The screaming behind him was hysterical now. Some were surely in the flames.

The door shook from the other side.

“Help,” Travis croaked and he wondered if he could be heard.

“Hold on, I’ll move this!”

He heard the clanging of heavy metal objects.

“She did it! She spread the fires!”

The door swung open and Travis tumbled out, into the hall. There was again a weak glow in the hall from the fire. The fire stretched from the backstage door across the hall to the stairwell Travis had seen it in originally, where the sentries had supposedly contained it. The fire doors were closed, and Travis wondered if White had caused a second fire.

“I saw her do it!” the man who had saved Travis yelled at him. He was one of the sentries.

He stood by a heavy bench, and a tumbled over statue.

“I tried to stop her, but there was a wall of fire. She screamed for Golding, and I had to hide.”

Travis tried to regain his balance, clear his mind. The man tried urgently to explain what he’d seen.

“She opened the fire door! She had gas or something and she spread the fire right into the Theater!”

Travis was bent over and could not see the man. He could hear the voice above him. His breathing was getting worse. He felt quickly sapped of strength, but his eyes slowly began to resolve images, and he made out the shape of the man standing over him

“Wait. Who are you?” the man said.

The man moved. Travis shot. The man screamed. He staggered back and fell to the floor on a section of wisping flames and glowing ash.

Travis staggered backwards. The man didn’t move. Travis’s breathing came again.

Travis fell to his side against a wall, listening to the screams in the Theater. Every once in a while they came closer as some made their attempt down the hallway, and then the pinnacle of horror as the blazing fire there penned them in.

Travis toppled as he tried to stand, then he tried again. He made it, in a crouch with his arms out for balance, like a drunken surfer. He slowly straightened his knees and gained his full height. He went looking for Lee Golding.

Back in the dark, Travis struggled upstairs quickly. The screams still came. He found the hall he wanted and turned towards the Theater rear exits. It was hot.

He heard their voices.

“I did it,” she said. “When I heard of the fires I knew it was our chance to be free, really free. I ran to the kitchen and got the cooking oil. I used it to spread the fire. It was dark. No one saw it. I came around and blocked the last door with a bench. Then I saved you, Lee, just you. I knew if you heard me screaming you’d be the first one out of there.”

There was a glow over them in the hallway, emanating from some small window at the back of the Theater. There was a racket like the world ending against the barricaded six double-doors. The two of them stood listening to the screams.

“We can’t just let them die,” Lee said.

“Why?” Jessica asked. “Why? Why? Why? Are they our children? Do we owe them anything?”

“I was protecting them,” Lee said.

“You were protecting us!” Jessica said. “What did you always say our weakness was? The gun could only be in one place at a time. Now we don’t need it anywhere but with us. Think about the food!”

Travis steadied himself to shoot. His breath was again constricted as smoke slowly filled the hall. His eyes clouded. He could not see them anymore. He panicked. What if they were approaching him even now? What if they were about to fire?

He was bent over, trying to steady himself against the wall. He fought for just enough breath to live at each moment. The screams never ceased, nor quieted in those minutes. It seemed like Hell.

He wanted to free them, but he knew Lee Golding stood there with his gun. He wanted to kill Lee Golding, but he could not stand or see or breathe.

He fell to the ground. In the cacophony from the Theater, Lee and Jessica did not hear it.

Somehow one voice came out above the others. It was Rick Dumas.

“HELP ME! LEE! I’M IN HERE! HELP ME!”

Travis’s eyes were shutting, two seconds, three seconds.

“I’M STILL IN HERE! LEE!”

Lee turned from the Theater and walked quickly into the dark. Jessica chased after him. The cellphone in his pocket buzzed for a text message. He knew who it was. He and Rick had learned they could send text messages directly to each other’s cell phone. It had seemed a great power at first, trying to guard the Theater and galley with one gun, but they’d found the communication range too limiting for that distance. He felt that phone buzz in his pocket and knew it was from the Theater.

The doors shook mightily but the barricades held them tight. Travis heard the screams in his nightmare. That’s how he knew they lasted so long. When he woke, everything was quiet. The fire was likely still burning in the Theater, but there weren’t any more people.

Travis made his way back through the darkness and twilight lighting to the Grand Atrium.

Most of those in the Theater died of smoke inhalation or from crushing under the panicked mob. Rick Dumas burned for his sins. The Theater fire doors held a long time so that the fire consumed everything within it.

57

 

All they had been through had been about Suffering. Adam didn’t take the voices during the sickness as authoritative. He knew it had been a madness. But it was a clue, and he studied on it until he knew it was the key. Suffering led to Jesus. It led to Revelations. It led to Job:

Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.

To Abraham, Genesis chapter 22, the sacrifice of Isaac. It led Adam Melville, in his mental frenzy, bible pages flipping quickly between his fingers, finally to Judas, Jesus’ betraying disciple, who suffered so much for his killing sin, as Adam suffered since killing the pirate. Matthew 27:5.

Adam’s followers were starved, weak, traumatized and insulated from the old world. They had only Adam to follow and they clung to his vision and hopes for them. They parted from each other just once more, each to find where they had left their wallets and purses. They came back to the restaurant and walked together out onto the Sunset Deck where they removed every piece, money, cards, pictures, phones, and threw them over the railings.

They returned to the solarium.

On a cruise ship, they had chairs and ladders and rope. The solarium had three metal tracks along its glass ceiling, through which rope could be looped.

“We have been chosen,” Adam said. “God reached into our lives and said, you need to be on the boat. You’ll be spared from the Flood, but you’ll be tested. We were attacked, so that we couldn’t return to the failed world. A gun was left, to bring violence among us. Count your days! God said. Know your lifetime.”

He stopped talking. He got up on his own chairs. He had two, as the chairs were small and might collapse or topple under his weight. The sun had come out at last; the clouds had parted like a curtain, revealing the great sun and the blue that had been hidden so long. Like Superman pulling open his shirt and jacket, the universe wasn’t really grey; that had been only a costume to hide the magic and majesty. The universe was revealed, anew.

All that life, all that strife, all that yelling and screaming, hoping and dreaming. What a ride! What an idiot’s ride his life had been. He laughed.

The others were all up on their chairs.

Life was a greater joke still, God a more honest comedian than Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks or George Carlin. Adam had been so sure of himself all his life, the power of his mind and his form. He had believed in God, but he had only worshipped himself.