There were hundreds of them still on this boat, and there was this bond between them, one that stretched across eons of human life; the bystanders, the victims, of history. They were the mob that lived sometimes with the illusion that they controlled their own condition.

When Gerry came into the light it was into a forest of corpses, hanging from above, swaying ever so slightly. They already smelled.

Gerry stopped at the sight. The meaning of what had happened here was obvious, but so shocking, and so overwhelming, that Gerry’s brain simply stopped for a moment. Then he saw it again, and knew what had happened. He cursed their disdain for this life and this world.

He walked the rows. There was the mother. The boy in the red shirt was not there.

Perhaps he wasn’t so eager to meet his judge.

“Why”

The voice was so quiet Gerry imagined he’d imagined it. But it came again.

“Why”

It came like a breath. If there were a place for ghosts, Gerry thought, this was it. He stepped softly towards where he imagined the voice to have come from. A fly buzzed around his head. He parted the bodies like curtains.

At the end of the row, the enormous, bloated body of Adam Melville hung, the fingers flexed and open to the ground.

“Why” the bloated purple face said through lips that seemed not to move at all. Two flies buzzed around his head.

The body swayed just so. Adam Melville blinked.

59

Lee Golding’s galley was abandoned, not a trace of food was left, save the spills and splashes dried and scummy over the counters, floors and stoves.

In the days that followed, Hesse and Travis went together searching for him. Gerry again ventured to join them but Travis again chose to protect a father for his son.

The ship was large, even now, with more and more of it shut off to keep the fire at bay. They had always to tread quietly and with great care. It occurred to Travis that they were hunting a man with an automatic rifle, while they held one pistol with three bullets. It was suicidal. But he didn’t think of stopping. When Travis was home, Hesse was hunting, so the gun never was at rest. There were no more locked cabins on the ship then.

They ate mostly fish, stretched in soup, bread and with rice.

On the second day, Travis explored some of the crew quarters that had not been flooded. In the living room there was a cell phone on a desk. It still had battery power. He turned it on. No signal. He scrolled through pictures. It showed a young woman, taking self-shots with friends in ports of call around the world. Home shots, with her parents and sister and dog.

Travis felt his knees go. He hadn’t slept in days. He steadied himself and went into the bedroom. There were two bunk beds. One of the beds was still perfectly made. It was like an artifact of another planet.

Travis lay down. I’ll just rest my eyes. I can hear the cabin door.

He remembered working in his dad’s shop at twelve years old, the year before they lost it, cleaning the basement store room and being so tired he took a nap on the boxes until his dad knocked his head to wake him.

He held the gun, pointed at the closed bedroom door. He closed his eyes.

He dreamt of the Festival, so that when wakefulness came it seemed like a dream. His body stayed asleep and he fell back into his dream.

He heard a crack. He shot up in bed. It was dark now in the room. The sun had set and though it was still daylight out the window, the room was shadowed.

He listened and heard nothing. He swung his legs down from the bed and came to his feet. He heard nothing. He waited, with his ear against the bedroom door. Nothing. He opened the door and looked out into the living area. The cabin door was still shut. He tiptoed across the floor, and listened at that door. This time he only paused a moment before opening the door and leaping into the hallway, his gun up, his head swiveling to take in both ways. The hallway was lit by the emergency tracks and empty as far as Travis could see, as the hall melted to darkness 30 feet in either direction.

Travis returned to his group. After the incident in the piano lounge, they had moved into an abandoned suite.

“How you doing, champ?” Travis said to Darren.

“I’m bored,” Darren said.

Travis’s head twitched at the answer.

“You want to go swimming with me later?” he whispered.

“Yeah,” Darren said.

“OK. I gotta go down to the Atrium to talk with John Hesse.”

“What do you talk about?” Darren asked.

Again, Travis was taken aback. Darren had not been asking such questions, had not been exhibiting interest or hope, since long before the rape.

“How to get us out of here,” Travis said.

“I want to go home,” Darren said.

Travis hugged him.

“Good, honey,” he said. “That’s really good. We all have to really want it to make it come true.”

Soon, Travis passed the gun to Hesse and returned. They never went swimming. Claude had taken a cabin on the same hall, but sat with Darren that night. The skies were clear and the night sky so bright that they opened the balcony door and looked out and the stars shone as if they were just out of reach.

“My favorite mythology is Vulcan,” Professor Claude said. “You know, Star Trek. Mister Spock’s people. Such a beautiful founding myth. The crowning glory of Vulcan culture is peace. Their legends tell that that peace grew out of the most violent of histories. But one Vulcan sect sacrificed their own blood to end the wars. Surak, the greatest of Spock’s ancestors, sent ambassadors for peace. They were killed. He sent more, and they were killed. But he didn’t give up; he didn’t stop. War is a perpetual motion machine, running on blood and always making more. Surak’s people sacrificed their blood for their enemies. Finally, the blood of the peaceful ran through the machine. The pump of violence lost its prime.”

“I wish we could beam off this ship,” Darren said.

“Well, it’s all make believe,” Claude said. “But it’s nice to imagine.”

60

The seas turned again, and the fish disappeared. Their hunger grew awful.

Each day another deck, room by room, Travis and Hesse read the remains of the ship itself: the infrastructure built by the ship’s company, the detritus of the tourists and survivors, and even the dead and the living that still existed throughout. Each day they’d return to the Atrium, where those that cared to continue living came for the poor nourishment that remained, and the fresh water of Brenda White’s rainwater supply. What was being eaten now would not have been food off the ship. The ventilation was out again, as were the toilets, and the air grew worse.

Death passed through the ship with a heavy hand. The last patients in the medical clinic weren’t getting better anymore, and Travis and the few nurses stopped taking new ones. There were no doctors, no morphine nor whiskey left for them as they wasted away.

Corrina never told Brenda what happened, never went back to the playroom. She slowly began to speak again around her family. She fought to recover that. She had tried, for days, not to exist, but she couldn’t. She and Darren had to exist for each other. She didn’t leave the new room, but she could exist there.

Vera died. The baby died.

Adam stuck to himself, mostly. The open wound all around his neck was in danger of infection, but no one was practicing medicine anymore. He hunted too, though what he looked for no one knew. His mind had broken into pieces again, and the voices returned. He wandered the ship, inside and out. He haunted the ship, and the people of the ship haunted him. The living were ghosts to him, and he walked past as though they could not harm him. Gerry wondered if he was somehow with his disciples after all. Gerry never saw the boy in the red shirt. He raged at himself. He had let the rapist go. Time went backwards, cause and effect inverted. He had let her get raped by not killing her rapist. The shame overwhelmed him so that he almost could not look at her.