by David Sachs
They worked in pairs, looking for food cupboards and storage areas, and through each refrigerator and freezer. Rick darted between each group as they made a basic accounting of what they had found.
He grabbed Lee.
“There’s not much,” Rick said.
“Everything we can carry,” Lee said.
They began arranging trolley carts, throwing on enormous hunks of meat in freeze-dried plastic packaging. There were cheeses and sacks of potatoes and vegetables. They took flour, pasta, eggs, milk, buns, and sauces. There were a lot of condiments. They found metal trays full of the fish catch, filleted and frozen.
Eleven carts went back, slowly through the halls in the dark, much more so being carried up seven flights of stairs before running astern on the Sky Deck, and carrying them back down to the Italian galley. The first flights of stairs took them under two minutes each. The last few, five minutes or more, with carts dropped and picked back up, food falling and being found and restacked by the light of cellphones.
They left two of their team behind, to pack the frozen foods in the Italian restaurant’s freezer.
On their return, the galley raiders sent a scout first to ensure that nobody had noticed their activity. So it went, as they brought three trips of food down to the little galley near the Theater. What was left then in the main galley was not much, but they still argued over going back a fourth time. They were exhausted, wearing through even the adrenaline of the night. Still, Rick, soaked through with sweat, wanted everything.
“If we leave them something,” Lee said, “they won’t attack, not right away. It’ll give us time to prepare defenses. This took way longer that I expected. If the next shift of guards gets up there and finds their friends tied up, in the galley, they’ll set a trap. Just be satisfied with what we got. We should’ve kidnapped one of those cooks though.”
They went downstairs, into the backstage entrance they normally used.
Lee stepped up to the Theater stage in the last dark before dawn. He called loudly for attention and began speaking. Only the track lighting along the aisle stairs was on at night, so that Lee could be just barely seen on stage.
“Everybody wake up and listen.”
He only had to say it once, in his full stage voice, and wait a moment to know he had their attention.
“There’s not enough food on this ship for everyone. Some people are going to get food and live long enough to get rescued, some people are not and are going to get sick and die. That’s the fact. I sure didn’t like it that other groups were in charge of that decision. I don’t know what’s gone on over there, why it is, but they’re half-wild. It was those guys that ran off, those guys that stole the food, those guys that left us to die here. They’re animals. They’ve been dealing with rapes and suicides. Animals. We weren’t going to leave those people in charge of our fate anymore. We’ve brought the food back to our kitchen here.”
There was a lot of noise and many shouted all at once.
“Are we still going to share it?” someone asked.
There was angry discussion going on across the Theater, trying to make sense of this newest development.
“You’re not listening,” Rick said, walking up on the stage. “There isn’t enough food. We have the choice to live or die. Don’t you understand that we’ve been caught in the biggest disaster that’s ever hit America, or the world maybe? Do you think anyone is going to blame us that we took the food instead of waiting for them to cut us off? The only thing that matters is living and dying.”
“And anyone who disagrees,” Lee added, “can leave now, because you aren’t welcome, and you aren’t getting any food, and you can tell them down there that they’re not getting any food. This is war now. If you want to live, you fight for it.”
“I won’t,” Adam said.
He stood alone, near the top of the main seating, but all those who sat in the balcony or could not see him knew who it was.
“We are still men,” Adam said.
“Then you’ll die,” Rick said quickly.
“We will all die,” Adam said. “But you will die wrong. I won’t.”
Adam began walking down the aisle.
“Friend,” Lee said, “I’m saving the lives of everyone here.”
“No,” Adam said, “you’re destroying them. And I never was your friend.”
He turned. Now he could see the entire Theater, even if only the outlines of people in the dark. He did not need to stand on the stage; he was a stage.
“Look at you all,” Adam said to the rest. “You blind mob. You pack animals. You cast off your self into the mob, and think right and wrong can be cast off as well. This is your choice. If you think it’s worth killing hundreds of innocent people so you’ll have a better shot to live a few days longer, stay here with him. If you believe in God, if you believe in decency, and that there’s anything in the human heart more important than how many beats it has left, then come with me.”
Every little couple, family, or group seemed in intense deliberation.
“This is the time to decide,” Adam said, “What do you stand for?”
He slowly began walking down the aisle to the open door at the bottom. Others stood in their seats as if to follow, and then, here and there some did: individuals, couples, and families.
Of those that stayed, some watched the ones leaving, others turned away, or hid their families from watching.
A man yelled for his wife. She was in tears, walking awkwardly down the aisle, as others scrunched themselves up to let her pass. The man called for her, exasperated.
“You’re wrong!” she shouted back. “You were always wrong!”
In the hall in front of the Theater, Adam gathered over forty people. They spoke very little, each consumed with the events moving their lives.
“I know a place we’ll be far from here,” Adam said.
They followed him up the dark stairs, up, up, so many flights of stairs, to the Sky Deck, then along that open space to the structure at the very edge of the ship, the solarium tower adjoined to the blasted bridge. Up one more flight there, they found the glass-enclosed hall dark under the cloudy sky.
“We’ll stay here,” Adam said.
“But what will we eat?” someone said.
“We’ll talk with the group in the Atrium. They’ll get the food back. There are still much more of them in the Atrium.”
“But he’s got a gun!”
“There aren’t so many of them now, most of them left in the lifeboats!”
“I thought we left them so we wouldn’t be fighting over food. What did we leave for?”
“Go back then!” Adam snapped. “Do you think things will be easier with those scorpions? Golding was right- at least one of the groups will die. But who has any reason to guess which it will be? Or whether, in the end, they won’t all die? Who wants to stake their soul on it? Look out there!”
He pointed out the glass walls at the black sea and sky.
“This is what God has given us. Uncharted waters. We thought we understood the earth. Our own arrogance. We do not understand our own bodies, even. We think that, because such-and-such has never occurred before that it won’t occur. But the world can die in a day. Every day of existence is uncharted territory. Every civilization on earth has a flood story. None of them saw it coming- there is no special warning that you live in momentous times.”
He was so strong and full of energy, it seemed the fight with Lee Golding and the long walk up had only woken his full power. Then his voice dropped- the energy he projected was still there, but it was suddenly controlled very tightly.
“Let’s capture this moment. Let’s all remember how it feels to be this scared, this desperate, this far from human society.”
They slept there. In the morning, when the sky became a lighter grey, but still before the sun could be seen, Adam took two others and went down to the Atrium.
37
The next morning Corrina walked down to
the Atrium for breakfast with Darren, Travis and Gerry.
It was early; many in the lounge were yet asleep. Corrina knew before she made it down the stairs that something was new and bad. Though more isolated than on previous occasions, there were again the sounds of wailing and crying on the floor, the unhappy sounds carrying over the general tumult of angry voices from the still sparse early morning crowd.
There were no breakfast tables.
She stood off by herself with just Darren, holding his hand. No one in the crowd knew anything. There was no point speaking with anyone. She waited, a few children and mothers cried, voices argued. Then there was a different noise level from one end of the Atrium, and the crowd parted, and Hesse came through the crowd and stood up on his dais. Behind him, standing on the floor but still standing out, was the giant of a man Corrina had seen before, the one who had accompanied the gunman from the Theater.
The big bearded man alone seemed the same after those weeks.
“I’ve been waiting for enough people to get here before announcing it,” Hesse began. “The galley was raided last night. The group from the Theater beat and tied up our guards and took most of the meats and breads...most everything. Lee Golding led them. The big guy with the gun. The same one that shot at some of you when you were trying to get out in the lifeboats. Now we still have some food! I’m sure that’s the first thing that’s on everyone’s minds. We won’t starve. We have food still, and we’re catching fish. But it’s going to be tough.
“The other thing,” he continued quickly. “We now have an antagonistic force on board with us. We’re going to have to deal with that.”
In the sliver of a pause between Hesse’s sentences, someone yelled out, “Who’s that guy? He was with Golding before.”
“This is Adam Melville. He wouldn’t go along with the raid. He and some others left the Theater. They thought they’d better not come down here, all of them, in the middle of the night, so they’re settled in another section, the solarium upstairs.”
“Who’s going to feed them?”
“We are,” Hesse said.
The noise of the crowd was silenced by the sharpness of Hesse’s continuation.
“But we’re going to find a way to get that food back. We outnumber them probably three to one. I’ll be talking with the Colonel about this. We will be getting control of the food back. I also want everyone to know that we’ve had progress with the electrical work that’s being done. The back-up power is stabilized now where we need it most. They think there’s a chance we’ll get satellite communications going.”
Several people yelled at once. “What’s taking them so long?” was heard.
“The radio room was destroyed. You know that. They had to scavenge equipment and build from scratch down in the power room. Look, our engineering people are not even experts with this kind of gear, and they’re trying to figure it out as they go. They’ve already gotten us the power needed to live. They’ll get us in touch with the world. We have a group in the galley now going through what we have left of the food. The team up there will have something down shortly. I’ll pass on more info as we get a better grasp of the situation.”
Corrina was surprised there had been no more questions. She couldn't think of any herself. It was just another twist of fate that had been brought on them, and against which they were powerless.
She remembered the bus ride from Charleston when she was seventeen. She had run away from home and school with Sasha, holding hands on the bus bench, looking out the window as the country rolled by along the I-95. She was terrified. Everything was open to her, and there was neither shelter nor guardian for whatever waited in the whole wide world. She remembered Sasha crying as they left the state, but Corrina never stopped smiling until they stepped off the bus in Chinatown in Manhattan. She never was so excited again. However scary life was, it was hers to create.
Now, she was one of the helpless. She looked over the strange and familiar faces amid the gold pillars of the Grand Atrium.
38
Travis Cooke sat in Hesse’s office with Colonel Warrant, the engineer Brenda White, and the refugee from the Royal Theater, Adam Melville. Adam Melville had two others with him, a man and a woman from his group, who waited outside.
Travis was not really sure why John Hesse always seemed to involve him in things. Perhaps it was his experience in emergency work. Maybe there was a trust built from fighting the first galley raid together, or of familiarity from that long ago meeting on the rugby pitch. Hesse just seemed to lean on him. Travis was both proud that Hesse had picked him out of the hundreds there as a kind of confidante and glad to have the opportunity to be involved, to actually have a say in how things were handled, and the chance to do things himself and to know they were being done right. He was also happy to have had the chance to speak now and then with Warrant and Brenda White, and Hesse of course, to gain the confidence that he had that these deputies did things right too. No matter how bad things were, Travis felt, you’re always better off with competent people.
“We can cut their power,” Colonel Warrant said. “We can kill the galley, cut their lights.”
“We have to go right past the Theater to cut their power,” Brenda said. “They’ll be watching. There’s that gun.”
Everywhere they argued, there was that gun. Yes, and there’s mine, Travis thought. Something kept him from telling of his gun. It was a key fact, and it was his alone right now. He wasn’t ready to tell it yet.
“Why did we ever set up their power?” Brenda Wright said. “If we’d just said no, there would be no Theater group now. We could have gotten the satellite going, we could have told them there’s a lunatic with a goddam machine gun!”
“It’s not a machine gun,” Colonel Warrant said. “It’s an automatic rifle. You’ve been working on the satellite for almost two weeks now and we haven’t gotten anywhere.”
“I told you it needs time,” Brenda said. “Sometimes you need to trust people who actually know what they’re talking about!”
“Sister, calm down,” Colonel Warrant said. “You’ve done good work, don’t take things so personally.”
“Calm down!” Brenda shouted. She stood. “Calm down! They have all our food. The tank is almost empty. The basins are almost empty. We don’t know what we’ll be drinking tomorrow. Jesus, what did we need a colonel in charge for? Were we hoping for a war?”
Brenda fell back down in her chair and heaved a great sigh.
Adam Melville offered to tell them what he knew of the vicinity around the Theater, and the layout between there and the Theater’s galley.
“Forget that,” Colonel Warrant said, “we know every inch of this damn ship by now. The question I have is, are you and your folks going to help us if we have to overpower them.”
“No,” Adam said.
“So you left those with the most food for the least people, to come live off us, who have the least food for the most people, and now you won’t contribute to our cause?” Colonel Warrant said.
“Colonel,” Adam answered, “We left them because we weren’t going to kill others to save ourselves. Why would we leave those that already had the advantage to come to you, only to now do the same thing? We wouldn’t fight you before. We won’t fight them now. Golding is a bad one. But there’s a lot of others in the Theater who are just trying to stay alive, and however your plan works out, there’s going to be people hurt. And it all may not make any difference. I don’t know whether we’re going to live or die, but I know there’s higher stakes. And remember something else: what you have left in that kitchen is not your food to give. It’s all our food. And if you don’t see it that way, you are Golding.”
There was quiet, and Travis could see, among this small group, that some could respect that answer and some couldn’t.
“Would you be a messenger?” Hesse asked. “A go between to see if they’ll share the food, like we did with them?”
“What good will that do?” the Col
onel said. “We can’t trust them, and we can’t leave ourselves at their mercy.”
“We can learn,” Hesse said. “We can find out how they’re guarded, maybe how their galley is guarded. We can even figure out a way to know where the gun is- if the gun is busy in the Theater, maybe we can overpower whoever is in the galley. For God’s sake Colonel, I don’t want to walk into gunfire. Maybe we can get some scraps of food, enough for breathing room, while we figure out how to take them on.”
“I’ll do it,” Travis said.
Adam never indicated whether he wanted the job, whether he would have taken the job. He simply nodded in acknowledgment that the job was Travis’s.
Brenda spoke then about the electrical systems.
“The power is stable, but I don’t know that I can get any of my men back to work with that gunman on the loose. The power room and the communication equipment are beyond the Theater, and with the compartments sealed off, there’s just not that much choice in how to get down there. Even if we could get to the power room, the wiring to the Theater is shared with ours until right below the Theater. If we wanted to cut them off, that seems a dangerous place to be mucking about with a flashlight and wire cutters. Plus, we’d wind up thawing the food in their galley.”
“Goddamnit, why did they put everything we need in the stern?” Colonel Warrant said.
Brenda looked right at Hesse and continued.
“On the other hand, if I did get in there, I could start a fire right under them.”
“We were lucky to get the fires under control once,” Hesse said. “We’d be suicidal to start one on purpose. Even if we wanted to kill them all.”
He paused and they all were stopped on that thought, that it had come to that thought.
“Most of their doors are permanently shut since the pirate attack,” the Colonel said. “We need to know which doors are in use, and how they’re guarded. If we could shut them in-“
“Then what?” Hesse said. “We starve them? Sooner or later they’ll make a way out.”