by Jordan Rivet
She took a pile of sweaters from the rack and returned to the plaza. She gave one to the boy, Neal. His mother gripped Judith’s hand wordlessly.
Judith went over to a group of people who looked like they had come from San Diego. They wore an assortment of office clothes, workout gear, and even a fast-food uniform, complete with a visor and a button that said, “How can I help you?”
“There are sweaters in the gift shop,” she said. “Under the circumstances I think we can use them. Spread the word.”
They thanked her and began to tell the others.
Judith clutched her pile of sweaters close and made her way back to the reception lobby, where they’d left the pregnant woman, unsure what she would find there.
Simon
The tall sailor still sat on the plush carpet steps, running his hands over his shaved head. He kept shaking it, as if arguing with himself, denying something.
“Excuse me,” Simon said. “I wanted to thank you for your help at the door. And on the gangway.”
“Just doing my job.” He stood and rolled his broad shoulders. “Name’s Reggie.”
“Simon. Did you see where my daughter went? I told her to find the deepest corner she could and shut the door.”
“Try the laundry room and the bowling alley,” Reggie said, “and the engine room if she’s not afraid of big machines.”
“She’s definitely not afraid of machines,” Simon said. “How do I get there?”
Reggie gave him instructions, and Simon set off into the bowels of the ship. He made his way down staircases and through corridors, occasionally passing bewildered-looking passengers and crew. He asked if they’d seen a little girl with pigtails and urged them to head to the plaza. No, he didn’t know what was going on. No, he didn’t think they were going back.
The ship was large, but it wasn’t the biggest cruise ship he’d seen by far. It didn’t belong to any of the major cruise lines, based on the logos painted on the bulkhead. It seemed to do family-oriented cruises to Mexico and the like. Had this ship even been as far as Hawaii? Simon wasn’t sure he liked the captain’s plan. He wanted to get back to San Diego as soon as possible. It couldn’t be destroyed. It just couldn’t.
He checked the laundry room, calling for Esther as the cotton piles swallowed sound. The clean scent of detergent masked the charcoal smell of the ash still clinging to his clothes. Where was she? Rationally, he knew she couldn’t have gotten off the ship, but panic still clutched at him with every second spent searching.
After ten minutes he opened the engine room door. A loud roaring filled the cavernous space, rattling his eardrums. The big engines looked like windowless cars lined up in the center of the floor. A metal catwalk ran around the outer edge of the two-story room. Simon stepped onto it from the doorway, his footsteps clanking.
A pair of men stood on the catwalk, staring down at the engines. One took a long swig from a hip flask. They must know what was going on outside then.
“Excuse me,” Simon shouted above the noise. “I’m looking for a little girl. Pigtails. Blue T-shirt. Have you seen her?”
The man with the flask looked at him, eyes bloodshot, and answered in a language Simon didn’t understand. The other man nodded and uttered what sounded like a curse word. Simon gestured toward the machines. The men shrugged and didn’t stop him, so he climbed down a flight of metal steps to the lower level.
His feet vibrated with the motion of the engines. He walked along the room, calling for Esther. It was well lit, even though the rest of the ship seemed to have switched to emergency power. The fluorescent lights threw sharp shadows across the machinery.
“Esther! Are you in here, button? It’s Daddy.”
He reached the end of the room and rounded the big engines. He started back, passing a row of machines with pipes running out of them, perhaps pumps of some kind.
“Esther?”
“Daddy?” Her voice was so small, Simon almost didn’t hear it above the growl of the machines.
“Yes, button. It’s me. You can come out now.”
“What’s going on? Are we at sea?”
A pair of large eyes appeared beneath one of the big pipes along the edge of the room. Esther stood. There was a long smudge of grease across one side of her round face, as if she had lain down on the floor. For some reason the sight made Simon want to cry.
“We’re sailing somewhere safe right now.”
“Where?”
“Hawaii. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
“Where are Mommy and Namie? Are they sailing to Hawaii too?”
Simon looked down at his daughter, with her messy pigtails and her blue Thomas T-shirt, and finally let the truth engulf him. He sat on the floor and pulled Esther onto his lap, hugging her close. She felt small and warm in his arms. He would keep this little girl safe no matter what happened next.
“Mommy and Naomi were in San Diego, Esther. They . . . they’re . . .” How could he explain this? What if he was wrong and they got out? “There was a big volcano in Wyoming. It erupted. When that happens, there’s lots of ash in the air and it can go really far away if the explosion is big enough and the wind is strong. It’s really dangerous, like poison.”
“Is that the smoke we saw?”
“Yes. That was the ash from the volcano. If anyone breathes too much of it, they . . . they could die.”
“Can’t they hold their breath?” Esther asked.
Simon passed a hand over his eyes.
“Not for long enough,” he said. “Not when there’s that much ash. If it rains it also gets really heavy, and it can make houses fall down on people.”
“What if they went far away?” Esther said. “Like us. We got away on this big boat, right?”
Simon cast about for a hundred different reasons why it might be true. What if they found gas masks? A safe basement? Was it possible? What if they had decided to drive to Mexico instead of going to the dentist? Would they be far enough away in time?
“We did. We were really, really lucky. I think most people weren’t as lucky as us today.”
“Is Mommy dead?” Esther spoke so quietly that Simon wouldn’t have heard her if he hadn’t been dreading those very words.
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“And Namie?”
“They were together.”
“Can we go back and find them?”
“I don’t think we can go to San Diego again for a while. Maybe weeks.”
“Did our house fall down?”
“I don’t know, button.”
“What are we going to do without Mommy?”
“I don’t know.”
The tears came then. Simon hugged Esther closer and wept into her tiny shoulder. Her Thomas T-shirt grew damp from his tears. Esther didn’t cry, but she gripped him tightly with her small, warm hands. The engine vibrated solemnly at his back.
Judith
The women in the reception lobby were crying when Judith arrived with her pile of sweatshirts. The older one with lavender hair and the long peasant skirt sat on the floor, rocking back and forth. Judith hadn’t realized before how tiny she was. She was holding the hand of the woman lying on the couch, whose eyes were closed.
Blood and fluid matted the cushions. It made Judith’s stomach turn, and she looked away. The woman with the cross necklace was on her feet. Her cheeks were wet and her shirt was covered in blood.
In her arms was a tiny baby. Bright-red hair dusted its head, still glistening with fluid. The woman hummed a hymn over the baby as her tears continued to fall.
“Is she . . . ?” Judith cleared her throat. “Is she okay?”
“They both are, honey. They both are.”
Wordlessly, Judith handed over the pile of sweatshirts. She helped the lavender-haired woman, who introduced herself as Bernadette, wrap the exhausted new mother in soft cotton. The other woman cleaned the baby with fragments of her own soiled clothes and then wrapped herself and the newborn in clean sweatshir
ts.
“There was supposed to be a nurse. Did she help you?” Judith whispered to Bernadette.
“Yes, dear. She was here for the worst of it. She just went down to the clinic to get some supplies. Our girl Constance is going to need stitches. She wouldn’t trust anyone else to get the right stuff, and Penelope here knows plenty about looking after babies.”
Penelope smiled over the newly swaddled form. “This is an angel. The Lord will look after us. Don’t ya’ll worry about a thing.”
“Stitches?” Judith felt ill. “Should we move her down to the clinic?”
“Best to keep her still. We’ll move her somewhere safe and clean as soon as she’s patched up.”
Judith fought down the bile in her throat. She couldn’t stand blood, and even talking about stitches made her feel nauseated.
“Umm, I don’t think I can help with that.”
“Of course not, dear,” Penelope said. “We have things under control here. Would you like to hold our little Catalina?”
“Catalina?”
“She’ll go by Cally for short,” the woman on the couch said, lifting her head slightly. “Like my mother, Calypso.”
“Oh, um, no. I don’t like ba— ”
But Penelope was already thrusting the tiny cotton-wrapped bundle into Judith’s arms. The baby barely weighed a thing, but Judith held her out in front of her like a twenty-pound sack of rice, both arms stiff. Catalina had a snub nose and ears like mother-of-pearl shells. Her hair looked even redder now that it had started to dry. It was soft like down. Her skin was nearly translucent. Judith could see the veins pulsing on her tiny temples. She swallowed a gag and quickly handed the baby back to Penelope.
“I’d better go see if everything’s okay back in the plaza,” Judith said. She wanted to get out of there before the nurse returned.
“Wait!” A face popped up from behind the computer on the reception desk. “Did the captain make an appearance? What’d he say?”
“Who are you?”
“Nora. I’ve been trying to access the net. Had to break into the ship’s system.”
Nora had spiky pink hair and at least a dozen earrings in each ear and two in her eyebrow. She appeared to be in her late twenties. Judith introduced herself and joined her at the reception desk, turning her back on the three women with the baby. She didn’t understand how they could sit there and coo over a wrinkly baby with all that blood around.
“Do you have an Internet connection?” she asked. For one wild moment she thought about emailing Donald Herz to tell him she wouldn’t make it to her interview. In a way it was easier to think about that than about her family. Captain Martinelli had to be wrong about San Francisco. She would email her parents to let them know where she was. They would answer her. Everything would be fine.
“I’ve been trying,” Nora said. “I’ve only been able to log on for seconds at a time. It’s worse than spotty dial-up.”
“Did you check the news?” Judith went around to the other side of the desk to sit beside Nora. The woman was relatively calm. Judith respected that. “The captain was telling everyone some pretty crazy things in the plaza. He said the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted.” Judith tried to laugh. “It can’t be that bad, can it?”
Nora shook her head. “It’s that bad. The networks in New York are broadcasting. Anything based in California or the Midwest is silent as the grave.”
“What do the networks in New York say?”
“Apocalyptic headlines. Fear-mongering talking heads. The usual click-bait bullshit.”
“You don’t think it was Yellowstone, then?”
“Some people say Yellowstone,” Nora said. “I don’t know yet. Need more data.” She twisted the ring in her eyebrow, making Judith feel queasy. “You’ve seen the documentaries, right?”
“Not really.” Judith didn’t waste her time with conspiracy theories and doomsday predictions. The chances of that kind of thing happening in her lifetime were vanishingly slim. And yet . . . “What do the documentaries say?”
“That it’ll get worse before it gets better,” Nora said. “The day of the eruption is killer obviously, but the scientists think the US probably wouldn’t be able to produce a harvest in the years afterwards because of weather disruptions. It’s like climate change on steroids. The big problem is that there might not be any food to get from overseas either if the harvests fail there too. Depending on what happens to the weather, we could go for years without a proper harvest.”
“What would we do then?” Judith asked. This was all hypothetical, surely.
“Starve,” Nora answered. “That’s what the documentaries say at least. It’ll happen all over the world.”
“This doesn’t feel real.”
“Tell me about it,” Nora said. “Hey, the net’s back. Let’s see if we can get the BBC. They’ll sort out the bullshit.”
Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Judith had never seen anyone type so fast.
“Here we go. Fuck.”
The BBC page loaded slowly, opening a few pixels at a time. The picture that emerged was a simulated image of North America. The headline, in eighty-point font, said simply, catastrophe. The simulation showed a crater the size of Washington over Yellowstone National Park. Contour lines marked the estimated ash fall range. California had been swallowed up. Lower Canada and the desert in the Southwest. To the east, the disaster squeezed outward like an amoeba. It ate up the Great Plains, the Midwestern cornfields, threatening Pennsylvania, sitting heavy above the Deep South. The Eastern Seaboard looked untouched for the moment.
“Damn,” Nora breathed. “It says casualties could be in the hundred millions. That’s eight zeros.”
They stared at each other for a moment. There was no scope to comprehend this catastrophe. A hundred million was an abstract number, a fiction.
And California was buried. Judith’s whole family was there. She hadn’t been close to her parents since their divorce. But even when they fought over custody, argued about money, or paid more attention to their work than to her, they had still been there. She could always go home. Now her whole life had been swallowed up in a single morning, and she couldn’t do anything about it.
“Isn’t anyone sending help?” Judith said weakly.
Nora turned back to her computer screen. Where before she had been purposeful, now her fingers moved clumsily. Judith felt like she was seeing everything from underwater.
“It says the president is in a secure location. Communications are spotty.” Nora clicked down through the article and scanned the accompanying headlines. “There’s not much real information. Experts speculating about the potential toll. They keep linking to a documentary from a few years back. People in the UK are rushing stores and stocking up on food and supplies.” Nora pulled up another page. “Same thing’s happening in the rest of Europe. God, I wouldn’t want to be working at a grocery store today.”
“What about the military?”
“Let’s see . . . Highest alert, obviously . . . All bases closed to civilians. Planes grounded all over the world, even air force. Navy ships in the Pacific are heading for a rendezvous at Pearl Harbor.”
“Really? That’s where we should go.” Judith thought of the warship pushing through the boat jam so recklessly, so confidently. She wanted to call in the cavalry, to have men in uniforms move in and set things to right. “The navy will keep us safe. I bet they’re already coordinating relief efforts.”
“Maybe,” Nora said. “Ugh, the net’s gone again. I’ll see if I can get it back.”
“The captain was staying in touch with people via radio up on the bridge,” Judith said. Captain Martinelli had called it the end of the world. He may have been right about the volcano, but that didn’t inspire confidence. There was no way it was that bad. Things would clear up soon. They just had to give it some time.
Nora pounded at the keyboard in frustration, then pushed back from the desk. “I can’t get it to work. All this ash can’t
be good for the satellite signals.” Nora hammered the keys again, but the screen stayed blank. “Nope, it’s gone again.”
They stared at the blank screen for a few minutes. A hundred arguments for why it couldn’t be as bad as the news said rioted through Judith’s mind. But she was finding it harder to explain this away. Just a few hours ago she had been preparing to take her first steps into a bright, shiny future. She had done everything right. But now she sat in a cold cruise ship lobby with a group of strangers, one of whom had just delivered a baby for goodness’ sake!
“What are we going to do?” Nora said quietly, almost to herself. She pinched her largest earring, a ball with spikes coming out of it, like the head of a mace, almost hard enough to draw blood. The report from the venerated BBC had brought the true weight of the disaster tumbling down on their heads.
“I don’t know,” Judith said. She remembered Simon saying they should keep people from panicking. She couldn’t process the implications of what had happened, but she had to do something. “It looks like we’ll be on the ship for a few days. Maybe we should make sure everyone has somewhere to sleep. Do you know how many people this ship can hold?”
“I can probably get a deck plan,” Nora said. She tapped at the computer. “Oh, and I found the passenger manifest.”
“How many rooms are there?” Judith asked.
“Give me a sec . . . Looks like there’s enough space for seven hundred fifty passengers and two hundred fifty crew. Six hundred forty-two passengers were checked in, but I don’t know how many of those are still on board, or how many extras we picked up. I think that Simon guy was collecting names.”
“There had to be a hundred of us running on from the city, maybe more. I’d be willing to bet there are at least a thousand people on this ship.”
“If that’s true, there won’t be enough passenger rooms for all the runners,” Nora said, bringing up a diagram of the ship on the screen. Each room was labeled with a number and occupancy figure. The ship didn’t look all that big, actually. Judith had thought cruise ships usually carried thousands of people, but this wasn’t that kind.
