by David Sachs
“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.
28
The power went out in the Theater. Lee sent a few of his men to check the ship, to find out if there was power elsewhere, but Rick returned before they did.
“They’re going for the lifeboats,” Rick said. “I could hear them all in the Atrium. They were raiding food and everyone’s panicking and trying to follow them before it’s too late. It’s chaos, and it’s black everywhere.”
Lee ran out of the Royal Theater with the rifle and a flashlight.
They couldn’t do this, he thought, bounding up the stairs. But there was no law to stop them. Hesse had said as much. Hesse and the Colonel’s control was a joke, but he had the gun. So he’d be the enforcer. Golding’s Law.
The lifeboats and life rafts were at the Atrium level. From the Italian restaurant, Lee had to climb four flights of stairs, run down the dark Penthouse Deck corridor, and down four more flights. The adrenaline surge was in him, and he hardly slowed. At the Atrium level, he forced open a door and went into the rain, walking solidly in the wind. He was familiar with weapons, and he worried that the gun would jam in the rain. This had automatic and semi-automatic options, which was good. He didn’t quite know what he’d do. If they were leaving, they damn sure couldn’t have the food. On the other hand, the more that left without extra food, the more food would be left for those remaining. How could that work?
Still, he had the gun, which was good. There were so many of them, and it was so hard to see in the dark, through the rain. He’d have to make liberal use of bullets to frighten them away from the boats, but how would he get the food? Their screaming came to him over the echoing rain from down the walkway.
He reached the first lifeboat with his heart beating in his throat. His only animal thought was that they were taking his food. He began firing above their heads in single shots, trying to get their attention. The crowd around the first boat turned.
“Give me the food!” the Mighty Lee Golding shouted holding his gun above his head so they could all see.
Only the first few at the edge of the crowd could hear him, the rest just stared, waiting.
This was the mob. The same that screamed and lost themselves in their screams at the arena. They were one monster with a thousand heads. He fired above their heads again and waded into the crowd, as some fought to get away and others fought to get into the boat. The sea of bodies parted around as he marched quickly towards the boat, firing a few more shots in the air. He got to the door, throwing a smaller man off the steps. The lifeboat was already beyond capacity.
“Give me all the food,” he screamed in the closed hull. He fired through the roof.
Nobody moved. Something made the lifeboat buck, and Lee fell hard against the wall. A man jumped at him. Lee caught his jaw with his big elbow, then smashed the stunned man’s face with the butt of the rifle. Screw it, he thought. There was a console- he shot it. He stepped back out of the lifeboat and shot up the davit control boxes and soft spots. There were the loud pings of ricochets, and Lee knew he couldn’t let fear of that stop him.
When he got to the next boat, more of them just scattered, which made it easier. But he couldn’t see any other way – he couldn’t stop them from taking the food unless he stopped them from going. He should have organized first, he shouldn’t have gone alone. He shot out mechanisms and controls for the next boat, and repeated that, so that hundreds had scattered before him. There were too many boats. Some of them had to be in the water by now. He switched the rifle to fully automatic. It made everything faster. The sounds of the ricochets came over the gunfire, but Lee didn’t see anyone get hit. The rain picked up suddenly and he was drenched as if in a waterfall. He looked up at the heavens and saw the spotlight, the only light on the ship. He felt a kind of ascendance, as if he were rising above this crowd he fought.
&nbs
p; The living mass around Travis’s group propelled them in jerks. The sound of gunfire pierced the storm, and the living mass held its breath and stopped convulsing. The sound was unmistakable, through the rain and wind. It came again, single shots. Then a burst, coming closer, and they heard screams, and reverberations of the fire against the ship.
“Daddy?” Darren said. “Are they back?”
Lee Golding, Travis thought.
“No,” he said.
Was he trying to get on a lifeboat? Or was he trying to stop them, as he and Hesse had tried to stop them in the galley? With that he realized he was now with the same group he had been fighting less than half an hour earlier; he recognized several faces that had appeared in the flashing of lights around the galley. The madness of it. He was struggling, competing and cooperating with the ones he’d thought monsters minutes ago, while another man with a gun threatened them all.
There was a loud sound like a machine breaking down as the mass again surged forward, and they all waited for the next sign of the gun. Why hadn’t he brought his gun? Travis thought. He’d been to Vera’s room and never thought of it. He would kill Lee Golding if he came near his family. But he had no gun. There was thunder that blocked everything out, and then the noises of gunfire and metal percussions were all around them, like the gunfire was part of the swirling tempest itself.
The gunfire was not heard in the piano lounge far above. The lounge had returned to its calm equilibrium. Those who were staying were staying. Only the sounds of the storm now.
Professor Claude Bettman stood and walked to the piano. It was dark, no one noticed. He began to play a nocturne of Chopin. It was not loud; the rattling of the glass all around them was loud. Only those in a few of the spots closest to the piano could hear.
A woman yelled for Claude to be quiet. A man, holding a child, shouted back to play.