Lee thought a few things through on the walk. It had to be Hesse. Hesse slept in the Atrium, along with so many others. But Lee knew a habit. Lee knew where he took his fresh air. Lee had seen him once, and after one of his sentries had reported it too, Lee had followed up with some snooping. Hesse was on the port-side walking deck usually a couple times a day. Rain or shine, though there had not been much shine. So he had opportunity. Then, although the Colonel might be more dangerous, Hesse was clearly the leader. So if he wanted to make a statement, there was none bigger than Hesse. So he had motive.

Motive, opportunity… I must be the killer, Lee thought. Plus, he hated Hesse.

He thought of his championship matches. The grueling night his stardom began, the pain and sweat and that big finish, lifting the 400-pound Moondaba and slamming him through the table. His arm raised, with a separated shoulder, at the center of 70,000 screaming fans at the Houston Astrodome.

When he reached the Italian restaurant, where Rick Dumas waited, there were five other men there, with several more in sentry positions nearby. When they didn’t have the gun in the restaurant, they had some numbers at least. They also had a system: each next sentry was close enough to hear the one before him, all the way down to the Theater. So the gun was really always at hand.

Lee had his hand on Rick’s shoulder. He had resisted Rick’s forays into personal friendship for a long time, but at some point Lee found that Rick had earned his trust. Still, he kept Rick in his place. Lee did not have friends as equals.

“I’m going to make sure they stay scared,” Lee said. “Keep the sentry plan we’ve got, I won’t be long.”

“Why don’t I come with you?” Rick said. “You don’t want to bring Jessica into this. I can help.”

“There’s no extra danger in coming with me, hero,” Lee said. “If I go down, everyone here does too. Get some meat for dinner.”

Even in the battle for their lives, there was something in Lee’s words, the voice, that cut Rick. As if Lee were mocking him in front of all the sentries, the Theater, and his wife. He may not have been as strong as Lee, and sure, Lee was the leader and protector. But Rick was no coward, and Lee would have been dead a long time ago without his help.

51

After the incident with the spies, the Colonel rethought his assassination plan and decided he needed to improve the odds. Golding had a far more powerful weapon than he, but Warrant had two advantages:

Lee Golding didn’t know about his gun.

They controlled the electrical grid.

He would visit Brenda and arrange a new tactic: At midnight, Brenda would kill the power everywhere around the Theater. The galley, however, would be lit up. This wouldn’t require new work: they had secured power to all the galley circuits, only most were kept off to conserve energy. Brenda could turn those lights on.

Killing the other lights, in the Theater and hall, while leaving the galley powered would be a challenge, and possibly a dangerous one. Mostly, it would take time.

So Colonel Warrant didn’t wait, he went unarmed to get Brenda started.

Warrant had a route that he had considered safest in evading unwanted notice, but he was always on guard. There weren’t any safe routes to the aft of the ship. The lighting was dismal. Through the service corridors there was no emergency lighting, and only the low level lighting from the few stairwells broke the darkness. Warrant counted out those breaks.

As he passed one, a vision appeared in the space of the opening. Then the monster was upon him, a hand at his throat and three hundred pounds of body weight forcing him against the wall. Warrant knew who it was. He wondered why he hadn’t been shot. His hand went to Lee Golding’s face, but the bigger man pulled back and slammed him into the bulkhead a second time.

“Kill him!” he heard a woman’s voice whisper desperately.

Warrant couldn’t fight.  Lee Golding was on top of him, crushing his lungs. He felt how weak he was. He grasped and struck at the monster in the dark, but to no avail. The breath escaping his mouth he knew would not come back in. The blood coming up his throat, coughing out, was life leaving him. His body had rarely failed him before. His had been such an effective machine: a body always able to manage the tasks assigned to it, a body that could be trusted to perform. He knew he could not sustain the effort he needed. He’d been starved for weeks. Now he was dead.

Lee Golding sprung back to his feet from the body, his knees unsteady. He spun and landed against the wall. He could hear his breath echoing in the space. His breath. His life. The other one gone.

“I killed the Colonel,” Lee said. “I did it.”

The wall seemed to lean, like he was strapped to an almost upright operating table, moving through strange angles. He regained his balance and was loose in the space. He felt weightless, bouncing.

He didn’t know why he hadn’t shot him. It had happened so fast. They’d heard the Colonel and stopped in the stairwell. When he saw the Colonel, the Colonel turned, and he sprung at him. Instinct, again.

“How will they know?” Jessica asked.

“Jessica, I did it,” Lee said.

“I know, Lee. I know what you did. But how will they know? His people? What good is it if they don’t know? Lee – you’re hurting me.”

He saw he was squeezing her arms.

He wiped his hands on his pants and realized they were slick with blood.

52

Gerry lowered himself down a dark stairwell in a part of the ship he hadn’t been to in weeks. Funny that, they’d been here less than a month and he had routines, routes he took, places he stayed. Despite the relentless boredom, he no longer explored the ship. Now it was obviously wiser to stick to one’s territory, but even before the raid on the galley, when there was no war on the ship, he had found a rut.

He had the gun in his belt, in back. He knew how to use handguns. He was in a state of bloodlust. He wanted nothing more than to kill someone. In the dark stairwell, he could not stop from seeing the back of Corrina’s head, her face tucked into his shoulder.

She was shuddering as she spoke.

“He was young. He had a baby face. Big eyes, big lips. He had a red striped t-shirt and he smelled awful, like vomit.”

He wasn’t one of the Atrium crowd. He might be in a room, but most of them came out to the Atrium eventually. Gerry couldn’t remember a red striped t-shirt on a boy like that. There were three places where he’d most likely be.

The bar. Travis had told Claude about it, Claude had told Gerry. Gerry had seen a few guys over the weeks that took their own carts of food, obviously okayed by Hesse. So Gerry figured that’s where those guys went; the rest must just stay put and get the food brought to them.

Second would be the solarium. The Theater peace freaks. Gerry had asked around and learned where they were camped out.

Finally, the Theater. That would be the last place to try.

Gerry knew he was at the right deck from the stairwell. There was a smell here unlike anything else. Vile. Rotted. “He smelled awful, like vomit.”

There was light in the portholes along the hallway, and there was the bar. The stench was more intense yet as he approached the yawning entrance. It was quiet, but not silent. There was noise of movement. When Gerry came around the corner to see the full bar, he saw dead and living mixed at the tables. The flesh of the living, or moving, was as discolored and rotted as the dead. There were flies. He wondered where they came from. Life feeds on life, but it thrives on death.

There were medical vials and needles on some of the tables. Hard liquor bottles.