The Flood

by David Sachs

  “How much food do you have?” Lee asked.

  “A lot,” Hesse said, then turning to Adam Mellville: “As long as we get picked up. I’ll have them bring some tables down to the Theater.”

  ”How much water do you have?”

  “Quite a bit,” Hesse said. “We have probably over a hundred thousand bottles. There’s also a full 300,000 liter tank. We’re trying to restore running water.”

  The two big men exchanged looks.

  “Our engineer thinks she can do it,” Hesse said.

  “I hope we ain’t gonna be here that long,” Lee said.

  Hesse shrugged. “It seemed wise to look into it.”

  “We’ve got a problem with the doors,” Lee said. “We had to barricade them during the attack. We need some kind of power hacksaw to get them open.”

  “Well, how did you get out?” Colonel Warrant asked.

  “Obviously there are some open doors. But we would prefer more open doors. So, if you please, send a saw.”

  The representatives from the Theater returned to their refugee center with smiles. Adam enjoyed his time with Lee Golding. He liked being surprised, and Lee Golding was always surprising. Adam was rarely with someone who drew attention away from himself.

  Travis quickened his pace in the Atrium crowd, and his son burst forward and jumped into his arms. Travis needed the boy; he hugged him for a long time before he spoke.

  “Hey, champ. Long day, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d it go?” Corrina asked.

  “Exhausting. We won some, we lost some. That guy running the show… I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  Gerry stood a few paces off with Claude Bettman. Vera stood by herself, and Travis imagined that the old lady had been standing all day.

  Soon Hesse called for attention, standing on the bar-top. Travis saw that the two big men had stopped on their way to the staircase to watch.

  “I know a lot of you are wondering about the lifeboats right now,” Hesse said. “Here’s what I think, after talking with some of the ship staff. There are not nearly enough lifeboats for everyone. The lifeboats have bare food provisions and their range is small. We don’t even know how far land is or what the conditions are. We believe we’re over 200 miles from shore. From the old shore, that is. No lifeboat will make it. The ship has a lot of food, it’s a luxury cruise line. It’s equipped with over three weeks of food. I think we’re a lot more likely to be found in this ship, than any lifeboat would be. So. I don’t see any percentage in taking a lifeboat.”

  Hesse went on, about water, powering the freezers and lights, and volunteer rotations.

  “He’s got it all figured out,” Claude said to Travis. “But see, he’s counting on the idea that no one will steal food from the kitchens to bring a little something extra on the lifeboat. Look around. People are thinking, he doesn’t think the lifeboats are a bad idea for the ones who take them – but that they’ll screw everyone left behind. These folks are thinking, what does that have to do with me?”

  Travis said nothing. He had a flash recollection of a refugee camp in Sudan, and the sea of anguished black faces. Emaciated bodies wearing rags. Red Cross workers carrying on, keeping their concentration on tasks, as if on a raft in that sea. He felt again that complete vulnerability, his tiny island of white safety amid that sea of black desperation.

  John Hesse finished talking, and Travis watched the two big men walk away to the staircase out.

  A boy ran up to Mighty Lee Golding, and the star wrestler signed something for him.

  “I need a walk,” Travis said. “Why don’t we go get some fresh air on deck?”

  Corrina agreed, and they offered to walk Vera back to her room. Gerry and Claude stayed in the Atrium.

  “Pavel, you look tired,” Vera said to Darren. “Beautiful boy.”

  Darren looked up at his mother but kept silent. The foursome walked up four flights of stairs and along the hallway to Vera’s cabin. Travis carried Darren after the first flight. Vera’s room was at the far end of the hall, among the penthouses.

  At the end of the hallway in the dim light something caught all their eyes at once. Legs protruded from a corner. With one step further they saw the whole body. It was the gunman from Vera’s room.

  He had a knife in his back, and dark staining spread across the orange.

  Some history from the prison perhaps had followed him, or some disagreement in conducting the raping and pillaging.

  Vera was on him at once, screaming, without enough breath for it. She landed on the corpse and pulled the knife from his back, plunging it into him again and again, trying to scream. She stabbed twice more before Travis grabbed her arm as she drew it back. He held it gently until she dropped the knife.

  She pulled her arm from Travis and stood up, an old lady, wild and blood-spattered. Corrina held Darren to her waist. Vera looked in all their faces.

  “What happened?” she said. “What happened?”

  Travis held her as she went limp. He walked her to her bedroom where she lay down.

  Vera regained her composure and looked up at Travis.

  “You can stay here tonight,” Vera said. “You will be more comfortable here than downstairs with the mob.”

  Travis left Corrina and Darren in the living room, and went back to the dead pirate. He turned the body. There was the gun, in a pocket. Travis took it. He hadn’t fired a gun in years; he’d never fired a pistol. But he wanted that gun now, and at the same time, didn’t want anyone else to have it. Didn’t want anyone to know about it.

  Travis walked the gun to Vera’s galley, under his shirt past Corrina and Darren, looking for a place to hide it, thinking through what was likely in each drawer or closet: food, cutlery, towels, pots, baking dishes.

  Finally he went into the bedroom. Vera was already asleep. He opened a closet, stood on his tiptoes and pushed it to the back of the top, empty shelf, out of sight.

  They left Vera to sleep and found their way, away from the gunman’s body, to the small walking deck, shaded by the deck above. Chairs and tables were overturned and left on their sides, helter skelter. The sea was calm, and there was something fearful in its unbroken spread as far as they could see. The ship made no wake now, it sat as solid as an island, the small waves breaking against her hull. The oil spill had spread and now encircled the ship. The black curtain delineated their drama. Beyond that frame, within that frame.

  They stood at the railing.

  “I love you,” Travis said quietly. He knew he shouldn’t be saying this. He felt ashamed for himself saying it but he couldn’t stop. “Corrina, I love you and Darren. That’s all I could think about when I ran from my place, and in the crowd at the dock, and when I thought we were going to get shot. Maybe when we get off the ship-”

  “Oh Travis,” Corrina said, shaking her head. “Please don’t”

  Darren looked up at the two of them, mindless of their words, and smiled.

  Hesse and Colonel Warrant were in different places for much of the day, but before the dinner crowd arrived, they caught up in the office.

  “We need to do some serious risk analysis,” the Colonel said.

  “The guy with the gun is a risk,” Hesse said.

  “Yes, he is,” the Colonel said.

  “But what can we do?”

  “Don’t give away too much, the less he knows about Brenda and the power and everything, the better. And the less he’s around the better. That’s not a guy who gets told what to do. The more he’s around, the more he’s gonna argue with you, and sooner or later the guy with the gun wins the argument.”

  “Let’s just keep him happy and fed and far from us,” Hesse said.

  “That’s all we can do. Maybe the Mighty Lee Golding’s a sweetheart. I heard Killer Kowalski was a vegetarian.”

  In the Theater, Lee sat in a front row seat with his wife and Rick’s wife while Rick sat facing them on the edge of the stage.

  “I wish I wou
ld have been there,” Rick said, “Man, I wish I could have seen their faces.”

  “I bring joy,” Lee said. “It’s what I do.”

  “They must have pissed themselves when they saw two giants and a machine gun.”

  “Well,” Lee said. “I wasn’t there to frighten them. Just to make sure we’re planned for, whatever they’re doing.”

  “They seem like they know what they’re doing,” Rick said. “They got a freezer going there, I’m sure they’ll get ours hooked up. I mean, I trust them and all but I’m glad they saw you and Adam and the gun.”

  “Why do you trust them?” Jessica said. “Are you that good a judge of character? You can judge a guy on the other side of the ship that you haven’t even seen?”

  “Well,” Rick said, “they sent the doctor.”

  Back home, Jessica’s mother lived in the mansion with her and Lee.

  Jessica had been a shy child, afraid of the world, but in her mother’s poor house she had been a princess. She dated and married famous Lee Golding, and her character had grown louder and more confident. With Lee’s support, she’d gone back to school, and then quickly ascended the corporate ladder, becoming with each step more extroverted and sure. She worked at a major insurance company as a vice president. In The Mighty Lee Golding’s palace in suburban Atlanta, her mother still called her Princess.

  “God,” Jessica said. “If we don’t get off this ship soon I’ll use that gun to shoot myself.”

  21

  They walked forward along the dark-stained wood planking around the bow end of the Penthouse Deck. The sun was descending so that it caught them straight on from the side. Corrina and Darren were holding hands. They saw others on the deck, some at the brass railing alone, some in canvas deck chairs with spouses or children. No one said hello, no one nodded as they passed. They were all together, but each group was alone on the deck.

  “I don’t see anybody out there,” Darren said.

  There was nothing but the green and lace waves stretching out into the haze.

  They continued onto the larger foredeck. Rows of deckchairs were tumbled over each other. No one seemed to care to clean any of the mess now. Two small semicircular bars rung around a large hot tub, sitting half empty and dead. They walked to the railing and looked out.

  The ship was moving, Travis thought. The sun was at a different angle tonight.

  I hope this sunset doesn’t bring more surprises, he thought.

  “There’s a lounge there,” Corrina said. “Let’s check it out.”

  They walked through the glass doors into a gleaming white piano bar. The room seemed more orderly than the exterior deck. The heavy furniture had been less upset. The salon had most of its ceiling as glass, open to the sky. The blue of the bar and tables, the black of the grand piano, gleamed immaculately in the light filling the room through the glass ceiling and walls.

  “Play something,” Darren said.

  Travis sat at the piano. He knew only how to play rockabilly style, simplified Jerry Lee Lewis. He couldn’t play something so happy, so his fingers just sat on the keys for a moment.

  “I don’t feel like playing, Darren,” he said. “I’m too tired.”

  He saw the disappointment further sap the energy and hope from the boy.

  “Travis!” the father barked in a mock rendition of Corrina’s rough voice, “Don’t bang the piano! Take a lesson before you play that thing!”

  Darren brightened. Travis’s impersonation was unmistakable; the voice, accent and cadence sounding just like his ex-wife’s, but more so.

  “Travis! Why do you hate my ears? Stop that banging!” Travis said, leaning his forehead in to Darren’s. “That’s what Mommy said.”

  Long, long ago, he’d used jokes and impersonations to make friends, to make people laugh. To make his father laugh. It got him through high school and college. He’d become so serious at some point in his adult life, and so sad when his marriage had ended, but he always kept that part of himself for Darren. He shared laughs with his boy, almost as a secret, like his father, a living room clown, had shared with him.

  “Maybe we should stay here tonight,” Corrina said, “The seats are like couches.”

  “We could look at the stars,” Darren said.

  Gerry and Claude sat on the wall of an indoor garden in the Atrium.

  “Do you wonder what kind of world we’ll be going back to?” Gerry asked Claude.

  “I try not to,” Claude said in his smooth growl. “I’d like to delay returning as much as possible, myself. Until I get to thinking what a real delay would start to look like on the Festival. I do believe we may be nostalgic for this quiet moment soon. I do believe all our possible futures will be… unpleasant.”

  “I think I’ll take my unpleasantness on dry land, if I have the choice,” Gerry said.

  “Dry land is a lot further away than it used to be,” Claude said, looking out at the darkened mass of refugees in the Atrium.

  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.”