Silently, they gathered what they could. Travis used his jacket to fashion a sack, holding the bottom band out and flipped up with one arm. He added a few smaller items to his pants pockets and folded some into his elbows and arms.
They were out again. Carrying as much as they were, they could not move so delicately and quietly returning in the darkness, but they met no disaster until the last door revealed the sunlit deck.
The few remaining boats were so damaged, it seemed impossible one could still function. When Travis saw the one Claude stopped at, it seemed the more unlikely. The davits were badly bent, and bullet holes dotted the bow.
“It’ll work,” Claude said. “Why aren’t they here yet?”
Claude opened the door and stepped up and in. He dropped his load of food and water and sat at the controls. He turned a key, and Travis saw the navigation lights switch on. The motor started with a cough as Claude tested that too for just a second before turning it off. Travis heard a mechanical clang, and the davits shook. Claude came back to the door.
“Why aren’t they here yet?" he said.
Travis took of his jacket and wrapped it tight as a bundle around his food and drink. The sound of gunfire answered Claude’s question. One shot, then two more. There was no screaming that could penetrate the distance from the Atrium, but Claude and Travis imagined they heard it anyways.
“We’ve got to go back for them,” Travis said. He had already slipped several steps from the lifeboat.
“We’re not going back into that,” Claude said.
“I can’t leave Darren,” Travis said.
“I can,” Claude said.
He slammed the door shut.
Travis knew his last chance was going in that boat and he leapt back to the davit, searching for a way to stop it. There was a loud clang and the davit shook. The boat dropped, but for one moment, Travis saw Claude through the window. They’d known each other thirty days, they’d seen each other every day for those thirty days, they’d seen intimately how each lived and thought and acted under the greatest pressure.
Their eyes connected, an intense final examination, and Claude was gone.
There was another gunshot and Travis’s turned away without hesitation and ran back towards the Atrium, leaping several lounge chairs as he sprinted. His Darren, his Corrina; he would leave this body lifeless before he would leave them.
He raced up the walking deck. The real screams sounded in his ears as he got closer.
65
Adam saw Jessica Golding and Rick Dumas sometimes. He knew they were ghosts, and that he was in a state between worlds and could consequently see everything.
He walked through staterooms, looking for things.
Sometimes while he walked forward he walked backwards through time. He was in No Time, and everything could happen around him at the same time as all of history in the flesh and blood world.
He walked through jungles, across tundra, above mountain ranges, and watched gods and spirits, heroes and villains, and the spirits drifted in the air all about him, eagles, snakes, bears, jaguars, apes, wolves and spiders, and monsters that never roamed the Earth, but he couldn’t ask them the Why that haunted him, Why he had not been allowed to go to God with the others.
He was immortal. Worse, he was immortal in all time and had to see everyone suffer.
He knew the ship was ablaze, but he didn’t only walk on the ship, he walked through Rome as it burned.
He found himself in the ship’s casino, as Jesus flipped the gambling tables.
Then the voices in his head all came together in a chorus, and he was called.
66
“Don’t move,” Travis could hear Lee Golding’s voice above the screaming. “You move, I’ll kill you.”
Travis chose a closed stairway so that he could look in at the Atrium from a hidden position.
Amid the massive wood and gold columns, the cowering groups of survivors, the dead fountains and flower boxes, he couldn’t see his family, nor could he see Lee. He saw that an always-open hallway was now shut off by a double fire door and he knew the fire had reached this refuge.
Then John Hesse came into sight. He walked like a titan through the refugees crouched along the floor. Lee Golding came to meet him. They were by the bar Hesse had made his first speech from. Near them was the marble statue of the great fish, diving into the water. Everything around it had deteriorated, while that statue was as Travis had first seen it.
“Where’s Cooke?” Lee Golding said.
“I don’t know,” Hesse said.
Lee Golding pointed the gun at Hesse’s middle.
Travis aimed and fired first. The Mighty Lee Golding shuddered. He spun sideways. Hesse jumped on him, as Travis ran from the stairs and others came to their feet.
The second gunshot echoed in the cavernous Atrium. The back exploded clean out of John Hesse and he fell over, against the statue, bleeding out.
Hesse’s cloak of invulnerability had sheltered everyone to some extent. John Hesse had been a man of magic, made of something different than other men, something other than flesh. The flesh was destroyed and the magic was gone. Everyone stopped at the moment Hesse was killed, as though the ship itself was expected to fall in on them.
Hesse’s life flashed before Travis’s eyes in one beat of his heart: memories of that incredible athlete on the rugby field, saving that little girl when the pirates attacked, hopping on that bar and getting everyone to come together, organizing the medical teams, meetings in his art shop office, asking Travis to clean up the suicides, hunting Golding. Travis knew nothing of Hesse’ life off the boat, but felt the contour of it: a life knowing how to behave, how to be happy. The life Travis had always wanted.
With Travis’s next heartbeat, Lee Golding was back on his feet.
He lifted the rifle, steadied it with his left hand and fired at Travis, but he was hurt by Travis’s shot, and the gun went off awkwardly. Travis had already crossed the Atrium to his family.
With an enormous noise, a roofed section of the Atrium near the double doors came down. Smoke filled the chamber and Travis lost sight of Lee as all were on their feet now. Travis grabbed his family and they ran with the crowd to the exits to the exterior promenade. A stairway came loose and tottered, and then just fell to pieces in the air, raining down slabs of metal and wood. He had seen Brenda White and her family below the stairway. Now, Travis could not see the people screaming in the cloud of smoke and debris.
Travis and his group came out the door and onto the deck, and now no one was sure which way to run at all.
“The boat’s gone,” Travis told Gerry, “Bettman’s gone.”
“Follow me,” Gerry said. “We can lower the other one.”
Fire had reached so many parts of the ship that people scrambled to escape each dead end. In the open of the deck, it was chaos. Survivors filled random disabled lifeboats, or crowded the railings waiting to jump.
Gerry led them to the one lifeboat he had found earlier that still might let them off the ship, and Travis found his jacket-food bundle where he’d left it and returned quickly to the others. One davit was bent, so one end of the boat tilted precariously. The boat looked so broken that others ignored it for the moment, sprinting past as Gerry opened the door. He came back to the davit.
“Get on,” Gerry said. “I have to open the brakes here.”
“How will you get on?” Travis said.
“I’ll have to jump, it’s the only way,” Gerry said.
“No!” Corrina cried.
“I can do it! Just get Darren on the boat now!”
The fire now was prominent everywhere they could look.
Gunfire sounded and Travis saw Lee Golding far down the deck running at them. The gun was on automatic now. Travis scooped Darren up and held him at his shoulder, by the door. Now, others saw Lee cutting them off and they turned and pushed past Travis to get on the lifeboat.