“I’m making a quiche,” Travis said, “Could I borrow a cup of milk?”

Lee Golding laughed, Rick laughed, the other two men laughed. Finally Travis chuckled.

“Hey, you never wanna lose your sense of humor, am I right?” Rick said. “I knew I liked you. Seriously, Lee, we oughta adopt this guy, he’s good people.”

“Seriously,” Travis said, “we’ll starve.”

“Seriously,” Lee said, “I don’t give a shit, and I’m not adopting you. But I appreciate the levity. These are hard times.”

“It’s gonna get a lot harder,” Travis said, “when all those people in the Atrium and the cabins get hungry enough, and you’re stuck here in one little room on a boat, with one gun.”

“It’s an M16 buddy,” Lee Golding said. “So you just pick which few dozen volunteers want to get shot first, and then bring it on. By the time you cowards are hungry enough to fight, you’ll be too hungry to fight. This is a defensible situation we got.”

“Yeah?” Travis said, “We’ve got a goddamn Army colonel, and an electrical engineer who has the whole ship figured out.”

Lee went into the Mighty mode, with his full stage voice and face: “It ain’t helped you so far!”

“Yeah,” Travis roared back in a spot on impersonation, his eyes just as big and angry as Lee’s, his voice as bombastic and self-important, emphasizing and slowing odd syllables. “And think how safe you’ll feel with a thousand enemies outside your walls with no options but killing! And you’re here touching up your goatee!”

“Is this how you ask for milk?” Lee said. “What the hell? You risked getting shot just to come here and tell me I’m not well liked?”

He turned to Rick and grabbed the gun from his hand, Rick letting it go like it was hot. Lee lifted the rifle, switched the safety, cocked it and checked the chamber for a round. He held it to Travis’s face, nonchalantly with one hand. Travis stared up the barrel, down the arm to Lee. He studied the wrestler’s face and saw in it some kind of question. Lee didn’t know what to do. Travis turned to Rick and saw that the small man seemed drugged, coked up. His face was flush; Travis could see his neck throbbing with his pulse. On Rick’s face was written: DO IT!

“How many rounds you got left?” Travis asked.

Lee lowered the gun, and then handed it back to Rick who had the unmistakable look of disappointment, of adrenaline unused.

The Alabama Assassin’s hands came up more quickly than Travis could have imagined, crossing each other to grab the sides of Travis’s head just as Lee’s body spun and dropped, and Travis’s head came down fast and hard over the big man’s shoulder. Travis’s limp body bounced up and back to the ground.

Travis lay absolutely still on the floor, his arms and legs flayed in snow angel form.

“Oh yeah” Lee Golding shouted. He made a V and wagged his tongue at Travis through it. “Golding gonna getcha!”

Rick stood over Travis’s head and focused his cell phone camera.

“Cheeeeese.”

41

A snake coiled across his dreamscape and looked at him.

“Smile,” the snake said.

The snake opened its mouth and swallowed him.

Travis woke on the jogging track up at the Resort Deck. They’d carried him a long way, he thought. It was still daylight, barely. His head pounded, his jaw felt like it was broken in pieces. He lay still staring at the grey sky, a cold drizzle in his face, returning to the reality of where he was. He rose and in doing so saw a measuring cup on the deck next to him. It was filled with milk. He lifted it and smelled it.

It smelled a bit off, but it was white and swirled in the cup like milk. He drank. It wasn’t too sour. It spilled down the jaw line, off his chin, and then he felt something lumpy and slimy go down his throat. He dropped the cup and ran to the railing and vomited. The milk was gone quickly and then he shook and convulsed as his stomach tried to force up stuff that wasn’t there.

Lights came on and off in twinkles orbiting his face.

42

Jessica Golding had her own dressing room, the only individual dressing room. The star’s room. Well, they had been booked first class after all. Lee didn’t stay there too often. He didn’t like being cut off, not knowing what went on beyond the walls. Lee was her eyes and ears, he told her everything.

Her husband had always been a strong man, but she had never seen him so intense, so self-assured. He had the gun. He’d killed the pirate. Most importantly, he’d been the one to decide that it was lunacy for everyone to die. He had turned this Theater into a haven.

He was her eyes and ears, and her hand in action. He was doing everything to protect her, damn any other casualty. She looked at herself in the mirror. If you die here, you deserve to die here, she thought.

She had never been beautiful, but there was something very alive in her that had made her attractive. She had long blonde hair that was frazzled and dead looking. On this ship, she had long since run out of, and anyway lost interest in, hair spray. The lines around her eyes and her mouth, the open skin pores of her cheeks, were no longer masked under makeup. They now defined her face. Her lips were still full and red, her eyes still intense.

She’d once cultivated flirting relationships with other men as a way of controlling Lee, but that had been lost to her since the flood. She had control of Lee now; that was undoubted.

Years gone by now, she had learned of an affair of Lee’s with a fitness instructor at one of his gyms in Atlanta. It had been bold and offensive, carried out in front of mutual acquaintances in addition to Lee’s business partners. The insult was so great her sister had implored her to end their marriage. She had not.

Lee’s actions had been so blatant, like a child flaunting authority, that ending their relationship seemed no victory to her. Using the incident to increase her own control over her husband was fitting and just. Her husband was a strong man, and that made the victory all the greater. She loved him more since she’d flipped their power structure.

He came in to the dressing room with the gun. She knew he had a guard at the door, one at the end of their hall, and another at the back entrance, which led to the backstage area. They owned the Theater and the restaurant. But the halls and stairs in between were no-man’s land. It was a nerve-wracking thing having only one gun with so many places to be, but what mattered most, in the end, was themselves. So Lee erred on the side of holding the gun if he was unsure.

He collapsed on the small couch. Since the war started, he’d been throwing himself down in exhaustion. She could see new lines in his face and knew his nerves were getting to him. That gun weighed heavy in his hand, and she knew, as she put her hands on him, that he was her hand but she was the blood that coursed through it. He was her muscle, but she was his strength.

She curled up with him. He took the couch all up himself, and she nearly had to sit on him. The gun was standing upright in the cushion behind his right shoulder. He put his huge hands around her thin neck and began to rub her shoulders.

“You look stressed,” she said.

“Nah,” he said.

This was his sanctuary. She was his sanctuary. But still she held herself stiff in his hands. The big hands were not at all gentle, working harder to soften her out. They hurt, but still she showed no sign, and he rubbed deeper. He was distracted.

“What happened?”

“They sent an ambassador,” Lee said. “They’re begging.”

“They couldn’t be that stupid to think after all this we’d just share.”

“I’m telling you,” Lee said. “The guy went up to the kitchen to beg for scraps.”

“What did you do?”

“I knocked him out. With the Mighty Head Mash, baby!” Lee laughed.