29

He couldn’t keep this up, Lee thought. He’d have no bullets left. He’d be left behind on this ship, and he’d have no bullets. He shot out another boat’s engine and davit mechanisms and moved on.

He fired again, single shots here and there, at the boats or davit mechanisms. Up the deck he walked, past each lifeboat, scattering the mobs but not waiting for them, trying to disable the boats as quickly as possible, hitting the engines, the hulls, the davit mechanisms, but bodies tumbled from the shots. There was the other side still. They’d still be evacuating. There were so many more boats, running off with the food. But he was too worried for bullets to keep trying to stop them. He’d stopped many but he couldn’t stop them all. He had to get out.

He knew he could never blend in with the crowd. He was too big, even in the dark, to mistake. He stormed through a gangway into an inner hall, his gun ready. He knew that just a short side hall separated him from the Grand Atrium and a whole bunch of people who would now want him dead more than each other.

He found a stairway and hurried towards the Theater. Up four levels, across the dark Penthouse Deck, and then back down a stairway astern of the closed compartment. He felt safe, insulated from the madness and violence left behind. His legs finally began to twist under him. He rested against the wall and caught his breath. Now the gun had been used, and violence was in play. He had only stopped a fraction of the lifeboats, a fraction of the stolen food. He thanked God he had the only gun.

The Theater was still dark when he arrived. He wondered how many here had left. He’d have to wait till morning to find out.

He broke the taboo against speaking in the overnights and shouted out.

“It’s over. Every lifeboat that didn’t get away already has been shot up. And so have a lot of them that tried to take food. Get some sleep, we don’t know what we’ll be facing tomorrow, but there’s going to be some angry, bleeding thieves out there.”

There was noise in the dark in reaction, quickly ebbing.

He found Jessica. They often slept in the dressing room, but they also had a place by the stage they’d made relatively private, and they stayed there sometimes when they were nervous of being cut off from anything. He lay down with her, and as the Theater returned to sleep, he couldn’t. He peered into the darkness, imagining shapes, black against black, and the only sound was the rain. The spectral shapes moved and he replayed the vision of thieves filling the lifeboats and saw himself shooting at them. He saw a woman hit by a bullet, falling in to one of the boats. Had he seen that? Or had he just imagined it?

When sleep finally came, its arrival seemed to slide right into its departure. He opened his eyes, and light was in the room through the small skylight, not a real sunlight, but a grey light, a shadow light, through the cloud and lighter rain.

It seemed most of his Theater group was still here; Jessica had disappeared.

He found his wife backstage in the dressing room.

“I shot them,” he said. “I don’t know how many.”

She was muted by the event. In the dark she stood and grabbed Lee and kissed him.

“Calm down,” she said. “Calm down. Lee, they asked for it.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. I might have saved all of us, who knows how many could have gotten away. But all them I stopped, how will we find their food? How will we ever get it back?”

“That’s not your problem,” Jessica said. “You stopped them. Get Hesse to clean up the mess.”

“How many of ours went?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessica said, “not many.”

“There were hundreds of them out there, maybe thousands,” Lee said.

“All from the Atrium,” Jessica said.

“Maybe it’s not too late for us,” Lee said. “I shot up the boats, but maybe we could find one that works. We could get some food and just get out of here.”

“Lee, think,” Jessica said. “Those lifeboats will never reach land. We’ll be floating with two armfuls of food. Which boat do you think will be found first? Here we have a huge kitchen and the gun. You did the right thing, Lee.”

Lee said, “I need to see Hesse. I’ll get Rick.”

Lee thought about bringing Adam, but while he could be sure of Rick’s support, he didn’t feel that way about Adam Melville anymore. Walking the long distance between the Theater and the Atrium, Rick and Lee could see what the night had done. They still passed individuals or small groups here and there, but they were not like people now. They were furtive and quick, like animals. They either knew what had happened, or what was worse, they knew only that something bad had happened but not what.

In the Atrium, some power had been already restored. Lee was struck by the quickness of the repair with all that went on that night. The emergency track lighting glowed in the dim dawn let in from the glass ceiling above. There were much fewer here than before. Fear and hatred appeared on faces here and there that recognized Lee, or his gun.

They found John Hesse. He was in his office, with two women. Hesse saw them through the window, his face grave. He waved Lee and Rick sharply to wait.

It was not long before the women wound up their business and left. Lee and Rick entered.

Hesse looked at them strangely. He was standing, they sat.

“They found a girl. Raped. Sixteen years old,” Hesse said.

Each let out an expression and then waited.

“In a bathroom,” Hesse said.

Lee and Rick sat motionless. Hesse stayed standing, by the counter.

“Well, what are you going to do?” Lee said.

“I don’t know,” Hesse said. “Last night, a lot of things went down. We have dead bodies, dead bodies, bleeding kids.”

Hesse stopped there to see Lee’s reaction. They stared at each other in silence. Finally, Lee spoke.

“I did what I had to do. And I have an M16 and you don’t.”

“Fine,” Hesse said. “You have an M16, and I don’t. So you can watch your own back. But with all this mess, here we are this morning, and everyone still has one ship to live on. So all I care about is how we survive from here. Now there’s this rape. Anybody who has a woman on board that they care about needs to worry about this.”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “So how are you going to deal with it? You couldn’t stop your own people from stealing food.”

“We need to find this guy,” Hesse said. “We’ll figure everything else out, but we can’t let this go. Those women, it’s one of their daughters. They’ve been staying here in the Atrium. She says the girl had never seen the guy before, so he’s probably from the Theater or in a stateroom. But she could describe him- and if he’s a refugee he’ll be in the same clothes.”

“So, the first step would be to check for someone like that in the Theater you’re thinking,” Lee said. “And you’re just offering a truce with me to get that.”

“I’m not at war with you,” Hesse said. “We don’t need more blood. We want to feed everyone, and get everyone off this boat. Those folks that stole food stole it from us too. We can still get back to normal, Golding. But everything falls apart if rapists are unpunished and everyone knows it.”

“Are you blind or stupid, Hesse? It’s already fallen apart. You’ve got people who tried to steal our food, and you’ll go right back to keeping them alive, but you’re mad at me for trying to stop them? Do you seriously want to sit here and waste time worrying about one girl? Wake up. We have thousands of lives hanging by a thread now. I let you have your little podium up there and let you get on with organizing and running things. Now look. The food's gone.”

“Not all of it,” Hesse said. “There’s quite a bit left, maybe a week’s worth, maybe more with the Italian leftovers. We don’t really know how many of us are left yet, or how much we can get back from what was stolen, so it’s hard to say exactly how long the food will last, but we’ve got a while yet.”