Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  And it stank. Like something decomposing under a log.

  George sucked in a sharp breath, tried to fight the fear, the uncertainty, tried to hold it all together which was not easy. Felt like his guts, his resolve was strung together out of thread and spit.

  For now there was survival. Nothing more. He had to remember that.

  “Do you think it’ll be long before we’re picked up?” George asked Gosling. And from the tone in his voice – a squeaky, breathless tone – he realized he sounded like some little kid that needed reassuring that there were indeed no monsters in the closet or under the bed.

  “Depends” Gosling’s voice was practically a whisper. There was something very guarded about it.

  “On what?”

  “On a lot of things,” he said. “If the current pushes us out of the shipping lanes, it could be awhile. If it doesn’t, I would say a boat’ll be by any time. Probably in the morning or afternoon. Hopefully. If not, well, we’ll be reported overdue in Cayenne tomorrow night… or tonight actually.”

  What George was hearing in his voice he did not like at all. It sounded like Gosling was reading from a script, like he didn’t believe a goddamn word of what he was saying. If there was an undercurrent there, it was saying, sure, George, they’ll be looking for us. Same way they look for lots of ships that vanish without a trace…

  “How long will these jackets float us?”

  “Long enough. Maybe.”

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t worry. First light we’ll have a look around, see what we can find. Should be lots of junk floating around. Usually is.”

  George could see his silhouette in the murky light, figured he was lying his ass off about a lot of things. And maybe it wasn’t that exactly, but it was something. So George decided to bait him a bit: “Shouldn’t somebody be here by now? A rescue ship? A plane? A helicopter?”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the distress signal.”

  Gosling exhaled sharply. “I think they might have a little trouble finding us. Being where we are.”

  “Which is?”

  But Gosling would not answer him. And that seemed to be the worst thing of all.

  2

  “You know something, Fabrini,” Saks said. “If they ever come out with an asshole of the year award, I’m putting you up for it.”

  Fabrini gave him the finger even though it was invisible in the semi-darkness.

  “You think anyone else made it?” Menhaus asked.

  “Course they did,” was all Saks would say.

  “Yeah, well don’t hold your breath,” Fabrini said sourly.

  “Shut your hole, shit-fer-brains. I told you, I told the both of you to get to the freaking lifeboats. But did you?” Saks slapped his palm into the water. “No, you two ass guppies sat there clinging to each other like you were queer for each other. So you swapped some spit and fell in love and this is where it got us.”

  “Fuck you,” Fabrini mumbled.

  The three of them were clinging to a large wooden crate. In addition to their lifejackets, they were safe for the time being. Saks had found the two of them dog-paddling through the surf like confused puppies. With his usual grace he’d directed them away from the boat. Until Menhaus bumped his nose into the crate. Then the trouble started. Both Fabrini and Menhaus did their best to clamor onto it. No dice. The crate spun in the water. They started screaming and hollering, fighting each other to get on top – so much for their pledge of watching each other’s behinds. Saks had to intervene and explain to them just what sort of mud-bathing, shit-eating farmyard critters their mothers had had sex with to give birth to a couple of candy-assed losers like them. After a good five minutes of abuse, they calmed down. They clung to different sides of the crate. In this way, they could float peacefully and safely.

  Menhaus was watching the fog, knowing there was something damn funny about it, but not wanting to point it out to the others. Hoping, maybe, that it was just his imagination. Nothing more.

  “No, Menhaus,” Saks went on, “I just don’t know what you see in Fabrini. What makes you wanna tongue him all night is beyond me. He’s hung like a pencil stub and dumber than a box of stale rat shit. I don’t get it.”

  Menhaus forced a chuckle.

  “We get out of this, fuckface,” Fabrini ranted, “and me and you are going to have business. You know what I’m saying, asshole?”

  “Yeah, I know what you’re saying, you little ass jockey,” Saks said in disgust. “And you should see me. I’m just blushing over here. I’ve never had my dick sucked by a wop before.”

  “You fuck,” Fabrini grumbled. “You suck. I’ll kill you.” He lost his grip and slid back into the water. The crate bobbed wildly. He fought to get a hold, but kept slipping and slipping. Panicking now, he began thrashing wildly in the water. Finally his fingertips caught a seam and he hoisted himself up.

  “Shit,” he panted. “Jesus.”

  “Quit fooling around, turd brain,” Saks snapped.

  “Both of you quit,” Menhaus said flatly. “I’m sick of listening to you. For God’s sake we’re not in the poolroom here, we’re out in the middle of the ocean and I for one don’t wanna drown because you two are acting like a couple brats.”

  “Shit,” Fabrini said.

  “He’s right, Fagbrini,” Saks murmured. “Let’s just take it easy here. Save our strength. We might need it. I know you two’ll need all the strength you can muster once you get on dry land and start raping each other.”

  “Goddammit, Saks,” Menhaus said.

  “Sorry. I just never thought I’d be stuck in the middle of the goddamn ocean with a couple guys like you. Jesus H. Christ.”

  “Shut up, Saks,” Fabrini said, sounding tired, finished.

  “Yeah, I’ll shut up. I think we all should shut up. Do us some good. Especially Fagbrini here. We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for him stroking your salami, Menhaus, instead of seeing to the boat.”

  “Fuck you and your father,” Fabrini said.

  “My father? Shit, least he taught me how to follow instructions. Yer old man was too busy screwing the neighbor’s poodle to teach you any sense.”

  Menhaus rested his face against the cool damp of the crate, wishing, praying for rescue. Anything. Right now, even sharks sounded better than listening to these two picking at each other.

  Jesus, had to be another ship out here.

  Didn’t there?

  But Menhaus wasn’t so sure. In fact, you came right down to it, he wasn’t sure about a lot of things. Where they were. That damn fog. That funny smell. None of it seemed right. He couldn’t put a finger on it exactly, but something in his guts was telling him this was all terribly wrong, that being shipwrecked was the least of their problems.

  “I wonder where the hell we are?” Fabrini said under his breath, but they heard him, all right.

  Saks grumbled something and Menhaus didn’t say a word. Was almost afraid to. Because, like the Mara Corday herself, he simply could not find his center. His compass was spinning wildly.

  “Somewhere in the Atlantic, I guess,” Menhaus found himself saying, hoping that was true.

  But Fabrini just grunted. “You think so? You really think so?”

  Menhaus was waiting for Saks to say something smart-assed, something crude and insulting, but humorous. Something that would defuse that awful, biting tension. But he didn’t say a thing and Menhaus felt something inside him clench just a little tighter. He stared off into that milky, shimmering mist and was seeing it now as something completely unnatural, something alive and aware and hungry.

  It eats people alive, a voice in his head was telling him, echoing up from some dark, lonely place like the bottom of a well. It sucks down ships and tosses people into this godawful soup and then slowly, patiently, it devours them.

  But that was just nerves talking. Nerves hot-wired by stress and anxiety and fear of the unknown. And Menhaus was not going to listen to them. He was going t
o be as tough as the other two, take it all with a grin or a smirk.

  Yeah, right.

  Bobbing there at the crate, he stuck his hand into the water, knowing just as George Ryan knew that there was something damn funny about it.

  “What the hell are you doing, Menhaus?” Saks wanted to know. “You’re not drinking that stuff, are you?”

  Menhaus assured him he wasn’t. “It feels funny, doesn’t it? The water? Thick or something?”

  “It’s like Jello right before it sets,” Fabrini said. “Goddamn soup.”

  “Just oil from the ship. That’s all it is,” Saks put in.

  And it sounded pretty good. Problem was, nobody was buying such a pat explanation and you could hardly blame them. Because it wasn’t just the water here, but everything. Everything was off in this place, everything was missing the mark somehow… not feeling exactly like it should and there was just no way to account for it.

  “It ain’t oil, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Jesus… feel this stuff. .. it’s like slime, it’s heavy, swampy, I don’t know what.”

  And as they argued back forth about it-they would argue pretty much about anything-Menhaus started getting some ideas, but he wasn’t about to voice them. Wasn’t about to say that, yes, it was slimy and not only that but salty and tepid and thick like watered-down gelatin. And that if he had to say what it reminded him of, he would have said amniotic fluid. A warm, vaporous bath of organic broth, seething and simmering like they were floating in the world’s largest placenta. Because he remembered reading once, back in high school, that placental fluid was chemically very close to the composition of earth’s primordial oceans. An organic flux of potential.

  “This isn’t worth arguing about,” he finally said, sick of listening to the both of them.

  Fabrini snorted. “Who’s arguing?”

  “Shut up,” Saks said. “Both of you. Listen… I hear something out there.”

  And that pretty much shut everyone down. They listened, feeling their own hearts beating, breath in their lungs. Because out there, out in that churning mist, they were expecting nothing good.

  Menhaus heard it right away and was surprised he hadn’t before: a distant thudding sound, like something was scraping harshly against something else. Thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk.

  “Oars,” Fabrini said. “Those are oars… somebody’s rowing out there.”

  And he was right, they all suddenly realized.

  For what they were hearing were the sound of oars rasping against oarlocks, creaking and groaning in the night. The sound began to get closer, though it was truly hard to say from what direction it was coming.

  “Hey!” Fabrini cried out, certain rescue was coming. “Hey! Over here! We’re over here!”

  And then Saks was shouting, too, both of them calling out into the fog, their voices coming back at them with an eerie sibilance. Menhaus did not join them, for he did not like the sound of that rowing. It was too frantic, too hurried, too panicked-sounding.

  It was not a gentle, searching rowing here, but the sound of escape.

  But Saks and Fabrini did not seem to notice or want to and they kept at it… kept at it until a high, keening sort of scream came echoing out of the fog. It was shrill and hysterical, almost feminine or girlish in its wailing.

  Nobody was saying anything then.

  And out in the mist, there was more than one scream now. Men were howling and crying out and the sound of their voices were absolutely terrified. Menhaus and the others heard the timbre of those voices and it shut something down in them, pulled each man into himself. For whatever was happening to those unknown men in that unseen boat, it must have been horrible.

  The screams were intermittent now.

  “Somebody’s in trouble,” Fabrini said low in his throat. “Maybe we should paddle our crate over there, maybe we should… should do something.”

  And Saks said, quite calmly: “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.”

  And, for once, Fabrini did not disagree.

  The three of them waited in the torpid water, listening and hearing and wanting dear God to be anywhere but where they were. Because they were locked down with terror now, three little boys hearing something dragging itself up the cellar stairs in the dead of night.

  And maybe had it ended there with a big, fat mystery, they could have written it off. But it did not end. For they heard splashing and thudding sounds, men stumbling in a boat. Hollow, knocking sounds. Wet sounds. And then coming through it all, the tormented, insane voice of a man screaming, “Oh God oh God oh God help me help somebody help me don’t let it touch me don’t touch me DON’T TOUCH ME-”

  And then it was cut off by a violent smashing sound like a steel girder had slammed into the boat out there. Menhaus felt something evaporate inside of him, maybe his blood and maybe his soul, and his skin went tight and his muscles bunched and compressed involuntarily as if they were trying to make his body smaller, less of a target. He had no spit in his mouth and no will to do anything but grip that crate harder.

  For what came next was worse.

  It sounded at first like something immense and fleshly had pulled itself up out of a swamp and then there was a low, bellowing snarl that reminded Menhaus of maybe a tiger roaring into a tunnel. It rose up, savage and guttural, echoing through the night. And then… then it was followed by tearing and rending noises, splattering sounds and a wet snapping. And finally, the chewing, grating sound like a dog gnawing on a steak bone.

  Menhaus was breathing so hard he was nearly hyperventilating. He didn’t mean to speak, but his voice came bubbling from his lips. “Make it stop, dear Christ, make it stop…”

  And he felt Saks’s hand gripping his arm like maybe he wanted to tear the limb free. “Quiet,” he said sharply. “For the love of God, be quiet.”

  And out in the fog, there were a few more splashing and sliding sounds and then the night went quiet and dead and there was only the three of them.

  Waiting.

  Wondering when it would be their turn.

  3

  “I think it’s a hatch cover,” Cushing said, running his hands along the long rectangular object before them. It was thick and sturdy and seemed about large enough for six men.

  “It won’t sink?” Soltz said.

  “No, not this. Hang on.”

  Cushing pulled himself up on it. It received his weight easily. He crawled over its wet, smooth surface. It was an overturned hatch cover, all right. Maybe the one that was blown off the starboard cargo hold, he figured.

  “Help me up,” Soltz said. “Please hurry.”

  Cushing grabbed him by his lifejacket and heaved him forward. After some frantic clawing, Soltz was onboard.

  “We are the only survivors,” Soltz said. “I know it now.”

  Cushing sighed. “No, we’re not. We can’t be.”

  “We might as well accept the inevitable, my friend,” Soltz said, filled with sadness like a little boy who’d lost his puppy. “We are dead men. It’s only a matter of how and when.”

  “Stop talking like that. Somebody’ll pick us up after first light.”

  Soltz chuckled grimly. “Yes, yes, of course.”

  Cushing stared out into the nebulous mist, saying nothing. If Soltz was going to die, he only hoped it would be soon.

  Soltz cradled his head in his hands “My sinuses are aching. This damp chill… I can’t take it for long. I’ll be dead of pneumonia long before any boat arrives” He started hacking, then sneezing. “It’s this awful air… I can barely breathe it.”

  “We’ll drift clear of it sooner or later,” Cushing told him.

  But Soltz didn’t seem to believe that. “Why… why does it smell like this? Like something dead and gassy? That’s not normal, is it? Well, is it? C’mon, Cushing, you know things like this… should air be smelling like that, even at sea?”

  Cushing rubbed his eyes. Soltz. Jesus. The guy was a wreck under the best of circumstances, but this… well,
it was even worse now. Of all the people to be shipwrecked with. But he did have a point there. That smell was not normal. It was stagnant, cloying like a malarial swamp in the armpit of the Amazon.

  No, it wasn’t right.

  No more than any of this was right.

  “Yeah, it smells funny, but don’t worry about it. It’s just the fog. When morning comes… well, it’ll burn the fog off.”

  “Then what?”

  Cushing just studied his shape in the dimness. “What do you mean?”

  Soltz kept swallowing, like he was trying to keep his stomach down. “When the fog lifts… what will we see out there?”

  4

  The lifeboat was big enough for a dozen men.

  Cook and the crewmen he’d found floating – Crycek and Hupp – were the only ones on board. Just the three of them with plenty of room to stretch out in that sixteen-foot orange fiberglass hull. Everything they needed to survive, including an inflatable canopy, was onboard. They had everything from burn cream to seasickness pills, fishing line to survival blankets, chocolate bars to purified water. The Mara Corday’s emergency equipment was top-notch, well-maintained and updated before each voyage. It was the first mate’s responsibility and Paul Gosling did not take it lightly. Yes, Cook knew, they had everything to survive, but they still had no idea where they were.

  Basically, what they had was a roomy prison cell floating in the sea, at the whim of the elements and current or lack of the same. There was food. There was water. There were oars.

  But there was no escape.

  All dressed up, Cook thought, and nowhere to go.

  “Christ,” Crycek said. “When will this goddamn fog lift?”

  Cook didn’t bother answering that, because he was of the opinion that it might never lift. And if it did… well, no matter. He’d heard the stories the sailors had been telling before the ship went down. He was certain Crycek had heard them, too.