Travis had one bullet left. He fired and missed.
Lee kept coming. Out of a cloud of smoke came Adam Melville, behind the Mighty Lee Golding, chasing him down.
Adam knew he had to kill the Mighty Lee Golding. He was meant to. Through Lee Golding lay peace.
Adam closed on Lee Golding as though Lee were not running at all, and then tackled him around the shoulders. The two men went down.
Flames tore through the windows and doors from the ships interior.
“Get on!” Gerry shouted. “I’ve almost got the brake open!”
The crowd now getting on crushed them, and Corrina was pushed away.
The two giants came back to their feet, but Lee had lost the gun. Almost engulfed in flames, the two men wrestled. They fell back into the burning wall, and through it.
The fire roared in Lee’s ears, as he hit the ground. He was pinned, unable to move under Adam’s weight. He’d lost, and he heard nothing but cheering.
Flames crawled upon them. They burned in each other’s grasps but Adam’s spirit had left the body and its pain was harmless to him.
Hands and bodies struggling to get through pierced the open space in the lifeboat doorway. Travis’s arm holding Darren was trapped in with those bodies. Corrina was separated from them by other bodies.
With one arm holding Darren, Travis reached across the shoulder behind him to grab for Corrina.
Darren screamed for his mother.
Travis took her wrist and nearly snapped it as he struggled to pull her through the bodies behind him as he pushed through the bodies ahead of him, trying to get Darren through the door.
There was a shift in the Festival. Travis caught a glimpse of Gerry at the davit’s controls. An explosion roared above all other noise. The ship shuddered; the lifeboat jerked. Travis lost his grip on Corrina and fell back into the lifeboat with Darren, a flash of orange light in his eyes.
“Darren, I love you!” he heard Corrina scream.
The davit released with a loud clang, the cable let itself out and the lifeboat fell away; all aboard bounced weightless for a moment as they fell. Darren and Travis screamed out for Corrina.
The lifeboat dropped three decks, hitting the sea with tremendous weight, the bow cutting into the water first, so that the open door in the boat’s stern was highest. Still, water flooded in, then the boat’s dive stopped and it rose again, steady with an inch of water on the floor.
Travis came to his feet first. He found Darren quickly and snatched him to his chest.
Some on the lifeboat were injured from the fall and cried out. Travis ran to the lifeboat’s open door holding Darren. They looked out at the Festival, thirty feet away, looming high above them and filling their visions. It shifted, leaning further away from them. They could look up at the railings of the deck they had fallen from, but they saw only flames.
There was no sign of Corrina, no sign of Gerry. The world they’d lived on so long was crowned in flame.
They waited, and Travis watched for someone to come plunging into the water, but no one crossed the flames.
They stayed at the door watching, no one spoke. Others were at the windows. The Festival shifted again. Who knew how much time went by before it shifted a third time, toppling almost sideways.
Hours they watched. The sun ran its course and went away. They still had light, the ship still burned. No life ever emerged from the ship or the sea. The lifeboat was dead and had drifted already hundreds of feet.
Travis was never conscious of it happening, but he must have come inside with the boy and sat down, because the next thing he was aware of was waking up on one of the bench seats with Darren in his arms.
Darren had already been awake.
He was looking forward in the boat. Two men and the woman were still asleep. Near the bow was a teenage boy, with a baby face and a red-striped shirt. This was whom Darren watched.
Travis looked at Darren. Darren saw and nodded at his father.
Travis walked forward. The teenager looked up at him.
He said nothing until Travis was above him.
“What?” he said.
Travis grabbed him by the throat. He pulled him up and smashed his head into the window, which shuttered but did not crack. The others on the boat awoke. The boy grabbed Travis by the throat and each of them turned purple, starving of oxygen. Travis smashed the head again into the glass, and again. The boy did not let go of Travis’s throat. Travis pressed his thumbs tighter and came up onto the bench, over the boy. Somewhere in his mind he understood Darren was watching, and he felt some satisfaction that he could show Darren that he could fight for the family, that there was someone strong to protect him. The boy was pushed down into the seat then, and Travis was on top of him until he was dead.
He stumbled to crawl back off the bench and the body, then fell backwards into another seat. He regained his feet. He went to the body of the baby-faced boy and dragged him to the stern, and dropped him out the door.
The body drifted away slowly, so that they could see it for hours, just as they moved so slowly away from the ship.
By nightfall, the fire began to burn itself out. By daybreak the fire was gone, and the hump of the ship was in the distance, and the water around them was black and shiny with oil and fuel and littered with flotsam from the ship as far as they could see.
Travis held Darren and they mourned the loss of Corrina. As dehydrated as Travis was, he still had tears, and when they were gone, he just stared down into Darren’s eyes, and Darren stared up into his. The most beautiful girl in New York had loved him, and the pain of losing her again was incredible. It didn’t matter if there were a God, or karma or just a cold universe, it was cruel.
It was all so random! Here were just dozens alive out of thousands on that ship. And what qualities, what actions, what plans had determined who would be here? How were souls chosen, which to be born to live in those protected bubbles, and which to inherit the low ground?
After all that fear, pain and loss, Travis and Darren held each other and felt as lucky as they were sad. What was the nature of the world, that this felt lucky?
Travis remembered the night before the flood, when he’d taken all those sleeping pills. He wondered again if he had died, and this now was heaven, and everything else had been something he’d had to go through to get here. He hoped the real Darren might be sleeping in his bed, dreaming of his daddy.
Travis kissed Darren’s head until they fell asleep. The boy and their love for each other seemed like a beautiful, shimmering flower in a wasteland.
No one spoke on the lifeboat. They floated for days, and those on the boat slept mostly. Travis relived his life with Corrina, minute by minute. He was amazed at how powerfully his memories came together, how slowly he could play them out in each detail. He reimagined the first and last nights they made love and thanked God that they had connected one more time, and that she had died with no anger between them. What had his life been about, in the end, except that one relationship and the child of it?
Darren never spoke much. He didn’t seem withdrawn to Travis, but stoic and watching. He wasn’t broken, Travis thought, he was fixed. He’d witnessed everything that could be. If the goal was wisdom, Darren was the winner!
How did they manage, in other places, Travis wondered. How did they handle it?
At night Travis would wake Darren and share secrets with him.
67
A fishing boat discovered them.
The men came onto it guessing that these were some others who had been caught in the flood. As everyone had been.
“There’s one alive,” a man said.
He pulled Darren up. Darren woke and saw the men and said nothing. He was so weak.