Текст книги "The Flood"

Автор книги: David Sachs

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

25

With the coming of that second Sunday on the ship, nothing felt the same. A comet had fallen from the sky once. Then, comets had rained from the sky, and now each looked up for falling comets.

Lee had taken a backstage dressing room behind the Theater, where they slept with Jessica on the couch and Lee on the floor. They had a flashlight, but slept in total darkness.

“The whole Theater is rattled,” Jessica Golding’s voice came in the black space. “You’re the only rock for everyone. But you’re nervous because the Atrium controls the power and you can’t see what they’re doing. Imagine how they feel knowing you have the gun and they don’t know what you’re doing.”

“They got us the power,” Lee said. “They got the message I’m watching.”

“Do you think they did that out of pure kindness?” Jessica said. “Or does it suit them to keep us separate? They gave us light so they could keep us in the dark, Lee.”

He rolled onto his side and looked up at the space where she was.

Twelve years old, Lee Golding was in jail in Mobile, Alabama. He was a freakishly big kid, but only had a kid’s strength. The police treated him roughly. His cellmates treated him roughly. He’d only stolen a Coke, and only because Therese Blackburn had asked for it.

The police knew his father, and that was no help to him. He didn’t get scared overnight in jail. He got angry. He imagined someday he’d be in control, and they’d be scared of him. They could do their worst to him; he could take it. But he was just a kid. It wasn’t right to push around a kid. He wished they’d held him and charged him, so a judge would see, but they were scared, he knew that was why they’d let him go after two days. They shouldn’t have done that to a kid.

He got bigger and soon had a man’s strength, even at fourteen, starring in basketball and football as a freshman. He loved playing. He was in control. He imagined crowds that weren’t there, announcers beside themselves at this most poised and powerful force in sports. He won basketball championships and Super Bowls with his sisters and friends in his front yard.

He believed in his fantasies, and they soon came true. Still the kid, excited, unafraid, he bound down the alleys of countless stadiums and arenas. His theme song blaring; his gown trailing him. He reveled in the glorious physicality of wrestling. His body, his skills, his persona, at the heart of the game. Then there were the movies, three years in Hollywood, two hits, and best of all, the sensation of watching himself, thirty feet high on a screen. It was never strange to him to become a star. He’d imagined himself one for so long.

Being on the floor in the dark dressing room didn’t bother him. Comfort and ease had never been part of the dream.

On Tuesday, he played three-on-three basketball again and ran again into little Travis Cooke. This time they were on opposing teams. Again, Travis’s fadeaway was on. Even with Lee leaping at him, stretching his incredible arms, Travis could fall backwards and float the ball above his hands.

Twice Travis pulled that move on Lee. Lee could always get his baskets backing his way to the net and reaching up for the pass. But Travis kept coming back and evening the score. He was tiring Lee out.

A third time, Travis took Lee one-on-one, slashed at him, then stopped on a dime, pushed off his front foot and drifted backwards, the ball coming up to shoot as Lee leapt forward after him. Lee’s hands came down through the air on each side of Travis’s arms. The big hands pummeled Travis’s face, the ball flew far off target and bounced away against the fence. Travis fell down on his back, his head slamming the court.

“Sorry. Let me get you up,” Lee said.

On one of the counters in the galley of the Italian restaurant was a line-up of cell phones. Built into the stovetop was one of the few outlets on the ship to carry power. Without Colonel Warrant there to ration their amperes, Rick and Jessica and a few others had been keeping their cell phones charged. They were useless for communicating, but a few of them still found comfort in keeping their phones charged. Just in case.

On Wednesday of the second week, the Italian restaurant ran low on supplies: the endless bounty of gourmet food had been reduced to a final array of unmatchable products. The Theater, or the Italian restaurant, were feeding not just those refugees who had originally been sent to the Theater, but those whose suites had been destroyed, like Lee, Rick and Adam, or whose suites were aft of the closed compartment, which made travel between fore and aft so difficult.

At first, more of them slept outside the Royal Theater, but as days went on many returned, preferring the emergency lights of the Theater to the absolute darkness of the suites and so much of the ship.

“I’ve been in the main kitchen. It’s huge,” Rick said to Lee and Adam. “But you think our food is going fast? Man, they’re feeding five times as many as we are.”

“They were,” Lee said. “There’s a lot less of them now than there used to be. Hesse over there hasn’t been so convincing in keeping people from the lifeboats. A third of that group has jumped ship.”

“Why do you suppose our group has stuck together more?” Adam asked.

“The gun,” Lee chuckled. “It has a certain charisma of its own.”

“My wife thinks so,” Rick said. “She keeps telling me how much better she feels that it’s our guy who has a gun. You know, who knows what people would do if there wasn’t a gun to answer to.”

“Just watch the Atrium and find out,” Lee said.

Rick and Lee went to see Hesse about new food arrangements to include the Theater group.

Adam Melville stayed behind. A chill had grown in his relationship with Lee Golding. From the beginning, when Lee had asserted his leadership in the Theater, he had gravitated to Adam as a partner. Adam had a certain aura about him. His eyes glowed.

He had worked with Lee on the logistics of their group, they had spent hours in discussion on the best courses of action to maintain the longest survival on the ship, and the two had acted together as ambassadors to Hesse and the bigger group. Then, Rick Dumas had somehow made them a triad. Adam disliked Rick. He didn’t trust him, and he could see in the Mighty Lee Golding certain character traits that Rick Dumas helped to bring out– it wasn’t something he could quite put his finger on.

Adam was not a religious man anymore. As a child he had grown up with Sunday school and Christian camps. He had won Bible contests; his mind retained incredible amounts of information and he had spent hours learning whole chapters by heart. In the early Seventies he had become a Christian hippie. He gave his mental efforts to his own interpretation of the text, and soon became disillusioned with the everyday flatness of organized religion. He became just a hippie, and said he was spiritual, not religious, but he always read the Gospels, even while searching for answers in the Upanishads of Hindu and Buddhist Mahayana Sutras.

He trained himself in electronics, and in the nascent field of computer science. Without formal education, he became a tinkerer and soon one of the earliest tech entrepreneurs, a living symbol in certain communities, of the link between hippie and silicon San Francisco.

He’d done well, and had started and sold off several companies during the booming Nineties. He was a groundbreaker, and he had inspired a mystical loyalty in the staff of each company he began. With his unique appearance he’d become a Silicon Valley legend. Now sixty-five, Adam had lost none of the energy and strength of youth.  His great arms were still as powerful as they appeared, and the mind worked as intensely as the eyes showed.

Adam had divorced and sold off his latest company in the last six months. He’d booked this cruise to imagine what was next, and it struck him how those converging turning points in his life had freed him up for this trip to witness this turning point for the world. He was obsessed with information and digital technology and often saw things in terms of information manipulation, computer programs and logic flows. He imagined Lee and Rick going to the Atrium as an arrow in a logic diagram, and he wondered what would be in the next box.

26

Rick enjoyed the looks he always got walking into the Atrium with Lee, like a celebrity. It was a place of sadness and Rick liked smiling in the middle of it, knowing eyes were on him and his friend. This time, there was a different atmosphere. There was fear. At first Rick thought the refugees were scared of him and Lee. He was excited by it. Then he understood that it was not directed at them in particular. It was just everywhere. There was fear in the Atrium, and by the time they got to Hesse’s office, Rick had it himself.

Hesse was with the Colonel; Rick could not remember his name.

Lee shook the Colonel and Hesse’s hands as they entered the art shop.

“How are you for food?” Lee said, while Hesse’s hand was still hidden in Lee’s own paw.

“We’re managing,” Hesse said. “Are you ready to join our food plan?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “Maybe we should think about joining you guys down there. The Theater’s nice, it’s a comfy space, but the dining area’s getting pretty messy.”

“We can’t handle you here,” Colonel Warrant said. “It’s just too difficult to handle these crowds for food alone, let alone the sanitation and sleeping space. Do you have any idea how much work it took to wire the Theater? We’ll bring the food to you. You guys keep taking care of everything else yourself. It’s working.”

“What do you have left in Little Italy?” Hesse asked.

“Meats gone,” Lee said. “Veggies gone, eggs gone. Have a bit of cheese and pasta still. There’s crackers and nuts and lots of cooking oil. What have you got? How long can we last all on your kitchen?”

“We’ll have to lower the rations,” Hesse said. “Not by much. We have enough to last a couple more weeks, but we can lower it again in a week, and again the week after that, well… we can last over a month if we have to. That’s including the Theater, of course.”

“Food will last longer if your people keep deserting,” Rick said.

“Yeah,” Hesse said. “I’ve done what I can. I don’t really have any right to stop anyone from taking the lifeboats. That’s what they’re for, right? It doesn’t hurt us and I can’t stop it anyway, so frankly, I have more important things to worry about. I’m staying on the ship, and my concern is everyone else who stays on. Anyone who wants to leave takes their own chances.”

Lee pulled the gun off his shoulder with one hand and slapped it down in his other palm.

“We could stop them,” he said, smiling. “You just have to ask.”

“We’re not asking,” the Colonel said. “You’ll hurt yourself with that thing.”

“Or somebody,” Hesse said.

“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “Or somebody. What about the fishing? I seen you got lines set up all along the starboard.”

“The fish are coming up covered in oil. We can’t eat from this ocean, at least until this oil spill breaks up and we drift on. Maybe this storm will help.”

“Or we get hungry enough,” Lee laughed.

“We still need our doors opened,” Rick said. “You were supposed to send up a power saw.”

“It’s in a flooded compartment,” Colonel Warrant said. “We can’t get it. You’ll have to keep using the doors you’ve got.”

Their first meal from Hesse’s crew was arranged for that evening. It would be a long trip for the carts.

“We have a group working on the service elevators,” Hesse said.

Rick and Lee Golding left. Colonel Warrant and Hesse watched them through the glass storefront.

“Is the power saw in a flooded compartment?” Hesse asked.

“No,” Colonel Warrant said. “That boy’s a risk. I take risk management seriously.”

“Maybe we should have had Brenda work on the satellite gear,” Hesse said.

“John, that’s a smart girl, but sometimes you have to reckon for yourself what someone is capable of. That gear is broke. And Brenda White told me herself she knows next to nothing about satellite receivers. We did the right thing. She’ll be working on it soon, if we’re still here, and if she can get it going, well, that’ll be when we need it. For now, we’ve got things running here and we can take care of ourselves. We did right.”

They drifted off into their own thoughts, looking out the storefront at the mob.

“You have any family?” Hesse said.

“Not really. Wife left me a long time ago. My son was killed in Afghanistan. You reminded me of him the first time I saw you up on that bar, you know that?”

He paused, almost happy imagining his son, getting a feeling of connection with him through Hesse.

“How bout you?” he added.

“My family’s from Chicago, they’ll all be fine. My girlfriend left in a lifeboat the first night.”

When the food came at last to the Theater, the rain had picked up and it could be heard on the thick glass of the skylight stories above. The food came, trolley after trolley. The food was in bulk and uncooked, meant to give the Italian galley three meals to work with, so that only one cross-ship delivery was needed each day.

It took more than an hour to feed everyone. Then, the rain came so heavy that it became the evening’s distraction. Four hundred or more leaned back and stared at the darkness above them from whence the noise came, never stopping, never letting up.

Rick was restless. He took his wife for a walk.

At forty-seven, Rick Dumas’ life had been successful and satisfying. He was a top seller for his company in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. He had lots of friends, and a beautiful wife. He’d always had lots of friends, and always had beautiful girlfriends. He was friendly, a good listener, but he had a secret to successfully navigating social situations, and all situations were social to him. He found the most powerful person in the context and he made them like him.

Rick and his wife made the long trip to the Atrium; he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. He wanted his wife to see him talking with John Hesse. Families and small groups squeezed past him in the hallways. There was an open door out to the lower level promenade, the wind keeping the door open despite its return spring. Rick and his wife were deafened by the sounds of the storm in the moment they passed it by.

The Atrium felt different again. There were loud voices and much movement in the dark. Rick could hear agitated families and groups passing information: the lowered rations; the Theater was out of food.

It was not like his previous visits, a crowd muted by fear and tragedy. It was a powder keg.

The power went out and it became very dark. Around the room came children bawling and men and women screaming in frustration and fear. Lightning illuminated the room in diffracted rays of crisscrossing light.

The thunder clapped and the glass pyramid above shook.

27

Travis was in the galley with Hesse, cleaning in the dim light granted by Brenda White and Colonel Warrant in their amperage rationing. There were thousands on board, but Hesse was somehow always at work. He usually took the worst jobs. Travis, like Gerry, Claude and Corrina, took shifts occasionally. They spoke little as Travis scrubbed the food prep surfaces and Hesse studied the supplies. Travis watched him.

“You’re from New York, right?” Travis asked finally.

“Yes,” Hesse said.

“Did you ever play rugby?” Travis asked.

“Yes,” Hesse said.

Travis nodded. “I thought so.”

“Yeah,” Hesse said. “I was with the Village Scottish. My God, I thought you looked familiar, all this time I thought I knew you from somewhere. Where’d you play?”

“Brooklyn, the Rebels, back, oh, ten years.”

“Oh!” Hesse smiled, slipping back to happy times. “I’ve been retired for a while, but we used to play you guys a lot. We always won.”

“Yes you did,” Travis admitted. “You had an amazing scrumhalf. Guy was near pro level.”

“Not quite, but thanks. It was me.”

“Yeah,” Travis said. “I know.”

“The Rebels,” Hesse said. “We used to beat you boys pretty good, but you had this flanker who nailed me one time, broke my arm.”

“That was me,” Travis said.

“Oh my God,” Hesse laughed. “You were dirty, man!”

“You were killing us! I had to stop you. I took you out, man. I put you down good.”

They laughed.

There was a sound of thunder, and the power went out.

Travis and Hesse said nothing. The sounds of their breathing showed that each was all right in the dark as Hesse looked around for his flashlight. When he had it turned on he spoke.

“No sense stopping,” Hesse said. “We’ll be getting food ready in the morning with or without power.”

He hung his flashlight from a rack above the counters and joined Travis in cleaning.

Their hands worked in the light as their heads were in the dark.

“On my first Red Cross mission, we were in Haiti,” Travis said. “And we had this power outage. I was in my tent, just a battery lamp on the table, and I was reading. And drinking. Drinking and reading. In comes this monkey.”

“Is this a joke?” Hesse asked.

“No, no,” Travis said. “This is true. The monkey comes in, and he’s staggering. I point my flashlight, and I notice three things. He’s got a liquor bottle in one hand, he’s dead drunk, and he’s bleeding profusely. So he’s drunk, and I’m drunk, and I stumble over and pick him up. He’s all playful. He’s so drunk he doesn’t even feel anything. But he’s been shot.”

“You’re picking up a bloody monkey in Haiti?” Hesse said. “You’re not worried about AIDS?”

“Myth. Haitian monkeys never had AIDS. Anyway. I’d been in Haiti a few weeks. And it was bad. And this poor drunk little monkey, he’s all limp in my hands, and making faces at me. I decided I had to save him.

“I got a friend, a nurse, and we turned on the lights in the operating theater, they were on the back-up generator. And of course, I’m a paramedic. I’ve never done surgery. But you know, I’d seen it all. And I’d taken courses. How hard could it be? We figured he was drunk, so we wouldn’t need to anaesthetize him. Actually, the bullet had passed right through him, didn’t hit anything. All we had to do was sew him up.  And I’m wondering, how did this monkey get the booze? And is that why he was shot? Did he steal it and get caught? Or did someone just shoot a drunk monkey for fun?

“The monkey slept it off in my tent. Next thing you know, he’s my buddy. He hung around all the time. We quit drinking together, actually. We used to do tricks, for the kids. Stupid drunk monkey. I wonder whatever happened to old Lord Disco.”

Hesse laughed.

“Yeah, he was a good dancer,” Travis continued. “So that’s what I think of when the power goes out. Haiti and Lord Disco and my first experience as a surgeon.”

Hesse slapped Travis’s back.

“I like that,” he said.

“I have a ghost story too, if you like ghost stories,” Travis continued.

“Of course.”

Travis waited, letting Hesse’s laughter and smile dissipate, letting the silence back in. Then, in a quite different, darker voice he began.

“It was on a night just like this. Dark and stormy. The wind was fierce and the rain lashed the house.”

Their heads perked up as they heard the noise, a percussive sound. Like jungle drums, getting louder. Just as Travis realized what the noise was, the galley doors were flung open and a stampede of humans rushed in. They had flashlights, and lifejackets with blinking lights, and cameras flashing. Travis and Hesse were blinded by the lights in their faces and then swarmed. Travis was punched from the blackness around him, then again. Arms grasped around him and he was pulled down.

He heard a struggle around Hesse, and Hesse’s voice and others blowing out in exertion. He stopped struggling, hoping they would leave him, then he was punched again in the face and he fell to the ground and couldn’t move. They were taking the food. There were dozens of them. The feet pounded by him unendingly until his eyes shut and he went to sleep.

When he opened his eyes, they were all gone. Hesse was gone too. He got up in the dark and made for the door, feeling along the countertop, around the pantry, along the wall of cupboards. In his desperate hurry to get to his family, he fell several times in the dark, as the longest hallway returning to the piano lounge had no windows and no light at all. Once, he hit his head on a cracked open door and bled from the cut.

The rumors of a run on the lifeboats reached the piano bar just as Travis did. Groups were already huddling in conversation or hurrying towards the exits. The rain was hitting the glass walls so violently it felt like the room was shaking, like a stadium of fans thundering.

“What happened?” Darren said.

Travis was wet and disheveled. He had a bloody split lip from the brawl as well as the cut on his head. He looked exhausted. His chest heaved with his breath.

“I was with Hesse in the galley,” Travis began, speaking to Corrina, and to Claude who came upright in the lounge chair. “Some group rushed us and took food, now everyone’s rushing on the lifeboats.”

“What do we do?” Gerry said. “Do we go to the lifeboats?”

“Look at that storm,” Travis said.

They turned to the open glass walls. In the moonlight they saw shimmering sheets of rain, exploding in tiny millisecond white flashes on the windows. There was a decision to be made that their lives depended on, and the immediacy of it increased with each other group that ran out from the lounge into the hall towards the lower deck. The more that panicked, the more need to panic.

“You want to be in a lifeboat in that?” Corrina said.

“These are big boats,” Gerry said. “They’re meant for emergencies.”

“We could be hundreds of miles from shore,” Corrina said, “Do they have food?”

“They have everything,” Gerry said quickly. “Food, water, they’ve got an engine, we could get somewhere.”

“Which way would we even go?” Corrina said. “We’ve been drifting for weeks. What’s the range of those lifeboats? Have they got enough food and fuel to get us in?”

“They’ve got no range,” Travis said.

“How much longer will our food last on the ship?” Claude asked.

“We don’t know,” Travis said.

“How can you not know?” Gerry asked. “I thought Hesse had this down to a science.”

“I don’t know because people are stealing the damn food!” he said.

“God,” Corrina said. “Travis, we have to do it. Let’s go.”

Travis looked back out at the storm.

“You have a child here,” Corrina said. “Damn it Travis, we listened to you to get on this boat, but now it’s time to get off it.”

“Claude, what are you doing?” Gerry asked.

“Staying.”

“You think the food’ll last longer?” Gerry said.

“No,” he said. “But there’s more places here to hide.”

They were aware again of the action around them, some groups leaving, others huddling together, just watching. The groups made their decisions nakedly in front of each other.

Travis insisted on getting Vera. He sprinted to her stateroom, down the hall of the same deck. Within minutes he came back alone.

“She won’t go,” Travis said. “She just wants her comfort.”

“Amen,” Claude said, stretching out on the couch.

“Okay,” Travis said. “Goodbye.”

Professor Claude stood and gave them each a hug. There was a stiffness, they each thought the other was making a suicidal choice.

“Try not to catch a cold,” Claude said, smiling at Darren.

Down four interior flights of stairs to the lifeboat level, they rushed out into the rain, Travis carrying his boy.

It was difficult to see in the dark as the rain and wind stung their eyes. They stayed in a pack as they moved along the slippery deck to the nearest set of boats. Corrina fell and Gerry grabbed her and pulled her back to her feet before she hit ground. They soon saw the mad press of people trying to get into the lifeboats. The lifeboats were kept at deck level, so only the gates and doors had to be opened, still someone needed to lower the boats and Travis again wondered who were those people.

Travis had seen the posted pictograms for lowering the lifeboat and they were complicated. He hoped there would be a crewmember in his group.

The boats had capacity for 150, but there were hundreds at the doors of the first one, and who knew how many already inside. It was the pier all over again, but this time no police, no crowd control. Just the animal crowd. In the dark, in the rain, individuality was lost. All that could be seen was a live mass, a giant organism struggling for its survival. Gerry led them around the back of the crowd, past one, two, three lifeboats.

Then there was a scene. Neither the tourists nor the refugees had had any chance for an evacuation drill, but there were still enough crew on board to lead the proceedings. As Travis and his group came around the back of the third lifeboat mob, towards the railing where there was a gap in the crowd, they could see well over the side of the ship. Some kind of soft chute led from the deck down several flights to four inflated rafts below.

The chutes were spinning and swaying with activity, and they could hear screams from the rafts as evacuees landed on each other, or missed the rafts entirely.

They couldn’t hear the splashes over the wind and rain, but they saw the men and women waving up out of the water, swimming out in the dark at the life rafts, or waving back up at the ship for help.

Again, they avoided the mob at the raft-chutes. By the fourth of the huge lifeboats the crowds seemed smaller, by the fifth they thought they had a chance to get in.

You were all in, or you were out. Travis held Darren tight to his chest, Corrina and Gerry pressed their bodies against his back, and they became a part of the living mass. Pushing, and soon being pushed from behind. There was no movement it seemed at first; Travis could just make out the door through the rain, above the heads. Not the door, but the part of the living mass where it met and flowed into the fiberglass walls of the covered lifeboat.

Travis’s throat began to tighten, he felt a sudden swelling feeling, and then his chest tightened and tightened. It was an asthma attack; his breath came short and sharp.

There was a familiar surge.  Travis thought he could see the mass pushing a little bit more of itself into the vessel, just as he was able to move forward about three feet. He willed himself to keep watching and moving as he struggled to breathe. There was little choice, there was no room to bend or spread his arms in the crowd.

He turned his head, and saw the next set of davits letting out cable and the boat dropping, one side swinging low then the other violently dropping, past the hundreds who still pounded with their fists on the closed shell. Then Travis saw the davit operator jump the three flights down. So that’s how they got on the lifeboats, he thought.

Another surge, Travis moved one step closer. The ship was rocking now with the waves and the crowd was so tight that they held each other up as they slid across the deck. Travis was dizzy now, and his vision seemed strange. He looked up and saw the spotlight, solid and blurry at the same time in its passage through a million moving drops of rain.