Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

22

Brenda and her team worked through the night. Once the freezers had been powered, wiring other circuits in the galley was more straightforward, so she’d turned her attention to the Atrium. Then, the Chief Electrician had seemed better equipped with his knowledge of the ship to lead that effort, so she’d turned to running water.

She thought of the thousands above dependent on this water, and how, out of those thousands, there would not have been more than a handful like herself who could, from scratch, deduce the principles and working of this complex and badly damaged system and bring it back to life.

She worked solidly for close to twenty hours, along with a core crew. Colonel Warrant proved to be as helpful as he was demanding, sending good food regularly and, when they finally took break from what they considered a very successful first shift, they finished with fine cigars and Scotch.

Brenda went back to her family and slept in the loud Atrium for ten hours before returning, getting caught up by Colonel Warrant, and getting back to work, still trying to repair the water system, still trying to expand the reach of their emergency power.

As each day went by without rescue, the work took on the feel of a full-time job. The longer they were on the ship, the more they had to think ahead. As it became a full-time job, the cigars and Scotch became an end of shift ritual. The supply on board was immense, and Colonel Warrant had commandeered it, treating his invaluable engineering team to the best of the best.

While Hesse and Warrant daily added to the list of necessities for the ship, Brenda began a side project, her own idea of redundancy. There was a full tank of fresh water still to be tapped, and a seemingly endless supply of bottles packed for the three-week cruise. Still. There was a double-load of humanity aboard, and no end-date on their occupancy. She never communicated her idea to John Hesse or Colonel Warrant. It had been threatening rain all day. Brenda remembered the weather report calling for heavy storms along the coast. So she set a crew up on a water collection project. They built dozens of large catch basins topside, and used a series of hoses to collect the water in a giant reservoir down near the desalination room.

Within three days of her starting work, Hesse asked her about the vast tubs of metal, plastic and nylon scattered on the top deck.

He didn’t give his blessing to the work. But Hesse didn’t want to push his ownership of Brenda’s efforts too far. He was sensitive to the idea that the only basis for his leadership was the goodwill of everyone involved.

Then she began to tinker with the communications system. Here, the Chief Electrician aboard had little help to offer. He’d never himself worked in the radio room. The Chief Radio Officer and his staff were missing. Brenda began surveying the equipment. Doodling diagrams. Thinking about it, while working on her ‘proper’ tasks.

Brenda freelanced like this because, as they finished those first urgent tasks, and she talked with Hesse and Colonel Warrant of what work to continue with next, she was never completely in agreement with the game plan.

The ship would never move under its own power. So the only way out was through outside help. To her, it was straightforward.

“Who cares about light? What have you all got to see?” Brenda White said on the third day.

“We have thousands of people scared to death on this ship, and we don’t know how long we’re going to be stuck here. If we want to avoid panic, we need light,” Colonel Warrant said.

“Well, I’ll need access to the Theater to find the main line in.”

“Look,” Colonel Warrant said, “they’ve got that guy with the gun. If he knows about your work, who knows what he’s going to want to do. We need to keep him in the dark.”

“Except you want me to turn on his lights,” Brenda said.

“We have to take care of everybody,” Hesse spoke up. “Just find a way to get power to the Theater, and the Italian galley, and try to avoid the guy with the gun.”

“Sure, standard work,” Brenda said. “Look. Let’s think about this. This amount of wiring is days of work. Maybe weeks. If we want to get the communications going, that’s a huge project too. We need to devote time to it.”

“We need to take care of the people on this ship,” Colonel Warrant said.

“But what we could find out with radio contact could change everything.”

“How?” Warrant said. “Whether a rescue is coming today or next week, we should be preparing for the worst, and that means making this ship habitable. I’ve seen that satellite equipment, it is broken beyond repair and we’ll be wasting time trying. You told me yourself you know next to nothing about satellite receivers and we have no crew left with experience.”

“I can figure it out,” Brenda White said, frustrated. “I need time to do it.”

“When we have stable water. Stable power to the galleys.  Emergency lighting to get safely around this damn ship. Ventilation and toilets so we don’t all get sick. Then communications,” the Colonel said.

It was a massive ship, and there was not enough spare wire to simply rig new lines as they had with the first freezers. They had to find the breakdowns, or scavenge and join together unneeded wiring systems.

She wondered if the communication gear would do any good anyway. If there were anyone there to listen, anyone there to help, wouldn’t they have as likely been found by now by search efforts? This was a big ship, you could see it a mile off. If they’d done air sweeps, like after the tsunami, the ship would have been spotted by now. It was a day and a half later. What was taking so long? Just how bad were things back home?

So she plodded along with her work, and the systems kept breaking down or overloading.

Everything Hesse and Colonel Warrant needed was always urgent. She did as she was told. She was happy to be occupied, though it was hard on the family, her being away this much with the work. They just sat around in the Atrium.

The girls were going a bit crazy, Brenda thought, and her husband as well, but she had to do this work. Somebody had to. She worked on the communications stuff every chance she got, but it was far beyond her experience and there was a lot of damage to overcome. Brenda had had no experience with this kind of equipment since college, and what training she had was far out of date.

She rigged a powerful spotlight to the deck, pointing up at the clouds.

That Colonel Warrant, he was micromanaging the amperes. With such limited and inconsistent power, Warrant wanted to know how every bit of that resource was used.

Brenda knew it would be a long time before the satellite communications would work, and she also knew they weren’t getting off this thing without help, so the spotlight was her other secret, after the water basins.

The spotlight, and its 10 kW and 45 amps, was a secret in plain sight.

The spotlight was obvious at night, beautiful in fact from the deck. But no one ever asked her about it.

23

 

In the next days, Travis, Gerry, Corrina, and Darren had less contact with the crowd of refugees who stayed mostly in the Atrium. To the refugees in the Atrium, their little spots on the floor, on the couches, or on spread-out blankets, were their homes. Travis and the group, including Claude Bettman, stayed in the piano lounge. Vera had invited them to stay in her room; Corrina had answered that they would stay in the lounge but come to visit her. Gerry and Travis disposed of the bodies of her husband and the gunman.

They were not alone. The tourists that knew of the lounge, who had been using it before the flood, would stop in in small numbers simply seeking a comfortable place away from their rooms, especially when it was cold on deck. Then a few other refugees discovered the room and moved in. Each individual or group kept to their own section. Some of them became acquainted with their new neighbors. Most of the forty strong population kept to themselves, and at night it was whispers in the dark.

The second night in the lounge was especially clear-skied, and Darren stared up at the great spill of stars above him, his father nestled behind him, pointing up, drawing silly made-up constellations in Darren’s imagination, telling silly stories about the characters in the stars. Darren trying not to laugh out loud, burying his face in his father’s shoulder and chest.

Darren took a liking to Claude Bettman. Claude could see that the kid was withdrawn; maybe that was the way he always was, maybe it was this situation. Claude was a widower. His daughter and grandkids were in Indianapolis, so he had only to worry for himself living to see them again. He was a professor of ancient history at New York University. He kept Darren entertained with his tales of ancient cultures and legends.

Darren listened, and Professor Claude drew him out, testing him with questions on the meaning of the stories he told. Somehow, in the midst of this Great Flood swallowing up the Earth, the kid still found magic in tales of dragons. It seemed to Travis, listening, as though the ship itself were slipping through the mists out of the everyday world and into myth and magic, of No Time and No Place.

Travis went every day to John Hesse’s shop; nothing was changing, except that people were getting anxious each day that nothing changed. Out of the several thousand gathered in the Atrium, there were always a few crying at any given time. Travis picked a Crier of the Day. The competition was tight; crying alone wasn’t usually enough. Anyone could cry, release a bit of the stress. To win Crier of the Day usually required out-loud sobbing of one’s thoughts, a public display that one had lost control.

Hesse had located the keys to most of the shops; those with any food had been raided, their shelves empty like the stores Travis had run past just a few days prior in Brooklyn. A few, like the jewelry, wine and cigar stores, had been smashed and raided by the pirates while others, like the fashion boutiques and gift shops, had their security and integrity respected still.

The officers and crew that remained had not quite lost their identity as a group. Some slipped off their uniforms and joined the waiting lives of the refugees, but most enlisted in Hesse’s efforts, and were put to useful service by Hesse, or Colonel Warrant or Brenda White, each of whom oversaw specific projects. There were musicians aboard, and some gave impromptu concerts. One magician dressed up twice for kids shows, in a corner of the Atrium.

Brenda’s team had yet to succeed in bringing power to the Atrium other than the original emergency lighting system. The skylights helped, bringing triangles and rectangles of light to most of the public parts of the ship, but in the evenings it was very dark, with just those emergency lighting tracks along the walls near floor level.

The wounded were brought down to the medical clinic. Travis and the medical squad tended the bedridden and changed dressings. The ship’s surgeon came by each day to check on the in-patients, and he kept office hours for any others to come see him with new problems.

Perhaps the most valuable were the chefs, many of whom remained from the original crew and were reunited, efficiently running a galley with no power and no running water initially. Everyone on board was well fed. Power availability increased, and portion sizes were shrunk compared to cruise norms, but the meal quality made everyone feel a little less besieged and desperate. They had lobster and prime rib with a garlic crust that was the talk of the ship.

Food service was an enormous effort. There were two shifts of galley workers, including the chefs, servers, dishwashers and others, and they rotated each of the three meals, with two buffet servings per meal.

They had, over days, accumulated the food stocks from the French bistro, the American burger joint, the Mexican taqueria, the Thai-Fusion dining room, and every other food shop on board – save the Italian restaurant. At last, running water reached the galley, which made cleaning much easier.

They kept the same servers at the buffet table for each of the two meal servings, to help discourage repeat customers. Still, they let clients take away multiple servings for their families or friends in other parts of the ship. Hesse had reasoned it best to encourage satellite groups, to keep things more efficient in the food service. He also, as time went by, followed up on the supposed groups that consistently came for extra meals to take away. They told where they were staying, and here and there, Hesse went to check them out or sent others to.

Some were hoarding. Two of the culprits were a young couple, tourists staying in their own cabin. John Hesse walked right in on them. He found a fresh garbage bag and loaded the food into it while they watched.

“Half of this would be rotted in a day, you idiots,” Hesse said.

The young man shoved him. Hesse swatted his arms away and grabbed the hoarder by the throat. His face became bloated and purple.

“If you mess with me, I’ll drag you in front of that crowd and we’ll see what they think. Don’t get out of line again.”

Hesse still held the garbage bag with one hand, but he easily slammed the other man into the wall before dropping him to the floor. He stepped in front of the woman, shoved his face at her and growled, then left. The food could be repurposed in the galley.

John Hesse had always been the leader. It was never something he questioned, it was all he knew. His friends thought he lived a charmed life. He was always on top. That kind of proof in his instincts made him easy to trust, easy to follow. But Hesse knew better, he knew the difference between himself and others and why they thought that of him. He never complained.

He saw the world as people who complained and people who would rise to the challenge. When he’d once seen how complaining made him look weak, he’d given it up altogether. Hesse was a bit of a solipsist. His strength of character, indeed his ethics, came from the thought of what kind of person he’d want to be if this were all a game he were playing.

Much of the ship had taken on a putrid smell. In the first day of the power outage, nearly every toilet on board had overflown due to their electrical mechanisms. Human waste had soaked through floors and into carpets all over the ship, and Hesse had organized the excruciating task of cleaning and bleaching the affected areas, with no steam cleaners and before the running water was restored.

Travis took to walking on his own. There were enough hours in the day for it. On the fifth morning on the Festival, Travis made a discovery. The spa. It had its own complex on the Resort Deck, the first mostly enclosed deck, below the open Sky Deck.

In the spa were fitness rooms supplied with stations of various apparatus and machines, and racks of free weights and dumbbells. There were aerobic rooms of stationary bikes, treadmills, stairmasters and rowing machines. There was a hair salon, an acupuncture clinic, a honeycomb of massage rooms. There were men’s and women’s lockers.

At the centre was a beautiful, long indoor swimming pool in a modernized Roman style. It was orbited by four smaller hot tubs. The tubs, and to a lesser extent the pool, had just begun to show signs of algae growing, from lack of cleaning and circulation. At the head of the pool was a large white marble Poseidon, trident raised, looking more majestic than threatening.

Under the statue, a plaque:

 

I begin to sing about Poseidon, the great God, mover of the earth and fruitless sea, God of the deep who is also lord of Helicon and wide Aegae. A two-fold office the Gods allotted you, O Shaker of the Earth, to be a tamer of horses and a savior of ships!

Hail, Poseidon, Holder of the Earth, dark-haired lord! O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in ships!

“So you’re the old earth shaker what did all this,” Travis said to the God.

Travis stripped naked and dropped his clothes over Poseidon’s arm.

“Well, keep an eye out.”

He plunged into the deep end. It was a shallow deep end – a pictogram specifically banned diving on the side of the pool – so he dove shallow and long. No rules, he thought. The water was cool and beautiful. Afterwards, he found a towel in a closet he tore open. He wrapped it around his waist and lay down in a tan and red-trimmed linen lounge chair looking out long windows at the sea. Travis had a stocky frame, big arms, big chest. His belly too was big, a little bigger each year. He was losing weight now, he considered. On a cruise ship.

24

Travis was beginning to recognize many of the faces. Some days, he noticed a few missing, and sure enough, a corresponding lifeboat gone. He knew that meant fewer crew left on the Festival, as the lifeboats were difficult to deploy without familiarity. It also meant that someone who wasn’t going with them was helping them, because someone had to be left behind working the davits to lower the boats.

He wondered why anyone would do that. Were they ‘sacrificing’ themselves by staying behind? Or did they just think it was safer on the Festival but were happy to help? What was the context, or relationship there?

Travis saw the great grey-haired man a few times on the deck, always alone, watching the sea.

He tried to keep Darren away from the crowd, but couldn’t entirely. They’d go down for meals. The whole ship came together then, and they could see just how many they were sharing the ship with. Then many would disappear back to their cabins or whatever corner of the ship they had made their own.

Vera didn’t like to leave her room; they would bring her meals to her, generally. Once in a while, she’d forget things, usually her medication which Travis supervised. She never forgot that Norman was gone, though she several times mentioned Pavel.

Near the end of the first week, Travis sat with Darren on the Sky Deck. They listened to a man playing banjo on a chair nearby.

“Do you think he was a musician for the ship, or do you think he was rescued like us, and brought his banjo instead of a suitcase?” Travis said.

“Ummm, I think he’s like us,” Darren said. “He brought his banjo because he’s all alone and he wanted to play music if he got lonely.”

A basketball shoot-around started at the court in front of them. Travis watched them pass the ball around, shoot and put in lay-ups.

The Mighty Lee Golding was one of the players. He didn’t have the gun. He had the ball.

“Can you take one more?” Travis asked.

“Sure,” the big man said. “I’m Lee Golding.”

Travis introduced himself.

“I recognized you. I saw you at Madison Square Garden against the Samoans, maybe twenty years ago. It was great. You tossed Trog through the announcers table.”

“You’re with us,” the Mighty Lee Golding said, and they began a game of three-on-three.

The third man on their side was a pylon, but Travis and Lee could play. Lee mixed fearsome intensity with a suddenly relaxed, amiable laughing humor. He could not be stopped inside. He couldn’t dunk, but he could almost drop the ball in off the backboard. Travis was shorter than all three of their opponents, but he had a fadeaway jumper that was hot, and he milked it. He used the pylon on their side for pick and rolls, and almost laughed at his teammate each time he was knocked to the deck.

Travis was happy. All the bad went away for a moment, and his only connection outside the game was awareness of his son watching him, and looking pleased.

“Go, Daddy, go!” Darren yelled.

Afterwards, he high-fived Lee, and the big man grabbed his hand, and pulled him into his sweaty bulk. Travis was helpless in Lee’s arms as he shook him. The bigger man laughed and with a butt-slap sent Travis to high-five the pylon and their opponents. His son had the biggest high-fives for him.

“Yay Daddy!”

Travis had deferred thought on the sweat problem while he played, but afterwards he could not ignore it. Nor was there anything he could do. He’d have to let the sweat dry and keep on wearing the stinking clothes. And he’d probably keep doing it as long as there was a game on.

The day after the basketball game made it a week on board. Sunday to Sunday. No one had come. There was an awful presence in the Atrium. No one on board had expected to be here more than a few days, even after the attack. For them to still be uncontacted after a week was inexplicable. It brought a very real change to the psyches of all: there was no longer the expectation to be saved soon. They had to live on this ship indefinitely. It was felt acutely as a third disaster. Flood, Attack, and Abandonment. Each of the three a different flavor, they came so fast on each other that it seemed the laws of nature had turned upside down.

Hesse had felt that, and suddenly the vast stores of food on the ship seemed clearly limited. Fishing was organized. Hesse and Warrant decided not to use the lifeboats with their very limited fuel and the chance for more desertions. They fished from the lowest decks above the Festival’s waterline. Nets were sunk down below the oil slick, and dozens of weighted, hooked lines lowered.

Brenda White felt the weight of a week’s work, heavy thinking, heated arguments, full-body pain from the physicality of wiring. The ship was running. It was time for a break. This time she shared a quick beer with some of her co-workers, and returned to her family. Her husband was exhausted, having stayed up to care for their five-year-old through a short-lived stomach bug, so she let him rest while she took the kids off to the playroom.

Brenda had checked out the playroom when the family had first come aboard for the cruise in Florida. The kids had pleaded to stay and play, but she wanted to relax by the pool, so she’d promised they’d come back. Now they had their chance.

The room was lit only from the grey light through the windows. None of the video games worked, nor did the various electronic gimmicks around the room, but the kids didn’t notice. They ran from Brenda at the sight of the room, 1,500 square feet of colorful oversize toys, slides, and ball pits, all theirs. In the center was a kid-sized cruise ship, orbited by different international scenes: an ice island with fake ice blocks to play with, and huge seal and penguin stuffed toys. There was a strangely isolated Paris, with an Eiffel tower and play bakery, and an ancient Egypt with 8-foot pyramids, containing rising tunnels exiting by a slide.

The old noise of her kids being kids came to her, and she relaxed into a beanbag chair and smiled.

When Brenda thought it might be time to wrap it up, another kid arrived.

Corrina Adamson introduced herself and her little boy, Darren. It was their first visit to the playroom. Brenda introduced her kids to Darren, and they were off into a tunnel.

Corrina heard Darren’s laughter coming from the tunnel, and she laughed, but her eyes teared up.

“I know,” Brenda said. “I know, darling.”

Corrina sat in the beanbag chair next to Brenda.

“I can’t believe we never came here before,” Corrina said.

The kids came flying out of a tube, down a slide, running over to the next play structure.

“We could get rescued right now and the kids would cry for more time,” Brenda said.

They both laughed, and the kids’ laughter came from the play ship.

Brenda stayed another hour, and Corrina and Darren played themselves for another hour, until they rolled together, red-faced laughing on the polar ice floe.

That night in Vera’s room, they ate small deli sandwiches. Corrina and Claude played chess on his travel board in the zip-up leather pouch.

“Can you tell me an African story?” Darren asked.

Professor Claude gave Darren a quick look and a smile.

“There is a story the Ashante peoples told, of two princes and two magic spiders.”

His attention was back on the chess game, the story seeming to flow from him without his influence on it.

“The father of the princes was a wise king, much loved by the gods. When it was shown to him by the sky god that his time was coming to an end, he decided to share his kingdom between his two sons. And so he granted each prince a tribe over which to be chief. But the King was worried that his sons might grow jealous and slay each other. And so, on his death, the king gave up his place with his ancestors for a wish. His wish was for Nyame, the sky god, to come to each of his sons and promise them a paradise in the afterworld, should they remain each at peace with his brother, and his brother’s tribe. But Nyame was wise and knew that men live for today and forget what is to come. So the god came to the princes while they slept, and gave to each a magic spider, which could find its way to, and kill the other of the princes. So that each prince knew, if he were to overreach, and take that which belonged to his brother, that his brother had the spider with which to destroy him. The tribes were happy and prospered under their princes, but the princes were afraid. Each prince knew that his brother could release his spider to kill him at any time. The fear grew and grew in them, until the night of the feast of the ancestors. With ghosts in the air and the veil between life and death so thin, each prince sent their spider, and each was in turn killed.”

They all waited for the next words. Corrina looked up from the game. The Professor didn’t notice. He moved his castle, taking Corrina’s queen bishop. The story was done.

“For God’s sake, Claude,” Gerry said. “Darren has enough death already.”

“Oh,” Claude said, looking up from his meditation on the chessboard. “I’m sorry. I am so used to these stories I suppose I don’t think of them as happy or sad or scary.”

Claude returned his attention to the game. Corrina had his queen.

“Sorry, Claude,” she said. “You were distracted.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said with a smile.

Travis was trapped in Claude’s story about the princes and the magic spiders.

“What will happen?” Darren said. “I mean, if no one finds us.”

“Someone will find us,” Gerry said. “Remember, Darren, if things get really bad, there’s always the lifeboats. Just remember that, if you ever really, really hate it here, we can always leave.”

They were quiet. When Darren went to pee off the balcony, Claude said to Gerry: “The lifeboats are suicide. But you’re right, it’s the only way off.”