Hell Rig (19 page)

“Well, he’s gone now. Gleason, Tolson and Waters—You would think it would be easy to find three men on a platform this small.”

“Do we go look for them?” McAndrews asked.

“In that?” Jeff waved his finger at what lay outside the door. He shook his head. “Not me. They are either dead already or someplace safe. We would just be sitting ducks out there.”

“Then we wait,” McAndrews agreed. He sat down heavily on a chair.

Jeff cursed silently and looked over at Sims. Sims was staring out the window at the fog, smiling.

“You find this humorous,” Jeff lashed out at him.

Sims turned from the window and glared at Jeff. “Not humorous, maybe, but exciting, invigorating.”

“Invigorating? Two of my friends are dead.”

“Friends?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “I didn’t think you cared much for Sid Easton and you obviously didn’t know Bale well enough for him to confide in you.”

Sims’ retort confused him; put him on the defensive. “They were co-workers and didn’t deserve what happened to them!” he shouted.

The others stared but he ignored them.

Sims smiled. “No one deserves death, but it comes to us nevertheless.” He shrugged. “The manner of their deaths matters little to the dead, only to the living who feel some inner need to justify their lives by a belated show of emotion.”

“It’s called grieving,” Jeff snapped. “Honoring their memory.”

“People are so concerned with their afterlives—heaven or hell? There is a vast plane of existence stretching between the two where most souls wind up.”

“Do you mean purgatory?” Lisa asked.

Sims shook his head. “No, purgatory is a waiting room the Catholic Church created to mollify squeamish people about their departed loved ones—a chance to pray them into heaven. The place I speak of is much worse than that. There, you are required to witness your sins, relive them. That alone can be much worse than paying for them.”

“That’s quite a bit of sophistry. Are you some kind of closet priest as well, or what?” Jeff asked.

“Like Bale?” Sims shook his head. “No, just a man who has brushed death’s sleeve and has seen…things a man should not.” He looked at Jeff with sadness in his eyes. “There is no life after death, but there is an existence of a sort. You do not want to go there.”

“Help us get off this rig,” Lisa implored.

“There is no getting off this rig,” Sims said almost gently. “Can’t you see that? We’re all here for a reason. Waters is right about that.”

“Waters is insane,” McAndrews added.

“Insane? Anyone who stares into Death’s blind eyes loses a bit of himself. He thinks he’s come back here for redemption but you know better.”

“What do you mean?” McAndrews challenged. Jeff noticed his face pale as McAndrews realized Sims meant Waters’ condition was his fault.

Sims shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters now.”

He turned to stare out the window. McAndrews closed his eyes but Jeff thought he saw a tear rolling down his cheek. He didn’t hold McAndrews to blame for Waters’ condition, in spite of his earlier outburst. McAndrews had acted out of love for his brother and his need to understand the reason for his brother’s death and the deaths of all the others. Waters was the key. He was obviously insane, but in his more lucid moments, he sounded almost convincing enough, at least, to impart a sense of fear to all the others.

Jeff was concerned about the voodoo amulet. By all rights, it should not have worked. Placing it on the door was just an act of desperation. He didn’t believe in voodoo, any more than he believed in magic, but somehow the amulet had worked. It had repelled the living fog. He had seen it with his own eyes. Growing up in southern Louisiana, he could not escape tales of voodoo and voodoo rituals. They were as ubiquitous as magnolias and mint juleps. He had dismissed them as fantasy, but now was beginning to wonder just how fantastical they were.

He would have to talk to Lisa about it. She was their in-house voodoo specialist.

Chapter Seventeen

Ric Waters stalked the deck like a shadow zombie. The fog enveloped him like a living cloak, comforting and succoring him. He existed in two worlds. Around him, the familiar steel and wooden structures of the platform collided with ancient stone and shadow, shifting from one to the other as he watched. The deepest shadows were doorways leading to places he did not want to venture. They were devourers of souls.

He knew the fog could have gotten to Gleason or the others easily enough. The lights were no safe havens, but some part of Waters, the thing he was becoming, knew the fog savored the taste of fear flowing from its next victims. The part of Waters that was still human remembered other victims, other fears. There was still time for death.

When Waters had received the radio message from Trey Dixon before the hurricane, his own fear had been pouring from his body like sweat on a hot, muggy Louisiana day. August was a sweltering month in Louisiana. The heat came early and lay on the land day after day without release. Even the nights offered no relief. The humid nights simply vomited the heat the land had swallowed during the day. Even the occasional ocean breeze offered little break from the monotony. The intense humidity was palpable, cloying. It smothered the body and attacked the spirit. The Gulf was even worse. The humidity rose from the warm waters and slowly broiled the life from everything it touched.

When Katrina had begun to build out in the Gulf, it had fed ravenously on the sun-baked waters, growing massive and wild, a creature of force without boundaries, without mind, without guidance. Even land, colder than the sea, could not stop it. This was Louisiana in August, the season of storms. Landfall would merely slow its progress. Hurricane Katrina reared above the horizon, a black fist preparing to strike. Waters knew he was in a race for his life to return to Global Thirteen.

The seas were rough, sending eight-foot waves crashing into his twenty-five foot crew boat. The radio was ominously dead. Through the driving rain, he caught his first glimpse of the platform as a layer of black smoke swept horizontally across the water. Fire on an oil platform was a monstrous thing, a living creature at times. It spewed from fractured natural gas pipes under tremendous pressure, coating everything in a thin film of liquid flame. It ignited crude oil, releasing poisonous toxins and black smoke and soot that seeped into the lungs and hardened. It burned metal and wood, destabilizing entire platforms. Retardant foam could not stop it. Water merely spread it. Men had no place to go but into the sea. “
In seas such as these
,
men would die
.”

The platform was portentously silent as he tied his heaving boat to the dock and leaped the five-foot chasm of churning water between platform and boat. One mistake could easily leave him with a broken leg or worse. He noted that the flames were low, not pressurized gas but mostly buildings burning and thankfully near empty storage tanks, already dying under the onslaught of rain. Someone had managed to shut off the main gas pressure manifold, saving the rig. Smoke and rain, whipped by the wind, blinded him, obstructing his vision. What he could see dismayed him.

Two men, he did not know their names, lay on the deck near the stairs. Both were mercilessly hacked and disemboweled. Waters almost heaved but managed to quell the tremors that ran through his body. He entered the main building by the rear door near the dining room and came upon the scene of another massacre.

Bodies and hacked limbs lay scattered on the floor like some gruesome butcher shop display. Streaks of blood indicated more bodies dragged unceremoniously from the room. He recognized the corpse of Mike Wilson, a driller, his head lolling at an obscene angle from its half severed neck, dead eyes staring wide open in wonder at his cold plate of meat and potatoes.

Another worker, Chuck O’Shea, head cook, his whites stained crimson with blood, lay draped over the dish sink, his back split open like a piece of beef. In all, he counted six bodies, plus the two outside. How could one man, the Digger Man, do all this?

Waters rushed outside past the empty sleeping quarters to the engineering shack. He passed the smoking hull of the portable metal trailer that had served as a crew quarters but did not stop to check it. The acrid, burnt-flesh smell was overpowering and he knew he could not bear to see what atrocities lay inside it.

The front of the metal building that served as engineering shack and supervisors’ offices looked as though a bomb had gone off. Metal panels lay smashed forward. The forklift sat at an angle jammed into the room. Waters shivered remembering Dixon’s separate radio description and plea with the Digger Man. No one was there, though pools of blood not yet washed away by the rain told their own obscene story. Two more bodies, one might have been Charles McMann—Waters wasn’t sure because of the massive amount of blood—lay on the deck, disemboweled and lifeless.

Waters turned the corner and froze, his eyes pulled upward by the horrendous sight of Digger Man swinging from the crane. The red headed mechanic had rods running through his chest that connected to cables and the hook. He had hung himself like a slab of meat. Even this was not enough to satiate his killing frenzy. Once aloft, he had disemboweled himself. His intestines lay in a pile beneath him on the deck. His eye sockets were empty, staring down at Waters like shadows. Waters stood there watching Digger Man’s body swinging in the gathering wind, shuddering as large waves crashed into the platform. The rig shuddered in death spasms.
Or birth pains
, he thought half deliriously of what evil erupted there.

Waters went crazy at that moment, he supposed, his mind began to slide slowly into that safe place where emotions could not touch him, watching Digger Man’s corpse gloat over his evil deeds, and this was indeed the Digger Man, not some horrible murdering monster. Looking at him, Waters remembered the quiet man with whom he spent many nights ashore drinking. This was the Digger Man, tortured and mutilated, the victim, not the monster he had become.

Waters looked around apprehensively, suddenly alert. If the Digger Man was there, swinging on his homemade gallows, where was the monster that had taken over his body? Its presence lingered on the platform, a great evil waiting to be unleashed once more. Night was falling and the shadows intimidated him. Each one breathed with a life of its own. They moved and writhed like smoke but he knew they were actually living entities.

Why spare him?

Fear, deep and consuming swept over him. A cold chill invaded every warm space of his body. He fought for breath. His bladder let go. He had to get away. Better to embrace the hurricane in his small boat than spend another moment on the dead platform with this monster.

As he turned to run, he saw a small cloth bag lying on the deck beneath Digger Man. Waters recognized it, had seen it half hidden beneath Digger Man’s shirt many times, a voodoo charm of some kind. He squeezed it in his hand, hoping some of its power would protect him just long enough to reach his boat.

Waters ran down the stairs two at a time, and without stopping or bothering to time his leap, swung out on the rope out over his boat. It came up fast and hard and he landed badly but broke no bones. He did not bother to untie the line. He used his pocketknife to cut the rope that held the heaving boat to the platform, cranked the engine and headed toward shore. He knew he would not make it before the full wrath of Hurricane Katrina swept over him, but he preferred death on his own terms.

The storm had descended on him in its fury. Huge waves crashed down on his boat, sending it beneath the water, only to break the surface again like a breaching porpoise. The wind sent deadly fingers under the boat, lifting it free of the water, threatening to overturn it. Waters knew that the evil, the Presence had not remained on the platform, at least not all of it. It rode the winds of the storm like a Dervish, sending waves smashing against his boat like the hand of Neptune. He gripped the cloth
gris-gris
tightly with one hand while trying to control the boat with the other. He prayed and he held on and he survived.

The thing that was the Digger Man warned him not to return. Maybe it was a small part of his friend striking out against his possessor. Waters thought he had beaten the darkness, but that was before the dreams began—horrible, frightening dreams—and the voices, at times promising power and glory and at others death and everlasting torment. He knew that a part of the evil left the platform with him.

Now, it had awakened. He had no choice but to return. Evil called out to evil. At the time, he thought it a kind of catharsis, a step toward healing. Now, he knew it was only to return the small sliver of the demon that had possessed the Digger Man, too small to posses him entirely but too powerful to ignore.

The Dark Presence touched Waters’ mind with horrific images and gruesome thoughts of dark regions and unimaginably ancient evil, more like chaos than an antithesis of good, an elemental desire for disorder and decay. In the eons, it had learned to feed on fear, the most chaotic of emotions, as man would feed on bread. It savored fear. Waters knew it was feeding on his.

As he haunted the ever-morphing decks of the rig, he walked as though through a double vision, unsure of which was real and which was illusion.

* * * *

Clyde Gleason awoke from a dream so horrible that he was still trembling as he flopped off the desk where he had slept. He had been on the farm, eighteen, not as big as he was now but still a strapping lad. It was so vivid he could smell the fresh mown hay, the stringent odor from the pigsty. A neighbor boy, Leroy Parnell, who loved to taunt Clyde for his clumsy feet and slow mind, sat on a bale of hay and laughed as Clyde loaded a wagon.