The Flood

by David Sachs

  “Oh, hello,” Corrina said into an imaginary phone. She slipped into an exaggerated Long Island accent – with South Carolina under it. “Yeah, this is Corrinna. Uh huh. Yeah. Yes, I’ll hold.”

  She held up her invisible phone and whispered to Brenda, “I’m on hold.”

  Corrina put the imaginary phone back to her ear. “Yes, could I get a cab? We’re on the Festival…. Yeah, that’s right. OK, you’ll honk when you pull up? Oh, what am I wearing? Yeah, it’s the same underwear I put on like, three weeks ago. Uh huh. Yeah, it’s nasty. Oh, you like that?”

  Brenda was laughing, wiping tears from her red eyes.

  “There’s a party tonight,” Brenda said. “Did you hear about it? Leon and I are going. We even got a sitter. Some of the bands are having a dance party in the night club.”

  “Really?” Corrina said. She looked out at Darren and smiled. “Yeah, I love to dance. And we have the luxury of a live-in babysitter right now.”

  “Travis?” Brenda said.

  “Yeah, well, he never was much of a dancer anyway,” Corrina said.

  “Do you still work together well as parents?” Brenda asked.

  “I suppose we’re all outside our comfort zone right now,” Corrina said. “We’ve probably spoken more these couple weeks than the last couple years.”

  Corrina paused. Spending this time with Travis had been emotional for her. She couldn’t talk to Gerry about it, so she’d been blocking it from her mind. She wished she could forget things, as Vera did.

  “I couldn’t take him back, you know?” Corrina said quietly.

  Since that first time they’d met, Corrina had always seemed cheerful and strong to Brenda. Now, she sounded sad.

  “I wanted to punish him. But I never wanted to ruin his life. He is a good man. I wish he could be happy again in his life, without me.”

  “You can’t fix everything,” Brenda said. “Or everyone.”

  Brenda took her kids back to her cruise suite, the same she had moved into that morning in Florida.

  As the sun went down, they met up in the disco: Corrina and Gerry, Brenda and her husband Leon, and dozens of others. Brenda flicked a switch and the strobe lights and spotlights came to life, circling the room. The crowd cheered and clapped, and Brenda took a little bow as the first band, a small salsa combo with acoustic guitar, bass, trumpet and shakers came up on the stage and led off with “Besame Mucho”, driven by a powerful syncopated bass line and trumpet blasts.

  The crowd kept the cheer right up and rushed to the dance floor. Corrina pulled Gerry out, and Brenda and Leon followed them. The band played with fire. It was for them a greater release than for the dancers. They’d been doing cruise gigs a long time, sticking together as a group. They came from the same village, and they left it together and stayed together. They veered between Mexican boleros, Cuban mambo, Brazillian samba and Latinized versions of American hits.

  Gerry and Corrina were very good dancers. It was what they did nights at home in their apartment when Darren slept. Looking around at the dozens, if not hundreds, crowding the dance floor, Corrina was pleased to again see faces she’d seen once or twice but then lost to their private routines. It felt like a reunion.

  The Mexican quartet blew themselves out and bowed their way off the stage, glowing with sweat in Brenda’s glorious strobe lights. They were replaced by a Jerry Lee Lewis style piano player, who unveiled the grand piano, hidden by a black tarp in the shadows, with a deft yank. They all danced, and smiled at each other in acknowledgment of this special moment they were sharing, the spirit they still felt as humans. When the rocking piano player played himself out, he was replaced by the Dixieland band.

  It was the show of their lives.

  There was no alcohol, but they felt drunk. Brenda and Corrina stumbled out to the promenade to cool off.

  “You did all this?” Corrina said.

  “Well. I talked to some people,” Brenda said.

  “You’re amazing,” Corrina said.

  “So are you,” Brenda said. “You’ll make it.”

  Brenda pointed at her spotlight, snake-like in the mist.

  “What do you see when you look at that?” Brenda said.

  “I see a shout out to the world,” Corrina said. “We’re still here. We ain’t going away.”

  They looked back out over the water. The music still reached them. They listened to the song and Corrina tapped her feet.

  “Heaven,” she sang along, “I’m in heaven/ And my heart beats so, that I can hardly speak.”

  34

  In the morning, Vera sat with them in the piano lounge. She too had been sick, and Travis was struck by how she’d wasted away. The winds were gone outside, and the air pressure seemed to change. Vera spoke.

  “When I was a girl, I was in the Siege of Leningrad. For two years, we were alone, trapped by the Nazis and their bombs. My house was destroyed. My parents killed, my brother. I was spared. I wondered why. I tried leaving; there was a caravan crossing the ice of Lake Lagoda. The Germans bombed the lake. I fell in the water. It was a miracle. I survived again. I was a beautiful young woman- then I was an animal, living in rubble, scavenging.”

  At first Vera had seemed focused, speaking slowly, as if considering how best to reach her point. But she began to seem tired and disconnected, rambling.

  “Two years like this. The bodies littered the streets, dead from starvation, from the cold, from the bombing. You don’t imagine what you can think when you are so hungry, when death seems so certain, not just for you- for everyone.

  She paused and considered what she had said.

  “There were cannibals then. I wondered sometimes how we did not all kill each other. But we had the Nazis to hate. But why would any God have saved me from Nazis and winter and hunger to bring me here?”

  While she spoke, Corrina had pulled Darren towards her, but he struggled away from her breast to face the old lady, listening seriously. When she finished, Claude looked at the boy.

  “And your dad thinks I’m the party-pooper, huh Darren?” he said.

  35

  Days after Travis’s visit to the Bowels, Hesse found him at dinner and pulled him into the office.

  “I need your help with something,” Hesse said.

  Travis nodded.

  “We’ve had suicides,” he paused to catch Travis’s eyes, then continued. “There’s a fair number that we know of, maybe a dozen. I’m sure we’ll find more. People come and tell us when they’ve found the source of the smell down the hall. There’s no way we can keep it from spreading. The rumors, I mean. That will make things worse. But we can keep people from seeing it, and seeing how many there are.”

  “What are you asking me to do?”

  “I need you to take a few guys who can keep their mouths shut and get rid of the bodies. Do it after the daytime crowd disperses and everyone’s in their hiding places.”

  Hesse gave him a list with directions and a flashlight.

  “What’s happening with the communications?” Travis asked.

  “Soon,” Hesse said. “Soon.”

  The same confident I’ve-got-a-plan tone he had for everything, Travis thought. But Hesse did have a plan. He’d expected this, too.

  Travis took Claude and Gerry to visit the staterooms on his list.

  There weren't any lights in the rooms. The emergency lighting only lit the hallways, and only enough to walk by. Gerry circled the first room with the flashlight.

  “On the couch,” Travis said.

  The man sat upright on the couch, his head at an awkward angle. They could see the blood, dried and browning. He had slit his own throat. The knife rested on the couch, just out of his grip.

  “I suspect an inside job,” Claude said.

  “No way,” Gerry said. “The butler, in the library, with a razor-sharp wit.”

  Travis looked at the wound. He’d gotten the air pipe but not the arteries. This had been slow and painful, and he would not have been able to scre
am.

  Travis wondered why Hesse had asked him to do this. What was there in Travis that he would be chosen out of everyone as the perfect guy to clean up suicides? The question bothered him.

  Travis and Gerry took the arms and legs. This was a less expensive stateroom than Vera’s. There was no balcony to throw him off of, as there had been for Vera’s husband and the man who had killed him. The windows were sealed. Claude led the way with a flashlight, out of the cabin, down the hallway. There was no promenade or foredeck at all on this level, so up a flight of stairs they carried the dead man. It was heavy work, and they paused several times to rest and adjust their grips, but they met no other passengers on their route. Out on the deck, the soft rain and breeze cooled them satisfyingly. They hurried across the deck, and without pause, lifted the man over the rail and dropped. There was no sound after that except their own heavy breathing.

  The next was a couple. They rotated so that they took turns with the body and the flashlight.

  “There’s something romantic about a double suicide,” Claude said.

  “I’m not that into commitment,” Gerry sputtered.

  At the railing, Professor Claude said, “Why couldn’t they just throw themselves overboard anyways?”

  “There’s something of the exhibitionist in a suicide,” Gerry said.

  “Yeah,” Claude said. “They’re making an argument. We get it. Life sucks.”

  As they walked back to the next spot, Travis shined the flashlight on Claude’s face.

  “So who do you like in the World Series this year?” Travis said.

  “I think we can pretty much eliminate the Yankees and Red Sox,” Claude said.

  “And the Braves and the Orioles and the Marlins,” Gerry said. “Could be the Rockies' year. Remember how the Saints played a season away from home after Hurricane Katrina?”

  “Yeah,” Claude said. “Ain’t life unfair?”

  Next came the teenagers. They did not joke in that room. Two dead, and a lot of blood. They looked beautiful.

  One had evidently killed the other, then done himself by the wrists. The knife was on the floor. It looked like his had been painful and slow. There was a balcony here, and the work was done quickly.

  Travis wondered at the trauma he’d seen in the last few years of his work, the nightmare of Sudan and nightmares of it since, the loss of his love and family, guilt, and now this, and still he fought. His life had been unhappy for three years since he’d lost Corrina, but somehow he still fought for it. Would Corrina? They both had Darren to fight for. Kids didn’t kill themselves. Not often. He’d never seen one as a paramedic. Darren, the indestructible, saving all their lives.

  The last one was at the opposite end of the ship. They were forced to take a circuitous route around the sealed compartment, outside again, inside again. The night was becoming late, the moon and a slice of star-filled night were just visible in a chasm in the cloud cover; the moonlight lit up the chasm walls so that they could see the full depth of the clouds above.

  “They uncovered some archaeological ruins in northern Peru,” Professor Claude said. “The remains of a human and animal sacrifice. Fifty children and as many llamas. This village literally sacrificed its future. For something. What do you imagine was bad enough that they’d sacrifice their kids for god’s mercy?”

  He laughed a haunted laugh. “Same DNA, same DNA.”

  When they entered the final room the stench was horrible. This one had been sitting for days. They found him in the bed, killed with medication, an empty bottle on the nightstand.

  “Oh,” Travis said, as the flashlight passed over the man’s face, “crap.”

  The other two did not bother to ask, they waited.

  “The ship surgeon,” Travis said.

  “Huh,” Claude said. “Physician, heal thyself.”

  On the walk back they realized they were passing by the Theater. They were outside the back doors and Claude held the flashlight on the sign for a moment.

  “The next bodies we’ll be tossing will have bullet holes,” Professor Claude said.

  “Just stop!” Travis said. “I hear this from you over and over, I’m sick of it. I feel your voice pecking at the back of my brain.”

  “That’s the truth!” the Professor said. “And I imagine if I put money down right now that things were going to get worse before they get better, neither of you gentleman would pick up that bet.”

  “Well, your money’s no good here, Darkness,” Gerry said.

  Travis laughed, the spell broken.

  “You’re a pretty funny guy, Gerry,” Claude said. “But you’re still only a rebound husband.”

  That night, Travis lay on the carpet in the piano lounge, his son sleeping above him on the plush curving bench of the booth. He had nightmares again.

  In the morning, Travis felt haunted from the night’s chores. At the Atrium, he saw Doctor Joel Conrad waiting for food. He looked awful, his skin was a bad color and his eyes were bloodshot.

  Before Travis could approach him, there was a scream.

  “FISH!” a man shouted.

  They all turned to see a group of men on the stairs, smiling all.

  “FISH!” the man screamed again. He held a basket teaming with headless fish.

  “We’ve got nets full of clean fish,” the man yelled. “We’ll eat well tonight! We’ll need a few more volunteers so any of you good with knives, please come by the kitchen after breakfast… if you’re not too busy.”

  There was a cheer from the crowd, and Travis saw Hesse cheering too. It had a sharp effect. Travis felt it in himself and knew everyone around him felt it. He guessed that they couldn’t possibly catch enough fish to feed everyone, but the ticking clock in their galley would slow down, at least.

  It was good news, so rare, it thrilled them.

  “Have you been back to see the baby?” Joel Conrad said, coming next to Travis.

  “No,” Travis said.

  “Pneumonia,” the doctor said. “She could hardly breathe last night. I put her on antibiotics. I’ve been to see her this morning and she already seems a bit stronger. She was able to feed again, at least.”

  Travis felt sick himself at this news. Did God have to do this too?

  The ghastly doctor grabbed Travis’s arm. His grip was still strong.

  “We delivered that girl,” the doctor said. “Death will have to tear her from my hands.”

  Travis smiled. It was good to see fight left in the good guys.

  36

  Lee and Rick spent days sounding out the crowd in the Theater. People were upset. There was anger at the Atrium for being in control when things went wrong. They were convinced that the other group was giving them the short end of the stick. It was a suspicion that had grown and fed on itself each day and each incident, seeded here and there by Rick and his wife, who loved to talk.

  Soon, it became impossible to imagine that they weren’t treated as an unwanted burden on the main group, bound to get secondary service in all cases; in food, in use of the electrical power, fresh water, in any kind of warning or communications on anything going on- like the lifeboat panic. If they weren’t being sacrificed yet, they would be soon, they were sure of that.

  Since the run on the lifeboats, Rick and Lee’s talks had pushed more and more of their group to that attitude. There was a growing desperation that whatever chance they’d had before the run on the lifeboats was greatly diminished. For days, Rick and Lee listened. They judged their peers, what types of ideas they had.

  When they began organizing, first Lee and Rick confirmed those they guessed would follow them easily. Then they picked from that pool the ones to draft. Lee avoided Adam in his recruitment. Adam had led a few more prayer sessions, at random intervals. It bothered Lee that he didn’t at least go somewhere that everyone didn’t have to watch. Lee didn’t trust Adam anymore. He was angry too, like Adam had ruined what could have been a great friendship.

  Lee and Rick took thirteen men a
nd seven women to raid the central galley. No one else was told.

  There was great excitement about the enterprise.

  At last, they were doing something. They had taken upon themselves the action to save their group.

  They went at night, when the dinner cleanup in the galley would be over, and there would be only the two guards.

  It was very dark. They crossed over the sealed section on the open Sky Deck, in pairs, to avoid alarm if anyone were out for a stroll. They reunited in an unlit service stairwell as soon as they were beyond the sealed section. They went slowly and quietly, along corridors less traveled. The ship's main Aquarium Restaurant was spread over two decks, with the lower floor opening to the Grand Atrium. The galley and food storage was below the restaurant, one deck below the Atrium.

  Outside the galley, they went terribly slowly. Lee and another man were in front. Lee walked out of the darkness, and could see into the open door of the galley. He walked in. There were two guards, in a set of rooms barely lit by emergency lamps, with many shadows.

  “Get on the floor,” Lee said. He didn’t even hold up the gun hanging from his shoulder, but the guards saw it.

  They lay on the ground. The man behind Lee signaled for the others to come in. Some had rope, and they went to tying up the guards.

  “What are you doing?” one guard said.

  “We’re saving ourselves,” Rick said.

  “Are you going to make us starve?”

  “Get them in the closet,” Lee said.

  The two men were stuffed in a storage room, their mouths taped to keep them quiet.

  None of the raiders were familiar with the galley, so the work was slow. The facility was massive, and not all visible at once. There was a lot to take in. They found that one side of the galley had been emptied out, and everything that was left was consolidated on the other side.