“Who’s going to feed them?”

“We are,” Hesse said.

The noise of the crowd was silenced by the sharpness of Hesse’s continuation.

“But we’re going to find a way to get that food back. We outnumber them probably three to one. I’ll be talking with the Colonel about this. We will be getting control of the food back. I also want everyone to know that we’ve had progress with the electrical work that’s being done. The back-up power is stabilized now where we need it most. They think there’s a chance we’ll get satellite communications going.”

Several people yelled at once. “What’s taking them so long?” was heard.

“The radio room was destroyed. You know that. They had to scavenge equipment and build from scratch down in the power room. Look, our engineering people are not even experts with this kind of gear, and they’re trying to figure it out as they go. They’ve already gotten us the power needed to live. They’ll get us in touch with the world. We have a group in the galley now going through what we have left of the food. The team up there will have something down shortly. I’ll pass on more info as we get a better grasp of the situation.”

Corrina was surprised there had been no more questions. She couldn't think of any herself. It was just another twist of fate that had been brought on them, and against which they were powerless.

She remembered the bus ride from Charleston when she was seventeen. She had run away from home and school with Sasha, holding hands on the bus bench, looking out the window as the country rolled by along the I-95. She was terrified. Everything was open to her, and there was neither shelter nor guardian for whatever waited in the whole wide world. She remembered Sasha crying as they left the state, but Corrina never stopped smiling until they stepped off the bus in Chinatown in Manhattan. She never was so excited again. However scary life was, it was hers to create.

Now, she was one of the helpless. She looked over the strange and familiar faces amid the gold pillars of the Grand Atrium.

38

Travis Cooke sat in Hesse’s office with Colonel Warrant, the engineer Brenda White, and the refugee from the Royal Theater, Adam Melville. Adam Melville had two others with him, a man and a woman from his group, who waited outside.

Travis was not really sure why John Hesse always seemed to involve him in things. Perhaps it was his experience in emergency work. Maybe there was a trust built from fighting the first galley raid together, or of familiarity from that long ago meeting on the rugby pitch. Hesse just seemed to lean on him. Travis was both proud that Hesse had picked him out of the hundreds there as a kind of confidante and glad to have the opportunity to be involved, to actually have a say in how things were handled, and the chance to do things himself and to know they were being done right. He was also happy to have had the chance to speak now and then with Warrant and Brenda White, and Hesse of course, to gain the confidence that he had that these deputies did things right too. No matter how bad things were, Travis felt, you’re always better off with competent people.

“We can cut their power,” Colonel Warrant said. “We can kill the galley, cut their lights.”

“We have to go right past the Theater to cut their power,” Brenda said. “They’ll be watching. There’s that gun.”

Everywhere they argued, there was that gun. Yes, and there’s mine, Travis thought. Something kept him from telling of his gun. It was a key fact, and it was his alone right now. He wasn’t ready to tell it yet.

“Why did we ever set up their power?” Brenda Wright said. “If we’d just said no, there would be no Theater group now. We could have gotten the satellite going, we could have told them there’s a lunatic with a goddam machine gun!”

“It’s not a machine gun,” Colonel Warrant said. “It’s an automatic rifle. You’ve been working on the satellite for almost two weeks now and we haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“I told you it needs time,” Brenda said. “Sometimes you need to trust people who actually know what they’re talking about!”

“Sister, calm down,” Colonel Warrant said. “You’ve done good work, don’t take things so personally.”

“Calm down!” Brenda shouted. She stood. “Calm down! They have all our food. The tank is almost empty. The basins are almost empty. We don’t know what we’ll be drinking tomorrow. Jesus, what did we need a colonel in charge for? Were we hoping for a war?”

Brenda fell back down in her chair and heaved a great sigh.

Adam Melville offered to tell them what he knew of the vicinity around the Theater, and the layout between there and the Theater’s galley.

“Forget that,” Colonel Warrant said, “we know every inch of this damn ship by now. The question I have is, are you and your folks going to help us if we have to overpower them.”

“No,” Adam said.

“So you left those with the most food for the least people, to come live off us, who have the least food for the most people, and now you won’t contribute to our cause?” Colonel Warrant said.

“Colonel,” Adam answered, “We left them because we weren’t going to kill others to save ourselves. Why would we leave those that already had the advantage to come to you, only to now do the same thing? We wouldn’t fight you before. We won’t fight them now. Golding is a bad one. But there’s a lot of others in the Theater who are just trying to stay alive, and however your plan works out, there’s going to be people hurt. And it all may not make any difference. I don’t know whether we’re going to live or die, but I know there’s higher stakes. And remember something else: what you have left in that kitchen is not your food to give. It’s all our food. And if you don’t see it that way, you are Golding.”

There was quiet, and Travis could see, among this small group, that some could respect that answer and some couldn’t.

“Would you be a messenger?” Hesse asked. “A go between to see if they’ll share the food, like we did with them?”

“What good will that do?” the Colonel said. “We can’t trust them, and we can’t leave ourselves at their mercy.”

“We can learn,” Hesse said. “We can find out how they’re guarded, maybe how their galley is guarded. We can even figure out a way to know where the gun is- if the gun is busy in the Theater, maybe we can overpower whoever is in the galley. For God’s sake Colonel, I don’t want to walk into gunfire. Maybe we can get some scraps of food, enough for breathing room, while we figure out how to take them on.”

“I’ll do it,” Travis said.

Adam never indicated whether he wanted the job, whether he would have taken the job. He simply nodded in acknowledgment that the job was Travis’s.

Brenda spoke then about the electrical systems.

“The power is stable, but I don’t know that I can get any of my men back to work with that gunman on the loose. The power room and the communication equipment are beyond the Theater, and with the compartments sealed off, there’s just not that much choice in how to get down there. Even if we could get to the power room, the wiring to the Theater is shared with ours until right below the Theater. If we wanted to cut them off, that seems a dangerous place to be mucking about with a flashlight and wire cutters. Plus, we’d wind up thawing the food in their galley.”

“Goddamnit, why did they put everything we need in the stern?” Colonel Warrant said.

Brenda looked right at Hesse and continued.

“On the other hand, if I did get in there, I could start a fire right under them.”

“We were lucky to get the fires under control once,” Hesse said. “We’d be suicidal to start one on purpose. Even if we wanted to kill them all.”

He paused and they all were stopped on that thought, that it had come to that thought.