Recommended by Kirkus ReviewsFor those that escaped the Flood, the nightmare is just beginning.
For three years, Travis Cooke has dreamed of reuniting his family, but not like this.
When the Flood hit, America’s East Coast was evacuated by every means possible, by air, land and sea.
Hours later, a cruise ship assisting in the rescue lies dead in the water: no power, no communications, and nowhere near enough food. Thousands of refugees on board, including Travis, his young son, the ex-wife he still loves, and her husband, find themselves alone in a big ocean.
As days pass, some wonder if all of them can live long enough for a rescue to come. With two guns aboard, some wonder how to improve their odds. Desperate to protect his family as the panic rises, Travis finds behind each door an unexpected new side to the Festival, but no way out. How far will a good man go to save the people he loves and has lost once before? How far would YOU go?
An electrifying debut novel that is thriller and mythic tragedy, and forces you into the minds and choices of people trapped.
You’ll remember where you were when the Flood hit.
And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:
1
A man leaned over a power auger, listening to the motor echo over the snow. Behind him, a fragile tent stood out on the wide white landscape. Inside the shelter, the two scientists examined ice samples. They searched for clues in a 65-million-year-old puzzle, the great die-off of dinosaurs and half the species on earth.
One day, the ground shook.
The table in the scientists’ shelter vibrated and slid towards the wall. The lamps swung from the roof. There was a booming noise from outside.
The world began to lean, until the table danced across to the opposite wall. Then the world flipped, the lights went out, and the sound of tearing filled the tumbling shelter.
They were the first to die.
2
It was a different world to wake to.
Travis Cooke was a paramedic and when he slept, coming off a long night shift, he still heard the ambulance siren in dreams. It confused him to be awakened by the noise. Sirens of all types, coming from all sides. His blurry eyes set on the bottle of sleeping pills and found their focus.
The clock on the nightstand said 7:15 a.m. He looked out the window and thought of zero hour. The streets of Brooklyn were filled with men, women and children running and cars almost at a standstill, horns honking in desperation. The end of the world. Terror. Terrorists, he thought.
Stressful and high-intensity events were his work. The reaction from his body should have been immediate. Instead, he was sluggish from the pills, uncoordinated. He fell from the bed. He thought of his son and ex-wife as he came to his feet. He turned on the TV as he began to dress. Before he could change the channel to the news station, he heard the president’s voice.
“…urge you to move inland…”
The picture came a moment after the sound. President Crawford was in an unfamiliar room. His seal was on the floor, and a flag stood next to the desk, but it was not the Oval Office.
“…as far as possible. This is a national emergency, an international emergency. The tsunami will be reaching Florida in under four hours, and will reach New York City by late this afternoon, before five o’clock, according to the best estimates we have right now. This will not be a survivable event. The National Guard will be directing transport airships to major hospitals. We ask all of those with cars to leave the coast immediately. We have asked that all transit companies, buses, trains, and airlines cancel all scheduled routes to assist in the evacuation process. We face a dark period in the next twenty-four hours.”
The pause seemed to last for hours. The president was saying something he knew would cause panic, possibly worldwide. That was the first thought that came to Travis.
“In other countries, tens of thousands may already have been killed. Only by acting quickly can we avoid losing hundreds of thousands.”
Travis tried phoning his ex-wife.
“The network is busy right now, please try again later.”
He grabbed his jacket.
Travis Cooke ran out of his apartment wondering if it would be the last time he’d see it.
3
Some felt safest in cars, others were headed for New Jersey by foot. The stampedes into each subway station that morning crushed dozens of the first New Yorkers to die.
Travis Cooke ran down broad Flatbush, the solid lanes of cars bounded by humans moving much more quickly on the sidewalks. He found himself funneled through the streets, all the current now flowing to the Manhattan Bridge. The strangers looked at each other as they ran, confirming that this was really happening.
From Brooklyn to Manhattan and from there to New Jersey, a solid sweep of cars and bodies. The strange hush of the movement punctuated by honking horns, kids crying, and random shouts. It was a nightmare marathon, all jarring for position. Travis saw individuals and small groups huddled in the crowd’s eddy spaces, sobbing, giving up already or simply unable to act.
There was a teenage girl he saw sitting on a bench, as if she were waiting for a bus. She stared at the rush of people. He thought about stopping.
At the Manhattan Bridge, the bottleneck of escapees impeded his progress. Bodies pressed into Travis’s, a hundred voices grunting, crying, shouting in his ears. His world shrunk to those bodies immediately around him. The drugs in his body still made him dizzy, but running straight was easy and his body was waking up quickly from the emotional and physical stress.
Crossing the river took close to ten minutes, then they poured out into the streets of Manhattan, across Chinatown, where buses filled up and forced their exit through crowds, horns honking. He ran up Chrystie to 2nd Ave, his feet heavy, sweat pouring from his temples. Everyone was running now in their own direction, to tunnels, bridges, trains, buses.
He ran uptown for twenty minutes, the tempo of his footfalls searing themselves into his mind, blocking out any thoughts of the equally frantic humans he passed by.
“Travis!” he heard, and he stopped to look around.
His eyes couldn’t focus on the shape approaching him. He tried to squint, but the sweat dripped and burned, making him shut his eyes. He felt his knees trembling with weakness and he leaned over, hyperventilating.
A hand was on his shoulder.
“Travis, where are you going?”
The voice was one he hadn’t heard in a while, a drinking buddy from midtown days.
“Corrina and Darren,” Travis managed.
“Travis, listen to me.”
The hand held him more firmly then or he would have fallen over.
“Get cross-town to the piers. They’re bringing in every goddamn ship on the sea to get people out. I just spoke with someone at Grand Central and it’s no use. They’ll be running trains out till we’re under water and they won’t get all those people out. But I got my cell phone, I was able to get on the Internet. The bridges and tunnels are jammed. People have started abandoning their cars, and they’re blocking everything. The president has mobilized the Navy, private ships, everything, and they’re all going to the piers. That’s the last hope, Travis. I gotta go.”
Travis’s head was down by his knees. He reached into his pocket although he knew he wouldn’t find his inhaler. His fingers dug into the palm of his hand as his chest burned with each asthma-constricted breath. How many minutes was he wasting? He forced himself upright and blinked his eyes clear. He put one leg in front of the other and began jogging again. After a few hundred yards he crossed 2nd. The security door of the building was broken, the lobby was quiet.
Both elevators waited on the ground floor. He pressed the button and got in.
In the elevator, the quiet scared him. He wondered if the doors would open, and everyone outside would be dead. Finally the elevator stopped and opened. He ran down the hall and banged the door of 1115.
“Jesus, it’s you,” a tall, thin man said, opening the door.
Travis pushed through him.
“Where’s Darren?”
“Dad!”
The boy swept into his arms and Travis closed his eyes, forgetting about the man standing over him, as he held his son so tight he knew he was hurting him but he couldn’t stop. He tried to slow his breathing down and heard his own heartbeat in his head. He released his son and stood up.
Corrina Adamson stared at him from the bedroom door.
Travis looked from her to the man and said, “I tried to call but the network was overloaded.”
“We’ve been trying to get a line too, trying to find a way out,” the man said.
His name was Gerry Adamson. He stood half a foot taller than stocky Travis. “The highways are jammed. I was able to get a text to my cousin and he’s been stuck for two hours on the Turnpike. But now I can’t get anything else, the Internet connection keeps going out. We were about to get the car and take the Tappan Zee.”
“The West side piers,” Travis said. “I ran into someone coming up here, he told me the only option left is by sea. They’re evacuating from the West side.”
“By sea?” Corrina said. “How can we escape a tsunami by sea?”
“I don’t know, Corrina, but if the president is ordering ships to pick up refugees, I would think they know what they’re doing.”
Gerry rejected the idea. They had a car. They didn’t have to risk everything on a desperation play.
“We don’t have time to argue,” Travis said. “You should be gone. Obviously you didn’t like any of your options too much. The bridges are a mess, people are leaving their cars. Let’s get the Hell out of here. If the piers plan doesn’t work out, we can find a way to Jersey from there.”
“I think we should go to the piers,” Darren said.
The three adults stopped and looked down at him. At six years old, he held his face in an aping of serious adult concentration.
“Okay, let’s go,” Corrina said.
“What if there’s no way out from there?” Gerry asked.
“It’s just a few blocks,” Corrina said. “We can go there and still have time to try something else.”
She smiled at Darren, and he smiled.
Travis picked up his son’s backpack, a cartoon design covering the back of it. “Is this all your luggage, Darren?”
“Yeah,” Darren said.
“Let’s go.”
He picked up his boy. Corrina and Gerry each grabbed a large travel bag from a matching set.
By the elevator they waited, Travis glancing at Corrina and Gerry clutching their wheeled luggage by the extended handles. Travis had nothing save the jeans and sneakers, the sweat-soaked long-sleeved t-shirt and his light jacket. He didn’t think of that, though. He thought only that he had Darren, which was then the only thing he cared to keep in this world.
4
November 19, Manhattan’s citizens gave up their hold on the levers of the earth. The stock exchanges, the banks, the boardrooms and media centers, all were empty. The action was on the street, and in the homes. The flood was an event that cut across all life stories. Everyone was doing something when it came.
The current in the streets flowed west, to the ships. To the last way out. There were faces looking out windows above them all, resigned to their fate, or skeptical of the gravity of the situation, or who just hadn’t heard and didn’t know how to ask and didn’t get what was going on at all.
Jogging straight up 51st St., Travis felt disembodied looking up and seeing the faces above. Another day, he might have been throwing himself through fire to rescue those people. Today, he hurried past, leaving them to death. For a reason he wasn’t sure of, he was leaving them now.
He had worked abroad as a paramedic with the Red Cross in Sudan and Haiti. He’d faced massive damage to the population and had worked knowing he could only save a few of the many, but he’d worked to save that few. Why not here? His son was on his back as they jogged. That was why. He was no hero. When it was expected of him in his work to help, he did so. When fleeing was called for, he fled.
All he had in his understanding of what was behind all this was the one word spoken by President Crawford: tsunami. Millions of New Yorkers fleeing their city, and he imagined few had even taken the time to discuss what was happening, how this could be possible, whether it were all somehow a mistake.
He was aware of keeping together with Gerry and Corrina as they ran, their talk clipped by expressions of disbelief, but Travis’s mind followed the buildings and street corners he passed, cutting across the heart of town past Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall, Manhattan’s studded body of concrete and steel, ancient masonry and mirrored glass.
As he voiced assurances to Darren, he thought that the stage his life had been played on might be destroyed forever. His would be the last generation to inherit four hundred years of Manhattan. Scenes of his New York life passed through his head. The Park. The school on Delancey and dad’s shop just down the street, the bar on Bleecker, the University, the hospitals, the rugby pitches, the nights out, Woody Allen and the Godfather movies, and Sasha’s party in Little Italy where the most beautiful girl in New York gave him her number. On this stage, his son’s life had begun, too. The set designers had something new in mind for this next generation.
At 11th Ave, the crowds were dense, blocking the view of the Hudson River a block away, but the concrete canopy of the Manhattan Cruise Terminal could be seen framed by the sky. Travis spotted several National Guardsmen watching with hands on rifles, doing their jobs while he fled without even his pager. The crowds were moving forward, pouring into the terminal buildings by the thousands. There were cruise ships visible beyond the terminals. Looking south, Travis saw a mismatched array of large and small craft docking and disembarking from Pier 86.
It was like this at the dozens of piers down the West Side, around New York, down the East Coast. Many ships were freightliners, and the crews were frantically removing the massive cargo containers to make space while armed Guardsmen held the crowds back. The White House had learned from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and had mobilized as aggressively as the most powerful nation on earth could. From New Jersey’s naval station Earle came the AOE supply ships that were now filling their holds with New Yorkers – the USS Arctic, USS Supply, and USS Seattle.
The ships were manned with skeleton crews, and hurried from the dock with unprecedented and unpracticed urgency.
Over the heads of the crowd, Travis could see the towers of a cargo frigate pulling away.
“This way,” Gerry said. “I think there’s more movement by that terminal.”
A fight erupted to their left, four men tearing at each other while a woman screamed. A Guardsman fired his weapon into the air, shocking the fighting men into passivity, but the effect on the crowd was to finalize the impression of chaos in America, that weapon fire was now necessary to maintain control. There was a surge forward under the strength of this new panic. Travis and his group were well into the crowd now, and he held Darren in his arms. Gerry held his bag with the pull-handle by his side. Corrina still pushed hers on the ground, keeping it in front of her feet. As they held themselves close, they said only with eye contact, Stick together!
“Don’t worry, Darren,” Corrina said. “Don’t worry, Darren.”
They were within fifty yards of one of the terminal entrances, and soon they were inside the vast hall. The flow of the crowd now was bounded by the building, and differentiated into streams to each stairway to the embarkation levels. There was terrific screaming, echoing in the huge room as groups argued over which ship on each side of the terminal to try for, which stairwell was flowing best. The flow had its own natural course, and individual choices were rendered meaningless by the brute power of it.
Upstairs, security had been turned inside out: doors everywhere were open, and security screening sections and metal detectors abandoned. National Guardsmen waited on the building’s exterior apron, maintaining order as Travis and the others emerged again to the open air. The ship itself loomed over them now, filling their vision, a great bulk of white and blue steel and circular windows, belted by lifeboats midway up, and capped by decorative spikes and curves of the top deck satellite globes, radar trees, the bridge, the logo-painted smokestack and other towers, just showing above the top.
A gangway rose up from the dock to an opening one floor up, and a human stream poured up and into the ship’s belly, emptying NY and filling the boat. Ships fit for thousands emptying a city of millions. Travis thought of a mosquito on an elephant.
There was a surge from the left, hitting Travis and Darren first, pushing them into Gerry and Corrina. A large circle in the surge began to fall, and in the tight space, the group was all pulled down together in the mass. Men and women were climbing over each other to get up.
“Darren! Darren!” Travis heard Corrina amid the screams.
“I’ve got him,” Travis shouted. With Darren still in his arms, he was sinking while the other bodies were pushing up around him. There were seconds until the crowd would surge again and he and his son would be under it.
A pair of black hands stretched down to him out of overcoat sleeves and white shirt cuffs. The hands grabbed his arms and pulled him upwards. Travis could see the man tensing his body to resist the pressure from behind him. He was in his fifties, dressed in a suit and overcoat, the tie gone. With his help, Travis was able to turn himself and pull himself upright behind Corrina.
Darren bawled, and Travis could just give him little squeezes on his back to calm him.
“Thanks,” Travis said without being able to see the man behind him then, feeling him pressed into his back.
“Soft spot for kids,” the man said.
Travis turned his head and just caught the forced smile that lit up the man’s furrowed face.
He saw that Gerry and Corrina’s suitcases were gone.
They could see armed National Guardsmen in the space between the stairs and the ship’s hull. The Guardsmen themselves had a desperate look; they were there to protect these people. How would they act if the people became the danger? Travis could see another ship beginning to pull away. He couldn’t see the crowd beneath that ship. He heard gunfire, and then screaming filled the air. Pushing Corrina ahead of him, with the stranger pushing him from behind, he was on the gangway stairs. The move up was halting, but manageable.
There was shouting around him now distinct above the other screams.
“This way, this way!”
“Matthew! Matthew!”
“Don’t lose me!”
“This way! Please follow the crew!”
This was a voice with authority. The voice assured Travis, and he felt the tension around him ease, too, with the voice. Looking out at the Hudson, he saw another cruise ship on its way down river, following closely behind a freighter whose deck was packed with escapees.
Travis heard all the voices around him going up the stairs. It was a habit he could not break. He was an observer of people and a listener, and he always heard the voices around him.
“I have to go back!”
“Oh God, help me!”
“This way, through here!”
“Please, I have to go back!”
“My leg is broken! Please help me!”
“Follow the crew!”
“Please, I have to go back!”
Corrina was suddenly gone ahead of him, and Travis was pulled off the gangway through the opening into a great hall by white-sleeved arms. He was shoved to the left. He was aware of soft light and colors around him, weird on this dark day.
“This way! Follow the crew inside!”
“Please, I have to go back!” he heard one last time from behind him.
5
He had seen fear before, in places of conflict and famine, where the worst things happen and life is carried out in unceasing desperation. The low ground, he called that state of living in his own private lexicon. So many millions of people around the world had lived there in the last twenty, fifty or hundred years – yet it was a completely alien place to most Americans. The low ground had followed him home. The low ground had found his son.
These Americans, Travis thought, have never considered death this way: announcing itself to each of them at once, for their families and friends and neighbors. He wondered what showed in his own face, how the possibility of losing everything was displayed in his eyes.
They were shuffled down the hallway by staff standing alongside another opening in the wall, from which a bright glow lit those turning and disappearing into it.
“Head to the light,” the staff called.
There was no need for the direction, the pump was primed and the flow set. The group turned into the light, a wide white-on-white staircase leading only down. After the first flight, the staircase walls gave way to banisters and railings and the open belly of the vessel. Travis saw the vast area of the ship’s Grand Atrium, a football field space with the feel of a Roman plaza, 70 foot gold-foil columns and drapes piercing the great hall vertically, the floor level marked by fountains, flower boxes, food counters and bars, lined by shop-fronts on all sides. The central fountain featured a great marble statue of a thin, broadly-finned fish, its angular impressionistic form curled into a violent surface dive through the array of water sprays. There were several of these staircases, and all those on the port side funneled the refugees in here. The space was already crowding.
Dark wood-paneled columns arose at the sides of the Atrium, supporting the many tiers of balconies above. The tourists, those paying passengers who had departed Key West on their 21-day cruise only the day before, lined the railings on each level. The floors themselves, cutting off at the edge of the Atrium airspace, were front-lit a bright emerald green, while the open staircases, Travis now saw, were alight with bright green paneling as well. From the railings, the rows of tourists looked down in silence at the refugees filling their ship. The line slowed on the stairs, but here there was not the pressure of bodies stacked against each other.
Travis wondered if this could be real. Had he finally taken too many pills to sleep? Was this a dream? Had he died, and this was something else? It was as though the drugs had returned to his blood. He felt as though he was stumbling through a liquid.
“We’ll find out if the president’s an idiot or not,” Corrina said.
As their own group reached the Atrium floor, Travis thought back to high school dances in the gym: that was his standard for crowd estimation, a full high school gym to him meant 800 or so heads. He guessed there were already two thousand in this room alone. He looked up to the crystal roof a great distance above, passing over the faces of the tourists on the radiating balconies. It seemed like a scene from the Wizard of Oz. He realized how much quieter it had become. Individuals crying out for lost loved ones or sobbing over their thoughts could be heard. There was a release of tension at getting where they were going, to a place that promised safety. Their brains now raced through what could happen on this ship. They desperately hoped to feel the ship move.
Travis noticed Corrina and Gerry holding each other tight, and he saw tears flowing down his ex-wife’s cheeks and over her smile. He kissed Darren on the forehead. He’d saved his son. Oh God, it was a terrifying and wonderful feeling.
“Come on,” Travis said. “Let’s push in. Darren, do you have to pee?”
Darren shook his head, no. He had stopped crying; his eyes were red and his nose dripped, but he was trying not to look scared anymore.
“Don’t worry, Daddy,” he said. “I can swim if we fall in. I can swim by myself now in the deep end.”
“That’s great, champ,” Travis said. “We’re not going to go in the water, though.”
They shuffled on together, tightening in the crowd as the city’s deserters continued to stream in from the several staircases. Huddled together, they simply stared, losing track of time. Travis noticed the on-board shops closed and deserted. After twenty minutes, or perhaps half an hour, they felt the vibrations of the engines coming to life. Soon, there was the sound of the ship’s whistle. Nothing else from outside could be heard, and Travis imagined the scene of desperation outside, as the ship freed from the pier.
With the last arrivals still pouring into the room, they felt the escape begin. The ship separated from port and from the unlucky still behind. From the desperation they’d been in moments ago, it was bizarre and jarring for the refugees now to find themselves surrounded by such exaggerated, fantastical luxury.
By the bottoms of the staircases, Travis noticed white uniformed men. Ship’s security, he presumed. This conveyed a real and specific sense of safety. The men were unarmed. Another statement of safety.
“Have you made your pick who’ll be first to piss in the fountains?” a voice near Travis said.
The speaker was the stranger from the pier, his arm outstretched. Travis shook his hand.
”I got that old rummy by the calla lilies,” the man said.
“Thanks for your help,” Travis said.
“No problem, no problem,” the man had a deep, rich and rough voice. “Got a granddaughter about his age. I’m Claude Bettman.”
“Travis Cooke. This is my son Darren.”
“Hi,” Darren said.
Claude Bettman crouched like a baseball catcher. “Hi Buddy. Not so scary in here, huh?”
Darren shook his head. Claude stood up straight.
“This is—- Corrina. And Gerry.” Travis turned to include them. “Claude helped us out after the crowd collapsed. I’m really in your debt, Claude, I mean that.”
Claude grinned. His lips were slightly purple, and he had an aristocrat’s smile. “I think this is the kind of event that cancels all debts.”
“Did you hear anything about how the evacuation was working?” Corrina asked.
Claude shook his head slowly. “I heard ships would head out to sea to ride out the wavefront. That was from a military guy on TV.”
“I don’t have the slightest clue what this actually IS,” Travis said. “I just woke up and all hell was breaking loose.”
“An earthquake,” Gerry said. “It split a huge shelf off the Antarctic. They kept changing the story. Whether the earthquake caused the tsunami, or whether one earthquake caused a split of the ice shelf that caused another earthquake, or what. But they say we’re going to have higher water levels. Once the wave comes in, the water may not be going back out. The whole East coast might be under.”
As a few outside the group listened in, Gerry pulled out his cell phone for a more current update. He couldn’t connect.
“Networks overloaded,” Claude said. “Every cell phone owner in America is trying to use it right now.”
Corrina had Darren in her arms now, and they rubbed noses and smiled eye to eye.
Nothing stops her, Travis thought, and he felt the familiar craving, wishing he could just join that embrace.
There was an electric sound as speakers around the ship came to life.
“This is Captain London. To all our new guests, welcome aboard the Festival of the Waves. An unfortunate name for this very difficult time, but this is a good safe ship.”
It was the voice Travis had heard coming up the gangway, the strong voice that first pierced the terror. It had been the captain himself pulling the refugees on board.
“We have an excellent crew that will keep us all comfortable as best we can. We will be making 15 knots out to open sea, and should be rendezvousing with that bump in several hours. That’s all it will be. A tsunami in the open sea is just a wave, you’ll hardly feel it. For safety reasons, I ask that all the newcomers please remain indoors whether in the Atrium or Royal Theater, and that our other guests please remain in their rooms. I will be giving a warning prior to meeting the waves. I know that this is a devastating day for all of you right now. But we’re safe here. Be grateful for that. Breathe.”
6
Lee Golding stood on the Penthouse forward deck, cupping his hands to light a cigarette in the wind. This was the top deck housing cabins, and the level had an extended lip at the bow, an outside deck at the far forward reach of the ship.
Lee Golding, the Mighty Lee Golding, the Alabama Assassin. The biggest name and most-hated-bad-guy of professional wrestling (once upon a time), was on board as a celebrity guest. The cruise line had planned a screening of his greatest matches followed by a Q-and-A. Over the three-week cruise he was booked to do a talk, sit at the Captain’s Table, and provide color commentary for a kids’ water polo game. Two of his films were going to be shown on the Festival’s big screen, the new comedy and one of the action ones. Probably not anymore.
His massive frame had not swollen with fat in his retirement from the ring like many of his comrades’. Not quite that much, anyway. His blonde hair receded slightly around his reddish temples, and hung long to his shoulders. He still had the trademark goatee, dyed silver. His face was neither ugly nor especially attractive. It was heavy and pleasant. He made friends easily.
Around him on deck were several other of the booked tourists, mostly keeping to themselves, enjoying the air that the ship’s captain had just asked them to forsake. There was no social convener to introduce them to each other. The ship’s security was more than engaged in handling the load of refugees in the ship’s belly and didn’t worry themselves with keeping the paying guests off the decks, at least for now. When the crowd below was under control, perhaps they would sweep the decks. For now, the captain’s voice on the loudspeakers was the deterrent. Lee Golding was undeterred.
He’d stayed in his room with his wife Jessica until the ship had left the pier. Then he’d left her there to watch the ship make it out to sea, and to watch what New York looked like being left behind to die.
Lee was out on deck passing by 15th Street and Pier 57. He saw industrial freighters, top heavy with loading cranes. There were still many ships loading, and the crowd remaining did not seem to him hopelessly large. He imagined he could still hear their screams over the sound of the many ships coming and going. As he saw one ship pull away from the dock, he heard shots fired. He thought of New Orleans, how the desperate had shot at helicopters in a gambit for attention. It was more likely the police, he thought. There’s no way you could wait at the back of the crowd. There was no way people would do that peacefully, unless a cop was there with a gun.
He wondered how it would go when the cops left. It would have been so much better for the ones left behind if there’d been no warning. They’ll die just the same, but first they have to go through this. If. If anyone gets left behind. If there really is a tsunami at all.
There were small ships in the water, heading in the opposite direction, up the Hudson and inland towards Albany. The little boats bobbed in the headwind. All those little guys going one way, and this big ship splitting the herd in the other direction. Lee thought of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, the stories of animals sensing disaster and heading to safety while fishermen marched to the docks like any other day.
The Empire State Building stood out above the island’s skyline. The Festival of the Waves rounded Battery Park at the south end of town. The rough dark waters of Upper Bay opened up before her. The Statue of Liberty came closer. The few there on the deck made towards the starboard rail to watch the Statue pass. It was the reverse trip of refugees of other eras, past the statue, past Ellis Island, Brooklyn to one side, Staten Island to the other, then under the Verrazano Bridge, to leave the outpost of America behind.
“Not quite the same feeling as when we pulled out from Key West, is it?” came a voice.
Lee came out of his daydreaming and smiled as he turned to the man a few feet away along the railing.
“No,” Lee agreed. “The cruise has definitely lost some je-ne-sais-pas.” Lee’s voice was louder than necessary, deep and amiable. Not quite his stage voice, but bigger than mortal.
“I’m Rick,” the smaller man said, a Texas accent. “Rick Dumas. I saw your wife and you a couple times on the ship, I’m just down the hall from you. You’re Golding, right? The Mighty Lee Golding.”
“Yeah,” Lee replied as they shook hands. “You don’t have to say ‘The Mighty’ every time, though.”
He sized Rick Dumas up as they stood together. His ship-neighbor was small, and had a pleasant but nervous face, as if he didn’t know when anyone might turn on him.
“I was a huge fan,” Rick said. “Really, your feud with Sinbad was phenomenal. Can you do your shtick for me? Come on. Do your shtick.”
Lee smiled. His face bulged out red, his eyes popping from his head like eggs, as he laughed devilishly. His fingers went to his lips in a V and he wagged his bendy tongue through the V.
“Golding gonna getcha!” he hissed.
His face softened and he laughed, and Rick laughed, and the Alabama Assassin slapped him on the back.
“Give my regards to Broadway, huh?” Rick said. “So long 42nd Street. Take a deep breath, 40’ latitude, 74’ longitude. That’s central Manhattan. I have one of those GPSs and I try to remember important places. When did you come up and start watching?”
“Just after the pick-up, when we left,” Lee replied.
“I came out when we were coming in. Man, you should have seen the air traffic. So many helicopters.”
“All going to United Nations, I bet.”
“There’s no shortage of people in Manhattan who can afford a helicopter ride,” Rick said. “I bet there were a lot of rooftop landings. Say, could I have a smoke? I don’t usually smoke, but what the hell. How often does the East Coast get destroyed?”
Lee reached for the pack in his windbreaker pocket, contorting his girth. Rick lit his smoke with difficulty, Lee again using his hands as a wind screen, holding the lighter, too.
“You don’t seem nervous,” Lee said. “You worried about this or what?”
“No, no. These ships, they’re really the greatest feats of engineering of our time. I mean, just turn around, turn around.”
Rick spun his finger and the two turned to face the majesty of the Festival of the Waves, towers of decks, of gleaming white steel and glass above them.
“A city under its own power at sea. A 90,000-ton traveling island of amusements and indulgence for 2,400 paying guests and 930 crew. It’s our era’s Great Pyramids. But they were for kings only.”
“Yeah, but they had to be dead first.”
“Listen, this is as heavy duty as ships come,” Rick continued. “Do you ever hear of a cruise ship going down? OK, there was that one off Greece but the captain was drunk. I mean, they put hundreds of millions of dollars into these. If any company ever lost a ship, they’d be ruined. Just think of the lawsuits.”
“Ever hear of the Titanic?” Lee asked.
“Come on, that hit an iceberg. And that was over a hundred years ago! That’s not even relevant, not to me, anyway.”
“When the captain announced the plan, he said the risk was minimal,” Lee reasoned aloud. “That even if we weren’t picking up the refugees we’d be riding out the wave. So I guess it must be safe.”
“Hey, look at that dude,” Rick said. “He looks like Man Mountain McTavish!”
Lee turned and saw a man standing alone. How had he not noticed this passenger yet? The man was more mountain even than Man Mountain McTavish, who’d always been soft in the ring. The stranger stood close to seven feet tall, and was broad shouldered. He had grey hair down to the bottom of his neck, and a thick beard. His arms came out of his short sleeves like a bear’s, the hairy flesh flexed as the man held the railing.
He stared ahead and was oblivious to the two men who watched him.
“Looking for whales?” Rick called, and Lee laughed.
The man-mountain did not respond immediately. As if some unseen intervening agent passed on the message, he turned after a moment.
“Call me Ishmael,” the man-mountain shouted back.
Lee smiled. That was from Moby Dick. He’d listened to that book on the road from one stadium to the next. It was about a guy who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. And a whale. Lee felt an instinctive connection with this other giant.
The bulk of land receding behind them became more indistinct in its details. By the time the security guards asked them to return to their rooms, the United States appeared as only a thickening of the horizon.
“Please stay in your rooms until you hear from the captain,” one of the white-uniformed guards said. “It will just be a few hours. We really need to rely on everyone’s cooperation to stay safe and get through this without any tragedies.”
The grey-haired man-mountain walked in past the Mighty Lee Golding and Rick Dumas with a friendly glance to include them, so that they could experience with him the shared thrill of this event. The two smiled back. The giant’s facial expressions were so intense Rick and Lee could not help but smile back, but he quickly lost his inclusive cast, turning to his own thoughts. The giant looked away and went on inside.
His name was Adam Melville.
He was a man who looked and planned for special moments. That’s the way he travelled; he was a moment collector. Even with his planned cruise interrupted, he couldn’t shake that habit. An event of this importance made him feel important watching it. And no one knew what was on the other side.
A long-time tech entrepreneur, he had a big imagination, and he was trying to imagine what he could see in the event that others didn’t. As he returned to his room, Adam thought again through the clues: the news reports, the early devastation, the unparalleled evacuation, the reported projections. He was a man who’d always thought of big ideas, and how the big ideas touched his life.
We know a great deal of the world’s history, he thought. From the time of each civilization’s adoption of the written word, we know of all their major events: 5000 years of history among the Sumerians in modern Iraq and in Egypt, 3300 years in China, 2600 years in Mexico. As the written word spread across Europe and the Indian subcontinent, so did our knowledge of history gain over wider swaths of the earth.
This event was beyond all that history’s telling, but that was not our only knowledge. Written history goes back 5000 years, but humanity goes back 7 million years, a much longer period of witnessing. This event had precursors within the collective memory of man. Our myths were older yet than our histories, and they told of such things.
Continued….
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