by David Sachs
Hundreds watched his face and wished for him to know what to do next.
“Firstly,” he continued, “does anyone here know of any fires going on, or, well, just any information that anyone has that they think is important, I guess this is the chance to shout it out.”
“Who are you?” someone shouted.
“I’m John Hesse,” the man on the bar said.
Travis was watching the triage nurses approaching the first few groups where hands were still held high. The nurses took their time. Travis was aware that the crowd was yelling at John Hesse on the bar, but he continued watching the nurses. Checking vitals without instruments. Asking the questions. Then the first wave seemed to break across the room, and the nurses moved on and hands held up turned to fingers counting numbers in the air. There was a three.
Travis was familiar with this kind of work. He saw two outstretched hands go down, and Travis knew what that likely meant.
“Does anyone here know about the power systems, or about propulsions? Do we have any of the engineers or anything like that?” John Hesse yelled.
One of the junior officers huddled in front of the bar spoke up, unsure of himself. “I don’t think we can get propulsion back. If they damaged the engines, we can’t fix them now. I haven’t seen any of the engineers. This emergency lighting we have is from a separate generator. I have no idea where it will be working or how much total power it has. But it means something’s still working, at least.”
“What happened to New York? Does anyone know?” someone shouted.
“We have enough to worry about here,” Hesse said. “We have to consider shouting as how we communicate as a group right now, so I guess we all need to be judicious. Don’t yell out information or questions unless it directly affects our activities and understanding of our situation… right now.”
“I have a dead body,” someone called out. “What should I do with it… right now?”
John Hesse looked down at the ship surgeon.
“We’ve only got two body compartments,” the surgeon said, “and they won’t be cooled even if there still is emergency power in the clinic. We could be here days, this could be a health hazard. Bodies rot quick. We need bodies off the ship, I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” John Hesse said back to the crowd. “We have no facilities here for bodies, and they will become a health hazard very quickly. The dead will have to be buried at sea. Please everyone see to your own family members, enlist the help of others in moving them if needed. Everyone is really going to have to get used to helping each other. When we take care of the more urgent matters we’ll have some organized body removals around the ship, but… take care of your own.”
Hesse took more questions, shouted out more vague ideas about assessing the situation, and then he called off the discussion and came down to talk with his second volunteer group. It was a crowd, but he could see that officers and some civilians had sifted themselves to the front while crew and some other civilians were just behind them.
“Which of you is the highest ranking ship officer?” he said.
“I’m a second officer,” a young man said. “I think that’s the highest.”
“Do we have any senior military officers?” Hesse asked.
“I was a colonel in the Army,” an old man said, adding, “I didn’t have too much experience at sea.”
Hesse looked from one to the other. “You two need to talk. We need an assessment of our power, our danger from fire and leaks, our food situation, our communications… that’ll do. We also need an assessment of the best way to get some food down here this morning, you might want to get a team together for that effort. You,” he pointed at the second officer, “you let the Colonel take charge, you tell him anything he needs to know about the ship. Colonel, you can take volunteers from the crowd here if you need to send teams out. I suggest you use the other men here-” indicating the officers and military men, “-as team leaders. But I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Colonel.”
“Before we do any of that,” the Colonel said, “we need toilets. The toilets aren’t flushing. Folks need toilets.”
“OK,” Hesse said. “You should have some crew here who can help.”
The Colonel looked behind at the crowd of volunteers.
“That should do. If I need more help, I’ll come back. And ask people to piss of the decks until we get the johns going.”
Hesse nodded.
“One more thing,” Hesse said. “Anyone you send out there, if they find any bodies, they have to be dumped.”
Hesse looked at the Colonel, and his eyes wandered across the other men gathered round him. As he looked at the men, there was nothing in his eyes that asked their permission. Like that, he became the general.
18
As supplies came down, the medical team worked in high gear. The crashing of the ships had caused scores of accidents, from flesh torn open to sprained ankles to bodies and bones crushed under falling structures. There were burn victims who had hung on through the night but could never be saved this morning. They mostly spoke of fire in stern areas and someone told of the power room exploding. There were heart attacks and bullet wounds, and one man who had left New York without his insulin in a diabetic coma. Travis, bringing morphine, occasionally heard the shouts of the crowd around him and the responses from John Hesse.
There were missing family members, and Hesse designated a landing on one of the staircases as a meeting place for those split up. The staircases didn’t glow green anymore. In the dull daylight, the emergency lighting was drowned out as well. All around, the fantastical lighting of the day before was gone, and now the Romanesque columns and shapes seemed an ancient, abandoned site just found in the fog.
As the morphine went out to the injured, the screaming echoing in the belly of the ship was snuffed one voice at a time.
Colonel Martin Warrant, long retired from active duty, first formed teams to construct and install porta-johns. They considered using water buckets to flush the existing toilets, but there was no way they could keep up with the demand without running water, so a whole lot of porta-johns would be needed. He put an old Air Force officer in charge of the john-crew, mainly Festival crew members, including some tradesmen and others familiar with the materials and tools available.
Only when the john-crew was organized and out did Colonel Warrant turn to his other priorities, assessing the ship and planning food delivery. He spoke to the other ship’s crew and military men and women after a brief discussion with the Festival’s last Second Officer.
“We will need to break up into teams. Because of the ship’s size and decentralization of food and key equipment, we will split by area. We are going to do this fast, but we are going to do this thoroughly and get it right. We’ll need information on damage, fires, communications equipment, power, remaining lifeboat capacity, other passengers onboard, and of course, food.”
He scanned the quiet group. “First of all, who here has the faintest goddamn idea about ships’ engines?”
Nobody answered.
“Alright. Who thinks they can figure it out?”
“We have scuba gear,” one of the Festival’s officers said. “Maybe someone could check out the propellers and get an idea how bad the hull is.”
“The bridge is gone,” another man said. “How could we sail even if we had power and propellers?”
“You can control the ship from the power room,” the Second Officer said. “You just can’t see.”
“Alright,” Colonel Warrant said to the officer who had mentioned the scuba gear. “Do you dive? Well, find four divers, and if you need men to lower them, take men for that too. Check the propellers, what the hell, take your time and check the whole goddamn ship. For God’s sake, make sure you’ve got a way back onboard. Good luck. Okay, what’s next? Right, who thinks they can figure out if the power room is salvageable?”
His assessment teams under way, the Colonel finally turned to food. Fortunate
ly, there were a number of galley crew there: the Executive Chef, the saucier, the roast cook, the assistant butcher, several waiters and busboys, beverage managers, bartenders and stewards.
It wouldn’t be easy, the Colonel was told: they had half their staff to prepare food, with no power, for double the crowd. So Hesse recruited more cooks, servers and dishwashers and Colonel Warrant sent another team off to work.
After his morphine round, Travis set up the blood clinic, calling for donors from the O-negatives. Occasionally, as the assessment teams left, the Colonel or some other among them would call for volunteers. One time he asked for helpers to bring food down. A few dozen lined up to give blood. It was then still before 8:30, but Travis was conscious of his own hunger as he heard that complaint repeated around the room. He looked towards his son and Corrina occasionally and was happy to see Claude Bettman had stayed near them.
After this, Travis worked with the doctors. He joined up with the sad man. His face now showed some relief in the distraction of broken bodies, his stock in trade. But he needed help. He had to amputate a foot.
The doctor’s name was Joel Conrad. He was also a New York refugee. A cardiac surgeon from King’s County Hospital, he and Travis began their acquaintance by naming mutual friends from New York hospitals. After a few minutes, that talk tailed off as they each realized they might be talking of dead men and women. He was a good doctor, Travis could see that as they worked. Now he could see his face, not hidden in a women’s lap, not disfigured with emotion. Conrad was a handsome man, with fine grey hair still somehow holding its part after all they’d been through. His face was tan, like some of the tourists on the Festival, which had initially sailed from Florida.
After the amputation, blood spattered on their shirt sleeves, they treated a burn victim. The patient’s husband cleared his throat and kneeled down so that his face was level with Travis and Conrad’s.
“Doctor. Do you think we’ll survive?”
Travis looked to Conrad as if to offer whatever support he could, but Conrad answered calmly, looking up at the man after his first few words.
“Why shouldn’t we?” Dr. Conrad said. “We have everything we need here. Surely we can live with some diminished electricity long enough to be rescued.”
The man seemed to be looking for more than an answer to the question he’d asked. He waited a moment after Conrad spoke and then continued.
“What if no one knows about us? What if it takes…”
“Then we’ll have to wait. Days or weeks,” Conrad said. “Remember that whatever we have suffered here, we are still alive. We still have this freshly stocked luxury ship to support us, and each other to get us through. I can assure you that there are many, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who are worse off than us. We escaped the flood.”
Travis saw Conrad grimace as he said those last words, but he let the impression go.
There was an injured girl. She had her family there, and the mother and brother were crying. The injury was less serious than it looked. Her clothes were bloodstained, but the loss of blood was not substantial, and Travis felt pride at seeing her hooked up to one of the newly donated bags of blood. He was distracted, so that only when they finished with the patient did he get a good look at Conrad’s face again. The doctor stood looking away, taking a momentary breather. The ugliness contorting his face had returned, and Travis thought: it’s guilt.
Sometime after noon, assessment teams began returning, conferring with John Hesse and Colonel Warrant. Then one team came, triumphantly, with food. Seven men and women came in with six-foot carts, carrying stacks of covered trays. Quickly the proud looks of those bringing the food turned. They were swarmed before they could penetrate the room.
Hesse jumped up onto the bar.
“Everybody! Please listen! There is plenty of food for everybody! But not all at once. The team getting the food will return to the galleys and prepare more cartloads, but there is not nearly enough here right at this moment for everyone – so why don’t we have the kids eat first, and anyone who absolutely feels sick?”
“Why don’t we just go down to the kitchen and get food ourselves?” someone called.
“The galley can’t operate with hundreds of us pouring in there. Please, give these people a chance to bring the food in.”
There was a lot of screaming.
“Who are you to tell us we can’t go up and get food ourselves?”
Hesse waited for quiet. In standing there above the others, his own patience was so visible it made the crowd quiet because they wanted to hear his response.
“Please!” a new voice screamed, a woman’s.
Travis saw. It was the mother of the girl on deck yesterday.
“This man saved my girl,” she said. “Please listen to him.”
Hesse cut in quickly to the space that followed her words.
“Guys, we are in a tough situation here and we all know it. Until we get all the assessment teams back, we really won’t know what kind of shape we’re in at all. But I can tell you one thing – if we choose to act now through chaos it will certainly be a lot worse. We have survived two disasters right now, but if we give in to fear and panic we will create a disaster of our own that we may not survive. Please. Back away from the food carts. We’ll call for kids first in a moment when they’re ready. We’ll have more food down here within an hour, and hopefully they’ll get power to the stoves. We have right now lots of bread, cold cuts, cheeses and fruits. Our cooks will get more sophisticated as we go. We may not even have enough food here on the next round, but be assured, we will feed you. No one’s ever gone hungry on a cruise ship.”
One of the men who had led an assessment team came right up to Hesse and tugged at the hem of his jeans. Hesse came down to him. The tension in the crowd dissipated; the food servers were left to set up, though many stood close by watching and watching the others doing the same.
“There are others,” the man said to Hesse.
“I know,” Hesse said. “Some of the groups have found families hiding out or locked in their rooms. They’ve been telling them to come down here. If anyone needs medical attention where they are, tell the doctor.”
“No, I mean a big group. Hundreds. They’re in the Theater. Apparently that’s the second location the captain herded the refugees in New York. There’s a lot of the tourists wound up with them now as well, the ones that had rooms in the back. It seemed like they’d overwhelm us here so I told them to send some representatives to come down here and coordinate with us and share information. They should be coming any time.”
Hesse nodded. As he rejoined Colonel Warrant, the crew member who had led the diving group returned.
Carts of food were continuously brought down; Travis and Conrad did not stop to eat. Bloodied, tired, and hungry, they continued. They set bones and splinted them, they stitched lacerations, they treated burns and intubated one man on a spinal board.
At some point, John Hesse returned to his perch on the bar and yelled for the crowd’s attention.
“We’ve gotten some reports back from most of the teams. Here’s our situation. First the bad news. The generators and engines are out of commission; of course, we’ll see if we can change that. We do have emergency power, as you can all see, but nobody in charge of it. That’s a problem we can solve. There is a watertight compartment shut off because of the collision, we have a twenty foot vertical gash. The compartments are designed to protect the ship from a leak filling the boat, and it’s working. We’re not in danger from the collision anymore. There was a ship fire crew already at work battling the fires. They’ve closed off several corridors, but they have taken more volunteers and have things under control. We have no communications. The communications room was adjacent to the bridge and was destroyed in the attack. Any emergency signal devices would have been in the same location. We can’t call for help. But this ship will be missed and will be looked for. We have to assume that authorities on land will eventually be performi
ng sweeps of the ocean. This was done when the tsunami hit Southeast Asia, so we know we’ll be found eventually, we just don’t know when that will happen. Our best estimate is that there are between three and four thousand of us still on board. By my guess, that means some few hundred left by lifeboat during the night.”
Immediately screams came from the crowd. One voice carried over the others.
“Why don’t we use the lifeboats now?”
“There aren’t enough,” Hesse responded. “First of all, the lifeboats are intended for the number of passengers and crew on the ship, not for two thousand plus refugees. Second, the lifeboats are high capacity, but I don’t think that those that left during the night were very efficient about it. In fact, I know they weren’t because I watched my girlfriend leave in one. And I’ll tell you what else. Those lifeboats will never make it back to land. It’s just too far. Here, the ship can still support us until we’re found. Now the good news. The ship isn’t sinking. There are no major breaches of the hull, and any flooding is being contained in the watertight compartments. We also have plenty of food. That’s it.”
“That’s all the good news?” someone shouted. “We aren’t sinking and we have food?”
“What the hell do you want?” Hesse snapped. “The entire east coast of the Americas is lost, and for all we know, Europe or anywhere else could be flooded too, but we’re alive, sheltered and safe. Count your blessings. All we can do now is pull together, stay organized, and survive. That’s… that’s our mission. Guys, we can survive here. We have food, and medical professionals, and a safe ship. We’ll make it as long as we need to.”
Hesse stepped down. More questions were shouted at him, but he ignored them and took Colonel Warrant by the arm. The two of them strode to a shop off the side of the Atrium. Hesse kicked the locked door open and the two went in to set up a command centre.