The Living

by Matt De La Peña

  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.

  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.

  24

  Sweep of the Destiny Dining Room

  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.

  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.

  25

  Launch of the Lifeboa
ts

  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.