Chris Adrian - The Children's Hospital

Jemma opened her mouth, but before she could speak the ship, which had disappeared as the hospital made one of its usual midday rotations, drifted into view again not a hundred yards away. Jemma stood up, and now she did like everyone else — she hurried to the window and pressed her face against the glass.

Dr. Snood lobbied vigorously to be appointed an ambassador, but the only thing worse than cannibals were cannibals encountered in the company of a snide fussbudget — Jemma had her absolute way. They appeased Dr. Snood by appointing him and the lift team as backups.

It was ten o’clock in the morning when Kidney spotted the boat. By five Jemma and the three lesser Friends were gathered at the head of the crowd on the roof. The boat had sidled up within twenty yards of them, close enough to read the name, the Celebration, and to see how utterly empty the decks and windows were. It was huge — the center of the hospital floated at a point about fifty yards from the bow, but the boat stretched out for hundreds of yards behind them.

They tested their phones one more time, and then Rob aimed the bazooka-sized launcher the angel had made for them and fired a rope and a hook across the water. It punched into a wall on the far side of a section of promenade deck and stuck fast. He sent another one over to strike four feet above the first, and he and Ishmael secured the lines to new hooks in the sycamore tree, stretching them tight with a crank. Rob tested them, tightening them both three times before he was satisfied, bouncing on the bottom one and launching himself over the first one, releasing one hand and doing a half twist before swinging down on the other side.

“Okay,” he said. “Are you sure you don’t want a fifth person?” He had sounded like Dr. Snood, when he had Jemma alone, arguing that it wasn’t safe for her to go.

“We’ll call if we need help,” Vivian said, and dialed her phone in demonstration. Back in the crowd, Dr. Snood answered his.

“Hello?” he said.

“See you later,” Vivian said. She hung up and climbed on the ropes. Jemma pulled at the neck of her maternity wetsuit — they were all wearing wetsuits — and went after her, looking down, like she wasn’t supposed to, as soon as she cleared the edge of the roof. A section of the eighth floor stuck out protectively underneath her, and then she cleared that. Emma waved at her from out of a fourth-floor window, part of an extraction team waiting with hooks and life preservers in the PICU, in case any of them fell in. Jemma put one black rubber bootie in front of the other and in five steps was over the green water. It made her feel cold just to look at it. She imagined the penguins again, streaming below the clear surface in a horde, and breaking the surface to jump up and perform stupid and amazing tricks on the rope.

Vivian shook the top line, and broke her reverie. “Come on, Poky,” she said.

On the other side, the four Friends arranged themselves in a line and began to explore. Ishmael went first, carrying the weapon. “The angel gave you that?” Jemma had asked him on the roof, when she saw that he was carrying a gun.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, turning and firing it at a bush. It shot something that looked like a stream of ink — not very fast, either. Jemma thought it was just a squirt gun until the coherent beam of ink suddenly broke apart into a net that wrapped around the bush. “That bush is neutralized,” Ishmael said.

They had landed on the third deck from the top of the ship. It was empty except for a row of lounge chairs. “They’re filthy,” said Monserrat, bending down to run her finger along the arm of a chair. It was covered with a layer of thick black dust, her finger left a glaring white mark. Vivian said, “Don’t touch that stuff.” She cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted out, “Hello!”

“You’re going to wake up the zombies,” Jemma said.

“There has to be someone here,” Vivian said.

“There doesn’t,” said Ishmael. “They could have gotten off at a different stop, or they could all be dead. Maybe they all jumped in the water. Maybe I was here, way before. Nothing looks familiar.”

“Maybe,” Jemma said. She closed her eyes and tried to look without using her eyes. Her fellow explorers were bright and obvious, she tried to look past them, imagining the ship to be entirely transparent, a cruise ship for Wonder Woman to relax on, to stuff herself at a constant buffet, to lie by the pool while she got a massage and a manicure and a teeth cleaning and a high colonic all at once.

“Let’s go,” Vivian said.

“Wait,” Jemma said. “I’m listening.”

“What do you hear?” asked Monserrat.

“Nothing,” said Jemma, already terminally distracted by the surprising variety of objects that came tumbling from Wonder Woman’s colon — old red meat, chewing gum, a California license plate, a hundred cocaine-stuffed condoms — but had seen already in her mind a glass boat empty of any flash of green life and filled with as much dust as air. They walked on in their cautious single file, down the deck toward the stern of the boat. Jemma looked back at the hospital. There was an unbroken line of people standing along the edge of the roof, and a face at every window. It should have been stranger, she thought, to see it floating there twenty yards away, but somehow the attendant icebergs seemed like the only strange part of the picture. The others turned around too, and all four of them stood, arrested by the sight until Snood, watching them with a pair of fancy binoculars, called to ask if something was wrong.

“It looks so small,” Ishmael said. “Have we really been in there such a long time?”

“Some of us longer than others,” said Vivian.

The wall to their left fell away after a few hundred feet, and the deck opened up across the width of the ship. There were dozens more chairs, and tables, all gathered in circles around a big circular bar. Jemma walked up and peered over the edge of it, at a hundred liquor bottles arranged in a spiral that echoed the shape of the hospital across the water. Not a single one was broken. The floor behind the bar was covered with the same black dust as the chairs.

“Hey,” Jemma said. “Footprints.” They crossed each other in the dust, and there was an intact pair standing in front of the vodka section.

“At least a thirteen,” Vivian said. “Do you think they’re fresh?” Everybody shrugged, not knowing how to tell such things. The back of the bar was sheltered by the wind, so they decided the prints might have been there for a long time. They crossed the deck and passed through a door onto rich carpet, raising dust with every step no matter how lightly they tried to go. Monserrat sneezed. “Hello,” Vivian said again, not very loud.

They passed a sign: Smoking Room, and pressed their heads against the glass to look inside at the dusty leather furniture and full ashtrays. Vivian’s phone rang again, making them all jump. “What?” she said, answering it. “Yes. Don’t call again unless an iceberg is about to hit us. All right. Goodbye. Snood again,” she said after she hung up, shaking her head. Beyond the smoking room they found another set of red-carpeted stairs. They considered splitting up, so some of them could continue exploring this deck while others went below, but fear of zombies or some similar unpleasantness kept them together. They discovered two more bars, a game room, a golf simulator, and a hot tub so full of dust it had become a pool of mud. They walked down the same strip of deck they’d landed on. Jemma waved at the hospital, feeling silly.

“It’s the Lido deck,” Vivian said excitedly at the bottom of the stairs, reading the name off a sign in the wall. “This is where all the action is. We’ll find someone here.”