Hell Rig (2 page)

Waters looked up at Ed as if seeing him for the first time. “The Digger Man and the others. He warned me not to come back, but I did. Now I can’t live with the nightmares any more. I’ve got to see for myself; see what’s real.”

“Bullshit!” Gleason burst out.

Waters stared at Gleason for a second before continuing, ignoring the outburst. “I found them. I found them all.” He shook his head and closed his eyes. Jeff noticed a tear roll down Waters cheek. “I found
him
.” Waters’ voice broke. He paused. “He was looking down at me, smiling, staring at me with those dead, empty eyes, taunting me.”

“Who was?” Jeff asked.

“The Digger Man.”

Jeff shivered at the name, as if someone had stepped on his grave.

Ed turned to Jeff and whispered an explanation. “John Diggs was a Cajun mechanic on the rig. He used to be a driller, so they called him ‘Digger Man’. Rumor is he cracked up and killed a couple of guys during the fire.”

“The Digger Man,” Waters repeated, nodding his head as if agreeing with Ed but likely did not hear him. “He killed them all. Now he’s waiting for us.”

“Well, kiss my ass and call me a frog,” Gleason burst out with a deep southern drawl. He wagged his thumb at Waters and chuckled. “He’s nuts!”

“You’ll see,” Waters said. “You’ll all see.” He settled back down and withdrew into his own world again.

The flight continued in silence. Waters had given everyone something to think about. To Jeff, even the sound of the big Huey was now somehow muted, as if the sky swallowed the sound before spitting it out again in tattered whispers. Twenty minutes later, he caught his first sight of Global rig Thirteen from the cockpit window and wished he had stayed home.

Chapter Two

The Huey dropped the Re-Berth crew and their equipment off on the miniscule helideck jutting out like an afterthought from the roof of the single-story main building, barely allowing them time to grab their bags before taking off again.

“Good luck, you guys!” the middle aged pilot, an ex-Air Cavalry captain with an Operation Desert Storm pin in his battered hat yelled to them as he revved the engines for takeoff. “You’ll need it!”

On the frightening descent, Jeff had feared the tiny landing pad with its whitewashed ‘X’ wasn’t large enough to land on. From several hundred feet up, it resembled a washcloth floating on the water. Now, standing on it, watching the Huey as it slowly grew smaller until it disappeared from sight, he felt as if he was floating on an island in the sky. Looking straight out, all he could see was blue sky and green water. He felt small and insignificant. The platform seemed different from others on which he had worked. It felt unsubstantial—dead. Maybe it was the fact that there was none of the usual hustle and bustle, no noise of drilling, or shouts or bells announcing shift changes. As much as he hated flying, he already wished he was back on the chopper headed for shore.

They were alone, one hundred and twenty-five miles out in the Gulf in one hundred-fifteen feet of water. They had no boat, a less than reliable radio and it would take the helicopter ninety minutes to reach them once it had landed and refueled, if they somehow managed to contact it.

“Gawd! What a piece of shit,” Gleason commented, summing up Jeff’s first impression. Gleason held one beefy hand over his eyes to shade them from the glare of the midmorning sun as he scanned their new home for the week. “Looks like the dump I grew up in.”

Tolson chuckled. “Except it’s got toilets.”

Jeff leaned over, suppressing a mild wave of vertigo, and scanned the platform’s main deck spread out below him. Rust and soot seemed to be the predominant colors—rust the color of congealed blood and soot so dark it blended into the shadows. The platform was an old one, built in the 1950’s and reworked as often as the fluctuating price of oil allowed. Rising on four massive, hollow round steel pylons driven deep into the mud and silt below and filled with water as ballast, it had withstood all Katrina could throw at it and came through better than some of the newer rigs had managed. Certainly, it had fared better than New Orleans. The platform had been undergoing a lengthy overhaul before Katrina with only a limited number of its wells operating. Signs of newer construction blended with old architecture spotted the deck.

Jeff thought again about New Orleans. They had detoured north of New Orleans along the southern edge of Lake Ponchatrain on their trip to pick up a portable pump. Jeff had gotten a good look at the Crescent City as they flew over it on the way out. He hardly recognized the city that he had so often visited and in which he had partied so many nights. Except for the tall downtown high-rise buildings, hotels, and what remained of the Superdome, large parts north and east of the city looked like lakes. The roofs of buildings rose from the water like crypts in a drowned graveyard. Indeed, the deluge had submerged many ancient cemeteries. God alone knew what would have happened if Katrina had not mysteriously dropped from a Category Five to a Category Three before making landfall. The city could have been completely annihilated.

He, like everyone else in America, had remained glued to the television as dozens of helicopters plucked stranded residents off roofs and as hundreds of volunteers with boats ferried refugees to safety. Other cities opened up their doors for the newly homeless but many stayed in New Orleans and coped as best they could. Crime and outrage rose with the water level. Someone had taken a pot shot at their chopper as they flew over the city. He suspected New Orleans would never be the same again, could never completely recover from such a catastrophic event. Katrina had cut out its beating heart and had exposed it to the world. He hoped he was wrong.

“It looks deserted,” Lisa said, interrupting his reverie.

He glanced at her. She was smiling at him, probably wondering why he was staring into space.

“It’s a ghost town,” he said, returning his gaze to the rig.

She frowned and walked away, picking up her bag.

The platform’s symmetry was awry. Jeff stared at it until the answer suddenly came to him. The day shack and portable crew’s quarters were gone, swept away by the hurricane force winds, as were several work sheds and winches, giving the rig an unbalanced look. The towering drill derrick had been dismantled long before the hurricane, as number Thirteen had been an operational pumping platform and no longer a drilling rig, but the rest of the platform had weathered the storm remarkably well. The new construction fared worse, speaking volumes about the quality of the modern work.

Debris littered the deck—crushed and rusted 55-gallon drums, broken crates, pipes twisted like pretzels by the force of the storm, snapped cables and all the other normal junk of human industrial civilization. Much of the lighter debris had blown away amid the fury of Katrina’s winds, perhaps winding up as part of the wall of debris that etched the shoreline along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts or littering the sea floor beneath the rig, future home to schools of fish and sea creatures that seemed to prefer the rigs as shelter.

Black scorch marks curved like arched eyebrows above some of the windows and doors, indicating the worst burned areas. Most of the windows were merely gaping wounds in the walls. The wind moaned a low sad note as it blew across the platform. Earlier chopper drops had brought out a load of plywood and cleaning supplies, paint and spray rigs, portable lights and a sand blaster. Two large pallets of sandbags were stacked haphazardly on the deck as if, like their chopper pilot, the delivery crew had been anxious to get off the rig. Re-Berth’s first job would be sealing the windows against the weather. Then came come the fun part—sandblasting the rust and soot, priming and painting the metal surfaces, and getting the platform ready for the engineering crew coming out to rework the rig, and make it operational once again. With crude oil selling for sixty-five dollars per barrel, Global was losing a lot of money.

He glanced at Lisa as she bent over to tie her bootlaces, noticing the luscious curve of her butt beneath her oversize jumper. Tolson also admired her figure but was far more brazen about it. Lisa straightened up, turned around and glared at both of them.

“Seen enough?” she asked. Mild irritation stained her voice.

Jeff turned his head away in embarrassment, but Tolson smiled and answered, “Not yet. I’ve got a slow imagination.”

She walked away in a huff.

As Jeff descended the stairs from the helideck to the main deck, he glanced into the darkened windows of the main building. It had housed a small company commissary, dining hall, labs, most of the offices, a few private quarters for supervisors and a recreation room. He saw figures lumbering past, the restless dead of number Thirteen. He blinked his eyes and the ghosts became broken furniture scattered across the floors and piles of ceiling tiles brought down by the rain. The rig smelled of smoke and soot and death.

When he reached the deck, he noticed Ric Waters standing beneath the crane across the platform, staring upwards. Waters stood about 5’9” and had once been a solidly built man; maybe even pudgy judging by the loose skin on his cheeks and neck, but Jeff noticed how loosely his jumper fit him. It now looked two sizes too big and his cap swallowed his head. Waters must have lost considerable weight since his ordeal. One hand twitched nervously as he held them by his side. The crane’s cables dropped to within twenty feet of the platform’s deck. Smaller wires dangled like hooks from the tackle. Waters began to moan, swaying side to side, as if in some kind of trance.

Ed stood a few yards behind him, watching. “Waters!” he yelled out.

Waters jerked around to face Ed. His face was pale and sweat beaded his forehead.

“Where’s the generator room? We need power.”

Waters stared slack-jawed a moment before nodding his head and disappearing around a corner.

“Love! Tolson!” Ed barked. “Follow him. Get us some juice. Jeff, you others, follow me. We need to find us a home for the week.”

Jeff looked around him. The platform seemed dead, but not as dead as he wanted it to be. It lay disconcertingly quiet and serene, as if playing possum—appearing to be dead before suddenly reaching out to grab him when his back was turned. He shuddered once as the tenebrous feeling swept over him and then picked up his duffel bag, following Ed.

They forced open a damaged side door of the main building, a single-story structure that covered most of one side of the platform. The door looked as if someone had pounded it with a sledgehammer from the outside. One hinge was broken and the door lay twisted and jammed in its frame. It took Gleason and Bale’s combined muscles to force it open. Stale air, sealed inside since the storm, rushed out. Besides the smell of smoke, mildew, rust and salt, it carried with it an underlying odor, like dead, rotten meat. Jeff looked at Ed in apprehension.

As if reading his mind, Ed said, “They removed all the bodies weeks ago, a few days after Katrina hit. The coolers are out, though. The contents ought to be pretty ripe by now. I hope you got your stomach back,” he warned.

Jeff nodded and swallowed. “Me too.”

The door opened onto a long dark hallway with double doors at each end. They found one decent sized room, a former office or break room, with the windows still intact and a table and chairs inside.

“We can use this as our meeting room,” Ed suggested. He immediately set up the small gas burner for the coffee pot, a priority in his eyes. A door led to a small adjoining half bath but there was no running water. ”
Once they had the water running, it would be just like home, cozy and warm
,” Jeff thought.

There were eight private or semiprivate sleeping quarters off the corridor for the office staff. Six remained in good condition, shielded from the storm by the doors at each end of the hallway. Two had broken outside windows, which had allowed in the wind and rain. In one room, the beds and built-in furniture were in shambles, a pile of damp, moldy wood that smelled like a wet dog. The second had fared much better, protected somewhat by the stairs to the helideck, needing only a general clean up to be useful.

They left one private room for Lisa, while Bale and McAndrews decided to bunk together in the one across the hall. Jeff chose the one adjacent to Lisa’s.

“Tolson and I can share,” he said. Of all the others, he and Tolson got along the best.

“I’m not sharing with the psycho,” Clyde called out, meaning Waters.

“He can have the dungeon,” Easton said with a mean spirited chuckle, eyeing the storm-damaged room that needed a bed. “It might suit him.”

“One of you can bunk with me,” Ed told them.

Clyde rolled his eyes. “I’d rather sleep with Easton than put up with your snoring.” He punched Easton in the chest. “I got bottom bunk, roomie.” Easton groaned and rubbed his chest.

“I’ll bunk with Waters,” Sims said with a shrug, surprising Jeff. “I don’t mind.”

“Sleep with one eye open,” Clyde warned.

Ed took the remaining private room for himself, tossing his small bag on the bed. “We’ll have to strip the beds, of course, because of possible mold and mildew, and use our blankets. No clean sheets or maid service, I’m afraid.”

Clyde snorted his derision at the thought of clean sheets and maids.

“Clyde. Let’s check out the rest of this joint,” Jeff suggested.

“I’ll come, too,” Easton chimed in, tossing his pack on the top bunk. “Maybe they got a candy vending machine around here.”