Dead Sea (36 page)

“Yes.”

He nodded. “And what are our alternatives?”

George knew what they were. “We don’t have any.”

And they didn’t. Living in a raft at close quarters pretty much ruled out the possibility of quarantine and there were no emergency rooms handy. Soltz was one of them. Infected or not, they had to care for him even if it meant getting sick themselves. They could not abandon him … if they did that, they were no better than, well,
Saks
for example.

“You’re right, we don’t have any. So?”

George just shrugged. “So I suppose there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Figured you’d say that.”

Good old Gosling. The supreme pragmatist. You could always count on him to see the practical side of just about anything.

Gosling had repaired the tears in the gunwale of the raft using the repair kit and had aired it back up using the hand-pump. They had taken some water, but not enough to be alarmed about. The inflated arches were pretty much toast, though. The creature’s barbed tail spines had literally shredded them and that was that.

George was starting to drift off when he realized that there was something in front of the raft. Another shadow, though this one was larger than the devil ray beast. Much larger. Whatever it was, it had to be easily twenty-feet across and seemed to be getting larger by the moment.

Maybe it was a submerged bank of weed, maybe something else.

He was about to draw Gosling’s attention to it when Soltz came out of his fugue, started babbling about the rusted chain on his bicycle in-between ragged breaths of air. Gosling went to him with Cushing at his side. Cushing mopped sweat from his brow and Gosling checked his vitals.

“How is he?” George asked, to which Gosling just shook his head.

And that pretty much said it all.

Soltz was fading and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. Just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and watch him die. And the idea of that just about sucked the lot of them dry.

That shadow was closer now. Easily within ten feet of the raft. Whatever it was, either they were drifting toward it or it was drifting toward them. Take your pick.

“You see it?” George said, knowing Cushing had.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

Gosling had seen it, too, but was preoccupied with trying to make Soltz comfortable. Maybe he had, for Soltz had gone back to his dream-island again which was about all you could hope for under the circumstances. If he had to die, it would be better if he went in his sleep.

Even with the semi-brightening of the day and the use of a flashlight, you could only see maybe five or six inches down into the sea. Light would penetrate no farther. That shadow, George figured, was about that far down, maybe less. Just visible as a shape, but no more.

“I don’t like it,” Cushing said.

Gosling was watching it. “Row around it then.”

There’s a mad dog in your path, just walk around it.

He was being Mr. Realism again, of course, but it was obvious that he did not like that big dark mass being on a slow collision course with them either. But he could not come right out and say it. It was not his way. He was used to being in charge of men and that had not left him. Even in this godforsaken place. And when you were in charge, you didn’t admit to trouble very easily.

George was thinking:
I don’t know what in the Christ you are, Mr. Shadow, but you’re giving me a real funny feeling in my belly and I don’t like it one fucking bit. Just go away now, go away. Leave us be. We don’t need another flying manta ray from Mars …

And wasn’t that a cheerful thought? That the dead bat-thing might have a big brother or a pissed-off father?

“Here,” Cushing said, putting an oar in his hands. “Let’s get away from it.”

George had his oar on the port side and Cushing had his starboard. Feeling something evaporating in their throats and the patter of their hearts begin to pick up, they began to paddle madly away from the mass. Neither thought they would, but then, when it was maybe five feet from the raft, they broke away and to the right and skirted it, came around it into open water.

There.

Simple.

It was behind them now. Just a huge, spreading shadow. In five, ten minutes, it would be out of sight, another nasty little secret tucked away in the fog.

“Probably wasn’t anything to begin with,” Cushing said, almost like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. “Nothing alive. Just something drifting around … some junk.”

And George wanted badly to disagree with that, because he didn’t think that mass was just some harmless patch of submerged weed or clot of muck. It had approached the raft because it
wanted
to approach the raft.

“Wait a minute now,” Gosling said. “It’s coming back … maybe it’s caught in the line from the sea anchor.”

Sure, George thought, maybe.

It sounded good, sounded damn reasonable … but he didn’t believe it. Whatever was out there it was indeed coming back. Not like something snared on the anchor, but like something moving under its own power.

“Shit,” Cushing said, which summed it up nicely.

The mass was coming back and coming back fast. It was still down deep enough in that foul water where they could not see what it was and maybe it wanted things that way.

Gosling had an oar now, too. “Row for chrissake,” he told them. “Row your asses off.”

And they did, splashing through the water, sliding over patches of weed and cutting across those occasional channels of open, dark water. They were moving, but it was still gaining. Coming even faster now and George thought he saw it moving with an odd pulsating sort of motion.

“It’s gonna hit us,” Gosling said. “Get into the center of the raft.”

They pulled in their oars and did just that.

Still the thing came, not slowing at all. It was going to bump them any minute now. Ten feet, then five, then right on top of them, everyone tensing and gritting their teeth and waiting for it … but it never hit them. Inches from the raft it simply disappeared.

“It went under us,” Gosling said.

And that surely wasn’t good. Because it was bad enough to be dogged in that Dead Sea by some black mass, but at least then you knew where it was. Not knowing, now that was far worse any way you sliced it.

“Where is it?” Cushing asked, trying to look in every direction at the same time.

“Gone,” Gosling said.

And George sat there, the seconds ticking away like separate eternities as he waited for something else to happen. For some nameless horror, perhaps, to rise up from the stark depths and engulf the entire raft like a clam closing its shell.

Up ahead, maybe twenty feet in front of the raft, bubbles broke the surface. Dozens of them until it looked like a submarine was about to surface. But what surfaced was that black mass again. It came nearly to the surface, then dipped back down again like it was saying,
yeah, I’m here all right, but you don’t get to know what I am. Not until I decide …

“It’s just sitting there,” Cushing said. “I don’t like this at all … fucking thing is giving me the creeps. Don’t mind saying so either.”

Gosling smiled thinly and maybe George did, too. But you could see that Cushing did not care one iota. That mass was scaring him just as it was scaring them, but at least he had the balls to admit as such out loud.

So they waited.

The thing waited.

“Haven’t we had enough already?” George said out loud and was immediately sorry that he had. The others were thinking it, sure, but he’d been the one to say it. Something that certainly didn’t need saying.

He kept his mouth shut.

After maybe ten minutes of awful
nothing,
the mass began to move slowly toward the raft. It was in no hurry. It had all the time in the world and seemed to know it.

“I think it’s … I think it’s coming up,” Gosling said.

It was.

Something was. Something was emerging, breaking the surface in a foam of bubbles and slime, something like an immense umbrella-shaped dome that ran from a lustrous purple at its apex to a fleshy bubblegum-pink around its edges. Thing was, it did not stop coming up. More of it was visible all the time, a hideous collection of floats and polyps and wheezing bladders, white and red and orange and emerald. All glistening and shining and fluttering. Around the outside of the dome, there were a series of dark oily nodules that might have been eyes … hundreds of them, black and jellied and staring.

“It’s a … a jellyfish,” Cushing said and you could hear it just beneath his words, that peculiar combination of wonder and terror and revulsion they were all feeling.

A jellyfish.

But the kind of jellyfish that swam the Dead Sea. Its bell was maybe thirty feet across, all those hissing bladders and floats that surrounded it as big as basketballs. They were inflating and deflating, like the thing was breathing. The water was roiling now with hundreds of pale yellow tentacles that fanned out in every direction. Some were wire thin, others thicker than a man’s arm and veined with a ruby-red networking that might have been arteries … or nerve ganglia for all anyone could say. Some of those tentacles must have been hundreds of feet in length.

“Jesus Christ,” Gosling said.

And George wanted to say something, too, but he was positively breathless. His lungs were filled with dust devils and blowing sand and that was probably a good thing … for if his voice had come, managed to push past his lips which were melted together in a gray line, it would have been a scream. The mother of all screams. For what was bouncing through him at the sight of this monstrosity, this evil living hot-air balloon and its attendant floats, was sheer, unbridled terror. Raw and stark and mad.

It could not be.

This thing could not be.

The water was a seething, undulating forest of its tentacles now and they had completely encircled the raft like coils of cable. They were underwater in thick, roping clusters and breaking the surface in tangles so thick you could have walked across them.

As far as George could see … tentacles. A writhing, heaving mass of them, congested like vines in the jungle.

When he found his voice, gagging on the heady vinegar-like stench of the thing, all he could say was, “What the fuck? What the fuck now?”

But nobody answered him.

Cushing and Gosling sat stock still, maybe afraid that if they moved that gargantuan alien jellyfish would sense it, would know exactly where they were and envelop them in a dripping sweep of tentacles. George decided he was going to follow their example and lock down his muscles, even though every muscle and nerve-fiber in him was snapping like high-tension lines.

So they sat and waited and the fog swirled and coalesced, was born in luminous plumes and sparkling shrouds, died in its own arms and was reborn again. Steam misted from the weeds and marshy water. And the raft waited silently with three ice sculptures onboard, an immense nightmare medusan ringing them in like a nickel tangled in a bed of kelp.

What finally broke that leaden, weighty silence was Soltz.

He moaned, groaned, made a wet gasping sound. His lips parted with a dry smacking. His face was beaded with perspiration and his unbandaged eye looked glazed and milky. “Water,” he was saying. “I need … water … need water … a drink of … water …”

And George, even though he knew the man was sick, wanted desperately to stuff a rag in his mouth, tell him to shut the hell up. Because that repeated, dull cadence of his voice was stirring up the jellyfish. Its tentacles were vibrating as if they were hearing it. Around the rim of its bell there was a fan of colorless cilia that looked like waterlogged spaghetti. They had been hanging limp before, barely moving with a sort of drifting motion like sea grass, but now they were twitching and trembling. Maybe the jellyfish couldn’t hear, but maybe it could sense the vibration caused by sound.

Cushing moved and a half dozen tentacles jerked as if in surprise.

“Sit fucking still,” Gosling said in a whisper. “It knows we’re here, just not exactly where …”

Soltz began to stir. He shifted and shook, the waterproof blanket sliding down to his knees. He was up in what passed for the bow and the thing’s tentacles were mere inches away from him over the lip of the raft.

His motion made those tentacles flutter. They changed from the color of wheat to a bright, neon-yellow. Most of them just lay motionless in the water, but a dozen or so above the waterline began to coil in lazy rolls like pythons. It wasn’t just the tentacles that changed color, but the bell, too. It looked oddly synthetic, George had thought upon first seeing it, like something poured from a Jello mold. A perfectly circular mass of transparent jelly that looked deep enough to drown in, skinned with a rubbery membrane like cellophane wetted down with cooking spray. And now it was changing color, too. From that rich purple to hot pink and then scarlet and orange and indigo … it looked like gasoline on water.

“Why the hell is it doing that?” George said under his breath.

“Chromatophores,” Cushing said just as quietly. “Pigmentation cells … it can either control its pigment or it’s reacting to mood swings like a squid …”

But George wasn’t sure if he was buying that.

What he was thinking was insane … but what if it was responding to their voices? The subtle vibrations they caused? Only when they spoke did the bell effuse color. What if it was … Jesus …
intelligent
and it was trying to communicate?

That was scarier than just about anything he could imagine. The idea of some revolting dumb predator was infinitely preferable to one that could reason. For if it could reason, then it was only a matter of time before it figured out how to get them out of the raft.

This was bad. George had thought it had all been bad up to this point … the giant eel attacking the raft, that crazy devil-ray bat … but none of that had been like this. It was one thing to be able to fight back, regardless of how disgusting your adversary was, but to just sit here and wait and wonder helplessly while your mind turned upon itself like a top, showing you all the unpleasant details of your death … yeah, now that was
really
bad. The sort of bad that reached down inside you and yanked your guts out through your mouth until there wasn’t a goddamn thing left in you but an echoing void like the hollow of an empty drum.