Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  And on this matter, they were right.

  8

  Cook figured he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew Crycek was digging in the supply compartments of the lifeboat. He could hear him swearing under his breath and then the boat rocked slightly as he stood up, saying, “Here! Here! Jesus Christ, we’re over here!”

  He raised something up above his head, something like a cylinder, and there was a muted pop and overhead, far up in that swirling vortex of mist, a flare burst in a shower of red sparks. It drifted through the fog, creating darting shadows and casting flickering bands of red-orange light. In that eerie, strobing illumination you could see just how thick that fog was. How it was composed of billowing layers pressed upon layers like blankets of smoky ether.

  “What is it?” Cook asked, springing up now. “A plane? Did you see a plane or a ship?”

  Crycek just watched that flare drift off, slowly sinking into the swamp of fog, his face lit by muted flashes of red light that were going yellow now.

  “What did you see?” Cook asked again.

  Sighing, Crycek sank back in his seat. “I… I’m not sure. It was a light, high up there, a light passed over us.”

  Cook licked his lips. They were suddenly very dry. Like chalk. “A light? What sort of light? Like a searchlight?”

  But Crycek shook his head, said it wasn’t that kind of light. It was sort of bluish, funny, just a glowing ball of blue light… that he didn’t hear any engine noise. Not a thing. Just the light, the light.

  Cook didn’t like it, wasn’t entirely sure why. Only that, yes, it unnerved him. A blue glowing light, but no sound of engines? Not a helicopter or plane then… because you would have heard it in this godawful graveyard silence. But if not a chopper or a plane… then what? And he supposed that’s what was getting to him. Crawling down into his guts and making something sharp prod at his bowels, making them want to void right down his leg.

  Something flying up there… something glowing… something that did not make a sound.

  “Gone now,” Crycek said, sounding very much like he wanted to break down and cry. “It’s gone now and we’re still here, still in this fucking fog.”

  Cook wanted to reassure him… but what was there to reassure him about? He was right: they were still in that fucking fog.

  But at least, he thought, we have not been seen yet.

  Again, he wasn’t entirely sure why he was thinking things like that, letting that scratching paranoia open him up in all the wrong places, but he was. Because here, in this world of fog and stink and steaming rank sea, maybe keeping your head down, maybe hiding and not being seen… maybe that was the best you could hope for.

  Cook popped another lightstick, took a good look at Hupp’s wounds. Crycek was cradling his head in his lap, stroking his brow. Cook looked at him and what passed between them was a prognosis and it wasn’t good. Most of the hair was singed from Hupp’s head including his left eyebrow. His face discolored by a livid purple bruise. There was dried blood on his mouth, some of it around his nose and ears. The skin of his chest and arms was raw and hurting. Where it wasn’t raw it was scorched and blackened. Rivulets of sweat ran down his brow. He was shaking and shivering. Now and again, he would moan. There was a heat coming off him, feverish and sickening… and the smell, a hot sour stink like the breath of a dying man.

  “No chance is there?” Cook said.

  “Not unless we get picked up real soon.”

  Cook licked his lips. “What are the chances of that?”

  Crycek just stared at him. “What do you think?”

  “I’m just asking because you’re a sailor.”

  Crycek shrugged. “Good, I guess, if someone picked up our distress signal. If that’s the case, someone’ll be along soon. Should’ve been here by now really. And there’s always the radio beacons. All the rafts and boat have ‘em. They begin transmitting the moment they hit water.”

  But Crycek had already explained those. They were called EPIRBs, Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons. They pulsed signals over marine and aviation distress frequencies. Class A EPIRBs also transmitted a signal that could be picked up by the SARSAT satellite. The lifeboat had one that started working the moment it hit the water. Cook himself had started the manual unit he found in the emergency equipment by following the directions on the container.

  “And there’s the radio, of course,” Crycek said, his voice not much above a whisper now. “All those distress calls we’ve been sending

  … if there’s anybody out there, they’ll hear ‘em.”

  And that’s exactly what Crycek said word for word, but what Cook was hearing was more along the lines of: If there’s anybody out there, why, we’ve just invited them in, haven’t we?

  No, Cook didn’t like it much. Didn’t like the idea of them being listened to, monitored, that somebody out there could find them just by homing in on the signals. The idea of it filled his mind with a shapeless, blowing blackness that made him afraid right to the core of his being.

  He thought: But isn’t that what you wanted? Somebody to hear you? To find you?

  Only he wasn’t so sure anymore. Wasn’t sure of a lot of things. All he was going on here was instinct maybe colored by imagination, but it was telling him that the thing to do in this place was to keep a low profile. He didn’t know what he was expecting really, but he was getting some bad vibes about it. And hour by hour, they were getting worse. Like some latent sixth sense in him was trying to warn him of impending danger.

  And what it really came down to, the very thing Cook couldn’t even bring himself to admit to, was that he didn’t know where they were, but he had a nasty feeling you wouldn’t find it on any map… at least, not one drawn by anyone sane. Nothing about this place was right. According to his internal clock the sun should have been up (he was guessing) an hour or more by now… but there was no sign of it. Not so much as a smudge of brightness up there. And while it wasn’t dark exactly, it was not actually light either. Things seemed to be caught somewhere in-between like a drawn-out midsummer twilight. That wasn’t right. That brooding, suffocating fog wasn’t right. The slopping, jellied sea was not right. And that pervasive gassy stench. .. no, that was certainly not right either. So, with that in mind, Cook was pretty much figuring that if there was an intelligence here that could monitor radio signals, then it wouldn’t be of the human variety.

  And that, most assuredly, scared the hell out of him.

  Sighing, deciding he was probably losing his mind an inch at a time, he looked out over that stagnant sea, wondering, thinking. Now and then he caught sight of wreckage-charred bits of wood, splintered beams, a crate or two, but never anything more than that. Unless you wanted to count clumps of floating weeds, spreading near-submerged things that steamed as if they’d just been pulled out of a boiling pot.

  “I guess we just drift,” Crycek said, the words coming out of him like air from a leaking tire. “We just drift and we wait.”

  None of that gave Cook any real hope. He was not an optimist by nature, but neither was he a pessimist. He was balanced on the borderline in-between, what his mother had once called a realist. Both he and Crycek could live for weeks with what was in the boat, but Hupp was doomed if help didn’t come soon. And maybe it was already too late.

  Already too late for everyone concerned.

  Cook had never felt quite so alone in his life.

  He had always been something of a loner. It was the way he was, had always been. He didn’t trust people. He decided early on that they were basically evil creatures hiding beneath a veneer of civilization

  … that is, when they bothered to hide at all. Many didn’t. And he wasn’t sure whether he liked these better than the others or not.

  Crazy as it sounded at this stage of the game, he still entertained fantasies of washing up on some deserted tropical isle. All by himself. No one to bother him, give him trouble or pain. Just nature and he. He could catch his meals from
the sea, scavenge for edible plants and berries. It would be a simple life. One that he was psychologically suited for.

  Hupp began to moan and thrash around noisily.

  “Here, here,” Crycek said. “I’ve got you now. You’re okay.”

  At the sound of his voice, Hupp quieted down. Crycek was very good with him, Cook thought. A born nursemaid. It took the right kind of person to care for others like that. And it was exactly what Crycek needed. There was something brewing in him, something hot and sharp that was cutting him open from the inside. Caring for his shipmate gave him an anchor, it cemented him to the here and now.

  And without it? Cook didn’t want to think about that.

  “You better try that radio again, don’t you think?” Crycek said and Cook was pretty certain there was something behind his words, something like sarcasm.

  “I suppose.”

  But he didn’t want to do that. It was about the last thing in the world he really wanted. And that’s when he decided it was all a sick fucking game between the two them. They both knew that it was hopeless, that the Coast Guard couldn’t send out a rescue mission even if they wanted to. But they weren’t going to admit that out loud. Something in them just refused to. For maybe once such things were voiced there was no going back. Like calling up some demon from the formless ebon pits of the universe, once you said its name aloud, you admitted its reality.

  So Cook went through the bit of transmitting a distress call and it was funny how his voice got on that radio now. Where before it was loud and clear and insistent, now he practically mumbled the words into the mic like he didn’t want anybody hearing him.

  “You hearing… anything out there?” Crycek was asking him.

  But Cook just shook his head. Just dead air and white noise. A raging storm of static that his mind pictured to be white and blowing like some electrical blizzard, a vast and tangled sound full of fuzz and friction and emptiness. It was a sound the human mind had trouble with. It grasped and fought to separate something, anything it could identify. And after a time, if it couldn’t get a hold of anything, it would create something before it went mad.

  Cook kept listening, knowing he had to.

  He began to hear odd patterns in it, the static rising and falling in gentle oscillations that sounded very much like breathing, respiration, something pulling air into its lungs and exhaling. But not air… static, in and out, in and out. He was hearing it and knowing it was his imagination, but unable to stop listening. There was something morphic, hypnotizing about it and you couldn’t pull your mind away. You could only listen to the static breathing, filling its lungs with that droning white noise and feel yourself being pulled away, floating.

  And about that time, Cook heard something come up out of that static, a voice that was clear and crisp and evil. A woman’s voice: “That’s right, Cook… you just keep dreaming and drifting… I’m out here in the fog, I’m waiting for you out here, waiting to touch you-”

  And maybe the voice itself wasn’t so evil, but its intent was unmistakable. Cook dropped the radio and fell backward onto the deck. Crycek was saying something, but he could not hear him. Could not hear anything but the static now and maybe the fog whispering and that clotted sea sluicing and that voice echoing in his head.

  “Christ, Cook… what’s wrong?” Crycek was saying, sounding desperate now.

  Cook poured some steel into his rubbery limbs, pulled himself up, just shaking his head. “Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing.” And he knew that sounded foolish, ridiculous, but it was the truth. Because he hadn’t really heard a woman’s voice out there, some malefic female ghost inviting him to doom and madness. Just imagination. He was tired and scared and confused and his imagination had spun all that into the worst thing it could imagine.

  His breathing slowed now and he felt foolish. Utterly foolish. He reached over to turn the radio off and, yes, it was still blaring static, but mixed in with it were those buzzing pulses he’d heard earlier. Something his mind had tagged as Morse Code for wasps.

  He shut the radio off.

  “Better conserve batteries,” he said, feeling, really feeling that fog out there now. Certain it was reaching out for him, wanting to drag him into a murky, enclosing shroud of itself.

  “What did you hear?” Crycek wanted to know.

  “Thought… well, I thought I heard a voice. Just my mind playing tricks on me. I need some sleep.”

  Crycek nodded. “There’s funny things in the fog. Funny, weird things. I know all about that. Maybe some of it’s imagination, but not all of it… no sir.”

  Cook just sat there, not saying a thing. Crycek was ready to talk now. He wanted to say things and none of it was going to be good.

  “I was out there, Cook. I was one of the ones that went to look for Stokes, the guy who jumped overboard. Gosling, the First, he picked me. Picked me because he must have known I was scared of the fog,” Crycek said, his voice low and even and somehow unpleasant. “We went out in the boats to look. Out into that goddamn fog. And I’m not too proud to admit I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment that boat touched water. Terrified. Because that fog wasn’t right then and it’s not right now. Yeah, I knew there were things out in that fog.. . crawling, pallid things… abominations… things that would drive you mad just to look upon them. Yes, I knew that.”

  Cook swallowed. “C’mon, Crycek. Just take it easy.”

  “Take it easy?” He uttered a short, sharp laugh that was more like the bark of a dog. It was flat and empty-sounding. Cook was glad, really glad he could not see Crycek’s face then, because he knew it would have been bad, a shroud chewed by lunacy. “Sure, I’ll take it easy. Out in that fog… we were hearing things. Things like voices calling us… awful, clotted voices spoken through mouths full of seaweed… and once, just the once, I heard laughter. A cackling laughter that almost finished me. And then, oh yes, then I saw something. I saw it and it saw me.”

  Cook’s arms were full of gooseflesh. He could barely find his voice. “What? What did you see?”

  But Crycek could only shake his head back and forth, make a weird whimpering sound low in his throat. “It… it was staring at me out of the fog. Something slimy and stinking with a long neck like a light post. It had a head, something like a head, but all curled-up like a snail shell. Jelly was dripping from it and there was some kind of growth hanging from it, like weeds or dangling roots, only they were crawling and twisting. And its eyes… oh dear God, those eyes, huge and yellow and wicked, staring at me, staring right into me like they meant to eat my soul raw…”

  Crycek’s voice faded out and maybe he with it. He was shaking and making sobbing sounds, his fist shoved up against his mouth so maybe he wouldn’t scream his mind away.

  Hupp began to moan and thrash.

  “Easy,” Crycek said. “Easy… I won’t let it get you, I swear to God I won’t… when it comes for us, I’ll cheat it. Yes, I’ll cheat it.”

  He started giggling then.

  Cook had all he could do not to join him.

  And then there was a sound.

  Something was coming out of the fog.

  9

  It was Fabrini who saw the flare.

  The flare Crycek fired off. And that’s how they found the lifeboat in the fog.

  “Paddle, you goat fuck,” Saks snapped at Menhaus. “It’s a goddamn boat!”

  “I’m doing my best,” Menhaus said under his breath.

  “So do better.”

  But it wasn’t easy. Not for any of them. Fabrini had sighted the boat just as Saks was asking him if his parents had any children that lived. They’d swung right into action, but it was tough going. It wasn’t easy to hang onto the wet, slimy crate and paddle your feet at the same time. And the crate wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to navigate or steer.

  “Let’s just abandon it,” Menhaus panted, “and swim for it,”

  “No way,” Fabrini said.

  “He’s right, Menhaus. If we d
on’t make the boat and we ditch the crate, we won’t have anything. Keep going.”

  Saks was getting damn tired of the both of them. Why, if this had to happen at all, couldn’t he have found himself adrift with say George Ryan or Cushing? Two smart guys there. They kept their wits about them. Not a couple of idiots like Menhaus and that dumb-fuck Fabrini. Fabrini was like some kind of poster child for incompetence and in-breeding. And Menhaus… Christ, what a piece of work. God must’ve been laughing when he brought those two into being. Some kind of heavenly practical joke. Fabrini’s old lady should’ve kept her legs closed… or dropped him into the toilet with the rest of the turds when the time came. One little flush and the world would have been spared so much.

  “It’s one of the lifeboats,” Menhaus gasped. “From the ship.”

  And it was. They could see someone – Saks thought it was Cook – waving and waving to them. There was someone else in there waving, too.

  Why don’t the stupid fucks row over to us? Saks wondered.

  He didn’t know why but he had a pretty good feeling he was going to have to knock a few melons together when he reached the boat. Goddamn lazy sonsofbitches. But it was just like Cook. A guy like that didn’t do squat until you told him so. When he took a shit, you had to show him which end to use.

  “We’re going to make it,” Fabrini said.

  “Yeah,” Saks said. “Your prayers worked, camel dung. What else did you wish for? A bunch of horny pirates to pick you up and gangrape you?”

  “Your turn’s coming, Saks, just you wait.”

  “Yeah, if you can get your tongue out of Menhaus’ bum long enough.”

  They kept swimming, gripping the crate, and paddling with their feet. It was slow going and exhausting work, swimming through that turgid, oily slop but no one was complaining. They would’ve swam through a septic tank to get to that boat. It was the light at the end of the tunnel… or at least a glimmer of it.

  “Okay,” Saks said, “swim for it! We don’t need the crate!”