He circled his group of passengers again, pleading for everyone to sit down.
Some did, but most of them still crowded the windows trying to get one last look, and Shy shoved his way to the window where Kevin stood and peered outside.
He froze.
A massive wall of water, almost twice the height of the ship and climbing still, and coming directly at them. It was clear they had no chance of making it over, but the ship continued plunging forward.
Everyone at the windows was screaming, even men, and Shy realized he was screaming, too, and a heavyset middle-aged man slumped to the ground holding his chest, and Shy’s entire body started to tingle and he lost all strength in his arms and legs and had to hold on to the window to stay standing as he stared at the cresting wave—this beyond all his understanding except it was the end of everything, and no person could change this fact, and no God, and the wave was directly in front of them now, and all Shy could see through the window was the roaring wall of ocean water.
He turned to run just as it slammed into the ship and all the small windows exploded with glass and water, and the floor shot straight up, and he found himself in the air—and in his slow-motion flight Shy saw bodies thrown from chairs, bodies crashing into other bodies, into walls, bodies toppling over the theater railing, falling onto the stage, onto chairs, onto the backs of other passengers, the ship alarm once again blaring in Shy’s ears, and the spray of cold ocean salt water in his nose and mouth and eyes, blinding him, and then he was somehow slammed headfirst into a chandelier and was lost….
22
Gaps in Consciousness
Shy came to in front of the open balcony door as the ship was slowly starting to right itself. Fallen passengers lay all around him, battered and twisted, faces frozen in shock or facedown, ocean water raining down on all of them from a gaping hole in the theater ceiling, and everything smelled of brine and seaweed.
He looked down at himself, saw that he was covered in blood and searched in a panic for where he was hurt—then he saw the woman lying next to him, her throat pierced by a thick shard of glass. She was choking on her own blood, coughing, her wild eyes staring directly at him as she vomited more blood into his lap.
Then her eyes slowly emptied out and her head slumped to the side, and when Shy went to reach for her, he was lost.
He came to in fits and starts after that.
At first everything he saw was frozen, like a photograph. Not a person moved and rain hovered in the air above him in sparkling droplets, and there was no sound other than the deafening roar of his own heart.
He saw a limp pile of bodies facedown in a pool of pink ocean water, and he saw a man holding a woman’s bloodied face in his hands and crying, and he saw Kevin’s body in front of the railing, an arc of thick blood spewing rhythmically from his forehead, and he saw a small girl standing against the far wall in her dinner dress and life jacket, eyes squeezed shut, hands reaching for some imagined person.
He turned back to Kevin, telling himself he had to do something to stop the blood, and he crawled over to Kevin’s still body, shouting his name, but he couldn’t hear his own voice. Shy ripped off his life jacket and his overshirt, tore it in half and tied it around Kevin’s head like a tourniquet. He pulled tight and then refastened his life jacket and shook Kevin’s shoulders, shouting: “Wake up! Kevin!”
But he still couldn’t hear his own voice.
Couldn’t hear anything.
And Kevin wasn’t waking up.
Shy kept shaking Kevin and yelling so hard that all the blood rushed to his head and he was lost.
He came to with ocean water pouring down onto his face, and him gulping for air, swallowing salt water and sand and gagging, until he rolled away coughing and vomited.
He was on the theater stage somehow with no recollection of getting there. And no Kevin. All around Shy were lifeless bodies submerged in a foot of water, drowning if they weren’t already drowned, theater seats ripped from their foundation, floating, the roof half caved in and the air thick with smoke and salt and mist, and the man in front of him was looking down at his bare thigh where a thick ragged bone had pierced through the skin.
Shy watched this man try to straighten the shattered bone in his shock, and it occurred to Shy that the man would soon bleed to death and that the man was Supervisor Franco.
Shy came to on his knees, at the front of the stage. He was crawling over his dead supervisor, over a drowned woman, and then tumbling down the stairs onto his back, where he stared up at the sky from which rain no longer fell, only hovering smoke and dew and odd salty droplets that traveled in slow motion toward him, dotting his forehead, his nose, his lips, his eyes, and he could see the faint outline of the moon through the thinning storm clouds in the sky, oblivious to all that was happening and people dying, and he breathed and tried to understand, but his mind grew so overwhelmed he was lost.
Shy was on his knees again, trying to get to another window. He could no longer feel the hum of the engine and he couldn’t hear anything and the air now smelled like burning plastic.
He rose to his feet, staggered through the silence, over drowned and broken bodies, looking back once more at his dead supervisor, and then he climbed the stairs to the balcony and carried himself to the first blown-out window, where he saw a second great rise of water in the distance, speeding toward them, this one so high above the ship it left no room for sky or moon or stars, and Shy opened his mouth to scream but no sound came out, and then there was another tremendous collision, this one soundless and so vicious he felt ship steel ripping and the walls caving and everything turning over, and he was hurled into the air again, only this time he was lost before he landed.
23
The Dead
Shy opened his eyes to darkness.
His vision slowly adjusted, and when it did he saw that he was outside the balcony door, a wall inches from his nose. When he turned his head he realized that the ceiling had collapsed and he was trapped underneath. No, not trapped underneath, more sheltered within. The ceiling and wall had formed a sort of teepee over him, saving his life.
He felt all around his body: head, arms, legs, feet. Everything still there and uninjured. The only pain was in his chest when he took a deep breath.
He breathed shallow as he pushed out from under the wreckage, then stood looking at the collapsed ceiling—a little to the left or right and he’d have been crushed. He was lucky to be alive.
Moving back into his muster station, Shy wondered how long he’d been knocked out, because it all looked so different now. Ocean water flooded everything and the entire theater seemed off—the ceiling now more of a wall and the stage at an odd angle. He could hear again, too, and what he heard was the groaning of the ship’s foundation and a few passengers crying or calling out names.
Something deep inside the bowels of the ship snapped, and the front end of the theater dropped several feet. Shy held on to the balcony railing in shock, knowing only that the cruise ship was ruined and that something impossible would be expected of him.
He struggled through cold, knee-high water, one of his shoes missing and his chest burning with every breath. Something was wrong with his ribs. He glanced down at his life jacket. Ripped straight through. Blood dribbling out the bottom. He reached up to unfasten it, but then thought better of it and kept moving.
At first Shy turned over each body he passed, but none of them could be helped because none of them were alive.