Dead Sea (5 page)

George couldn’t sleep.

He laid there, feeling the subtle thrum of the ship beneath him. It was nothing he really cared for, but after awhile your body seemed to adjust to anything. The mind was the real problem. A certain paranoia had settled into him now. Before, it had been merely a bad feeling. Like a sense of apprehension a person got before going to the dentist or getting their taxes done. Normal, really.

But this paranoia, it was different.

He knew it wasn’t from Saks’s tales of jungle predators. Things like that were pretty much to be expected in the bush.

This was something else.

An almost black, unrelenting dread that worried at his nerves like a cat at a mouse. It would not leave him alone. Every time he closed his eyes, they snapped back open and he started, gasping awake like he was being smothered. A brooding sense of foreboding.

An almost inescapable knowledge that the shit was about to hit.

Heavy weather ahead.

So George laid there, expecting the worse, wondering what form it would take and when. Thinking maybe he was going crazy, but knowing, somehow, that would be the least of his problems. They would be into that fog anytime now and maybe they already were. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that Gosling had been nervous about that fogbank rolling at them. George didn’t know much about fog and particularly fog at sea … but there was something unusual about this one. And he didn’t believe for a moment that fog glowed like that.

It just wasn’t natural.

What had Lisa said at the docks?

Be careful of those big crocodiles, George. And be careful out on that sea … funny things happen at sea. My dad was a sailor and he always said that. Funny things happen at sea

George was shivering.

Jesus, how prophetic those words were becoming.

Cushing was up later than the others.

Long after Fabrini and Menhaus shook their unease and nodded off and George finally gave in to sleep and Saks and Soltz called it a night, he was still awake. Awake and restless.

He wasn’t like the others, not really. And this wasn’t because he held some elitist notion that since he was educated and they weren’t, he was a better man. For he wasn’t better, just different. He wasn’t a grader operator or a dozer jockey like the others. He came under the guise of being an office manager, a clerk, the guy who was to be the go-between for Saks’s crew and the mine people. It was his job to see that the crew got everything they wanted and when they wanted it.

And this was true.

Within limits.

He was the only one of the crew who knew Franklin Fisk personally. Saks had dealt with him and his people on several other projects in South America. But that was strictly a business relationship. Cushing, on the other hand, knew Fisk very well, had worked for him for some ten years now. He had been instrumental in implementing the multimillion dollar marketing strategy of Fisk’s overseas interests. Fisk, it so happened, was also married to Cushing’s sister. No one on the crew knew this. No one would ever know it.

No one would ever know the truth.

And the truth was that Cushing was a spy. That he had been hand-picked by Fisk himself to keep an eye on Saks. Saks was rumored to be a nasty one. Yes, he got the job done, always brought the projects in under budget and within schedule. But rumors had it he was an alcoholic. That he spent his days and nights drinking in his tent while his men labored. That he was physically abusive of his crew. That he often treated local workers like slave labor. On his last project, Saks had been accused of raping a village girl. He had also been accused of causing the deaths of three local men in a blasting accident. The story went that Saks had set the charges to clear a shelf of rock that was obstructing the road there were laying … but neglected to inform the workers.

Saks was, in essence, a public relations nightmare.

The sort of man who could give Fisk Technologies and its parent, Fisk International, a bad reputation. Still, Fisk used him. He was always the lowest bidder. But on this job, Cushing was put in place to watch him.

Cushing didn’t like it.

But he owed everything to Fisk.

So he was going to watch and learn.

Of course, if Saks learned about any of it and the rumors were true, Cushing was a dead man. Crocodiles and snakes would be the least of his worries.

Laying there, he thought about death.

Felt it reaching out for him …

The ship was now thoroughly encased in the fog.

Even the running lights only cut into its churning, drifting mass a few feet. Gosling stood there, watching it, feeling it, getting to know it. It didn’t look much like any fogbank he’d ever been through before. It was too yellow, too luminous. He’d never seen mist sparkle like that, almost as if there was electricity in it, some kind of surging, dormant power. And it was cold.

Jesus, cold like a blast of air from a freezer or an icehouse.

Abnormal.

And it left an almost wet, slimy residue on the skin. And that wasn’t right. It was crazy fog, this stuff. And, deep down, he knew it was bad. He knew it was what had knocked out their radio, had made their compass go crazy, shutdown the GPS. The very idea of that compass not being able to find magnetic north, just spinning aimlessly, bothered him in ways that he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Lighting his pipe, he studied the fog more intently. It seemed not to be just blowing past them now, nudged by unseen winds, but actually
mushrooming
before the bow. Spiraling and twisting and sucking like some awful vortex that the ship was being inexorably drawn into.

And the smell.

What was that awful stink?

A thick, organic smell of swamps. Rotting vegetation and hot, putrid decay. A high, wet stench that reminded him of tidal flats and putrefying things vomited onto beaches. It grew stronger and stronger until he had to lean against the pilothouse with dry heaves clawing up his throat.

And then … worse.

A pungent, cloying chemical odor of methane, ammonia, fetid gas. He went to his knees, gagging, his lungs rasping for something breathable. But it was no good. It was like trying to breathe through a mouthful of mildewed weeds. The air had gone too heavy or too thin. It was wet and dry, polluted with a loathsome stink, blighted and rank.

Gosling’s head spun with crazy lights and a screaming white noise. His skull was echoing with something like the clatter of a thousand wings flapping and flapping until it felt like his head was going to burst.

And then he was breathing again, gasping for breath. The stink, the bad air just a memory. He laid there by the pilothouse door until his head stopped pounding.

He didn’t know what had just happened.

But, mentally, he filed it under worst case scenario.

“What the fuck is this?” Saks said when he made it out on deck a few minutes later. He took a moment or two to check out the fog, dismissed it, and grabbed Gosling by the shoulder, spinning him around. “You,” he said. “I’m talking to you, mister. What the fuck is this?”

Gosling knocked his hand aside. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Something went shit with the ventilation system below decks for chrissake. I got guys down there passing out and puking their fucking guts out!”

“It’s this fog,” Gosling said and then, as if realizing how silly that sounded, said, “I’ll check it out.”

“Damn right you will.”

After he left, Saks stood there looking into that boiling fog and wondering what kind of dumbfuck, inbred morons could’ve navigated them into a mess like this. Goddamn stuff was so thick they wouldn’t see a ship until it was three feet away. And it was everywhere. A solid, misting mass of yellow-white fog like nothing he’d ever seen before in his life. It looked so thick you could scoop some up with your fist and put it in a jar. But that wasn’t the worse part. The worst part was that it looked blank. Neutral. Nothing. Like they were stuck in the middle of nothing, lost in the static on a TV screen. Even the ship didn’t seem to be moving, yet he could feel the engines, hear the bow cutting the drink.

What kind of brownwater, butthole sailors are these?

More people were pouring out on deck now. The ship’s crew in addition to Saks’s own. They were all looking a little green. Some were being helped along by their mates. One of the engine room swabbies collapsed and started heaving onto the deck. They were all a real mess. A suffocating, acrid smell came from the open hatches.

“Saks,” Fabrini said, wiping his hands on his jeans like something greasy was all over them. “What is it? What happened?”

“I don’t know. Ventilation system went to hell maybe. Fumes from the engines backed-up. Something.”

One of the sailors shook his head. “Ain’t no way, mister. Nothing in those turbines smells like that.”

Another sailor wiped his yellow face with a rag. “He’s right.”

“Okay, Einstein,” Saks said, “then what the hell was it?”

Nobody said anything.

“This isn’t right,” Menhaus said, shivering. “It isn’t just the engines here, and you all know it. Take a whiff. That fog smells … smells like something dead. There’s something wrong with it.”

“Who asked you?” Saks snapped.

It was at this particular moment that someone started screaming.

Everyone promptly shut up.

All the arguments and grumbling skidded to an echoing halt. The screaming was coming from aft, on the deck. Somewhere out in that maze of equipment and containers lashed to the spar deck. But in the fog … it was really hard to say exactly where. Everyone turned and made ready to go, to investigate …
made
ready and that was about it. Because everyone just stood there, faces pale, lips locked tight. No one moved. They all wanted to know what the hell was going on, but nobody wanted to be the first to charge through that fog and see. Maybe it was the sheer quality of that scream which was more than just a scream but the shriek of somebody being slowly roasted over a hot bed of coals. It was loud and shrill like nothing they’d ever heard before.

It was the sound of someone who’d just lost their mind.

“Jesus,” Saks said. “We better-”

The screaming broke down into painful, sharp squeals and the guy who was doing it appeared suddenly out of the murk. One of the deckhands. He was soaking wet, wearing rubber chest waders which had fallen down to his hips now. The front of his denim apron was red and glistening and he clawed frantically at it. His face was hooked into an awful, gray, twisted mask and everyone got out of his way.

“Get it offa me get it offa me get it offa me!” he howled, thrashing away across the decks, leaving a trail of blood. “OH JESUS JESUS JESUUUUS IT’S IN ME IT’S YAAAHHHHH …”

Before anyone could move, he ran to the railing. They saw him as a dim form convulsing in the fog. And then he threw himself over into the sea.

“Sonofabitch!” Saks said, breaking the spell. “Man overboard!
Man fucking overboard!”

But no one came.

And everybody just stood there, not knowing what in the hell to do. To a man, nobody even moved an inch toward that spot where he’d gone over. Yes, they’d all been watching him, wanting to help him, but the screams, the blood, the very nightmarish absurdity of the whole situation had kept them from doing anything. They just watched. For it almost appeared as if he’d been
pulled
over the railing, rather than jumped of his own accord. And the splashing they heard … huge, echoing splashes … it didn’t seem like a man could make that kind of noise. It sounded more like somebody had dropped a car into the drink.

There was complete silence for a moment or two.

It was like everything was suspended, locked down tight and motionless. You could hear the water, something that might have been a distant drone of wind, the faint thrum of the engines, but nothing more.

“Man overboard,” one of the sailors said very quietly. “Man overboard. There’s a man overboard.”

But no one seemed concerned.

Reality had taken a beating in the last few minutes and it was still reeling, still trying to find its proper footing and the men with it.

“He’s gone,” Saks said. “Even if we turned this crate around, we’d never find him. Not in this.”

“Oh dear God,” Menhaus said. “That man.”

One of the sailors ran off and a few seconds later an alarm began to sound. It was high and whining like an air raid siren. The sort of thing that went right up your spine, filled your head, made you want to grind your teeth and squint your eyes.

Despite the racket, everyone started talking at once. Talking almost in low tones like they didn’t want the others to hear what they were saying.

Fabrini had his own way of dealing with the unreal, the frightening. He got angry. “This is bullshit,” he said, walking around in a loose circle. “This is fucking bullshit. We’ve gotta turn back. You hear me? We gotta turn back. I ain’t gonna die like that.”

“Like what?” Saks said.

“Yeah,” Menhaus said. “We don’t even know what happened.”

Fabrini realized they were all staring at him. His swarthy skin had an almost moonish pallor to it now. “You heard that guy for chrissake! All of you heard him! You heard what the fuck he was saying!
Get it off me, get it off me!
He was bleeding like somebody stuck a knife in him! Something got him, right? Something must’ve bit him!”

Saks rolled his eyes. “For the love of Christ, Fabrini, the guy was nuts. He probably slit his own fucking wrists or something.”

No one argued with that hypothesis. It was neat and tight and safe. It made sense. You could fit it into a box, close the lid, and be sure it wouldn’t get back out again. And it was much better than the alternative and nobody even wanted to consider that. At least not openly. Not yet.

Saks looked around carefully. He didn’t like any of this. He’d seen situations like this in the war. Times when the shit hit the fan from every which direction and the tension was so high you could feel it pulsing from man to man in an unbroken circuit. And when things got that stressed out, men cracked. Men started thinking crazy shit and somebody didn’t throw water on it and quick, they started doing crazy shit. And particularly when you had some nut like Fabrini running around feeding their fears, saying the crazy, dangerous things that were on everyone’s minds. And when that happened … mass hysteria soon set in and people got hurt.