Matt de la Peña - The Living

He headed straight for the kitchen, the source of the smoke, looked through the swinging-door windows. Three kitchen workers were inside, aiming extinguishers at a roaring fire—the white foam hardly containing it at all.

Shy pushed through the doors, shielding his nose and mouth with his shoulder. “Paolo wants everyone up top!” he shouted in a muffled voice. “Now!”

The three of them turned around.

Shy was overwhelmingly relieved to see that one of them was Rodney.

“Shy!” Rodney shouted, tears streaming down his face.

“Rod! You need to go get on one of the lifeboats, man! There aren’t many left!”

“Everyone’s dead, Shy!”

“Go get on a lifeboat!” Shy shouted back at him. “Hurry!”

Rodney dropped his extinguisher, grabbed the others by their shirts and all four of them hurried out of the burning kitchen. Shy told Rodney he’d meet him on the Lido Deck as soon as he found Kevin. Rodney hugged him, then pushed away and sloshed through the water toward the exit.

Shy scoured the back half of the dining room for survivors with a new determination. Carmen and Rodney were still alive. But soon the air grew thick with smoke, which was now spewing out from underneath the kitchen doors. Shy had trouble breathing, and whenever he coughed it felt like a knife digging into his ribs.

Kevin shouted his name from across the dining room, but just as Shy started toward him, stepping over bodies along the way, he heard a second voice. “Help me.”

Shy stopped in his tracks, looked all around, saw nothing.

“Help me. Please.”

“Where are you?” Shy shouted.

“Here.”

The heat from the fire in the kitchen grew more intense. A thick layer of smoke had gathered near the ceiling. Shy saw a man and woman, completely submerged in water, holding hands. He saw a motionless woman slumped against the wall holding her stomach, covered in blood.

“Shy, let’s go!” Kevin yelled again.

Just then there was a massive explosion in the kitchen. A burst of flames shot through the doors, started eating at the restaurant walls and ceiling. When Shy turned to run he saw a hand reaching up from behind a fallen chandelier.

It was the man who’d been following him all around the ship. The man in the black suit, Bill. “Help me,” he pleaded. “Please.”

Shy froze.

The fire raged across the entire back half of the dining room now, smoke burrowing into his lungs. Shy flashed through Kevin’s warning, his and Rodney’s trashed cabin, the man’s threats in the Luxury Lounge. But Shy couldn’t just leave someone.

He reached down and grabbed the man’s hand and pulled, but the man’s leg was trapped under the chandelier. He couldn’t move. And Shy couldn’t lift him. The water now up to the man’s chin.

“Please,” he begged.

Shy slipped his hand out of the man’s grip and tried lifting the chandelier, but it was too heavy. Kevin was beside him now, gripping the chandelier, too. Together they strained, Shy’s chest killing him as he coughed, and Kevin shouting for the man to push.

Finally the three of them moved it enough for him to slip his leg free. The man got to his knees quickly, but when he tried to put weight on his leg he toppled back into the water.

Shy and Kevin lifted him, threw his arms over their shoulders and started dragging him through the restaurant. Flames crackling at their backs, running across the ceiling and walls in front of them now, the intense heat blistering Shy’s skin, singeing his hair.

The front exit was on fire, the doors closed and covered in flames. Shy looked back at the rear exit, but it was even worse.

“Carry him!” Kevin shouted. “I’ll do the doors!”

Shy coughed as he watched Kevin hurry awkwardly through the knee-high water. He struggled to stay standing with the man weighing him down.

Kevin led with his shoulder and crashed through the double doors, collapsing into the water on the other side. Shy followed, half carrying, half dragging the man, both of them diving through the flames, everything going silent for Shy underwater.

He quickly raised his head up and sucked in a smoky breath and started coughing uncontrollably as he and Kevin pulled the man toward the warped stairs.

Through the darkness outside, Shy saw the outline of several lifeboats already on the ocean, whitecapped waves thrashing them around. A line of passengers and crew jockeyed to get on the two remaining lifeboats, as both ends of the sinking ship were now on fire.

Shy and Kevin helped the man up the uneven stairs to the closest lifeboat, pushed him through the line of shouting passengers. “Vlad!” Kevin yelled. “Make sure he gets on the boat! His leg is hurt!”

“We just reached capacity!” Vlad shouted back. “We’re lowering it now! Get him on the next one!”

Shy and Kevin turned toward the other boat, a crowd already pushing and shoving in front of it. Shy knew he should be fighting, too. The lifeboats were ten times safer than the open rafts. Especially in these conditions. But there was no room left. And he was crew.

“I’ll get off!” someone shouted from inside the lifeboat in front of them.

Shy watched the guy climb over the other seated passengers and jump down onto the deck. It was the guy Shy and Kevin kicked out of the Jacuzzi on the first night of the voyage, Christian. He was actually giving up his seat.

Christian asked about the man’s leg, explaining he was a doctor, then he helped boost him onto the boat. Shy scanned the rest of the faces on board, looking for Carmen or Rodney, but they weren’t there. He was sure he’d seen Carmen climbing into one of the lifeboats, though. Maybe hers had already launched.

Kevin and Shy started cautiously down the slanted deck toward the raft-launching site, Christian following closely behind them. But when they arrived they found Marcus and Paolo shouting for them to hold on and pointing toward the ocean.

Shy spun back around, saw another huge wave. This one only half the size of the previous two but big enough to lift one of the lifeboats and slam it against the side of the ship. Pieces of shattered boat flew into the air and flailing passengers spilled out into the stormy sea.

The cruise ship creaked and shifted under the power of the wave, the water just failing to reach as high as the Lido Deck.

Shy stared down at the battered lifeboat, scared to death that Rodney or Carmen might have been aboard. The top half ripped completely away. Paolo now explaining that they had to be close to the islands. Otherwise the waves wouldn’t be breaking the way they were.

“I don’t see any land!” Kevin shouted.

“We will by morning!” Paolo answered. “We just have to make it through the night!”

“If a boat can’t make it,” Marcus said to Shy, “how will a raft?”

Shy had no answer as he scanned the water, looking for Carmen’s head. But it was too dark to see anything more than shapes.

The final two lifeboats were being lowered toward the ocean, several passengers staring out of the opening, looking down at the people floating on the water or back up at the burning ship.

Paolo loaded the few remaining passengers and crew onto rafts, one after the other. Shy looked around as he moved with the line. The sinking ship. The lifeboats getting tossed around on the ocean’s surface. A group of passengers trapped up near the burning bow of the ship, leaping off, one by one, screaming as they fell past the raft launch site, into the raging water.

Shy was shoved onto one of the rafts by the crew member behind him, bodies quickly filling in around him, and then the raft slowly lowering down the side of the ship. When it reached the end of its launch rope, the raft plunged toward the sea, Shy gripping the handle beside him, yelling like everyone else, weightlessness like a knot in his stomach, his gaze fixed on the life-vested bodies below, on the stripped ship parts and swirls of ship fuel, and then he shut his eyes as tight as he could and braced for impact.