, which he’d pulled out from under a bench all wrapped up like a package. In it was a water bottle and crackers.

“Why didn’t they drink this?” the man asked. He shook his head.

“Why?”

THE END