Hell Rig (3 page)

Jeff shook his head. Easton’s sweet tooth was undoubtedly the reason for his bad teeth and rank breath. He doubted Easton would find anything edible left on the rig.

According to the building plans, the hallway led to two small offices, a slightly larger reception area in the front of the building, and the cafeteria and recreation room in the rear. They chose to inspect the cafeteria first.

“Is that blood?” Gleason asked, rubbing his finger down a red-brown stain on a door bearing the International Symbol for restroom. The door was shattered and off its hinges. Deep gashes looked as if someone had taken an axe to it.

Jeff looked closely. He could not be certain, but he hoped it was just a rust stain. “Nah. It’s just rust from the pipes above,” he said.

Gleason eyed the maze of pipes running overhead, “If you say so.” He did not sound entirely convinced of Jeff’s quick appraisal.

They peeked inside. There were four stalls and four urinals. A large round fountain sink in the center of the room operated with a foot pedal, leaving the hands free. Jeff tried it but no water came out.

“No water in the tank above. We can set up a pump and fill it with salt water. We can at least have a flushing toilet. Any small comfort will only make the job easier. We can refill the tank with fresh water when the supply ship arrives and have showers.”

“Better than hanging your bare ass over the railings,” Gleason agreed.

An open door at the rear led to a large communal shower.

“God, it stinks,” Easton said, pinching his nose between two fingers.

“Smells like stale piss,” Clyde said.

Jeff eyed the red stains on the wall beneath two of the showerheads and the streaks running to the floor drain and said, “Maybe something else, too.” A large booted footprint was visible in the red stain. “Let’s go.”

The cafeteria was in shambles. Tables were scattered and overturned. Broken dishes and glass made footing treacherous. Fallen ceiling tiles lay in molding piles on the floor. The smell of rotten food permeated the air. Gleason forced open the back door and the incoming breeze swept most of the offending odor away.

“Bale and Sims get to clean out the cooler, agreed?” Gleason said.

“Right,” Jeff seconded. He did not want to shovel out a ton of rotten meat and vegetables. Easton nodded his head vigorously. Jeff looked at a particularly large crimson stain on the floor that he could not explain away as rust. As he stared at the stain, its odd shape became that of a man thrown onto his face, one arm and hand stretched above him. He could even make out the fingers where they had clawed uselessly at the tile floor and the imprint of the nose, eyes and mouth, opened wide as if screaming, frozen forever in dried blood. He could even hear the scream, distantly at first as if forcing its way through the steel deck and concrete and tile, solidifying in the air.

“Easton! Turn that damn thing off.”

He looked at Gleason who was yelling at Easton. Easton had turned on the water faucet of the sink and was smiling as the air bled out in a loud screech. He shut off the faucet and the scream stopped. Jeff sighed. He was letting the place get to him. He eyed the kitchen. Rig workers were notoriously well fed. It was one of the ways the company kept men off shore as long as possible. Ferrying in new crews and training them was costly. It was much cheaper to pay bonuses to those capable of handling the long weeks, even months of isolation off shore. The food was bountiful—all you can eat steaks twice a week, fresh seafood caught off the rig, potatoes, vegetables, gravy, sandwiches, fruit, pies, pastries and ice cream with every meal. No worker ever went hungry. Jeff had seen some workers down a half-gallon of ice cream by themselves after a heavy meal as well as take a bagged lunch of four large sandwiches to their work site. Good cooks were in great demand. A bad cook didn’t last long on a rig. More than one cook had been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night and unceremoniously deposited on a supply ship for the long, embarrassing ride back to shore.

Easton walked behind the serving line, lifting lids on the chafing dishes. Thankfully, the disaster had struck between meals and the line was relatively clean. The ovens, though, were a different matter. Easton opened one, only to be overwhelmed by the appalling odor of rotten meat. Four moldy beef roasts sat in roasting pans.

“Care for a slice?” Easton asked with a grin.

Jeff fought down the nausea and walked out, but not before noting that there were no maggots in the meat. That struck him as odd.

“The pantry is in pretty good shape,” Gleason reported from the open door. “Water got in but the canned goods are okay. I wouldn’t try the crackers though,” he added with a wink.

They entered one room off to the side of the cafeteria. Numerous card tables, arcade games and a wide screen TV furnished the room, a recreation room, Jeff supposed. Cards and poker chips littered the floor and tables. More odd, reddish-brown stains marred the linoleum tile floor. Jeff tried to ignore them.

“Great! Pac Man,” Easton shouted, pointing to one of the arcade games against the wall. As he reached out to touch it, the lights flickered overhead and the video game roared to life. When the music blared suddenly, he leaped back into the arms of Gleason, who roughly shoved him away. Easton tried to smile, but was clearly embarrassed by his reaction. Lisa and Tolson had restored the power.

“What a rush!” he said with a giggle.

“Good! They got the juice back on,” Gleason said. In the background, they could hear one of the two generators sputtering, but running.

The overhead lights pulsed a few times before coming on. In full light, the rust-red stains looked more like bloodstains than Jeff cared to imagine. One long smear ran from the center of the room, across the floor and out the door as if something, or someone, had been dragged away. The disarray of the furnishings seemed out of proportion to the actual storm damage. The wind and rain had not penetrated this room. It looked more like the scene of a riot or a big brawl than the aftermath of a storm.

“Look at that!” Easton shouted in glee as he spotted the vending machines standing in a small alcove off the game room. “Sodas, candy, chips. It’s a gold mine!”

“The chips are probably stale,” Jeff warned.

Easton laughed and kicked at the front of the candy machine. His foot bounced off the Plexiglas front and he almost fell down. He tried again and failed.

“You ain’t got enough ass for your sass, Easton,” Gleason said and pushed Easton aside. Gleason shattered the front with one kick of his size thirteen boot.

Easton reached inside and grabbed a half dozen Baby Ruth bars, shoving them in his pocket. “Thanks, Clyde.” He pulled a dollar bill from his pocket and tried to slide it into the soda machine. When the machine would not take it, he punched all the buttons and waited for his soda. Nothing happened.

“Rusted up,” Gleason said. He grabbed the machine with both hands and shook it vigorously. The soda dropped with a thud into the slot. Easton grabbed the soda and popped the top as Gleason stepped back. The hot, shaken soda spewed all over Easton.

Gleason laughed so hard he began to cough. Jeff tried not to laugh.

“Damn you, Clyde!” Easton yelled as he threw the offending soda away.

Gleason shrugged. “What did you expect? It’s been sitting in there cooking for God knows how long.”

Easton turned to leave.

“Wait! Maybe they got some Tic-Tacs in there too, for your breath,” Gleason suggested.

Easton rolled his eyes, did an approximation of a Billy Idol sneer and stalked off. They explored the outside wing of the main blockhouse and found a stairwell leading down to the cellar deck containing the mudroom, storerooms and workshops. The lights were out and the stairwell looked dark and uninviting. Cold, damp air smelling of mildew welled up from the lower level in spite of the heat.

“Let’s save it for last,” Jeff suggested, feeling slightly uneasy about the opening. The others agreed.

The second hallway on the outward facing side of the building was in shambles. It had taken the full brunt of the storm. Sections of the outside wall were missing. What had once been labs were now empty shells, all its contents long gone, swept away by the storm. Of the two front rooms, one, a reception area, was still serviceable. The other, an office, while relatively intact, smelled of blood and mildew. The black and white linoleum floors were smeared in blood. Empty beer bottles lay smashed on the floor. The desk was overturned and a blotch of blood stained the wall behind it.

“Looks like someone had a real party,” Easton commented.

Jeff shot Easton a dirty look. The gloom of the room and the smell were beginning to get to him as he realized that the rumors about the Digger Man’s murder spree were true. “Let’s go see what Ed wants us to do first,” he suggested.

Chapter Three

As Lisa Love and Eric Tolson followed Waters to the generator shack, she noticed the manner in which Waters reached out and touched things, caressing them—barrels, pipes, even the wall of the shack—as if for reassurance that they were real. He mumbled quietly to himself, words Lisa could not quite make out but having the measured cadence of a prayer. Tolson jerked his thumb at Waters and made circles at his head with his finger for Lisa’s benefit, but she found no humor in Waters’ condition. He frightened her. She had taken only one course in abnormal psychology during college, but knew how little it took for someone riding the thin razor edge between sanity and insanity to lose all touch with reality. Waters clearly rode that fine edge. He met all the criteria for classic Survivor’s Syndrome. Finding all his buddies dead had unhinged his mind. He felt a deep guilt at surviving.

The generator shack was intact. Except for a few broken panes in the room’s single window and a few loose pieces of steel siding, it seemed to have weathered the storm well. Once inside, however, they discovered one of the 500-kw Caterpillar diesel generators had been savaged. Someone had attacked the control panel with a pickaxe that they found discarded beside the wreckage, amid broken glass and stripped wires. Parts had been broken off the generator engine and neatly piled like an offering in front of the generator. Some of the internal parts were visible through holes in the casing.

“The Digger Man
,”she thought.

“Well, that one’s a bust,” Tolson said after a quick examination of the damaged generator. “We’ll never get it working.”

Lisa examined the second generator. “This one looks good.” She picked up a severed cable. “Once we reattach the power cable, it should run.”

“Maybe. Let’s check it out.” Tolson began his own examination of the second generator.

“Digger Man did this,” Waters said. He looked around as if in awe of his former friend’s handiwork. “He destroyed the first one but something must have stopped him before he completed his task.” He nodded at the wire and chuckled. “He disabled it though.”

“His task?” Lisa asked.

Waters nodded. “To bring the darkness.”

“Darkness?”

“Things thrive in the darkness that can’t abide the light. It’s why we fear shadows.”

“I’m not afraid of shadows,” Lisa said.

Waters smiled. “You soon will be.”

A chill ran up her spine at Waters’ words. Was he just trying to frighten her or was it a premonition?

Tolson had enough. “Waters, why don’t you go look around while we get this thing working,” he suggested. “Go chat up some of your ghost buddies.”

Waters glared at Tolson a moment before leaving.

“Thank God for that,” he said after Waters left. “The man gives me the creeps.”

“Do you think he’s crazy?” she asked.

“As a loon. Now, do you know anything about generators?”

Lisa smiled. “Not a lot. I told Ed I took some electronics courses once and now he thinks I can do anything. That’s why he sent me with you.”

“Ah, I thought it was because of my charm. Then you’re not going to be much help except to look at are you?”

Lisa placed her hands on her hips defiantly. “I’ve helped my father tear down more than one old car and rebuild it. I know a Phillips head screwdriver from a torque wrench. You work, I’ll hand you tools. Deal?”

Defeated, Tolson smiled. “Deal. There’s nothing I can do with the first one. I don’t have the parts.” He opened the doors of the second. “This doesn’t look too bad. Reattach a few wires and we’ll give her a try. Check the fuel.”

Lisa looked at the gauge. “About a quarter full.”

“Not good. Check the other one.”

She opened the panel on the destroyed generator. “Even worse. It’s almost empty.”

Tolson tilted a diesel drum on its side to judge its contents. “Less than a quarter full.” He squatted in front of the generator panel. “If we can’t find any more diesel fuel, this baby will run about three days, tops,” he said as he used cutters to strip the wires on the cable.

“The supply ship will bring more, right?” she asked.

“The one thing I’ve learned about supply ship captains is that they take their own sweet time.” He grunted a few times as he tightened a few screws. “There, that’s done. We might as well change the filter and oil while we’re at it. Hand me a 5/8ths box end, please.”

She smiled. “That’s the cute little roundy thing, isn’t it?” she asked as she handed him the correct wrench.