Dead Sea (18 page)

“Hearing something?” Gosling asked him.

“I’m not sure.” And he wasn’t. Was it imagination or … or did something want him to think that?

“It’s funny static … never heard nothing quite like it before. Those sounds in there, buzzing sounds now and again. You listen to it long enough you get the feeling …”

“That it’s listening
back?”

But if Gosling thought that, he would not say and maybe it was his silence that was the very worst thing of all.

He feels it, too,
George found himself thinking,
he feels something out there, something listening, something cold and predatory … and maybe amused.

But George knew he had to get off that track. For it was the road to dementia and once you started down it, you’d never come back. It was strictly a one-way street.

Gosling shut the radio off. “Nothing out there,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

George figured if the both of them kept telling themselves that, given time, they might even believe it.

He stared off into the fog like maybe he was waiting for it to show its teeth. “You don’t have much hope for us, do you?”

Gosling shrugged. “I don’t put much in things like hope or faith or luck. I used to hope for things, wish for things for all the good it did. Experience taught me otherwise. You make your own luck, I guess. I’m not saying luck doesn’t exist. I’m sure it does. But not for me and probably not for you. Some people have it, most people don’t.”

George uttered a short laugh. “You can say that again.”

They sat in silence, wishing they had something to smoke or something hard to drink. Anything. Humans loved their chemical dependencies and they never meant so much as they did in survival situations.

“Listen,” Gosling said.

“I don’t hear …” George began and then he did.

It was subtle, but it was there: a sort of tapping sound. And it was coming from under the raft. It wasn’t a big sound like before when the raft had actually been lifted from the sea. This was nothing like that, this was more investigatory, probing, curious. George heard it down there, thinking with a chill that it sounded very much like fingertips scraping over the rubber. It started getting louder, bumping and squeaking, thudding.

“Jesus-”

“Shut up,” Gosling warned him.

It ran up and down the bottom of the raft, creaking and bumping and scratching. Then it just touched now and again.

When it hadn’t happened again for maybe five minutes, George said, “What do you suppose that was?”

But Gosling just shook his head. “I don’t know … I just hope it stays gone.”

Saks was watching the boys play, thinking that he had nobody to blame but himself. That he had hired this crew of mama’s boys, dick-suckers, and all around morons.

The fog had brightened now and the boys were all excited that the sun was coming up, would burn off that fog and deliver the lot of them into never-neverland. They knew better. They all knew better. The fog was filled with a sort of illumination, sure, but to Saks it didn’t look like sunshine at all, but more of a silvery moonlight that the fog tinted yellow. It was not a clean sort of light, but dirty like sunlight tinted through a yellow window pane.

What it came down to, he knew, was that it was all wrong.

Sure, it was brighter now. You could see people’s faces, make out things just fine, but it was not what you’d call a sunny day. It surely was not normal.

After they’d reached the lifeboat and everybody had a bite to eat and some water, everybody chatted away and then one by one they’d fallen asleep … not realizing until that moment how tired they were. Saks himself had gone out hard, not waking for nearly five hours.

But he felt better now. On top of his game.

And his brain was firing on all cylinders again. For what he was thinking about as those idiots fooled with the fishing gear from the survival canisters, was not how
they
were going to stay alive, but how
he
was going to stay alive. How he was going to take control of this little party of stooges and make them work to his adavantage.

Saks was a natural at things like that.

Menhaus was rigging a lure with the sixty-pound test line. Since they didn’t have any bait … any bait that could be spared, that was … Menhaus decided to use his watch since it had seized up now anyway.

“It’s worth a try,” he said. “I saw it in that movie.”

Fabrini grunted. “Sounds fucking goofy to me.”

“So let me do it. I don’t need your help.”

Menhaus was talking about something he’d seen in the film
Lifeboat.
The survivors of a shipwreck used a belt and a shiny bracelet as a fishing lure to try and catch fish. But they didn’t have any real tackle, Menhaus pointed out, and that gave him a distinct advantage.

“I gotta see this,” Fabrini said.

“Let’s go fishing then,” Cook said, happy that they finally had something to do other than watch Saks.

Saks was wondering exactly what they thought they were going to catch in that soup.

Crycek was up in the bow, had Hupp’s head cradled in his lap as before. He watched the entire thing with glazed eyes. Maybe he was there and maybe he was somewhere else entirely.

Carefully, Menhaus lowered his makeshift lure into the water and jigged it like a real lure. He kept doing this, feeding out line, going deep with it. He kept at it ten, fifteen minutes, adjusting depth, feeling around down there as he had as a boy for catfish while Fabrini told him how crazy it all was. But Menhaus kept it up, figuring it was a way to pass the time if nothing else.

“Anything?” Fabrini asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Ah, shit, this is a waste of time.”

“No … wait. I felt something.”

The line jerked in his hands once, twice, three times. Menhaus gave it a good yank, trying to set the hook. Nothing. He tugged it, but there was no pull, no sensation of weight on the other end. But there had been something down there. Unless he snagged the hook on something. He fed out a little more line, jigged it carefully, again and again and again.

“There’s nothing down there,” Fabrini said.

Menhaus figured he was right … but then the line snapped taut in his hands, burning through his fingers. The sixty-pound test was heavy stuff and it cut bleeding valleys into his palms. He cried out and Fabrini took hold of it, too, smart enough to slide on one of the gloves from the emergency bin. He got a good grip on it and, Jesus, there was something big down there.

“We got a whopper here,” he said. “C’mon, Menhaus, this bastard’s fighting …”

Everyone was paying attention now.

Crycek’s eyes were wide and unblinking.

Saks had narrowed his.

Cook looked mildly intrigued.

Menhaus got the other glove on his left hand and the both of them fought that line that whipped and snapped in the water, whatever was on the other end appreciating the meal of that shiny watch but downright pissed off that it was hooked to a line.

Fabrini had never done much fishing, but Menhaus was an old pro.

They pulled against their catch and then played out the line, kept working it that way, tiring out what was on the other end. After what seemed ten minutes of that, there was no more fight.

They started hauling it in.

Foot after foot of line was pulled into the boat, Saks reeling it in as the other two pulled. The nylon fishing line was stained pink from immersion in that moldering sea.

They were getting close now.

Fabrini kept looking to Menhaus, wanting to know what came next.

Menhaus had sweat beading his brow.

There was a sudden thump under the boat and then another and Menhaus directed the line out from under the hull. He directed their catch around the port side, leaning over the gunwale and trying to get a look at it. But the light … dirty alien light … only penetrated a few inches into that opaque sea.

But there was something there. Something pretty good sized.

“We’re going to bring him up far as we can,” Menhaus said. “Then I’ll see if I can get a hold of him, pull him in.”

Together, they brought their catch up until they saw a greenish-brown caudal fin that was broad like a fan of bony spines with a pink membrane connecting them. It slapped against the side of the boat. Slipping on both the gloves now, Menhaus reached down and took hold of its tail just above the caudal. “Jesus, sumbitch is slimy … heavy, Christ … get ready boys …”

“Be careful,” Cook said.

With everything he had, Menhaus yanked it up out of the drink and it flopped over the gunwale and fell to the deck, not far from Crycek’s boots … which he quickly withdrew.

“What the fuck?” Saks said.

But they were all thinking that.

For it wasn’t a fish … exactly.

It was segmented like the tail of a lobster, twisting and gyrating, seemed almost boneless as it thrashed and sprayed slimy water in every direction. The men were falling over each other to get out of its way.

“You’re some kind of fisherman, all right,” Saks said, enjoying the other’s discomfort and horror.

It was maybe four-feet in length, the body reticulated and brown, oddly serpentine at the posterior end and thickening up to the width of a nail keg towards the head. There was something obscenely fleshy about it. It was a fish … yet not a fish. Like some weird, repellent hybrid of fish and crustacean. It was muddy brown at the tail and the color faded as it moved towards the head … or what might have been a head … and became entirely translucent like the body of a brine shrimp. You could see the shadows of pulsing organs and what might have been arteries.

The craziest thing, though, was that its head — completely eyeless as far as they could tell — terminated in dozens of snapping, whipping things like the barbels or whiskers of a catfish. But these were transparent as icicles, each ending in a blood-red needle.

What Saks was mostly aware of, though, was its smell … like rotting fish on a beach, high and foul and moist. But with a curious after-odor like cat urine.

“You brought it in!” Fabrini snapped at Menhaus. “Drag that fucker out!”

“I ain’t touching it,” he said.

“Keep away from it,” Cook warned them. “I don’t trust those whiskers … they could sting.”

Saks just watched it, wondering what sort of sewer of evolution it had wriggled from. Something like that … it had no right to live.

Its pectoral fins were spines like the tail, webbed with pink flesh, but the lower pelvic fins were something between fins and stubby walking legs. And back toward the caudal, there were tiny appendages which could have been nothing but swimmerets like those of a crayfish.

But for all of this, it seemed to be a fish.

Somehow. Some way. For it was incontrovertibly fish-like.

“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini cried. “Somebody kill that fucking thing!”

And they all wanted to, for it was so incredibly appalling that it offended them on some basal level. It was a horror. Something that had slithered out of the backwash of a primeval sea … snaking and undulating and disgusting. But nobody dared get near it.

Saks took up an oar, staring down at it, figuring it would be up to him to smash this monstrosity.

It was dying now, he could see that much. Getting sluggish and dopey. It wouldn’t last much longer. Each of those plates or segments were expanding to take in air, deflating again with slushy sounds. He figured it didn’t have the normal forward gill slits of a fish, but that the openings between the segments must have been gills of some sort.

“Get the hell out of my way,” he told Fabrini, moving around it with the oar.

Hupp was moaning, gagging, sounding like he was going to wretch. He slid out of Crycek’s grip and Crycek let out a little cry … but too late. Hupp’s leg got too close to the fish and those whipping barbels grazed the open flesh, leaving red vertical blisters like blood poisoning or burns. Hupp screamed and flopped and blood came from his mouth. His leg where the barbels had grazed it went blue as a blister, then black. Swelling up like bread dough. He shuddered and slumped over, dead as dead can be.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody did anything.

Crycek whimpered a bit, but didn’t touch Hupp’s body. Was afraid to, maybe.

Saks was watching that thing.

It had no eyes, but all those whiskers or whips were ringed around a flat, flabby gash further in which he supposed was a mouth. Each time the plates expanded to take a breath, that repulsive mouth yawned wide. There were things in there, maybe tongues but looking more like a nest of slender blue worms.

Saks figured then how this sucker hunted.

It used those wormy-tongues to lure in fish much as an alligator snapping turtle did with its own tongue. And once prey got past that flabby cave of a mouth, those whips would come in and seize it, inject it with some nerve agent that would paralyze it. For that’s what those red thorns were: nematocysts, stinging cells like those of jellyfish. Those whips acted like the tentacles of a sea anemone … they captured and killed what the tongues lured in. Saks figured that might explain the thing’s fins … they were like legs because it probably crawled over the bottom.

“You sure you ain’t gonna filet this bastard?” he said to Menhaus and Menhaus stupidly shook his head as if it had been an option he decided against.

Saks stood near the fish … but not too near.

It was growing very still now. Even the whiskers were barely shuddering. And there was a ripe, decomposing stench wafting off it like a bucket of steaming entrails. Saks brought up the oar and smashed it down on the head. Those plates weren’t as rugged as he first thought. The impact of the oar split one like a peanut shell … black, inky fluid oozing out. He brought the oar up and then down, crushing those barbels to paste. He kept hammering at it until it ruptured completely open, pissing a stew of meaty organs and black juice and vomiting out a bile of yellow jelly.

Opened up like that, it didn’t smell too sweet.

Fabrini upchucked over the gunwale.

Menhaus was green as moss.

Cook, however, was unmoved by any of it. If he was anything more than offended by the fish, he would not let Saks see it. He sat in the stern, eyes hard as forged iron. Pale and pinched-looking, but nowhere near as bad as the others.