Stranded (31 page)

He scrambled in the direction where he thought the mirror Boucher should have been, throwing all his pent up adrenaline and fear into keeping the giant man down, but found only empty floor.

He glimpsed a blur in his peripheral vision right before the bosun's boot connected hard with his ribs, stealing the air from his body and any sense of orientation he'd enjoyed. The room became a gravityless void in which he floated unmoored to anything but the kick that had launched him. He crumpled around the boot. Serge tried to draw back his foot for another blow, but Noah held on despite the breathless agony of the first kick. He heard a solid hit and the bosun let out a groan. Serge tried to step back but Noah clutched at him tighter, until the big man fell. Reminiscent of what had first alerted them to Serge Boucher's presence, the hollow gourd thump of his skull hitting the floor carried up and down the hallway like a shot. The man sighed and lay still. Noah crawled up his leg, ready to repeat the sound by banging his head against the floor. Connor intervened, pulling him away.

“Let me go,” he said, taking a ragged breath. All the bottled up history of antagonism and poor treatment at the hands of the deckboss rushed into his head like hot blood. He wanted to take his shots and punish the man. Connor fought to hold him. Although weakened by months of deprivation, he was still strong. By the time Noah broke free, he'd come back to his senses. Mostly.

“Stop, man,” Connor said. “He's out.”

Shame burned in Noah's chest. He wanted to protect the crew. But he wanted to rescue some of them more than others. Boucher was low on the list of souls to save. However, this wasn't the Serge Boucher who had turned down Noah's OT requests or belittled him in front of his friends. This wasn't the man who had dropped him over the side of the
Arctic Promise
onto the ice or who threatened to beat him up after dragging him back on board. They were the same, but their histories were different. He was a reflection. This man was not responsible for what the other one had done, even if he was his reflection. And based on what they'd heard while creeping up on him, he'd already taken care of the other version of himself.

Noah wrenched his elbow out of Connor's hand. Connor stepped away, his shade fading into the deeper darkness. Noah had a feeling of déjà vu. Seeing the black shapes, watching them out of the corner of his eye as they flitted past was like trying to track Boucher or Connor in the dark hallway. What if
they
were the shapes now? The lights weren't really out, but they were ghosts in someone else's reality. Yet a third world of men struggling to break free of what held them. The darkness was what they were now.

He rubbed at his eyes. “Enough of this shit. I want to get the lights on.” Noah felt his way along the wall. His shoes squeaked on the wet floor as he passed what remained of his Boucher.

 

32

The transition from the accommodations block to the working area of the drilling platform was as dramatic in the dark as it had been in the light. A long, straight hallway bridged the gap between the living quarters and the industrial area of the rig. If they were caught out in a spotlight in that hall, there was nowhere to go. No doorways, no windows, just a straight corridor with a watertight bulkhead door at the end. It was installed to isolate the crew from the hazardous substances beyond, but would serve as a perfect obstacle for a quick escape from danger on this side. It had dog locks like on board ship that would take time to open. Only slamming it shut could be done in a hurry.

When Connor opened the door, Noah felt like someone pressed a rag soaked in gasoline to his face. The stench was thick and the air even tasted bad on his tongue. Although the industrial area smelled of crude oil and sulfur before, the odors had intensified. The day before, he had been on the verge of total exhaustion, his throat and lungs already burning with frozen exertion, and he hadn't been paying attention to how unpleasant it was to breathe on a drilling platform. His mind had been on his toes and fingers and he hadn't taken a full measure of how a place like the Niflheim smelled. And of course, it would, given the nature of the work. He'd just been happy to be inside. A day later and sightless, the powerful stench of what the roughnecks pulled out of the earth was overwhelming.

Noah tugged on Connor's shoulder, asking him to stop. His guide paused and leaned back, the silent language of the unseeing becoming ever more fluent between them. “Is that smell normal?” he whispered into Connor's ear. He tried breathing through his mouth in an attempt to suppress his gag reflex. Still, the tinctured air made him feel sick to his stomach. Crude oil, machine grease, and smoke combined in a potpourri only a native of the most hellish underworld could enjoy. He wondered why it would continue to smell as bad as it did. Shouldn't the smells dissipate with disuse? The answer, of course, was that no one had come to relieve the rig of what it had pulled up from the ocean floor before the crew abandoned it, and Connor's band of refugees weren't drilling roughnecks. Every drop that had been collected had been left neglected, corroding the machines, eating its way out like a demon removing the circle of salt that bound it, one grain at a time.

“Nope. That's nothin' at all like normal. The place stinks, yeah, and you get used to it, even. This, I am
not
used to.” Connor led Noah another step down onto a landing before stopping again. He patted Noah's hand. Noah released his shoulder and waited. He listened as Connor moved deeper into the room, his footsteps making wet sounds like walking on a damp sidewalk after a heavy rain. He heard the man sniff and gag. The footsteps moved farther away and Noah tried to rein in his panic. Suppressing the urge to cry out, he knelt down and touched the floor with a pair of fingers. Bringing them up to his nose, he flinched away from the odor. They were covered in a slick film of something horrible. He wiped his fingers on his pants and immediately regretted it. Just standing in the room made him feel filthy down to the roots of his hair.

A few seconds later, he heard wet footsteps returning. In his conscious mind, he knew it was Connor, but instinct told him to get away and hide. Connor's voice emerged from the blackness, easing some of his tension. “Where are you?”

“Same place, over here. Where'd you go?”

Noah felt Connor grip his wrist and press something into his palm. “Look, I know you don't want to use these, but we're out of options. This blind leading the blind shit is slowing us down, and we don't even know what we're walkin' into. We need to
see
if we're going to get the lights back on without killing ourselves. Living quarters are pretty easy to get around in. It's all just halls and doors. But the industrial deck is chock full of dangerous shit goin' in all directions. I don't want to escape being murdered just to fall in a well bay, if you follow me. We don't need to keep 'em on, but I can't find my way by feel any farther than this room right here.”

Connor was right. Being right wouldn't keep them from getting shot if Brewster saw them coming, but it would keep him from walking into a low valve and opening a fresh gash in his head or stumbling off the edge of a catwalk into a waste pit. “I'm with you.” He felt along the device for the switch. His thumb traced a small rubber circle and, holding his breath, he pressed it, waiting for the gunshot that would follow. A flash of white light shone at his feet. He doused it immediately and traced his fingers along the shape of the tool in his hands, surprised by the bend at the top. “What the hell?”

“Huh?”

“It's bent.”

“Oh, it's one of those ninety-degree lights. You stuff it in a work vest pocket or something so you can work with both hands while you use it. They're in boxes all over in case the lights go out, or you just need to get under something, I guess.”

His pupils had dilated so much in the complete dark that a light shining away still resulted in large purple circles hovering in the dark after he doused it. Straightening his wrist, he lit the flashlight again, this time shining it ahead of him into the room. The view was still as foreign as before. Man-sized pipes rose out of the floor, extending up and bending away along the high ceiling before disappearing into the walls. Everything was painted autumn colors of yellow, orange, and red in what Noah assumed was a pattern someone somewhere understood. But not him. Maybe red meant something dangerous, but everything else was a mystery. The only answer he had was that this was a drilling station. They pulled raw petroleum out of the ocean floor to ship to be refined elsewhere. Petroleum that was now coating the floors.

“Where are we?” Noah asked.

“This is a pump room. The main generators and switch room are over that way, other side of the well bay. We can cut through that room to get there.” Connor pointed to a massive white steel door twice as tall as either of them. While it had likely been designed to facilitate the movement of behemoth machinery, it gave the appearance of a workplace for unknowable cosmic monstrosities like in the pulps his grandfather had given him as a kid. Noah started off toward the doors, holding his free hand around the light lens, trying to focus its shine down to the area exactly in front of him. That he hadn't already been shot or stabbed was good enough evidence they were alone. Still, he felt the need to minimize his visibility.

Noah doused his light and pulled up on the bar locking the door in place. It screeched in its metal guides as he lifted the end out of the floor. Clear of the hole below, the door swung a few inches under its own weight before creaking to a stop. He pulled it open another couple of feet before stopping it. They didn't need more than a narrow space to slip through and Noah didn't want to make any more noise than he had to. There wasn't a single god damn thing on the installation that had been built to be silent.

He tried to angle his body through the opening but the fumes and stench pushed him back. He couldn't stop gagging at the overwhelming rotten egg odor of the room beyond. He shut his eyelids tight and backpedaled away from the assault until a standpipe behind him painfully halted his retreat. Fluid rushed around his feet, splashing onto his shins. The door hadn't swung open because of its weight, but because something behind it had pushed. And it made him want to run, out of the room, right off the rig, and across the ice back to the
Promise
. He didn't know much about the oil drilling business, but he watched the news and had seen videos posted online by environmental activists worried about spills in the Arctic. He knew the shit soaking through his pants legs was highly volatile as well as toxic.

“Jesus Christ!” Connor shouted. He clicked on his flashlight and Noah braced for the explosion. The oil didn't ignite, however. Connor pulled the door open wider and shone his light into the room. He doubled over and vomited into the sea of viscous black shit flooding out around their feet. Noah pushed himself forward despite his instinct to flee, and pulled Connor away from the door.

“We gotta get out of here.” The men backtracked toward the stairs to the dormitory. Noah wasn't sure what scared him more, the toxic pool they were splashing through or the darkened hallways of the living quarters they were running toward. Against Brewster, he had a chance. There was nothing to do about the tide of crude oil but run.

They climbed and pushed through the waterproof door, dogging it behind them, sealing off the industrial section of the platform. Noah gasped for fresh air and found none. Although they'd locked off the polluted area behind them, he was soaked below the knees in highly combustible fuel that smelled like Hell. Connor's choking echoed up the hall. Noah felt dizzy and sick. He wanted to stick a finger down his throat to purge the feeling, but the sickness wasn't in his stomach or guts. The poison was in his nose and his throat and lungs. It was on his pants and soaking through his boots into his socks.

“How the hell could that have happened?” he said. His voice was raspy and his words came out in a painful hiss. He shined his light on his legs trying to see how much of his clothes had been stained. How much of him would erupt in flames if he met an errant spark.

“Ruptured tank, maybe.”

“Could it have been done from a control room?”

Connor shook his head. “There's no purge button, if that's what you mean—installing something like that would be insane. I don't know exactly how they refine this shit, but I do know the rig is designed to burn off excess natural gas through a vent and crude oil shouldn't ever spill out like that. It's dangerous as all hell. That ain't ever supposed to get out.”

“Brewster couldn't have had time to uncouple a pipe fitting and dump a tank, even if he found his way to the room ahead of us. That's heavy work and he's been too busy.”

“Shit's been breaking down left and right for a while. My guess is all he had to do was turn off the gennies—or send Henry to do it. That coulda been the last straw. Power to the pumps might've been the only thing keeping those tanks from filling up with pressure and bursting. I don't know. What I know for certain is, we can't turn 'em back on now. Forget about the oil; if even the
vapor
ignites, it could flash back. A single spark would send the whole place up.”

Before Noah could ask if it was possible to flush the industrial area, clear out the spilled crude, he heard a shot and squatted low as if he could dodge bullets. The sound had echoed out from another hall, coming from behind at least one closed door, but even muffled it made him want to duck and run. He fumbled to turn off his light and, when it didn't go dark the first time, thought seriously about smashing it against the rail running the length of the wall. A second try darkened it, however, and the men stood in quiet shock waiting for the next shot. A closer shot, followed by the sound of a bullet hitting the wall or the door … or a body. What they heard instead was screaming. Screaming followed by another bang from a distance. And then silence.