Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

14

The ship had several theaters. The largest, the Royal Theater, boasted 800 luxury seats and a 1500-square foot stage, fronted by a small orchestra pit. This was the second destination Captain London had herded the refugees from the West Side pier in New York. The Goldings were among the last flooding through the six double doors at the top of the Theater.

When the Navy ship had borne upon the Festival, Lee and Jessica Golding had been on the deck. In the chaos that followed, their cabin was not an option for escape. It lay just stern of the intersection of the two ships. They could see from the crash that they were homeless. Lee had watched that ship come in right up until it tore through, and the men came over the sides.

As the torrent of refugees returning tapered off, individuals or small groups still continued to join them in the Theater. When the gunshots became louder, closer, and more frequent, Jessica Golding shut the door nearest her. Lee followed her lead and looked around for something to barricade the doors with. The seats were permanently installed, but there were drapes on the walls, hanging from six-foot wrought-iron rods. He grabbed at a drape and pulled hard, snapping the fixture holding the rod. The rod came loose, and Lee quickly slid the drape off. He brought the rod to the door. It fit through the double door handles but with its length it was difficult to angle it in. Lee Golding’s action and intensity began building a panic in the room. Others came and helped, wedging the rod against the wall, forcing it into the depression the door was set in. Around the upper ring of the Theater and down in the lower corners, the struggle was repeated as groups of three or four men frantically pushed and struggled to fit the rods across the door handles.

Lee ran onto the stage to lock the door that led out through the backstage area and dressing rooms. In the hall there he saw the man-mountain with whom he had shared the escape from New York. The grey giant was alone in the hall, still searching for a place to hide.

“My room is gone,” Adam Melville said.

“Come in here, you’ll be safe,” Lee said. “I need to lock this door.”

They walked back out to the stage. When they emerged, the room was quiet. Jessica walked to the front and sat with Lee on the stage stairs. Adam found himself a seat near the front row. The seats were enormous luxury loungers, but he was still wedged between the armrests.

They waited.

It had been just hours ago that they’d watched New York recede, feeling that though the world was ending, they were safe. Safest seats in the house. When Adam had left the deck that afternoon, he’d had a flash about that wrestler, Lee Golding. A bad feeling. He had been troubled by this thought, and determined that he would keep an eye out for the other big man. And now Lee Golding had saved him.

It was not long before there was a noise at the door to stage right.

The wave of absolute quiet spread through the room, pushed on by the noise of the shaking and banging of that door.

Lee rose from his seat and stood by the side aisle, peering around the end of the stage.

Gunfire tore through the door, tearing into the angled floor of the aisle. Those by that side of the Theater screamed and rushed out of the path. The door shook from the other side. The curtain rod, it could be seen by all, was only just barely wedged across the two handles. The five and a half feet of rod to one side of the handles was loose, and drooped to the floor. The doors shook, and then one handle snapped free of the curtain rod and the door swung open.

Enter the pirates: two men in orange prison jumpsuits.

Lee stepped back, blocking Jessica Golding behind him as the two men came into view of the full Theater. One of the men had a rifle: a Navy M16A3, demonstrated in fully-automatic mode by the gun bursts at the door. He wore a tactical vest over his jumpsuit and a Navy officer’s cap, tipped awkwardly.

“Well, well,” the man without the gun said. “the motherload of the mothership.”

“You got money. We got bullets,” the gunman said to the room. “Let’s make a deal.”

“This could take a while,” the man without the gun said, surveying the hundreds of faces.

“OK. We need a volunteer.”

Lee Golding stepped forward.

“What do you want?”

“Wait, I know you,” the man with the gun said. “Wow. I’m gonna make the Mighty Lee Golding my butler.”

Lee was pressed into service as their surrogate mugger. The gunman and the gunman’s partner would follow him up the aisle, and Lee would collect the money. For his collection, they quickly took the largest handbag from a woman near the front and dumped its contents. Lee took the bag, with the men behind him, and started his tour with Adam Melville.

“How did you ever get that ship?” Adam asked the invaders as he stood, and put his hands to his pockets.

The man without the gun’s face went queer, his eyes opened wide.

“God, man, God! The guards and staff bolted early, so by the time that ship with no crew came for us, there was just the last few sucker-guards. God set it all up!”

The man spoke so flamboyantly, he was like a man possessed, or it seemed to Lee, like a pro wrestler challenging him in an arena somewhere.

“Then,” he continued, “we had our own Navy guy to drive the boat: that’s God’s hand! And now the Mighty Lee Golding is my valet. Well, we’re getting years of bad karma reversed today.”

They had known, even in Sing Sing, what was happening around them. They knew that when the main body of guards evacuated, they were almost surely to drown in their cells. When the evacuation of prisoners finally came, the unexpected success of their uprising and of stealing the ship had driven them into a frenzy. Killing the guards and all but a few of the ship’s crew had set a new tone for all of them in this very new world. If they were violent before, they were free now.

Adam took his wallet out and passed it to Lee. Lee looked back at the men.

“Just the cash and cards,” the gunman said.

“You all been living the high life too long,” the ranting man continued, “and your own chickens are coming home to roost. Today is the Day of Big Payback, when ying becomes yang, and the hardest luck crew gets dealt a flush.”

He was high, Lee thought, and he found himself wondering how they got drugs in prison, and what drugs they had. Lee took out money and three credit cards and dropped them in the bag.

“Now frisk him,” the man with the gun said.

“What?” Lee said.

“Frisk him!” the man with the gun said, straightening the gun towards Lee and Adam.

“What for?” Lee said.

“’Cause it’s funny to me,” the man without the gun said.

The Mighty Lee Golding turned and put his arms around Adam Melville. He began to pat him around, like in the movies. His arms struggled to reach around the bulk of the other.

“Don’t forget his crotch, check it.”

Lee patted down Adam’s crotch, the insides of his thighs. His huge paws with the class ring and wedding ring went up patting Adam 's chest, and under his armpits which were wet, and the shirt dark, with sweat.

“He’s clean,” Lee said. He looked at Adam with a little nervous laugh.

“Next.”

Lee took money, jewelry and credit cards up the line. There were hundreds of refugees to rob, and they passed their things quickly through Lee Golding’s hands.

Two thirds of the way up the first aisle, Lee saw the muzzle of the gun close by his head, moving loosely. He turned and grabbed the gunman’s arm. The two crashed into the wall. The second of the pair was a few steps below on the aisle, and was immediately up the stairs onto Lee’s back. Lee had an iron grip on the wrist below which the gun was held, and he cracked it against the wall while pressing his weight right into the man. He scarcely noticed the second on his back, before Adam tore the gunman from Lee with one hand, pulling the gun away from him with the other. The Mighty Lee Golding, the Alabama Assassin, shook his man like a rag doll, cracking the gunless man’s back on the railing along the wall. The other swung away from Adam and began to run towards the door he’d come through. Adam lifted the gun with both hands and fired several rounds in one quick squeeze. The sound shocked his ears. The man in the orange jumpsuit fell to the floor.

Lee had his man on the floor and was throwing his enormous fist into the gunman’s face until the gunman was no threat. Lee caught his breath and came to his feet.

Adam stood before him in the aisle, staring at the dead man, the arm with the gun limp by his side. Lee came to him and took the gun, and Adam didn’t respond. Lee pointed it at the groaning, broken man on the floor and fired.

The echo dissipated from the air, and the quiet now in the Theater, whose acoustics were renowned, was such that the panting of Lee and Adam could be heard across the room. Lee put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. Adam walked away from him, past the dead man, and collapsed in a seat.

Lee held the gun in the air. The rush, the adrenaline, heartbeat, serotonin, and all the eyes on him, were something he’d not felt in so many years since he’d left the ring. He was high with the rush. He leaned back and laughed his stage laugh. He made a V with his fingers and wagged his tongue through it.

“Golding gonna getcha!” he yelled.

The crowd roared in a cheer. He looked at Jessica and winked.

Lee left the handbag he’d used on the floor for those robbed to reclaim their things. Only Adam stayed in his seat.

Lee was down on the dead man, checking his tactical vest.

“Motherload from the mothership,” he said.

The whole Theater must be able to hear his heart beat, he thought. Let ‘em.

The pockets were full, all of them, with ammo clips. Eight 30-round magazines in all. Lee unclipped the vest from the dead man, blood and all, and threw it on over one shoulder. For a moment he tried getting the other arm through, but it needed adjusting to fit so he left it hanging from the one shoulder and returned to the front, to Jessica.

Adam tried to keep himself from vomiting. The sudden threat taken suddenly away, he felt disgust from the sick opportunism of the prisoners, the fear, the roar of the gunfire, the bloody death. He killed a man.

The main lights went out. The alarm stopped. Only the emergency lights along the floor were visible, twinkling like stars below them, and they were above heaven.

15

Some length of time after the lights went out, the ship moved. It began as a shudder, then the floors shifted beneath them in Vera and Norman’s luxury berth, and they felt the ship tilt to one side. The floor came up at a tremendous angle, and they all tumbled off their chairs, rolling over each other into the wall.

“The Navy ship’s separating,” Gerry said.

They stayed pressed against the wall, and then felt the room begin to spin slowly, as the Navy ship tried to reverse away, and the Festival clung to it.

“Momma?” Darren called in the dark.

“I’m here,” she said.

With a shudder, it stopped. There was an echo of metal tearing, and the ship began to right herself. It stopped short of coming back to level, but straightened enough that they could stand.

“They’re gone,” Gerry said. “They must be gone.”

“Will the lights come back?” Darren asked.

“I’m sure they have a back-up system,” Travis said. “They’ll fix it. And we’ll be off this ship soon anyways, li’l bud, we’ll be off soon.”

Travis went out on the balcony and verified that the Navy ship had separated, still visible but moving away. He could now hardly make out the dark stern of the Festival, but he could see that its lines were bent and broken.

“I’ll take a look down the hall,” Gerry said, “and see if there’re lights anywhere.”

Gerry walked towards the cabin foyer, bouncing off the wall, and then tripping over a chair. Finally, the group heard the door as Gerry exited. They felt, each of them, that there were no guarantees of return when someone left a room.

The hallway was dark except for a dim track of emergency lighting along the wall, an inch above the floor. Gerry heard crying from many places. He began to walk forward. He didn’t know what he was hoping to find, other than light.

Gerry Adamson was a strong man with a soft personality. He’d grown up poor in New York, his mom a single mother in and out of jobs, in and out of drunken uselessness. Gerry had raised himself. He’d raised himself to be mean, until a teacher took the time to explain where his road was leading.

Young Gerry was smart and mature out of necessity, so he listened. It was a surprise to those who knew him back then that he went on to become a teacher; a surprise that he’d had the inclination and a surprise that he’d had the discipline and ability. At the same time, those who knew him as an adult, as a lover of poetry and a gentle man, good with kids, would not have guessed at his rough boyhood.

He was soft spoken, although not quiet – he loved to talk, about art and ideas.

Poetry was one of the links between the two Gerry Adamsons – it was poetry that had allowed him to escape meanness and find meaning. His own first book of poetry had sold well in New York. But it could never make a career for him.

As it was a teacher who had brought the idea to him, it had been natural for him to become a teacher himself, to inspire kids to look beyond where they were.

His whole life, it seemed, he’d been trying to find a light in the darkness.

Travis took the others out onto the balcony to wait. The deck chairs had toppled against the railings, but they straightened them out and could make out each other’s faces in the cloud-dimmed starlight. It was cold, but being able to see each other seemed a greater comfort than the warmth of the cabin.

Vera lay in one chair silently. Corrina sat in the other, holding Darren. Travis sat on the floor, his back against the railing. There was only blackness filling the space he had earlier been able to make out the Navy ship in.

Gerry felt like a space walker moving through darkness, following the thin glittering line on the wall. The sound of crying around him, and nothing else, scared him.

“Is there anybody there?” he said.

There was no answer. He imagined others as terrified as his family behind each door.

His hand was along the railing, and he passed an obstruction so that the cavity of the Atrium opened to his left. There were two emergency lights on the walls and he could make out movement down below him. Darkness moving inside darkness, and still the only sound he heard was crying. He looked down at what he guessed were scores of people below him, whimpering. He went back to the room.

3257 was the number on the door. When he knew he was near it, he felt the doors to find the number. At 3257 he opened the door and went inside.

“It’s me,” he said.

“We’re here,” Corrina’s voice came back to him.

He joined the others.

“There’s nothing for us out there,” he said. “At least not yet. There’s no one in charge, no order, no lights. Just guests locked in their rooms and refugees crying in the Atrium. We should wait here till morning.”

“What if the ship sinks?” Darren asked.

“We shouldn’t be in any danger, honey,” Corrina said. “These big ships have watertight compartments to seal off any leaks. And if anything does happen, there are lifeboats.”

“Oh.”

Vera insisted Darren and Corrina sleep in the bed. She found extra blankets and made a bed for herself on the couch. They watched her carefully, but she seemed completely composed, and never again mentioned Norman. Travis and Gerry stayed out on the balcony, uncovered on the lounge chairs in the cold. There was a break in the clouds and the moon showed through. That bare obtrusion of light made the sea sparkle and showed just how alone they were.

The men did not talk.

Shivering exhaustion finally overtook Travis as he thought that the previous night he had taken his pills and gone to sleep in his apartment in Brooklyn. He wished there were a pill that could make him wake up back there.

His sleep was tortured. He slept on his side, curled up, flipping sides constantly to stay warm.

He dreamt of New York. He imagined scenes of his childhood, and then the water would rush in and fill everything up. There was an image of New York streets filled with starving Sudanese, and he saw himself flying away before the water filled the streets and the black bodies floated up around the tips of the skyscrapers. He had the idea of the city as the capital of the world, the hub of all roads, all civilization.

He saw all the peoples of the world facing New York in their prayers, and then the water overtook the city and he didn’t know if that’s what the people were praying for. He heard the voice of the man with the gun, the killer. People like you have nightmares about the world burning. People like me have fantasies about it.

16

One day after the earthquake, Travis woke on a balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

The sun was still behind the ship, but the black of night had become grey, and then showed hints of blue. The air began slowly to warm. Like millions of others that day, Travis woke wondering where he was and then remembering. He made a noise as he rose and Gerry was waking too on the other lounge chair. They shared a look, sharing what they had in common.

Travis stretched and stepped to the railing.

“There’s lifeboats gone,” he said, looking over the side.

The lifeboats hung several decks below them. Travis pointed at empty spaces where boats had been the night before.

“Oil leak,” Gerry said looking down.

Travis followed his gaze to the stern and saw the inky black cloud on the water of the rear quarter of the ship. Gas had leaked, too, and spread farther, casting rainbows off each wave.

They went inside the cabin and woke the others, Vera on the couch, Darren and Corrina in the bed. Vera gave Darren an apple from the fridge.

“Norman?” she called. “Norman?”

Corrina took her hand and walked her to the balcony.

“Come, dear, come and see this view.”

It was still before 7:30 a.m. when they left the room as a group. There were a few people in the hallway, and Travis wondered if he looked as dazed as they did, wandering in the first grey light to reach the spaces of the ship.

“Is anyone in charge?” Gerry asked one man.

The man pointed down into the Atrium, which was just coming into view as they passed the obstruction along part of the interior walkway.

“People are down there.”

The Atrium was a natural gathering point. Many of the ship’s rooms opened up to views of it, and the bulk of the refugees considered it their base on the ship. It was where they returned.

With the skylight above they could see fully in this space, though the light was still grey.

The Atrium was already filling up the way it had the day before, only now there were more audible cries of pain as well as despair. Long shadows criss-crossed the scene, the writhing mass of injured and petrified. The light from the high crystal roof and the many mirrored surfaces created blocks in bright focus, highlighting personal traumas here and there.

As they walked down, Travis felt a quick comfort as he recognized Claude Bettman in the crowd, the man who had picked him and Darren up in the rush to get on the ship. Claude was a physical artifact of yesterday that was unchanged.

There numbered near a thousand in the Atrium, and hundreds watched from the walkways above.

Travis led them to Claude near the stairs, standing by himself. Claude had lost his overcoat during the night, and now wore just his brown suit with the jacket undone and his open-necked white shirt.

“Claude,” Travis said.

Claude looked them over, a quick assessment of how they’d made out.

“Did they come after you?” Darren said.

Claude smiled. “They did. But I’m all right. They got my coat though. Imagine that, Darren. What kind of pirates steal overcoats?”

Darren smiled.

Claude made a pirates growl at Darren.

“Arrr. Give us the overcoat! Or walk the plank, landlubber!” he said.

Claude saw the look on the face of the old woman who was with them now and stopped.

Travis was watching those immediately around them. He heard pained breathing and peered around some backs to see a man bleeding from the shoulder.  He was half laying on the ground, his torso and head supported in the lap and arms of a woman who kneeled behind him. A man kneeled over him, tying a tourniquet inexpertly but solidly.

There was the little girl who had been rescued from the crashing tower on the deck, but not the man who had saved her. She was evidently with her parents now, and the man was not with them.

The captain and his team on the bridge were gone, Travis thought, but where were the other officers? Where was the hospitality manager? Time passed as they and all around felt the weight of those questions, and no one answering them. Travis saw uniformed crew here and there in the crowd, looking as lost as everyone else.

“You think you have a handle on the things that can kill you,” Claude Bettman said. “You watch what you eat, you don’t smoke. You worry about muggers and stay away from the dark parts of town. But you don’t know. You don’t know what could be falling from the sky at any moment of your life. I certainly didn’t bet on the tsunami-pirate double.”

“HEY!” a man’s voice came above the din of the group. Travis looked around.

“HEY!” the voice called out louder.

Travis saw that a man stood on a bar, perhaps fifty feet further into the Atrium than their group. Travis knew him. It was the hero. The man who had saved the girl on deck.

“Since we’re all standing around here and nobody really knows what to do,” the man yelled, “maybe we should get to work. There’s a lot of injured people right now, so first of all, can we have any medical workers please come down here, let’s get organized. Any doctors, nurses, or paramedics, come down here. If there’s any Festival officers or crew who can help us understand the condition of the ship, actually any military people, anyone else familiar with ship mechanics or electronics, please come down. I’m sure we could use some help figuring out how to efficiently assess the situation on the ship, the damage and the options, and take care of everyone’s needs.”

He saw the huge movement in the crowd and changed his mind.

“Wait. Let’s do the medical group first, give us some time to get that organized before any of the others come down. Medical professionals first.”

The man on the bar was average height, slightly overweight and broad shouldered. He had close-cropped brown hair and a square jawline. Although he looked only about forty, his skin was creased and lined, slightly pockmarked around the neck. That square jaw, thick neck and sure eyes made him appear remarkably strong. The leonine power of his face alone made it handsome.

The bar the man stood on was dark polished wood, with green-bronze marble on the countertop matching the floor. The liquor rack behind the man had been emptied before the refugees had come on board, so the servers’ enclosed space behind the bar looked like a penalty box.

While most of the crowd was turning to face the man, several were already approaching him, pushing their way through, coming down from the upper levels. Travis looked back at his family, and said to Corrina, “I’d better go help. Holler if you need me.”

“Go ahead,” Corrina said.

He looked at Claude and nodded and waded through the crowd towards the bar.

“Are there any senior officers around? Has anyone seen where they are?” the man on the bar called.

“I saw them on the bridge,” a young man in the crowd shouted. He was dressed in uniform, the uniform of a deckhand. The uniform was coated in blood all along one side. The murmur in the crowd died down greatly and this young man with a strained voice held the attention of everyone who was not tending a wounded companion.

“A lot of the senior officers were with the captain on the bridge when it got hit. Birnbaum, the Staff Captain, Harrington, the Chief Radio Officer, the Navigation Officer, the First Officer, the Quartermaster” he said. “They’re all dead. But they went after the rest, too. Of the officers, I mean. I saw it.”

The deckhand paused.

“I heard them, and I hid,” he started again haltingly, as if any two pieces of the story together would be too much to take in. “I was on the Sky Deck, and I saw them coming. I hid in an equipment closet. I could see them come in to this lounge area, right near where the ships came together. There was a leader named Haggard. He had this yellow bandana and a big beard and this loud choppy voice, yelling at everybody. Crazy. He was telling them to bring all of us, the officers, the crew. I saw two of our First Officers come by themselves, they tried to approach him and talk to him. He shot them down.

“He’d get them coming in in groups, and they’d line them up at the railing and give them all names of their prison guards. Then they’d shoot them, and toss the bodies over so the next ones to arrive wouldn’t see. I saw it all, I heard all their talk, I was right in the middle of them. They killed dozens of us. The blood poured across the deck, they made footprints in it. They’d push the officers and laugh at them slipping and falling in it. It came right into my closet and pooled around my feet.”

The man stopped and tried not to cry.

“They sent most of their men room to room. Rape and pillage, he said. Each group had at least one gun, they knew there were no guns on cruise ships to fight back. He gave two hours for everyone to get back to their ship. The leader had this friend. He was quiet, but everyone was talking to him, and I heard that it was his idea, taking the ship, becoming pirates. He’d been in the Navy, they called him Commander. He knew how to run the ship. They had another guy who was a gunner. They were giving him high-fives too. For hitting the bridge. Killing everyone. They didn’t even mean to collide! They were trying to come alongside and screwed it up, and they were all laughing about it.

“They kept joking about being pirates. They made our crew walk right off the deck, some of them, and if they wouldn’t walk off, they shot them and threw them off anyway. They sent some of their men to find the power generator and knock it out. They wanted to destroy any communications equipment. It sounded like they’d destroyed anything on the Navy ship that could give away their own location, but the leader, he didn’t seem so sure about it. I was there for an hour, two hours, who knows. They never stopped killing the whole time I was there. It got dark and I couldn’t see but I could hear them scream and I was crouched down with my hands on my feet and could feel the blood coming up against my shoes.

“When it was over, and the ship pulled out, I came out. It was dark, and I slipped in the blood. I went to the staff dining room, I thought some others might go there. There were a few dozen of us there, staff and crew. There were some flashlights to see. I just sat there, I couldn’t even talk. Many of them are gone now. The other staff. They took the lifeboats and left while it was dark. I didn’t. I couldn’t even talk.”

The man on the bar was staring at the deckhand, far across the room, waiting for more that wasn’t to come.

“Okay,” the man on the bar said finally. “Now the danger is gone. We have to take care of ourselves.”

He looked at the couple of dozen men and women who had gathered close to the bar or were still approaching it.

“You all are the doctors and nurses? Okay.”

He looked back up, taking in the whole room.

“If you have someone who needs medical attention, please put your hand up.”