“And how is it you have power back and we don’t?” Lee said.

Hesse rolled his eyes.

“Our engineer and her men were up all night getting the generators running again. And guess what? They’d blown because of the circuit powering the Theater. So they had to disconnect it to get power back here.”

“Who are you to decide who gets power? It’s pitch black in there at night.”

“Look, we have thousands of people getting their food or living here.”

“You had thousands, looks like a lot fewer now. Guess you didn’t really inspire a lot of faith did you?” Rick said.

The Mighty Lee Golding stood.

“I trusted you,” Lee continued. “All our lives in your hands. I said, when I first came down here, he’s got things under control, he’s already got things going on. So I let it stand. This is the result. From now on, I call the shots.”

He leaned over the counter, his gun hanging behind him. Hesse could have gone for him then, and grappled with Lee before he could get his gun in hand. Lee hoped he’d try.

“No,” Hesse said. “No one here’d put up with that, not the Colonel, not the staff, not the people out there.”

“They’d put up with it if I killed you.”

Lee pulled back and grasped the gun by his side, holding it underarm, not lifting it to aim at Hesse but threatening with it.

“If you kill me,” Hesse said, “they’ll kill you.”

“Who?” Rick said.

“Anyone,” Hesse said. “We all know what you did last night. No one will make anything of it because last night a lot of things happened that we can’t do anything about now. But if you kill me you won’t have a moment’s rest on this ship. The moment you kill me, you’ll be marked. Someone will get you. We’ll get power back to the Theater. It’s still a safe place to use as a hub. Trust me. No one wants to see you here in the Atrium again.”

Lee laughed.

“Are you for real?” Lee said. “You threatening me to stay away? You stay away from the Theater. If I see you, I’ll kill you, and I guarantee no one there will be bent on vengeance. Get our power back, or I’ll be back. Send the food, or I’ll be back. And I’ll know if you’re shorting us, I’ll have eyes in here checking your rations. You got anything to say to me, send someone else to say it or bring me down. I’m telling you, stay away from the Theater. I don’t like you.”

30

In the morning, as they had every morning, the groups from the piano lounge went down to the Atrium for breakfast, joining a steady stream of tourists and squatters from the staterooms.

The crowd was significantly smaller than it had been. There was coffee. The food was late.

Hesse came up onto the counter top.

“I think you all know something about last night. There was a lot of food taken. There were people hurt. All the lifeboats are either gone or shot up. I’ll get into that in a second but first I know you are all wondering about the food.”

The longer he spoke, the more he regained his strength.

“We’re going to be fine,” he continued. “We need to stick together. We’re going to have to cut down the rations again, but we can still last well more than a week, eating decently. We’ll have two meals a day now, skipping lunch. The portions, like I say, will be a little smaller. If we have to change again in a few days, we will, but I think everyone should still be getting enough now. The food’s just going to be a little late today.”

“What about the guy with the gun?” someone said.

“He’s from the Theater,” Hesse said. “He went to save our food. He’s just like everybody else. He just wants to survive. Last night some of us went a little crazy. It isn’t going to do any good now to try and figure out who did what last night. We all know it didn’t go well for anyone. If everyone just trusts each other, and no one tries to steal our food, there won’t be any more violence.”

Hesse looked slowly over the crowd.

“The professional wrestler with the gun just wants to survive,” Claude said. “Like that’s not a scary motivation, right?”

He fixed a look at Travis. “What would YOU have done if you’d had a gun last night?”

Travis was stunned. Did Claude know? It was impossible. But why hadn’t he taken his gun last night, after all? What would he have done with it? Would they be on a lifeboat right now? What would he have done with the stolen food?

“That guy’s bad news,” Gerry said. “Have you spoken with Hesse about him?”

“No,” Travis said.

Would he use his gun? Travis wondered. Would he trust it to another’s judgment or was it his choice alone to make?

His whole life he’d wondered how to live right. He tried, but it was like chasing a phantom. Working hard meant being less of a dad. His emergency work abroad meant being less of a husband. He never really felt like he knew how to live right, but he tried.

He’d wonder if he really was good, or just acting at it.

Now, again, he wanted to do right. He wanted to help. He didn’t know how.

“I know some of you tried to get away last night,” Hesse said. “I know some of you tried to steal food, and I know some of you were there in the galley when I was attacked. But there is no way we can survive if we don’t turn the page on last night. There are no more working lifeboats, so our only option is to work together to live here until we’re rescued.”

“How are we going to get off this ship?” someone yelled at Hesse.

“We just have to be patient- there’s no doubt that, eventually, there will be rescue efforts. After the flooding in Indonesia, there were sweeps of the ocean within days. It’s obviously been a major catastrophe, but eventually, people are going to come looking for the thousands and thousands who will be lost at sea.”

“Man is smoking crack,” Professor Claude said. “Indonesia, it was the rich countries helping. Who helps when the rich countries get it?”

“The other thing,” Hesse continued, "is we think we can get the communications system working. We have some good people who know what they’re doing and we think that’ll be ready sooner rather than later.”

“What’s taking so long?” someone said.

“For one thing,” Hesse said, “the satellite dish was structurally damaged. It’s taking some time to get that in working condition. The rest of it is electronics, and I can’t tell you what’s involved. It’ll take what it takes. They’ve only been working on it a few days. The first priority has always been getting more power and redirecting it where we needed it to survive. We couldn’t do both things at once.”

The food came at last, but it was slower in coming than in days before. It was another hour before Travis’s group ate. A half-cup of scrambled eggs, a thumb of sausage, a small slice of melon. It wasn’t so bad, Travis thought. Some of the chefs must have stayed.

Rumors of what had occurred in the night filtered in to the Theater as well. Men and women went in and out of the Theater freely, and the events of the night had spread across the ship.

When Lee came back from the Atrium, he was something beyond a leader and protector of the group. He was a force.

There were no announcements here. There were no arguments.

Adam watched Lee sitting up on the edge of the stage, talking with his wife and Rick Dumas. He felt sick and went for fresh air.

He liked being outside on the ship and took a circuitous path around the Sky Deck before returning to the Theater. A strong wind blew through his long hair. It was cold and dark though it was the middle of the day; the ocean was steel grey, kicked up into large swells. The storm was preparing to return. We haven’t things bad enough, he thought. He looked up at the great spotlight and followed it as high to the heavens as he could make it out.

As Adam came back in from the fresh air he was struck by the smell of the ship. The consequences from the toilet overflows over a week ago, thousands of unwashed live bodies and dead bodies left to sit too long, the poorly managed porta-johns, and a dead HVAC system. The air was heavy. It made him queasy.