Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  But by then, they could already feel the uncomfortable list to port. Smell something like smoke.

  “What happened?” George asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Cushing admitted. “I came awake hanging out of my fucking bunk, hearing that goddamn alarm. I heard someone shouting fire. We better get on deck.”

  Soltz moved quickly then. Much quicker than either man could’ve imagined he’d move. By the time they’d gathered themselves together, Soltz was fully dressed and had his suitcase in hand.

  “Jesus, nobody said we were sinking,” George said.

  “I’m not leaving this behind. All my things are in here.”

  Saks was barreling up the corridor as they went out. He looked angry. Maybe frightened, too, but probably just angry that he was frightened. He was carrying a heap of life jackets. “Put these on,” he said, throwing the life vests to the floor.

  “Is it that bad?” Cushing asked.

  “Come on, you dumb shits,” he snapped, “unless you wanna be toast.”

  George looked up in the rafters, the survival suits hanging there. They could keep a man afloat and warm for days, it was claimed. “The suits…”

  “Fuck the suits,” Saks said. “Now move!”

  The corridor was filling with smoke. It was more of a mist than anything, but it was getting heavier by the moment. The air had an awful scorched, acrid stink to it.

  They followed Saks up to the deck, donning the vests as they went.

  “What happened?” Cushing asked.

  “Are we sinking?” Soltz wanted to know. “Are the lifeboats ready?”

  “Barge slammed into us, slammed into us hard. We’re taking on water,” Saks said. “Fucking barge tore into the forward hold, lit up that diesel fuel in there. Amidships and forward hold are an inferno. The rest of those drums go and…”

  He didn’t need to say more. They could pretty much envision what it would be like sitting on a stick of dynamite.

  The first explosion rang out when they reached deck.

  26

  Fabrini felt the explosion before he actually heard it. He and Menhaus were standing by one of the graders, lost in the ever-present fog. The impact threw them face first to the deck. They heard the muffled, mushrooming roar while they were airborne, followed by the sound of shattering glass and men screaming.

  And while all of that was bad, the worst thing was the ship itself. It shuddered with a heavy, crawling roll, seeming to shift alarmingly further port without righting itself, flinging men across the decks like jackstraw.

  “This can’t be happening,” Menhaus kept saying as he pulled himself to his feet, wiped blood from his lips, and was spilled to the deck again by the violent heaving motion of the ship.

  “Oh, it’s happening,” Fabrini said. “It’s happening just like I fucking knew it would.”

  Containers stacked amidships had been reduced to shrapnel as the hatch covers beneath them were blown free, gouts of flame raining over the spar deck. It lit things up just fine. Encased in the luminous fog, the flames reflecting against it… the ship looked like something that had burst the gates of Hell.

  Saks came charging forward, moving with an almost feline grace despite the jerking decks. “Give a hand with the lifeboats, you pussies,” he called out. “To the boat deck, move your asses! Come on, Fabrini, you fucking wop, move it!”

  Menhaus grabbed his arm as he rushed by. “Saks? It isn’t happening, is it? Tell me it’s not happening! I got a wife… I don’t wanna die out there! I don’t wanna die!”

  Saks shoved him to the deck. “Listen, you fucking baby! Your mommy’s titty ain’t nowhere in sight, so quit acting like a shit and lend a hand or so help me I’ll-”

  There was a high pitched metallic groaning from below and the decks trembled, dropping Saks on top of Menhaus. He crawled free.

  “Move it! Move it!” he shouted. “Fabrini, you fucking cock mite, what the hell are you standing around about? Lend a hand, goddamn you!”

  The decks were mass confusion as crewmen and mates rushed about in the swirling mist, calling out orders, clearing debris, and desperately stripping tarps from lifeboats.

  The ship continued to drift with a jolting, uneasy motion, leaning further and further port as the fire raged and the sea rushed in.

  27

  Gosling jogged across the lurching decks, climbing the see-sawing ladders to the pilothouse. The air was thick and pungent with belching black smoke and the stink of charred wood.

  He saw the deck lights flicker in that cloistral fog.

  Go out.

  The ship was plunged into seething blackness. Men started to scream again and he wondered if they’d ever stopped. The world was a hive of noise. Timbers crunching, metal creaking and groaning with fatigue. Voices were calling for help. Voices were arguing. Grown men were shrieking like babes and he wanted very much to join in.

  Then the lights came back on, flickered with a dim strobe effect, but finally caught.

  As he entered the pilothouse, or was thrown into it, he saw Morse at the radio. He was shouting into it. “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” he bellered. “THIS IS AN SOS! THIS IS AN SOS! WE’RE SINKING… OUR POSITION…” he tossed the mic against the bulkhead. The lights kept flickering. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! We don’t have any goddamn juice!”

  Gosling grabbed him by the arm and spun him around. “Captain, we have to get off her,” he stammered. “The sea’s coming in too fast for the pumps… if the rest of those drums go-”

  “I’ve seen the Fourth of July, Mister, I know what’ll happen. Let’s get off this bitch. Lower those boats.”

  Gosling had already given that order, just as he’d given the order for the men to don their survival suits just as they’d been trained to do… but in the confusion and panic with the ship yawing and rolling severely, well, he figured most never heard.

  “Let’s go, First,” the captain said.

  He took the lead, Gosling at his heels, making for the hatch… but never got there.

  A tremendous ear-shattering roar ripped the night into shreds. The deck beneath them heaved and buckled. The pilothouse collapsed in a rain of splintered wood, glass, and twisted metal.

  Gosling crawled from the wreckage, bleeding from a dozen gashes in his face. He found what was left of Morse: he’d been split in two by a beam.

  It happened that quick.

  Gosling made it out to the ladder, started climbing down the superstructure, deck by deck. The fog had thinned now, it seemed, been replaced by funneling black smoke. He almost made the spar deck when another explosion tossed him through the air. Girders and flaming sheet metal collapsed on top of him.

  He tried to pull himself free, but his foot snagged.

  “Help!” he called out. “Over here! Lend a hand!”

  28

  George, Soltz, and Cushing were gripping the portside handrail for dear life as they’d been instructed by one of the mates when the latest series of explosions barked in the night. They were thrown to the deck, but they all saw what happened.

  And what a sight it was.

  The explosions hit with more force than the previous ones. Like cannon shots. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! The decks reeled and buckled with a cacophonous screech of tormented metal, splitting open with great jagged rents that emitted eruptions of boiling flames. George saw the hatch cover over the starboard cargo bay actually bulge momentarily like a balloon suddenly filled with air before bursting its latches with a thundering boom and shooting into the sky like a rocket. Great rolling clouds of mushrooming fire and black greasy smoke poured into the sky, mixing with that noxious fog into a seething storm of fumes that sucked the oxygen from the air.

  “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God,” Soltz whimpered.

  George held on to him and Cushing, almost afraid to let go. Flames licked over the decks now, engulfing everything in their path. Lifeboats went up like kindling. Men were blazing like torches. The big dozers were shrouded in fire. George saw four or five
men dive off the writhing decks, stick matches consuming themselves.

  The deck lights went out for good now.

  They were no longer needed. The ship had become a flickering funeral pyre of orange and yellow billowing light, backlit by the mist.

  There were flashes of purple and red light, more detonations from below, more flames, more dying and screams of agony. The air was reeking with a hot, raw stink of seared flesh and crackling thunderstorms.

  “Come on!” George screamed over the jarring racket. “We gotta get off her before she goes!”

  They got unsteadily to their feet as the ship lurched further and further to port, the mangled decks dipping down to the water line. There was a sudden awful blaring noise of screeching metal as both of the dozers snapped their moorings and slid across the decks, taking howling, crushed men with them as they burst through the railing and into the black waters below. Huge fireballs cascaded into the night.

  George and the others ran towards the bow, vaulting the injured and the dying as the ship heaved. Jagged fissures opened up before them, swallowing one of the graders and four men who’d been trying to toss a lifeboat over the side. Their screams split the air.

  “Over the side!” George screamed. “Now!”

  “I can’t swim,” Soltz blubbered. “I’m afraid to-”

  George shoved him into the darkness and planted his foot on Cushing’s backside. Both men careened to the waters below, vanishing into the fog. George took one last look around before doing the same. The ship was going down fast. It seemed he could almost feel it sinking. The decks and cabins were raging with fire now. He gripped the railing and made to jump.

  But stopped.

  Someone was calling for help.

  Just go, goddamn you, a voice cried out in his head.

  But he couldn’t. This one voice seemed to rise up above everything else and he couldn’t ignore it. He jogged through the smoke and pillars of fire. The voice was louder. It was coming from up near the superstructure… or the jagged pile of burning shrapnel it now was.

  “Help me out of here,” Gosling moaned. “For the love of God…”

  His ankle was trapped between two timbers. George wrapped his hands around the upper one, the encroaching fire singing the hairs of his beard. With a great heave he budged it an inch, two inches, three. Gosling pulled his leg free.

  They made it to the railing together.

  “Over the side!” Gosling shrieked.

  Another explosion rocketed through the night and both men were catapulted into the sea along with shards of steaming metal and burning wood. There was that dizzying moment of descent, lost in the fog and blackness, then the water. The sea was warmer than George anticipated. Warm and soupy, yet oddly refreshing after the heat of the ship. He plunged down into the waters, sinking and sinking, wondering why the lifejacket wasn’t working, and then he surfaced, sucking in smoky, salty air. Something gripped his shoulder and he realized it was Gosling’s hand.

  “Swim!” he gasped. “Swim away from her!”

  29

  George followed in Gosling’s wake, distancing himself from the ship, realizing the vacuum of it going down would probably pull him under if he didn’t. The water was bobbing with wreckage. It was like swimming through an obstacle course. He heard voices crying out. Heard voices answering. At least they weren’t alone in their plight. The sea was flat as a tabletop… but the water itself… odd. Not just warm, but turgid, thick… water but not water as George knew it. But there was no time for observations. He kept up with Gosling and soon the ship was a flaming silhouette in the distance.

  “We’re okay now,” Gosling panted. “Far enough.”

  George watched the Mara Corday give up her ghost.

  The fog was still a constant, but visibility had improved. The ship had listed now until its port gunwale practically touched the water. Then there was a booming rush of fountaining bubbles and she righted herself. For a second. The bow sank lower and lower, waves rushing up and over it. The stern rose up vertically like a jutting black finger and then she went down with an enormous hissing, leaving a sucking whirlpool in her wake. A few moments later, more cargo and flotsam bobbed to the surface.

  Then there was only the cloisterous fog pressing in and that stillborn, tideless sea.

  PART TWO

  THE DRIFT

  1

  George’s first impression was that he and Gosling were alone out there.

  His second impression was a feeling: panic.

  Combined, these things made him want to scream and thrash like some little kid drowning in a bathtub. But slowly, slowly, he got it under control. He was with Gosling. Gosling was an experienced sailor

  … if anyone could keep him alive and get him to dry land, it would be the First Mate. That provided a certain sense of security. It wasn’t exactly something you could wrap yourself up in and go to sleep with, but it was something.

  They heard voices in the distance from time to time, but when they called out no one answered. There were a few bits of scattered light from burning objects still afloat, but one by one, they went out. And then all there was was that ever-present fog, thick and roiling. It still had that odd luminosity to it… like it was backlit by the glowing beam of some distant lighthouse. If nothing else, it provided scant illumination.

  Just enough, George figured, to make everything look weird and surreal.

  And creepy.

  Because there was no other word to describe it. For that’s exactly how it looked out there with that fog and the odd glow: creepy.

  Sure, George was trying damn hard not to panic, but the bottom line here was that they were out in the middle of fucking nowhere without a lifeboat or a life raft and it was night and by dawn their life jackets would be saturated and they’d drown. That is if the sharks didn’t get them first. His mind had already sketched that particular nightmare out in some detail. He kept remembering scenes from that movie where the big shark gobbles people up. He kept wondering what it would feel like when those teeth sank into him. Would it be a big goddamn shark that would swallow him whole or would it be a smaller monster that would maybe bite his leg off? He’d seen a show once where a shark did that to a shipwreck victim. It just kept coming around, taking bites and pieces.

  Oh, Jesus.

  This can’t be fucking happening, he thought frantically. This only happens to guys on the late movie. Shit like this doesn’t come down on normal guys like me who run bulldozers for a living and are just trying to keep the creditors at bay-

  “HELP!” he started screaming. “IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? GODDAMN YOU ANSWER ME RIGHT NOW FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!”

  There was no answer. Just that brooding silence. And that odd sort of humming he could hear from time to time.

  “You feel better now?” Gosling said. “Good. Now knock it off for chrissake. We’re not dead yet.”

  George kept treading water as if he didn’t trust the lifejacket. “Oh, you’re a real fucking comfort,” he panted.

  “Quit splashing around,” Gosling told him. “Just lay back like me. The jacket’ll float you. All the racket might attract interest”

  “Sharks?”

  “No,” Gosling said. “That’s not what I was thinking exactly.”

  And George honestly didn’t have the balls to follow that one up. Not sharks? What, then?

  “Don’t panic. We’ll be fine. But there’s no sense in wasting energy treading water when you don’t have to.”

  George swallowed and let himself float. It wasn’t bad. It was almost relaxing just bobbing there.

  “Are there really sharks out here?” he asked.

  “Who can say? This is the ocean, George, lots of things call it home. It’s a food chain like any other.”

  Shit. “Will they get us?”

  “Not if I can help it.” He must’ve sensed the panic in George’s eyes. “All right, listen to me and listen good. There are two things that attract sharks. The first is doing what
you were doing – splashing around. What you’re doing when you do that is drawing attention to yourself. You’re acting like a fish in distress. You’re sending off the same signals. The second thing that attracts sharks is blood. They can smell it in the water. I’ve heard they can smell it for miles. So don’t thrash around and don’t bleed. Simple.”

  George started checking out every ache and pain in his body to see if he had any cuts. He didn’t think so. “You didn’t cut your leg back there, did you?”

  “No, I just twisted it. Relax. Wait for the dawn. We’ll be fine.”

  And that was easy for him to say, George thought dismally. Big, tough sailor-boy. But George was no sailor and after this little party he was moving to fucking Kansas. He never wanted to see open water again. He didn’t think he’d ever even go swimming again. And if he did, there wouldn’t be anything bigger than tadpoles in said water, thank you very much.

  Which made him start remembering things. The panic… the fire and screaming and confusion… the ship going down… sure, it had all blotted out other things for awhile, darker thoughts about that awful fog and the stories circulating concerning it. You know, all that cute, amusing stuff about the Devil’s Triangle and that sort of thing.

  But now it was back.

  Now it was digging down inside him and it had teeth.

  He thought: What if any of that crazy hoodoo bullshit is true? It’s bad enough to abandon ship, but to abandon ship in some fucking crazy dead zone that chews up ships and men, swallows ‘em alive and kicking…

  Jesus, it was all bad, wasn’t it?

  And not just that weird fog and all the rest, but even the sea itself. So calm, so warm. Unnaturally warm, it seemed. And its consistency just wasn’t right. Not like water really, too oily, too thick, too something. Like it was full of suspended sediment, closer to gelatin than water. It left a slimy residue on the skin.