by David Sachs
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.”
17
There were just five doctors, twenty-two nurses, three paramedics and one combat medic. Travis recognized one of the doctors, the middle-aged man he’d seen on the deck crying in the woman’s arms just before the attack. On this doctor’s face, Travis saw an anguish so ugly he forced himself to keep looking at it, as if he needed to understand.
One of the men in the group was the ship surgeon. There were two ship nurses as well. They did not know if the other nurses or doctor on staff had been killed or abandoned ship in the lifeboats.
“Do you have anyone else here you know from the ship?” the ship surgeon asked the ship nurses.
They nodded.
“Take them with you and go to the clinic. We’ll need surgical tools, all the basics, okay? Every scalpel, scissor, and forceps we have. Plenty of gloves and antiseptic. We’ll need spinal collars and backboards, bandages, splints, the whole shebang. Suction, oxygen, zappers, all the toys with battery packs. Let’s see. Thrombolytics and morphine.”
He spoke with the casual precision of expertise. The two nurses went back to the clinic, taking with them three other crew: a bartender, a DJ, a waiter.
“Go on, doctor,” the man from the bar-top prodded. “How do we manage this?”
“Okay,” the doctor looked around his makeshift team. “Guys, the first thing you need to know about multiple casualty triage is that the rule changes from Do the best for each patient, to Do the best for the greatest number of patients. Who are the nurses? You five will fan out. We need to triage, like this. M
inimal intervention now, just opening airways or controlling external hemorrhages. Nothing else but assessment. All these guys with their hands up, get them to show a number with their fingers. Check the patients out. Salvageable and can’t wait is number one – any massive trauma or loss of blood. Salvageable and can wait is number two, broken arms, non-critical wounds, 1st and 2nd degree burns. Number three is unsalvageable. Who are the paramedics?”
Travis raised his hand, along with two other men.
“Get the number threes morphine, then come help with the ones. When we deal with the ones and twos we’ll see if any threes can be saved. Anyone with serious blood loss… we just don’t have the blood.”
“We can do a donor clinic,” Travis said. “Right here. I did it in Africa. They just use the whole blood.”
“We can’t do blood tests,” the ship surgeon said.
“Ask them,” Travis said. “A lot of people that are O-negative know it.”
The universally compatible blood type, O-negative.
“Okay,” the ship surgeon said. “Okay. You, triage nurses, go. Get moving. Remember, one, two, three.”
The ship surgeon peered into the crowd and then called out, “I need two volunteers to run back to the medical clinic. Two volunteers who know where the clinic is, can run there, and carry stuff back.”
The ship surgeon sent two passengers back to work with the nurses to bring blood storage and needles, tubing, saline bags and hangers.
The man on the bar left the ship surgeon to organize the medical team.
He faced the two junior officers from the ship who had come down, as well as six military officers and dozens of soldiers and reservists. The man on the bar asked them to wait while he addressed the crowd.
“Okay, everybody, we have good news. The ship’s surgeon is here, he has his staff nurses and a whole team of doctors and nurses volunteering from the crowd. We have nurses going out right now to do triage. Please do as they say, the doctors will be following them. We should have medical supplies from the clinic starting to come in around ten minutes. We have some of the ship’s officers and some folks with military experience. We’re going to have them come up with a plan to assess our situation as quickly as possible, and assess our food situation as well which I think everyone here is probably starting to wonder about.”