“He knows about the gun now. We need to flush him out. We’ll cut his power. He’ll be out, and you’ll hear him in the dark. He won’t even be able to see you.”

“If he’s in the dressing room, he’ll go out the back, he’s got sentries right there, he’ll think its safe. I’ll wait there, around the corner. You get to Brenda and tell her what to do.”

Hesse turned away from Travis. Travis slipped through the crowd, which had tightened around them. Hesse climbed on to his speech-bar.

“We’re going to have to fight,” Hesse said. “We only have a few days food left, and we can’t just let him kill us as he pleases.”

He didn’t want to tell them about Travis and the gun, but they needed to begin preparing in case Travis failed.

The crowd was shouting back at him.

“He didn’t kill one of us, he killed one of you.”

“We have to fight!” Hesse said. “We have no food. And what if he finds our communications work? We could be in touch with the world in a few days.”

“Why don’t we just wait then?”

The crowd overtook Hesse, arguing over fighting now or waiting for satellite communications. Hesse let it play for a minute. When the level and frequency of shots slacked, he spoke.

“We can’t wait for someone to save us. Every day we wait, we get weaker. Every day, he will be working to improve his own defenses.”

“What do we do, Hesse?”

“We need to get ready to fight. Golding has spies. We caught one. But because he has spies, we can’t just openly talk about our plans.”

“THIS ONE IS! THIS ONE IS A SPY! THIS ONE IS A SPY FOR THEM!”

“What?”

Heads turned to look. The Atrium was considerably sparser of bodies than when Hesse had first climbed the bar weeks ago, so that he could easily see the speaker, and the man he was pointing at. He knew both men. Both had families.

The man being pointed out squirmed and looked around.

“I followed him! I saw him go to the Theater, talk to the sentries, then Golding. I followed him a second time and the sentries let him right in!”

The man ran, but was summarily grabbed in a number of hands and arms.

“Please! I just needed food for my family! My son is sick!”

He was enveloped in blows. More tried to join than could get into the space around the man.

“NO!” Hesse yelled.

He ran into the human shell around the man.

“Please no! NOOOO! Albert! Albert!” a woman cried.

“DADDY! DADDY!”

Travis came in after Hesse.

“Stop! For God’s sake STOP!”

With each man, their peeling him off the scrum seemed to break the spell and their resistance dropped.

Albert was dead.

Hesse was stunned for a moment. He then grabbed two of the men who stood over the body still.

“Get his body out of here!”

Travis staggered. At once he understood what had happened: they had killed a father for sacrificing the group for his family. Something that they all would do themselves, to one degree or another. But you couldn’t make that play and fail. The violence of the group awaited.

“There’s nobody out there!”

On one of the open staircases electrical engineer Brenda White shouted at the group.

“Sorry everybody! Didn’t mean to get your hopes up! No one home! No answering machine!”

The Atrium wail. It had become part of life.

Brenda stumbled like a drunk down the stairs. Her husband and girls came to her and hugged her.

Brenda White straightened up and found her way to John Hesse with her family trailing and grabbing at her.

“It’s time to use my powers for evil,” Brenda said.

“We’ve got a job for you,” Hesse said.

56

 

Travis Cooke kneeled by his son.

“I gotta go, buddy, but I’ll be back soon. You just remember Daddy loves you.”

He was going to kill a man, or be killed. There were still hours before sun-up, and he was going to kill him this night, just as they’d intended with Colonel Warrant. Brenda White had been sent to her work, to disable the power in the Theater.

He remembered playing basketball with the Mighty Lee Golding, the thrill of teamwork with that larger-than-life man. If things had been different, they would probably have been friends. Only the situation revealed what Golding really was. He wondered about what friendship could mean: in a different place, a different story, you’d be trying to kill each other.

Travis stood and looked at Corrina. She met his eyes for the first time since the rape. She was sad for him.

With one look back he captured his son’s face in his mind and went away holding it there. Gerry and Claude Bettman walked by his shoulders, up a dark set of stairs.

“What were you doing with the gun, Gerry?” Claude asked. “If Travis found it, and Warrant was going to use it, why were you carrying it?”

“It’s a phallic extension, Professor,” Gerry said. “It makes me feel confident.”

“Huh. You’re funny, Gerry,” Claude said. “You’re a terrible shot. That man is 350 pounds, standing broadside and you couldn’t get him.”

“Yeah,” Gerry said.

“You a killer?”

“I always thought of myself as a man of peace,” Gerry said. “I’m not rash, I’m pretty patient and calm. Even keeled.”

“But you lose your temper sometimes.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see our friend here as a man of violence,” Professor Claude said. “In fact, I think he’s very poorly cast for this role.”

“I’m not looking for any critic’s awards,” Travis said.

“You know what kind of movie this is? A tragedy. And on this Ship of a Thousand Wrongs, you’re making the mistake of this whole cruise,” the Professor said. “Golding doesn’t want to fight. You’re bringing the Reaper closer for everyone, not farther away. You have a son back there, and you’re walking alone into a machine gun and three hundred haters. What is the matter with you? Look we’ve had a lot of yucks these last few weeks, but you’re going to orphan your kid.”

“Shut up, Claude,” Travis said.

“Or what? You’ll shoot me? Having a gun doesn’t make you the hero, partner. This is not the movie you think it is. This is the one where a boy’s mom gets raped, then his dad gets killed.”

Travis grabbed Claude by the shoulders of his jacket and rammed him into the wall. The jacket tore, the two of them tumbled down the stairs, to a landing.

Claude and Travis disentangled from each other and stood quickly.

“I’m the one trying to protect Darren, not you,” Claude said. “Go ahead and kill yourself.”

Claude started down the stairs and Travis started up.

“The unbearable lightness of Darkness,” Gerry said, walking a step below Travis.

“I’d rather go alone from here,” Travis said.

“I’m going with you, Travis,” Gerry said. “I can’t let you go in there alone.”

“We’ve got one gun. An extra set of hands isn’t going to help. I need to be small, get in, and get out.”

“You’re not going alone,” Gerry said.

“No. Gerry, if I don’t make it back, Darren will need you.”

Step. Step. Step. The breath of the men was their only communication.

“I’ll take care of your son,” Gerry said. “And I’ll take care of Corrina.”

“I trust you,” Travis said. “You’re a good man.”

“The other day Claude and I went to check the lifeboats,” Gerry said. “One of them needed some repairs, but we can start it now, and the davit isn’t too bent. And there’s another one, the boat won’t start but it seems seaworthy and I think we can get the davit to work. We’d just drift. But we’ll be off this boat. I wanted to talk with you about it before, but I didn’t know how we’d get any food. Now, I think anything’s better than staying on this boat.”

Travis nodded in the dark.