by David Sachs
Then the door was opened and closed. He ran for it, and for a second time the door held him fast. He heard the screaming behind him. The fire had reached the Theater and it was spreading. Travis went at the door with his body. He gave it everything, and the door moved just a hair and Travis knew it had been blocked with something. The fire was filling the hall behind him. The screams had reached a new pitch from the Theater. Travis was burning. The smoke was trapped. He struggled breathing. His asthma took hold; his chest tightened. He held the door with one hand, the gun with the other and tried to stay on his feet.
The screaming behind him was hysterical now. Some were surely in the flames.
The door shook from the other side.
“Help,” Travis croaked and he wondered if he could be heard.
“Hold on, I’ll move this!”
He heard the clanging of heavy metal objects.
“She did it! She spread the fires!”
The door swung open and Travis tumbled out, into the hall. There was again a weak glow in the hall from the fire. The fire stretched from the backstage door across the hall to the stairwell Travis had seen it in originally, where the sentries had supposedly contained it. The fire doors were closed, and Travis wondered if White had caused a second fire.
“I saw her do it!” the man who had saved Travis yelled at him. He was one of the sentries.
He stood by a heavy bench, and a tumbled over statue.
“I tried to stop her, but there was a wall of fire. She screamed for Golding, and I had to hide.”
Travis tried to regain his balance, clear his mind. The man tried urgently to explain what he’d seen.
“She opened the fire door! She had gas or something and she spread the fire right into the Theater!”
Travis was bent over and could not see the man. He could hear the voice above him. His breathing was getting worse. He felt quickly sapped of strength, but his eyes slowly began to resolve images, and he made out the shape of the man standing over him
“Wait. Who are you?” the man said.
The man moved. Travis shot. The man screamed. He staggered back and fell to the floor on a section of wisping flames and glowing ash.
Travis staggered backwards. The man didn’t move. Travis’s breathing came again.
Travis fell to his side against a wall, listening to the screams in the Theater. Every once in a while they came closer as some made their attempt down the hallway, and then the pinnacle of horror as the blazing fire there penned them in.
Travis toppled as he tried to stand, then he tried again. He made it, in a crouch with his arms out for balance, like a drunken surfer. He slowly straightened his knees and gained his full height. He went looking for Lee Golding.
Back in the dark, Travis struggled upstairs quickly. The screams still came. He found the hall he wanted and turned towards the Theater rear exits. It was hot.
He heard their voices.
“I did it,” she said. “When I heard of the fires I knew it was our chance to be free, really free. I ran to the kitchen and got the cooking oil. I used it to spread the fire. It was dark. No one saw it. I came around and blocked the last door with a bench. Then I saved you, Lee, just you. I knew if you heard me screaming you’d be the first one out of there.”
There was a glow over them in the hallway, emanating from some small window at the back of the Theater. There was a racket like the world ending against the barricaded six double-doors. The two of them stood listening to the screams.
“We can’t just let them die,” Lee said.
“Why?” Jessica asked. “Why? Why? Why? Are they our children? Do we owe them anything?”
“I was protecting them,” Lee said.
“You were protecting us!” Jessica said. “What did you always say our weakness was? The gun could only be in one place at a time. Now we don’t need it anywhere but with us. Think about the food!”
Travis steadied himself to shoot. His breath was again constricted as smoke slowly filled the hall. His eyes clouded. He could not see them anymore. He panicked. What if they were approaching him even now? What if they were about to fire?
He was bent over, trying to steady himself against the wall. He fought for just enough breath to live at each moment. The screams never ceased, nor quieted in those minutes. It seemed like Hell.
He wanted to free them, but he knew Lee Golding stood there with his gun. He wanted to kill Lee Golding, but he could not stand or see or breathe.
He fell to the ground. In the cacophony from the Theater, Lee and Jessica did not hear it.
Somehow one voice came out above the others. It was Rick Dumas.
“HELP ME! LEE! I’M IN HERE! HELP ME!”
Travis’s eyes were shutting, two seconds, three seconds.
“I’M STILL IN HERE! LEE!”
Lee turned from the Theater and walked quickly into the dark. Jessica chased after him. The cellphone in his pocket buzzed for a text message. He knew who it was. He and Rick had learned they could send text messages directly to each other’s cell phone. It had seemed a great power at first, trying to guard the Theater and galley with one gun, but they’d found the communication range too limiting for that distance. He felt that phone buzz in his pocket and knew it was from the Theater.
The doors shook mightily but the barricades held them tight. Travis heard the screams in his nightmare. That’s how he knew they lasted so long. When he woke, everything was quiet. The fire was likely still burning in the Theater, but there weren’t any more people.
Travis made his way back through the darkness and twilight lighting to the Grand Atrium.
Most of those in the Theater died of smoke inhalation or from crushing under the panicked mob. Rick Dumas burned for his sins. The Theater fire doors held a long time so that the fire consumed everything within it.
57
All they had been through had been about Suffering. Adam didn’t take the voices during the sickness as authoritative. He knew it had been a madness. But it was a clue, and he studied on it until he knew it was the key. Suffering led to Jesus. It led to Revelations. It led to Job:
Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.
To Abraham, Genesis chapter 22, the sacrifice of Isaac. It led Adam Melville, in his mental frenzy, bible pages flipping quickly between his fingers, finally to Judas, Jesus’ betraying disciple, who suffered so much for his killing sin, as Adam suffered since killing the pirate. Matthew 27:5.
Adam’s followers were starved, weak, traumatized and insulated from the old world. They had only Adam to follow and they clung to his vision and hopes for them. They parted from each other just once more, each to find where they had left their wallets and purses. They came back to the restaurant and walked together out onto the Sunset Deck where they removed every piece, money, cards, pictures, phones, and threw them over the railings.
They returned to the solarium.
On a cruise ship, they had chairs and ladders and rope. The solarium had three metal tracks along its glass ceiling, through which rope could be looped.
“We have been chosen,” Adam said. “God reached into our lives and said, you need to be on the boat. You’ll be spared from the Flood, but you’ll be tested. We were attacked, so that we couldn’t return to the failed world. A gun was left, to bring violence among us. Count your days! God said. Know your lifetime.”
He stopped talking. He got up on his own chairs. He had two, as the chairs were small and might collapse or topple under his weight. The sun had come out at last; the clouds had parted like a curtain, revealing the great sun and the blue that had been hidden so long. Like Superman pulling open his shirt and jacket, the universe wasn’t really grey; that had been only a costume to hide the magic and majesty. The universe was revealed, anew.
All that life, all that strife, all that yelling and screaming, hoping and dreaming. What a ride! What an idiot’s ride his life had been. He laughed.
The others were
all up on their chairs.
Life was a greater joke still, God a more honest comedian than Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks or George Carlin. Adam had been so sure of himself all his life, the power of his mind and his form. He had believed in God, but he had only worshipped himself.
San Francisco, they’d danced naked in the park as the sun rose. He was so young, so full of energy and he felt so close to God. Perhaps that was the closest he had been to a prophet, to righteousness. Then came failed marriage, disillusionment, worship of money and technology and the power of man and mind. He had thought it was all a path, an honest consistency running from Golden Gate Park to Silicon Valley. Layers were being revealed to him now. He was learning more of his own life in these last few moments of it than he had in sixty-five years of living it. He knew there was something beautiful in it. He knew he had been special and blessed and it had guided him, off the path and back, to be here. Abraham had been asked to sacrifice his son. He felt hungry now to sacrifice himself to fill some place in God’s plan. He’d been born for this, run away from it, been led to it.
When he opened his eyes he had to squint from the sun. It felt so warm on his face, the first warmth in so many weeks.
“We didn’t have to wait to go to God. God came to us. God came a long way. Now he’s shut all our doors, and waits just out the window. We just have to take one step to meet him.”
Matthew 27:5.
And Judas cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.
He stepped off his chairs, knocking one of them over. There was a symphony of clanging chairs going over on the tile floor, and muted grunts. A chorus of fifty righteous, 1illful deaths.
58
The ship was aflame.
Brenda White returned before Travis could, and warned Hesse.
After the pirate attack, fires had been contained in fire-resistant sealed sections. That time there had been an organized response led by the Festival’s trained fire crew. They had now to organize something similar, with a half dead army. The indefatigable John Hesse had quickly put together a fire brigade, but they had been directed by Brenda’s understanding of the fire as emanating from her electrical sabotage a level below the Theater.
When Travis came back to the Atrium he felt like a bear returning from a winter in a cave. The sun had just come up, and the light in the Atrium made him squint. Travis noticed his clothes were splashed with new vomit and blood and he wondered from whom they came. He was a killer. He felt like he should tell someone.
He saw his son and ran to him. The boy watched his father across the great floor, fixed to his spot. Finally, when his father’s arms came to him and lifted him to his chest, the boy smiled. The mother watched and smiled too. She had been wasting away, draining out physically and emotionally. Her smile now was real and solid, on the face of a ghost. Her smile had been Travis’s favorite thing at one time. Seeing it now seemed a final gift.
Travis stayed in that embrace with Darren, shutting his eyes. He wished they could die this way. Finally he put his boy down to find Hesse.
Real sunlight made the Atrium beautiful again. The pillars and statues shone, the long drapes seemed bright and bold. Only the people, sick, coughing, lying down in filthy clothing, were still gray.
Travis found Hesse.
“They’re all dead,” Travis told him in the office.
Hesse took it in dumbly.
“That Golding, his wife set fire to the Theater. Locked them all in. They’re all dead, except Golding and his wife.”
How long they sat there, while the sun shone into the Atrium.
Finally Hesse said, “You couldn’t kill him?”
As if the story would change and there would be a better ending.
Hesse told Travis about the firefight. Travis shook his head. The firefighters were sent to the wrong level. Even if the fire from below had been contained in the stairwell, the Theater fire would have spread. He knew at least that backstage door of the Theater had been left open. The fire would have spread from the Theater.
They were quiet a while. Then it was Travis who brought them back to the ship, and what had to be done.
“He’ll be in the galley,” Travis said. “It’s the only place he can be, unless he wants to take whatever won’t rot and move off the grid. He thinks I was in the Theater. In the fire. He thinks he has the only gun on the ship again. But he’ll still be waiting. He’ll be in the galley and if he’s not he’ll have destroyed whatever food he couldn’t carry.”
“Do you have any bullets?”
“Three.”
“Give me the gun, I’m going to end this,” Hesse said.
“No,” Travis said. “Don’t ask again.”
They were in no rush to talk. The sun on their faces was an irresistible distraction. There were spaces between each communication.
“If he’s gone from the galley,” Travis said, “how will we find him? And what good will it do us?”
“If he’s gone from the galley, he’ll have food stashed. The perishables are irrelevant, there wasn’t much left. But he’ll have bread, flour, and clean water, and he’ll have it hidden somewhere. It doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter what it means, what it helps, if it gains us anything. We have to kill him.”
Travis agreed. Killing Golding was a need now. It gave meaning to their lives.
“I need some time with my family,” Travis said. “Let’s talk later.”
“Wait,” Hesse said. “Travis. How did we get here? What did we do wrong?”
“I don’t know. There’s only so much difference your choices can make when you don’t control anyone else’s. Maybe some games are built to lose.”
Travis left Hesse; Hesse went back into his office.
Back near the grand staircase, Travis rejoined Gerry, Corrina, Darren and Claude. Claude had said nothing on Travis’s return. Travis felt no animosity towards Claude. He was glad he was still around; still felt that it was more shelter for his son to have Claude there.
Gerry took Travis aside. They walked towards a closed off staircase. In privacy, Gerry said simply, “Any bullets?”
“Three.”
He handed Gerry the gun.
“Get it back fast, and with a bullet left,” Travis said. “I aim to put it in Golding.”
Gerry took the gun. This time he wouldn’t come back without firing it. He went up the stairs; Travis went back to his group.
It was a long walk to the solarium. Gerry was in no hurry. He stopped at the first of the exterior decks, and took in the sun. Was he a violent man? Claude had asked. Yes, he was. He had lied to Professor Claude. He had always been violent. He’d hated it, shamed for it, bellowed it, rode it and used it as a threat at various points in his life, but it had always been there. There could be no greater testimony to that beast inside him than the lengths he had gone through in his life to get beyond it. Poetry. Yet in poetry was passion and violence too. It was a false cover. His life had been shaped by violence.
“If I kill, let it be for love. But let me kill.”
He went back into the dark, ascending.
Professor Claude sat with Darren by his side, but felt a chasm between them.
“Flood myths are just about universal,” he told Darren. “Every culture, every religion has a story of a great flood that wiped away all the earth, all humanity. No one knows if these stories are based on facts, or whether there is some deep human urge or fear of this kind of idea: wiping out everybody, even all history, and starting fresh.”
“That’s what God should do,” Darren said.
He had no more power than the boy, the professor thought. Helpless, but to watch as whatever life had in store came right at them. He was a history professor and had at times imagined himself as a fly on the wall in some dramatic era; he’d wondered what it felt like to watch great events unfold, powerless over the direction of your own existence in the face of such forces. He was the same as the boy, now, tossed ab
out in the sea of history, at the mercy of fate or the actions of some small handful of men.
There were hundreds of them still on this boat, and there was this bond between them, one that stretched across eons of human life; the bystanders, the victims, of history. They were the mob that lived sometimes with the illusion that they controlled their own condition.
When Gerry came into the light it was into a forest of corpses, hanging from above, swaying ever so slightly. They already smelled.
Gerry stopped at the sight. The meaning of what had happened here was obvious, but so shocking, and so overwhelming, that Gerry’s brain simply stopped for a moment. Then he saw it again, and knew what had happened. He cursed their disdain for this life and this world.
He walked the rows. There was the mother. The boy in the red shirt was not there.
Perhaps he wasn’t so eager to meet his judge.
“Why”
The voice was so quiet Gerry imagined he’d imagined it. But it came again.
“Why”
It came like a breath. If there were a place for ghosts, Gerry thought, this was it. He stepped softly towards where he imagined the voice to have come from. A fly buzzed around his head. He parted the bodies like curtains.
At the end of the row, the enormous, bloated body of Adam Melville hung, the fingers flexed and open to the ground.
“Why” the bloated purple face said through lips that seemed not to move at all. Two flies buzzed around his head.
The body swayed just so. Adam Melville blinked.
59
Lee Golding’s galley was abandoned, not a trace of food was left, save the spills and splashes dried and scummy over the counters, floors and stoves.
In the days that followed, Hesse and Travis went together searching for him. Gerry again ventured to join them but Travis again chose to protect a father for his son.
The ship was large, even now, with more and more of it shut off to keep the fire at bay. They had always to tread quietly and with great care. It occurred to Travis that they were hunting a man with an automatic rifle, while they held one pistol with three bullets. It was suicidal. But he didn’t think of stopping. When Travis was home, Hesse was hunting, so the gun never was at rest. There were no more locked cabins on the ship then.