Hell Rig (27 page)

“Come out, Waters,” he called. “Show yourself.”

Nothing happened. He peered into buildings, checked between piles of garbage.

“It’s me you want, Waters,” he challenged. “I brought the others here.”

He descended the stairway to the cellar deck. Here, the silence was even more ominous, the air strangely still. No breeze stirred, yet he could hear soft sounds like whispers in the shadows. His flashlight spilled into dark nothingness. The beam disappeared as if the shadows were absorbing the light rather than being dispelled by it.

“Are you there, Waters?” Ed asked.

“Yes,” Waters answered from the darkness. He stepped out of the shadows, barely recognizable. His eyes were missing, leaving empty sockets in their place. Blood streaked his face and arms. His skin was pale and waxy, moving disconcertingly, undulating waves of putrid flesh.

Ed tried to slow his racing heart. He had listened to Jeff’s description of Waters but had dismissed it as a fear-induced hallucination, yet here he was even more hideous and repulsive than Jeff had described.

“Who are you?” he asked the presence behind the missing eyes, backing up as Waters moved toward him, flowing rather than walking. Waters’ legs did not move, riding instead above the deck on a thin film of viscous shadow.

“Digger Man.”

“You said the Digger Man was dead.”

Waters smiled. On his dead face, it was ghastly. “They’re all dead, but they live again, here, inside of me.”

Waters’ flesh rippled obscenely as hands and faces tried to force their way through his skin, souls trapped inside his putrescent body. Voices poured from the pores of his skin, voices Ed recognized.

“Help me, Ed,” Easton begged shrilly. Ed shuddered.

“Why did you bring us here?” Big Clyde’s ghostly voice asked.

Ed dropped the flashlight.

“Do I frighten you?” Waters asked.

“I’m too old to be frightened,” Ed shot back, struggling to slow his racing heart. “You disgust me.”

“We’ll see.”

They stared at each other like old adversaries sizing up the other. “What do you want?” Ed asked.

“I want your soul, your
gros-bon-ange
, as Miss Love calls it. I call it your essence.”

“I’ll trade my soul for the others,” Ed offered quickly. He knew he was grasping at straws but if Waters wanted his soul, maybe he could bargain with him.

“Why should I trade for what is already mine?”

Ed was stunned. “Wh-what do you mean?”

Waters began to change form. His skin rippled and swirled. Flesh ran off his body like hot wax, revealing a thin, frail woman with short white hair and thick glasses. She squinted at Ed as if trying to see him properly.

“Elizabeth,” he sobbed.

“Ed,” she answered. Her voice was as he remembered it; quiet and sweet, musical like a small brook trickling across moss-covered stones. It was his wife, looking as she had a few months before her death, before the cancer that had hidden away like a shadow deep inside her liver had taken her life.

“God, I miss you, Liz,” he cried. He raised both arms to her. She did not run into his arms as he had hoped. Instead, her eyes narrowed and she raised a finger, pointing it at him accusingly.

“Then why did you kill me?”

His heart skipped a beat and he felt faint. His leaden arms fell to his side. “Kill you? I didn’t kill you.”

“You prayed for my death during those last few weeks.”

Ed shook his head. How could she have known? “You were in horrible pain from the cancer. The painkillers didn’t work. I wanted it to end for your sake.”

“For your sake, you mean. The hospital bills were eating away at your hard-earned savings.”

That very thought had crossed his mind, once, before he forced it deep down where it could not bother him. He had cashed in his savings bonds to pay for her radiation treatments, only to see them fail miserably.

He smiled. “I didn’t care. I would have given it all to have you back.”

“If you let me go to the doctor six months earlier instead of complaining about the cost, I might still be alive.”

He hung his head in shame. She was right. He had cajoled her into waiting until he had the cash, waiting until it was too late. In the end, the cancer had eaten away at his savings the same way it had devoured her flesh.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “So sorry.”

“That’s not enough, you bastard,” she answered.

He looked at her. Anger flashed in his eyes. Elizabeth never swore. “You’re not my Elizabeth. You’re Waters.” He balled his left hand into a fist.

Elizabeth disappeared, replaced by Waters laughing.

“She’s here, too, Ed.”

Ed shook his head, hearing the lie. “No, she was a good woman. If there is a heaven, I know she’s there.”

“Who says there’s a heaven?” Waters mocked.

Ed swallowed hard. “The deal stands. My soul for the others.”

Waters stopped smiling. A shadow oozed from him, flowing from his eyes and mouth. It hung suspended in the air like a dark flaming cloud. Slowly, it took human shape. Waters, emptied like a balloon, stumbled backwards and collapsed on the deck. He gasped once before going silent, a human host no longer needed. The shadow grew, stretching as if cramped confined in Waters’ body. The eyes were flames, the mouth a black gaping wound in an ebony parody of a human face.

The creature moved toward him, shifting like a shadow, glistening like oil. Ed raised a fist and swung hard. His fist felt as if he had punched into tar. His fist stuck there, held fast by shadow substance. He could not wrench it free.

The shadow opened like a veil and enveloped Ed; it smothered him in flames. He was a fly trapped in black amber, unable to move, to breathe and even to think clearly. A putrid ichor filled his mouth, dripped down his throat, spreading throughout his body, consuming him from the inside, just as the cancer had consumed Elizabeth, cell by cell.

He tried to think of her, Elizabeth, of better days when they had first married and their entire lives spread out before them, a vast book filled with pure white unwritten pages. Too quickly, time had scribbled down their loves, their quarrels, and their unfilled desire for children. Their entire lives had passed in the blink of an eye. A fatal melancholy gripped Ed as that which had been him, his essence, slipped slowly into the black void. Inevitably, the shadow won. Ed’s tenuous grasp on Elizabeth’s memory slipped. He knew he would never see her again.

The shadow, its job done, poured from Ed’s corpse like ebony smoke. It once again merged with Waters’ body, shuddering as dead nerves fired and decaying muscles labored. Waters lumbered off, leaving Ed’s empty, blackened husk lying on the deck. The hollow laughter that emerged from Waters’ lips was the only sound in the night and it slowly faded.

Chapter Twenty Three

Jeff awakened first, vaguely aware that something was wrong. The last, wispy vestiges of a nightmare remained like a bad taste in his mouth though he could not remember it. He heard wind and rain pounding the building. The powerful hand of Hurricane Rita finally reached out for them, seeking to blow their house down, but unlike the little fairy tale pig in the straw house, they had nowhere to run from the big bad wolf. He laced up his boots and checked on Lisa. She still slept comfortably. One leg protruded from beneath her blanket. He followed its smooth lines upwards to her buttocks, just barely visible. His imagination filled in the rest. He smiled at the serene expression on her face. So relaxed in slumber but so tense and driven when awake—she was a contrast in opposites. He admired her selfless desire for answers, but simple escape from their predicament without answers would suffice for him.

Sometime over the past few days, he had fallen in love with her, he realized. It was not just her beauty, though she had plenty to spare. Jeff sensed something about her, something pure and untouched by life’s trials and tribulations. Lisa rose above mundane problems and faced life head on, challenging it, perhaps daring it. Even now, she was coping with their situation better than he was.

He had a few girlfriends in high school and had dated sporadically over the years, but never managed to keep a relationship fresh for very long. As soon as his interests conflicted with a new girlfriend, he stopped seeing her. It was selfish and cold on his part, he knew, but he was young with no intention of settling down and there were plenty of girls out there. Jeff could blame his mother, her lack of warmth, or maybe it was just a flaw in his character, a genetic defect. Either way, he now wanted desperately to change it. Now, the thought of a steady relationship no longer dismayed him. With Lisa, he thought just maybe he could do some growing up.

If they survived the next few days.

Jeff checked his watch and saw it was midmorning. He had slept almost ten hours. He felt refreshed but a little stiff. Ed should have woken him earlier to get started on the cooler. Time was running short. Then he noticed that the power was off.

“The last of the fuel finally ran out,” he said to himself. They had better move the bodies quickly. He saw the Glock lying on the table and his heart began to pound. He felt a sudden premonition of danger. Images from his recent dream flowed back into his mind like a rising tide from that deep dark pool hidden in his subconscious.

In quick vignettes, he saw Ed face off with Waters, who wasn’t really Waters, and lose.

“Lisa! Wake up,” he shouted, bursting into her room

Lisa woke instantly and sat up. “What is it?” she asked, her eyes roaming the room for danger.

“Ed didn’t wake us up and the powers off. He left his Glock,” he added.

She threw off her covers and began to pull on her jeans. Jeff took one glance before politely turning away. She sat down on the edge of the bed and immediately began to lace up her boots. “Where is he?”

“Outside, I imagine,” Jeff replied. “He’s with Waters.”

She looked up at him. “Oh, God,” she whispered. “You go, I’ll check on Tolson and follow,” Lisa suggested.

Jeff nodded and went to look out the window. The sky was gray and heavy with dark clouds. Lightning laced the clouds together in a skein of fire. A heavy wind whipped across the deck scattering debris and the garbage they had so carefully collected and stored. Rain lashed the deck with a ferocity bordering on anger. Hurricane Rita wanted to erase the only obstacle in her path, Global Rig Number Thirteen. He went back to wake Sims and found his room was empty.

“Damn,” Jeff mumbled. He went to inform Lisa.

“Sims is gone, too,” he told her. She shook her head and continued to hold the thermometer in Tolson’s mouth.

“His breathing is regular and his temperature’s normal,” Lisa said. She checked Tolson’s wound. “My God! Look!”

Jeff looked where Lisa had pulled back the bandage. Where Waters’ machete cleaved deep into flesh, only a thin red puckered line remained.

“It’s almost healed. That’s good, isn’t it? Let him sleep.”

“It’s healed,” she repeated numbly. “That’s all you can say about it?”

He shrugged. “It’s no stranger than anything else happening.”

As Jeff opened the door, cold, wind-blown rain pelted him in the face. He winced. “The fog’s gone, at least,” he said, trying to force a smile.

Lisa said nothing as she looked around.

Lightning lit up the clouds from inside and thunder rumbled across the gray overcast sky.

“Where could they have gone?” Jeff asked.

Lisa said nothing. He looked at her and saw the fear in her eyes. She stood rooted to the deck, staring at the threatening sky

“Lisa?”

She turned and looked at him.

“What is it?” he asked.

She frowned. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“The evil, the darkness. It’s stronger, much stronger. I can feel it throbbing in the deck through my boots, in the air around us. Jeff, it’s in the storm,” she moaned, “and the storm’s here.”

Now that she had labeled it, he, too, knew there was something heavy and oppressive in the air and it wasn’t just the coming storm.

“We have to find Ed and Sims. Come on,” he urged.

Lightning flashed around them—brilliant pulses like disco strobes in mad chaotic rhythm. Thunder followed on the heels of each brilliant flash, merging into one, ear-throbbing pulse. The rain flew at them straight across the platform like arrows fired from a bow, stinging their faces, almost blinding them. There was no hiding from the onslaught. It did not let up but they refused to turn back. Ed was somewhere out there, and Jeff was determined to find him before it was too late if his dream was prophetic or find his body if it was real.

The wind assaulted them, tried to scour them from the deck. Jeff took Lisa’s hand and held on tightly to keep her on her feet. The sea heaved as if alive, a wild creature suffering from some abysmal nightmare. The platform shuddered and swayed drunkenly with each crashing wave. As the angry waves broke against the platform, sheets of saltwater spray, launched by the frenzied winds, cascaded over the deck, trying to sweep them from their feet. Between the downpour and the spray, it was almost impossible to see. Debris whipped past them. One barrel, half filled with some chemical, rolled into Jeff’s legs, sending him toppling to the deck bringing Lisa with him. She fell on top of him. He pressed his face to hers.