“The monkey slept it off in my tent. Next thing you know, he’s my buddy. He hung around all the time. We quit drinking together, actually. We used to do tricks, for the kids. Stupid drunk monkey. I wonder whatever happened to old Lord Disco.”

Hesse laughed.

“Yeah, he was a good dancer,” Travis continued. “So that’s what I think of when the power goes out. Haiti and Lord Disco and my first experience as a surgeon.”

Hesse slapped Travis’s back.

“I like that,” he said.

“I have a ghost story too, if you like ghost stories,” Travis continued.

“Of course.”

Travis waited, letting Hesse’s laughter and smile dissipate, letting the silence back in. Then, in a quite different, darker voice he began.

“It was on a night just like this. Dark and stormy. The wind was fierce and the rain lashed the house.”

Their heads perked up as they heard the noise, a percussive sound. Like jungle drums, getting louder. Just as Travis realized what the noise was, the galley doors were flung open and a stampede of humans rushed in. They had flashlights, and lifejackets with blinking lights, and cameras flashing. Travis and Hesse were blinded by the lights in their faces and then swarmed. Travis was punched from the blackness around him, then again. Arms grasped around him and he was pulled down.

He heard a struggle around Hesse, and Hesse’s voice and others blowing out in exertion. He stopped struggling, hoping they would leave him, then he was punched again in the face and he fell to the ground and couldn’t move. They were taking the food. There were dozens of them. The feet pounded by him unendingly until his eyes shut and he went to sleep.

When he opened his eyes, they were all gone. Hesse was gone too. He got up in the dark and made for the door, feeling along the countertop, around the pantry, along the wall of cupboards. In his desperate hurry to get to his family, he fell several times in the dark, as the longest hallway returning to the piano lounge had no windows and no light at all. Once, he hit his head on a cracked open door and bled from the cut.

The rumors of a run on the lifeboats reached the piano bar just as Travis did. Groups were already huddling in conversation or hurrying towards the exits. The rain was hitting the glass walls so violently it felt like the room was shaking, like a stadium of fans thundering.

“What happened?” Darren said.

Travis was wet and disheveled. He had a bloody split lip from the brawl as well as the cut on his head. He looked exhausted. His chest heaved with his breath.

“I was with Hesse in the galley,” Travis began, speaking to Corrina, and to Claude who came upright in the lounge chair. “Some group rushed us and took food, now everyone’s rushing on the lifeboats.”

“What do we do?” Gerry said. “Do we go to the lifeboats?”

“Look at that storm,” Travis said.

They turned to the open glass walls. In the moonlight they saw shimmering sheets of rain, exploding in tiny millisecond white flashes on the windows. There was a decision to be made that their lives depended on, and the immediacy of it increased with each other group that ran out from the lounge into the hall towards the lower deck. The more that panicked, the more need to panic.

“You want to be in a lifeboat in that?” Corrina said.

“These are big boats,” Gerry said. “They’re meant for emergencies.”

“We could be hundreds of miles from shore,” Corrina said, “Do they have food?”

“They have everything,” Gerry said quickly. “Food, water, they’ve got an engine, we could get somewhere.”

“Which way would we even go?” Corrina said. “We’ve been drifting for weeks. What’s the range of those lifeboats? Have they got enough food and fuel to get us in?”

“They’ve got no range,” Travis said.

“How much longer will our food last on the ship?” Claude asked.

“We don’t know,” Travis said.

“How can you not know?” Gerry asked. “I thought Hesse had this down to a science.”

“I don’t know because people are stealing the damn food!” he said.

“God,” Corrina said. “Travis, we have to do it. Let’s go.”

Travis looked back out at the storm.

“You have a child here,” Corrina said. “Damn it Travis, we listened to you to get on this boat, but now it’s time to get off it.”

“Claude, what are you doing?” Gerry asked.

“Staying.”

“You think the food’ll last longer?” Gerry said.

“No,” he said. “But there’s more places here to hide.”

They were aware again of the action around them, some groups leaving, others huddling together, just watching. The groups made their decisions nakedly in front of each other.

Travis insisted on getting Vera. He sprinted to her stateroom, down the hall of the same deck. Within minutes he came back alone.

“She won’t go,” Travis said. “She just wants her comfort.”

“Amen,” Claude said, stretching out on the couch.

“Okay,” Travis said. “Goodbye.”

Professor Claude stood and gave them each a hug. There was a stiffness, they each thought the other was making a suicidal choice.

“Try not to catch a cold,” Claude said, smiling at Darren.

Down four interior flights of stairs to the lifeboat level, they rushed out into the rain, Travis carrying his boy.

It was difficult to see in the dark as the rain and wind stung their eyes. They stayed in a pack as they moved along the slippery deck to the nearest set of boats. Corrina fell and Gerry grabbed her and pulled her back to her feet before she hit ground. They soon saw the mad press of people trying to get into the lifeboats. The lifeboats were kept at deck level, so only the gates and doors had to be opened, still someone needed to lower the boats and Travis again wondered who were those people.

Travis had seen the posted pictograms for lowering the lifeboat and they were complicated. He hoped there would be a crewmember in his group.

The boats had capacity for 150, but there were hundreds at the doors of the first one, and who knew how many already inside. It was the pier all over again, but this time no police, no crowd control. Just the animal crowd. In the dark, in the rain, individuality was lost. All that could be seen was a live mass, a giant organism struggling for its survival. Gerry led them around the back of the crowd, past one, two, three lifeboats.

Then there was a scene. Neither the tourists nor the refugees had had any chance for an evacuation drill, but there were still enough crew on board to lead the proceedings. As Travis and his group came around the back of the third lifeboat mob, towards the railing where there was a gap in the crowd, they could see well over the side of the ship. Some kind of soft chute led from the deck down several flights to four inflated rafts below.

The chutes were spinning and swaying with activity, and they could hear screams from the rafts as evacuees landed on each other, or missed the rafts entirely.

They couldn’t hear the splashes over the wind and rain, but they saw the men and women waving up out of the water, swimming out in the dark at the life rafts, or waving back up at the ship for help.

Again, they avoided the mob at the raft-chutes. By the fourth of the huge lifeboats the crowds seemed smaller, by the fifth they thought they had a chance to get in.

You were all in, or you were out. Travis held Darren tight to his chest, Corrina and Gerry pressed their bodies against his back, and they became a part of the living mass. Pushing, and soon being pushed from behind. There was no movement it seemed at first; Travis could just make out the door through the rain, above the heads. Not the door, but the part of the living mass where it met and flowed into the fiberglass walls of the covered lifeboat.

Travis’s throat began to tighten, he felt a sudden swelling feeling, and then his chest tightened and tightened. It was an asthma attack; his breath came short and sharp.