“That’s the truth!” the Professor said. “And I imagine if I put money down right now that things were going to get worse before they get better, neither of you gentleman would pick up that bet.”

“Well, your money’s no good here, Darkness,” Gerry said.

Travis laughed, the spell broken.

“You’re a pretty funny guy, Gerry,” Claude said. “But you’re still only a rebound husband.”

That night, Travis lay on the carpet in the piano lounge, his son sleeping above him on the plush curving bench of the booth. He had nightmares again.

In the morning, Travis felt haunted from the night’s chores. At the Atrium, he saw Doctor Joel Conrad waiting for food. He looked awful, his skin was a bad color and his eyes were bloodshot.

Before Travis could approach him, there was a scream.

“FISH!” a man shouted.

They all turned to see a group of men on the stairs, smiling all.

“FISH!” the man screamed again. He held a basket teaming with headless fish.

“We’ve got nets full of clean fish,” the man yelled. “We’ll eat well tonight! We’ll need a few more volunteers so any of you good with knives, please come by the kitchen after breakfast… if you’re not too busy.”

There was a cheer from the crowd, and Travis saw Hesse cheering too.  It had a sharp effect. Travis felt it in himself and knew everyone around him felt it. He guessed that they couldn’t possibly catch enough fish to feed everyone, but the ticking clock in their galley would slow down, at least.

It was good news, so rare, it thrilled them.

“Have you been back to see the baby?” Joel Conrad said, coming next to Travis.

“No,” Travis said.

“Pneumonia,” the doctor said. “She could hardly breathe last night. I put her on antibiotics. I’ve been to see her this morning and she already seems a bit stronger. She was able to feed again, at least.”

Travis felt sick himself at this news. Did God have to do this too?

The ghastly doctor grabbed Travis’s arm. His grip was still strong.

“We delivered that girl,” the doctor said. “Death will have to tear her from my hands.”

Travis smiled. It was good to see fight left in the good guys.

36

Lee and Rick spent days sounding out the crowd in the Theater. People were upset. There was anger at the Atrium for being in control when things went wrong. They were convinced that the other group was giving them the short end of the stick. It was a suspicion that had grown and fed on itself each day and each incident, seeded here and there by Rick and his wife, who loved to talk.

Soon, it became impossible to imagine that they weren’t treated as an unwanted burden on the main group, bound to get secondary service in all cases; in food, in use of the electrical power, fresh water, in any kind of warning or communications on anything going on- like the lifeboat panic. If they weren’t being sacrificed yet, they would be soon, they were sure of that.

Since the run on the lifeboats, Rick and Lee’s talks had pushed more and more of their group to that attitude. There was a growing desperation that whatever chance they’d had before the run on the lifeboats was greatly diminished. For days, Rick and Lee listened. They judged their peers, what types of ideas they had.

When they began organizing, first Lee and Rick confirmed those they guessed would follow them easily. Then they picked from that pool the ones to draft. Lee avoided Adam in his recruitment. Adam had led a few more prayer sessions, at random intervals. It bothered Lee that he didn’t at least go somewhere that everyone didn’t have to watch. Lee didn’t trust Adam anymore. He was angry too, like Adam had ruined what could have been a great friendship.

Lee and Rick took thirteen men and seven women to raid the central galley.  No one else was told.

There was great excitement about the enterprise.

At last, they were doing something. They had taken upon themselves the action to save their group.

They went at night, when the dinner cleanup in the galley would be over, and there would be only the two guards.

It was very dark. They crossed over the sealed section on the open Sky Deck, in pairs, to avoid alarm if anyone were out for a stroll. They reunited in an unlit service stairwell as soon as they were beyond the sealed section. They went slowly and quietly, along corridors less traveled. The ship's main Aquarium Restaurant was spread over two decks, with the lower floor opening to the Grand Atrium. The galley and food storage was below the restaurant, one deck below the Atrium.

Outside the galley, they went terribly slowly. Lee and another man were in front. Lee walked out of the darkness, and could see into the open door of the galley. He walked in. There were two guards, in a set of rooms barely lit by emergency lamps, with many shadows.

“Get on the floor,” Lee said. He didn’t even hold up the gun hanging from his shoulder, but the guards saw it.

They lay on the ground. The man behind Lee signaled for the others to come in. Some had rope, and they went to tying up the guards.

“What are you doing?” one guard said.

“We’re saving ourselves,” Rick said.

“Are you going to make us starve?”

“Get them in the closet,” Lee said.

The two men were stuffed in a storage room, their mouths taped to keep them quiet.

None of the raiders were familiar with the galley, so the work was slow. The facility was massive, and not all visible at once. There was a lot to take in. They found that one side of the galley had been emptied out, and everything that was left was consolidated on the other side.

They worked in pairs, looking for food cupboards and storage areas, and through each refrigerator and freezer. Rick darted between each group as they made a basic accounting of what they had found.

He grabbed Lee.

“There’s not much,” Rick said.

“Everything we can carry,” Lee said.

They began arranging trolley carts, throwing on enormous hunks of meat in freeze-dried plastic packaging. There were cheeses and sacks of potatoes and vegetables. They took flour, pasta, eggs, milk, buns, and sauces. There were a lot of condiments. They found metal trays full of the fish catch, filleted and frozen.

Eleven carts went back, slowly through the halls in the dark, much more so being carried up seven flights of stairs before running astern on the Sky Deck, and carrying them back down to the Italian galley. The first flights of stairs took them under two minutes each. The last few, five minutes or more, with carts dropped and picked back up, food falling and being found and restacked by the light of cellphones.

They left two of their team behind, to pack the frozen foods in the Italian restaurant’s freezer.

On their return, the galley raiders sent a scout first to ensure that nobody had noticed their activity. So it went, as they brought three trips of food down to the little galley near the Theater. What was left then in the main galley was not much, but they still argued over going back a fourth time. They were exhausted, wearing through even the adrenaline of the night. Still, Rick, soaked through with sweat, wanted everything.

“If we leave them something,” Lee said, “they won’t attack, not right away. It’ll give us time to prepare defenses. This took way longer that I expected. If the next shift of guards gets up there and finds their friends tied up, in the galley, they’ll set a trap. Just be satisfied with what we got. We should’ve kidnapped one of those cooks though.”

They went downstairs, into the backstage entrance they normally used.

Lee stepped up to the Theater stage in the last dark before dawn. He called loudly for attention and began speaking. Only the track lighting along the aisle stairs was on at night, so that Lee could be just barely seen on stage.