Dead Sea (13 page)

Yeah, right.

Bobbing there at the crate, he stuck his hand into the water, knowing just as George Ryan knew that there was something damn funny about it.

“What the hell are you doing, Menhaus?” Saks wanted to know. “You’re not drinking that stuff, are you?”

Menhaus assured him he wasn’t. “It feels funny, doesn’t it? The water? Thick or something?”

“It’s like Jello right before it sets,” Fabrini said. “Goddamn soup.”

“Just oil from the ship. That’s all it is,” Saks put in.

And it sounded pretty good. Problem was, nobody was buying such a pat explanation and you could hardly blame them. Because it wasn’t just the water here, but everything. Everything was off in this place, everything was missing the mark somehow … not feeling exactly like it should and there was just no way to account for it.

“It ain’t oil, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Jesus … feel this stuff … it’s like slime, it’s heavy, swampy, I don’t know what.”

And as they argued back forth about it-they would argue pretty much about anything-Menhaus started getting some ideas, but he wasn’t about to voice them. Wasn’t about to say that, yes, it was slimy and not only that but salty and tepid and thick like watered-down gelatin. And that if he had to say what it reminded him of, he would have said amniotic fluid. A warm, vaporous bath of organic broth, seething and simmering like they were floating in the world’s largest placenta. Because he remembered reading once, back in high school, that placental fluid was chemically very close to the composition of earth’s primordial oceans. An organic flux of potential.

“This isn’t worth arguing about,” he finally said, sick of listening to the both of them.

Fabrini snorted. “Who’s arguing?”

“Shut up,” Saks said. “Both of you. Listen … I hear something out there.”

And that pretty much shut everyone down. They listened, feeling their own hearts beating, breath in their lungs. Because out there, out in that churning mist, they were expecting nothing good.

Menhaus heard it right away and was surprised he hadn’t before: a distant thudding sound, like something was scraping harshly against something else.
Thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk.

“Oars,” Fabrini said. “Those are oars … somebody’s rowing out there.”

And he was right, they all suddenly realized.

For what they were hearing were the sound of oars rasping against oarlocks, creaking and groaning in the night. The sound began to get closer, though it was truly hard to say from what direction it was coming.

“Hey!” Fabrini cried out, certain rescue was coming.
“Hey! Over here!
We’re over here!”

And then Saks was shouting, too, both of them calling out into the fog, their voices coming back at them with an eerie sibilance. Menhaus did not join them, for he did not like the sound of that rowing. It was too frantic, too hurried, too panicked-sounding.

It was not a gentle, searching rowing here, but the sound of escape.

But Saks and Fabrini did not seem to notice or want to and they kept at it … kept at it until a high, keening sort of scream came echoing out of the fog. It was shrill and hysterical, almost feminine or girlish in its wailing.

Nobody was saying anything then.

And out in the mist, there was more than one scream now. Men were howling and crying out and the sound of their voices were absolutely terrified. Menhaus and the others heard the timbre of those voices and it shut something down in them, pulled each man into himself. For whatever was happening to those unknown men in that unseen boat, it must have been horrible.

The screams were intermittent now.

“Somebody’s in trouble,” Fabrini said low in his throat. “Maybe we should paddle our crate over there, maybe we should … should do something.”

And Saks said, quite calmly: “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.”

And, for once, Fabrini did not disagree.

The three of them waited in the torpid water, listening and hearing and wanting dear God to be anywhere but where they were. Because they were locked down with terror now, three little boys hearing something dragging itself up the cellar stairs in the dead of night.

And maybe had it ended there with a big, fat mystery, they could have written it off. But it did not end. For they heard splashing and thudding sounds, men stumbling in a boat. Hollow, knocking sounds. Wet sounds. And then coming through it all, the tormented, insane voice of a man screaming, “Oh God oh God oh God help me help
somebody help me don’t let it touch me don’t touch me DON’T TOUCH ME-”

And then it was cut off by a violent smashing sound like a steel girder had slammed into the boat out there. Menhaus felt something evaporate inside of him, maybe his blood and maybe his soul, and his skin went tight and his muscles bunched and compressed involuntarily as if they were trying to make his body smaller, less of a target. He had no spit in his mouth and no will to do anything but grip that crate harder.

For what came next was worse.

It sounded at first like something immense and fleshly had pulled itself up out of a swamp and then there was a low, bellowing snarl that reminded Menhaus of maybe a tiger roaring into a tunnel. It rose up, savage and guttural, echoing through the night. And then … then it was followed by tearing and rending noises, splattering sounds and a wet snapping. And finally, the chewing, grating sound like a dog gnawing on a steak bone.

Menhaus was breathing so hard he was nearly hyperventilating. He didn’t mean to speak, but his voice came bubbling from his lips. “Make it stop, dear Christ, make it stop …”

And he felt Saks’s hand gripping his arm like maybe he wanted to tear the limb free. “Quiet,” he said sharply. “For the love of God, be quiet.”

And out in the fog, there were a few more splashing and sliding sounds and then the night went quiet and dead and there was only the three of them.

Waiting.

Wondering when it would be their turn.

“I think it’s a hatch cover,” Cushing said, running his hands along the long rectangular object before them. It was thick and sturdy and seemed about large enough for six men.

“It won’t sink?” Soltz said.

“No, not this. Hang on.”

Cushing pulled himself up on it. It received his weight easily. He crawled over its wet, smooth surface. It was an overturned hatch cover, all right. Maybe the one that was blown off the starboard cargo hold, he figured.

“Help me up,” Soltz said. “Please hurry.”

Cushing grabbed him by his lifejacket and heaved him forward. After some frantic clawing, Soltz was onboard.

“We are the only survivors,” Soltz said. “I know it now.”

Cushing sighed. “No, we’re not. We can’t be.”

“We might as well accept the inevitable, my friend,” Soltz said, filled with sadness like a little boy who’d lost his puppy. “We are dead men. It’s only a matter of how and when.”

“Stop talking like that. Somebody’ll pick us up after first light.”

Soltz chuckled grimly. “Yes, yes, of course.”

Cushing stared out into the nebulous mist, saying nothing. If Soltz was going to die, he only hoped it would be soon.

Soltz cradled his head in his hands “My sinuses are aching. This damp chill … I can’t take it for long. I’ll be dead of pneumonia long before any boat arrives” He started hacking, then sneezing. “It’s this awful air … I can barely breathe it.”

“We’ll drift clear of it sooner or later,” Cushing told him.

But Soltz didn’t seem to believe that. “Why… why does it smell like this? Like something dead and gassy? That’s not normal, is it? Well, is it? C’mon, Cushing, you know things like this … should air be smelling like that, even at sea?”

Cushing rubbed his eyes. Soltz. Jesus. The guy was a wreck under the best of circumstances, but this … well, it was even worse now. Of all the people to be shipwrecked with. But he did have a point there. That smell was not normal. It was stagnant, cloying like a malarial swamp in the armpit of the Amazon.

No, it wasn’t right.

No more than any of this was right.

“Yeah, it smells funny, but don’t worry about it. It’s just the fog. When morning comes … well, it’ll burn the fog off.”

“Then what?”

Cushing just studied his shape in the dimness. “What do you mean?”

Soltz kept swallowing, like he was trying to keep his stomach down. “When the fog lifts …
what will we see out there?”

The lifeboat was big enough for a dozen men.

Cook and the crewmen he’d found floating — Crycek and Hupp — were the only ones on board. Just the three of them with plenty of room to stretch out in that sixteen-foot orange fiberglass hull. Everything they needed to survive, including an inflatable canopy, was onboard. They had everything from burn cream to seasickness pills, fishing line to survival blankets, chocolate bars to purified water. The
Mara Corday’s
emergency equipment was top-notch, well-maintained and updated before each voyage. It was the first mate’s responsibility and Paul Gosling did not take it lightly. Yes, Cook knew, they had everything to survive, but they still had no idea where they were.

Basically, what they had was a roomy prison cell floating in the sea, at the whim of the elements and current or lack of the same. There was food. There was water. There were oars.

But there was no escape.

All dressed up,
Cook thought,
and nowhere to go.

“Christ,” Crycek said. “When will this goddamn fog lift?”

Cook didn’t bother answering that, because he was of the opinion that it might never lift. And if it did … well, no matter. He’d heard the stories the sailors had been telling before the ship went down. He was certain Crycek had heard them, too.

“Is he still unconscious?” Cook asked, looking over at Hupp.

“Yes,” Crycek said. “I rather doubt he’ll wake at all.”

Hupp was the first assistant engineer and he was in a bad way. He was badly burned and banged-up from one of the explosions. Like Crycek, Cook’s knowledge of medicine was strictly limited. He’d examined Hupp in the glow of a chemical lightstick, but that didn’t tell him much. But judging from the fever boiling in his blood and the awful, hot stink wafting off of him,it looked very grim.

Cook had been the first to see the lifeboat. It had probably been blown clear of the ship’s davits — along with its equipment during one of the final thundering detonations, Cook figured — and had managed to right itself in the flat seas. He found it within minutes after swimming clear of the ship. Sometime later, an hour or so, he’d found the two crewmen. Crycek was wearing a survival suit and Hupp just a lifejacket. Crycek had been holding onto Hupp, in order to keep his head out of the water. Said he found him floating like that, barely conscious.

So there they sat, waiting.

Thinking.

Worrying.

Cook could’ve asked for better companionship than Crycek. The man just sat there brooding in the gloom, clutching a lightstick and refusing to part with it. Much as he refused to part with his day-glo orange survival suit. Like he was expecting them to sink at any moment. But there was more to it than that, Cook knew, for Crycek had been one of the sailors that had manned the rescue boats when that crew member-Stokes, Cook remembered-had lost his mind and jumped overboard. He kept watching the fog like he was expecting something.

Now, Cook was quiet by nature. Not much of a conversationalist, but even when he tried, he couldn’t get much out of Crycek about their search in the fog for Stokes. Crycek got real nervous when Cook brought it up just to pass the time.

And why was that?

All Crycek would say was, “The fog, there’s funny things in the fog” And from the way he said it, you could tell real easy he wasn’t alluding to clowns and dancing bears.

Which made Cook think about all those stories running through the ship, bits about the Devil’s Triangle and things about Stokes being bloodied by something that drove him mad. And that other tidbit he’d gotten from one of the porters, something about the search team having some weird, spooky experiences out in the fog.

Cook didn’t like it.

Didn’t like a lot of this.

Among the equipment stowed on the boat were signaling devices and flares, a manual radio beacon and even a portable VHF radio. Cook had been sending out distress signals for what seemed hours now, calling out for help on the VHF.

So far, nothing but static.

And it was that very static that was bothering him. For it almost sounded at times as if there was something buried in it, a strange distant buzzing sound that came in short, irregular pulses. It rose up and faded away, it seemed, before his ears really got a chance to separate it from the background noise. But it was there, he was sure it was there.

Maybe it was nothing … yet, Cook didn’t believe that. The few brief instances when he’d heard it, it had unsettled him for it did not seem random or undirected. And that should have been a good thing … but for some crazy reason he didn’t think it was.

What?
he asked himself.
What is it that bothers you about it so much? What you might be hearing could be just dead noise, atmospheric interference… or maybe the Coast Guard searching you out. Isn’t that a good thing?

He just wasn’t sure.

For nothing was reading right here, from the fog to this soupy becalmed sea, and part of him was certain that if there was an intelligence behind that buzzing, then it was not benevolent in nature.

That was crazy, paranoid thinking, but there was something about the fog that encouraged such wild leaps of irrationality. The buzzing pulses or pings or whatever they were only occurred moments after Cook sent out a voice signal. Maybe that meant absolutely nothing … but what if somebody out there was locking onto those signals and was seeking them out?

This is the very thing that unnerved Cook, the very thing he dared not even admit to himself. Because he couldn’t get one central idea out of his mind: whatever came out of the fog would not be a good thing.

Crycek had heard those sounds when he used the VHF, too. And when he did, he pulled the plug from his ear, said, “Fucking weird … that sound, you hear it? A buzzing. Like there’s some locust out there wanting to talk.”