Hell Rig (29 page)

“Quick, get inside,” he told his companions as they made it to the wood shop door. He used up the last of the foam and tossed the extinguisher after the swimming rats. Just before he stepped through the door and closed it, he saw the rats stop swimming, turn to face him with twinkling red eyes and merge together to form Waters’ head floating on the water. He slammed the door and dogged it shut.

“What?” Lisa asked, seeing his pale face.

He shook his head, afraid to relate what he had seen or imagined he had seen.

They checked each room and found no sign of Waters. When they reached the mudroom, Tolson began to climb the stairs to the vat.

Jeff stopped him. “Don’t bother. We’ve checked it twice.”

Tolson glanced up. “Maybe the bastard’s up on the helideck.”

Jeff took a deep breath. “No, it’s too dangerous,” he warned. “Besides, he couldn’t even keep his footing up there.”

“I’m looking anyway,” Tolson said determinedly.

They followed Tolson back up to the main deck. Tolson began to inch his way up the exposed stairs to the helideck. Jeff held his breath.

“He’ll be killed,” Lisa cried in his ear.

“He’ll make it,” he assured her. He had seen Tolson do many near impossible things he had set out to do. Tolson was no quitter.

They watched with agonized anticipation as Tolson crawled up the stairs. At the top, exposed to the wind, he did not attempt to stand. Instead, he raised his head over the edge and scanned the helideck.

“Nothing!” he called down to them. His words torn away by the wind, meant less than the negative shake of his head and the look of disappointment in his eyes.

Tolson scooted back down the stairs on his belly.

“Where the hell is he?” Tolson complained when he reached them.

“Maybe he’s back in the blockhouse,” Jeff suggested.

“What about the charms?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t know. He’s either there or he’s gone. He’s not out here.”

“Let’s check.”

Tolson led the way with the Glock. They entered the front door and checked each room carefully, ending in the cafeteria. “Look,” Tolson said.

Wet footprints led from the rear door to the pantry.

“Waters,” Jeff said.

Tolson indicated silence by placing his finger to his lips. He faced the pantry door with the pistol, motioning Jeff stand to the side and open the door. Jeff watched Tolson as he mouthed the 1-2-3 count down.

On three, Jeff opened the door and stood back. Tolson stood there, his mouth open, staring into the pantry. Lisa walked over and looked inside.

“Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. “They’re gone.”

Jeff looked in and confirmed her observation. All the bodies were gone. The only thing left was the plastic bucket containing the arm and the plastic the bodies had been covered with.

“He’s moved them, but why?”

“To where?” Lisa added.

“Check the cooler,” Tolson suggested.

They went through the same process as before, but it, too, was empty.

“Son of a bitch,” Tolson snapped. “Why does he need the dead?”

Jeff was perplexed. How does a mad man think? “I don’t know.”

Tolson slammed his fist against the cooler door. “When I find that bastard…” Tolson didn’t finish his threat. He rushed for the rear door.

“Wait!” Jeff cried out. With a sudden pain in his stomach, he realized he was too late.

Ignoring Jeff’s warning, Tolson opened the door. Waters was standing there, waiting. His empty eyes stared at Tolson. A cruel smile creased his pasty lips. Tolson raised the Glock and fired three quick rounds into Waters’ chest. The bullets passed harmlessly through Waters with a sickening squishing sound as if he were a water ghost, exiting his back and disappearing into the storm.

Waters reached out his hand toward Tolson’s head. Tolson did not back away. He raised the Glock a second time. Waters stopped his hand a few inches from Tolson’s head, but ebony shadow fingers projected from his fingertips. They entered Tolson’s forehead. Tolson jerked as if electrocuted. Tendrils of smoke rose as his large mustache singed. Tolson’s body began to spasm and he dropped the Glock. He danced like a marionette, held erect only due to Waters’ hand inside his head. After a few seconds, Waters withdrew his hand and Tolson sank to the floor.

Jeff went at Waters but Lisa held him back.

“Don’t,” she cried.

Waters looked at him. “Not yet, Towns,” he said, his voice a whisper. “Your turn will come soon enough.”

“What do you want?” Jeff yelled.

Waters stepped over Tolson, still trembling on the floor. He stopped a few feet inside the door and pointed to the amulet on the door.

“Did you think it could stop me, stop us?”

“It stopped the fog.”

Waters laughed. “The fog is mindless, an elemental doing our bidding. We are beyond life and death. The dead do not die.”

“What did you do with my friends’ bodies?”

“They, too, serve a purpose,” Waters answered.

He decided to try reasoning with the part of Waters that remained. “There’s still time to get off this rig before Rita hits, Waters. We can take the emergency craft and escape.”

“You fool! There’s no escaping Rita. Katrina supplied the power to open a rift in the Gateway. Each death holds it open that much longer. Rita comes next to tear the Gateway asunder for all time. We will send its mad, hungry winds at New Orleans once more, drowning the city beneath the waves. It will become a lost city of legend, like Atlantis or Mu.”

“Why destroy New Orleans?”

“Carnage is our meat; death our bread,” Waters continued. “Each soul strengthens us.”

Something in Waters’ words didn’t ring true. “Why New Orleans? It’s mostly evacuated from Katrina already. Why not Galveston or Houston? There are millions there.”

Waters face changed slightly. His pale skin rippled as if something moved under the skin. His lips twitched and one eyeless socket blinked. He raised one hand toward Jeff before suddenly reverting to his previously stiff, cold posture.

“It is insignificant,” he said.

Waters turned toward the door.

“Wait?” Jeff called.

Waters stopped in the doorway but did not turn to face him.

“Why are we still alive?”

“You will be witnesses,” Waters said. “Afterwards, you too will become one with us.”

Lightning flashed and Waters simply vanished.

“Oh, my God,” Lisa whispered, coming up to stand beside Jeff. “I thought he was going to kill you.”

“Not yet. That means we still have a chance.”

Tolson drummed his heels on the floor. His eyes rolled beneath his lids and the color had drained from his face but he was alive.

“He didn’t kill Tolson either,” Lisa said, bending down to touch Tolson’s forehead.

“He didn’t do him any favors,” Jeff noted. He picked up the Glock and placed it in his waistband. “Help me get Tolson to a bed.”

Together, they managed to lift him up and drag him to his bunk. He was perspiring as if his fever had come back upon him.

“He doesn’t look good,” Lisa said. “Look.”

She pulled back Tolson’s shirt collar. The nearly healed gash was once again open, this time festering with yellow ichor oozing from the wound. The stench was sickening.

“There’s not much we can do for him except keep him in bed.”

Lisa looked up at Jeff. Her voice broke slightly as she spoke. “We’re going to die aren’t we?”

He yearned to say no but knew she would hear the lie in his voice. “We’re not dead yet,” he said. “If I have to die, I want to stop this bastard first.”

“We need more answers,” she said.

He shook his head. “If you mean what I think you mean…”

“I’ll do it alone this time.”

“No, we do this together or not at all.”

She reached out and lightly touched his forehead, brushing a lock of wet hair from his eyes. “I’ll get things ready.”

As she walked away, Jeff wondered if going into the land of the dead twice was asking for trouble. He mentally damned Sims. The man was never around when needed. Where had he gone now? Was he already another of Waters’ victims?

Jeff checked his watch. Time was running out. The main force of the storm would bear down on them in less than six hours. If they weren’t securely locked in the cooler by then, they would never make it.

Chapter Twenty Four

Once more, candles flickered in the emptied front office. Jeff had retrieved his lighter where Sims had left it by the coffee urn. The wind howling outside and the rain clawing at the door lent a macabre aspect to the situation, like a gothic séance.

“I don’t have any more alcohol,” Lisa said. “It might be more difficult to trance.”

“I thought of that,” Jeff said, holding up a small syringe partially filled with a milky white substance. “It’s morphine, from the med kit I took from the ship. I wish I had Sims’ damn metal hip flask.”

Lisa eyed the syringe in Jeff’s hand with trepidation and suspicion. “I don’t know—morphine? It could be dangerous.” She had grown up hearing horror stories of people hooked on morphine, crack and heroin. She didn’t trust her will power. What if she was one of those who couldn’t handle it?

“It’s only 2 milligrams,” Jeff assured her. “Not enough to be dangerous. It will only relax you, not knock you out.”

“You’re sure?”

Jeff smiled. “I’m sure. I’ve had a shot of liquid morphine before when I broke a bone out on a rig.”

She nodded. “Okay, you do it.” Lisa held out her arm and closed her eyes. She felt Jeff wrap something around her arm above the elbow. Then, a tiny sting as Jeff found a vein in her arm. He released the tourniquet and folded her arm up with a cotton ball over the wound. Before she could tell him it didn’t hurt, she felt the drug hitting her system, making her woozy.

“Whoa,” she exclaimed as she stumbled.

Jeff led her to a chair. “Sit a minute until it levels out in your system.”

She was strangely calm.
Is this what addicts feel
? After a few minutes, the worst of it was over. She knew the drug was in her system but she could still function.

“I’ll start now,” she told Jeff.

Jeff started the music on her I-pod. It seemed to her the storm outside was keeping time with the African drums—the low boom of thunder of the Gimbe, the crack of lightning of the Djembe and the polyphony rumble of rain of the Djun Djun. Slowly, the rhythm reached her feet and she began to dance around the room chanting. She felt the platform sway and incorporated its stuttering rhythm into her movements. Platform, storm, music and she became one.

At first, she didn’t think it would work. She felt no connection with the Loas, just a strange sense of harmony with the storm outside. The room began to change around her, the walls dissolving. She opened her eyes and was alone in a dark space.

“Jeff,” she called out but received no answer. For whatever reason, she was alone this time.

Baron Samedi did not come to her. She was outside alone in the storm. Rain soaked her hair and clothes and she felt a chill. Looking around, she could see she was on the platform but not the one from which she had just left. This platform was a rig from hell. Thick ropes of rust and crusted blood hung like vines from the roofs of buildings that were mere shells of themselves, caved in and crumbling. Pieces fell as she watched. The deck was no longer concrete and steel. It had become a living substance firm but not hard. She could feel a pulse, like a slow heartbeat, through the soles of her shoes.

Darkness prevailed. She could see neither water nor sky, although flickering smudges of light in the distance looked like lightning. The platform was a thing of shadows. They moved like diaphanous veils across the deck, leaving pools of deeper darkness behind them. She was afraid to move, fearing the deck would disappear beneath her entirely.

“Welcome,” a voice called out. The voice was deep and echoed as if from a deep well. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, surrounding her.

“Who are you?” she asked, looking around and fearing the answer.

“Damballah Wedo,” the voice answered loudly, shaking the platform. Bits of rust and other unidentifiable substances fell on her from overhead. She cringed as a piece of something moved on her arm. Without looking, she shuddered and shook it off.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“You have moved through time. This is your future—darkness, emptiness, despair. Soon it will come to the entire world.”

“Unless we stop you,” she answered more boldly than she felt.

Laughter shook the rig. “You are here as a witness, nothing more. You are powerless to stop me or my minions.”

“Your minions?” she asked.

Immediately, the misshapen, mutilated bodies of her dead fellow workers surrounded her, created from the substance of shadows, their dead, sightless eyes seeing or sensing her in some ethereal manner. She stepped back and Sid Easton lurched forward, one ear missing, and a demonic grin on his otherwise cold pale face. He raised his arms, reaching for her, exposing the lack of entrails in his abdomen. She slapped at his arms, repelled by her contact with his cold, lifeless flesh.