Matt de la Peña - The Living

Thunder pounded, followed by more lightning.

There were hundreds of passengers already lined up near the lifeboat launch site in the dark. A few emergency team members loading them aboard. Many of the boats were missing, either already launched or ripped away by the waves.

Shy tried to take deep breaths to calm himself down, but each deep breath felt like a knife in his chest.

And he didn’t know where he was supposed to go.

Or what he was supposed to do.

He spotted Marcus with a group of crew members on the Lookout Deck, near the life raft pods. Shy knew the rafts were a last resort, because they were so much smaller and less equipped for survival. It meant some of the lifeboats had been lost.

He headed for the rafts in almost a crawl to keep from slipping on the angled deck. The passengers near the lifeboats were in a disagreement about whether the vessels should be lowered into the storming ocean now.

“You can’t expect us to survive these conditions!” one passenger was shouting. “Look at it out there!”

The ocean was still raging below them. Whitecaps everywhere and sometimes a twenty-foot wave that would crash into the broken ship.

“This thing’s going to sink!” another passenger shouted. “And there are fires, too! Don’t you get it? The lifeboats are our only chance!”

“They’re designed for rough seas,” a crew member tried to explain.

“But we still have time! We should stay on the ship as long as possible. Radio for help!”

“There is no help!” a woman shouted. “Didn’t you see what happened to California? All the help will go to them!”

Shy didn’t know who was right or wrong, just knew he had to do something. He joined in with the emergency crew, trying to calm everyone down as others continued prepping the lifeboats for launch.

“The captain said it himself!” a man shouted. “There’s no radio communication! They won’t even know we’re out here!”

A tall passenger fought his way up to the front of the line with his wife and kid. He grabbed the shoulder of a crew member, said: “You need to get premier class off this ship first! We paid for that right!”

This sparked a new debate, about who should be loaded onto the lifeboats first: women and children or premier class.

Shy listened to them go back and forth, and he watched the passengers already loaded up in the lifeboat stare over the side at the choppy ocean, most of them holding on to each other or gripping the sides of the boat. One woman slipped trying to get in, and Shy watched her fall violently back onto the angled ship deck, headfirst, and roll against a closed door where she didn’t move.

A group of people hurried to her. Everyone else stared. A man lowering himself from the boat, her husband maybe, started screaming. He ran to her, kneeled down and picked up her head, then looked up into the sky, shouting: “No!”

Shy pushed away from this group of passengers and continued toward the emergency rafts, slipping several times along the way. As he climbed the angled stairs, he heard a rise in commotion behind his back. A fight had broken out. Two passengers shoving each other while emergency crew members tried to separate them.

At the top of the stairs, Shy looked over the ship again. From this new vantage point he saw how much the back half was already sagging into the ocean. It didn’t look real or even possible. Several lifeboats on that end had been forced underwater, empty. The front half of the ship reached up into the sky and leaned slightly to the side. Smoke billowed out from inside the ship, and Shy realized that fire was as much of a threat as sinking.

Lightning pierced the ocean right next to the ship. Thunder so loud he ducked for cover. He was overwhelmed and scared beyond understanding, but he forced himself to focus on crawling forward, on getting somewhere, to the rafts and Marcus, that was all he had to think about.

A group of Paradise crew members were huddled together, working to open the hard-shelled canisters that held inflatable life rafts. The first of them to look up was Kevin, Shy’s bloody shirt still wrapped around his head.

“You’re here!” Kevin shouted over the storm. “I looked all over the theater! What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Shy said. He pointed at Kevin’s head. “You were knocked out.”

Kevin touched the shirt on his head. “This is yours, isn’t it?”

Shy nodded. He looked at Marcus, too. And Vlad. “How long since the second wave hit us?” he asked.

“Half hour,” Kevin said.

It seemed impossible that he’d been out that long. Thirty minutes was a big chunk of time to be unaccounted for. But he understood how lucky he was—he’d eventually come to, while others hadn’t.

Paolo called out to the entire group: “We get these rafts prepped first, men! Then we double back through each station in teams, helping only those who can be helped! There isn’t much time!”

Shy kneeled beside everyone in the dark, his eyes fixed on what was framed by the two flashlights, his mind stuck on the last of Paolo’s words: “There isn’t much time.”

They got the first pod open and Marcus held it as the raft filled automatically with carbon dioxide. It grew big enough to fit a dozen people. Paolo had already explained that all the lifeboats on the other side of the ship were trapped underwater and useless. And Shy had done the math in his head. Seven lifeboats and five rafts. It wouldn’t fit even a quarter of the passengers and crew members. But then, how many of them were still alive?

Paolo capped the raft, pulled out the handles and made sure the emergency compartment was fully stocked. Shy studied the contents, knowing that he would likely need this stuff in order to survive: water, dry food, fishing kit, hand and smoke flares, radio signaling device, tarps, blankets, small basic tool kit and water dye.

Paolo tapped Marcus and another guy, shouted: “Drop the raft at the launching site and do a sweep of the theater! You’ve got fifteen minutes!”

They each took a side and carried the raft above their heads, half crawling down the angled stairs.

Before they cracked open the second pod, Shy heard a loud creaking sound coming from the back of the ship. An explosion followed, and they all spun around to look. Bright flames shot up into the dark sky, illuminating clouds of black smoke. Screams came from the line of passengers waiting to board the lifeboats. Shy looked down at the raging sea, then back up at the burning and sinking ship.

They were all going to die.

He repeated this fact in his head, again and again. Calmly, though, in his shock.

The second raft filled with carbon dioxide. Paolo did his safety checks and tapped Kevin and Shy this time, told them to drop off the raft and do a sweep of the Destiny Dining Room.

They both took a handle, lifted the raft over their heads and started cautiously across the Lookout Deck. When they got near the bottom of the stairs Shy scanned the line of passengers and spotted Carmen climbing into one of the lifeboats.

“Carmen!” he called out to her. When she didn’t hear him, he turned to Kevin, told him excitedly: “Carmen just got on one of the boats! She’s alive!”

Kevin nodded and they dropped the raft off at the launching point, secured it just behind the one Marcus had carried down. They moved back inside the ship, into the Destiny Dining Room, passing the empty hostess stand where they split up. Shy took the rear of the huge restaurant, Kevin stayed up front.

The place looked like it had been hit by a tornado. Fallen ceiling slabs, tables and chairs scattered and on their sides, thick smoke hovering above the flooded floor where motionless bodies lay. It was strange how numb to death Shy had already become. It hardly slowed him down. As he sloshed through the water, he recalled the jealousy he’d felt in this dining room earlier. Carmen and Toni talking about their engagements. Carmen’s man kneeling on the boardwalk. It all seemed so ridiculous now.