Matt de la Peña - The Living

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.

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.

There was no sign of Carmen or Kevin or Rodney or Marcus. For a while he wasn’t sure if he was alive either. But he had to be alive because he was walking and breathing. Painfully. And he was seeing these bodies facedown in the water, bodies missing limbs and gashed open and covered in bright red blood.

The only dead person he’d seen back home was his grandma. And even after how sick she got, she looked almost peaceful inside her wooden casket—the makeup they’d used made her look nearly like herself again. But this death was different. It was fresh and ugly and vicious.

He stopped turning over so many bodies.

Shy spotted the back of Carmen’s head near the stage, sticking out from under the fallen curtain. He rushed down the angled steps toward her, turned her over, but it wasn’t Carmen. It was a middle-aged woman he’d never seen before, and the woman was dead. He lowered her head back into the water and moved on.

More fallen passengers to climb over.

Shy found himself pounding the heel of his hand against his own forehead, trying to think, trying to wake himself up, but he couldn’t think or wake up.

They’d been hit by two giant waves. He knew that.

And all around him people were dead.

And the ship was sinking.

But his brain refused to process anything beyond these facts, like all of it was happening to someone else, his space self or a complete stranger.

He shoved debris out of his way: splintered paintings, fallen statues, potted plants, jagged shards of shattered mirrors, chunks of the ceiling and the walls and the stairs. Empty life jackets. Motionless bodies.

“Carmen!” he began shouting through the theater.

“Kevin!”

“Rodney! Marcus!”

Over and over he shouted their names, but there was never an answer. Only a handful of people still seemed even conscious, some just sitting in the water, dumbfounded, others searching for loved ones or stumbling toward the exit like Shy.

Outside lightning flashed, and in that second of illumination, Shy saw how badly the ship had been damaged. The back half already sinking into the ocean and the front twisted on its side and raised slightly above the water. All the windows blown out and no trace of the glass atrium ceiling. The control room flattened and battered and the bridge ripped right down the middle. Seaweed and ocean water pooled in every corner of the Lido Deck.