Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  They all pushed away and made a beeline for the boat which was mere yards away now. It seemed like the longest distance any of them had ever traversed.

  “I can’t,” Menhaus panted, coming to a rest, feeling that water around him, warm and thick and oddly comforting. “I can’t… do.. . it.”

  “Come on,” Fabrini said, grabbing him by the lifejacket and towing him along. “You can do it, goddammit. You can.”

  “Oh, leave him,” Saks said. “Let the fishies play with him.”

  They paddled and fought their way to the boat. Through that marshy, miasmic sea, fingers clawing through islands of decomposing seaweed. A yellow, rank mist rose from the water. When they reached the boat, each man was too exhausted to climb aboard. They just hung off the gunwale and sucked in sharp, salty breaths, feeling heavy like they’d been dipped in liquid cement.

  “I’m glad you guys made it,” Cook said, unsmiling.

  “You too,” Fabrini said.

  “Thank God,” Menhaus rasped.

  Saks rolled his eyes. “All right, girls. You can make love later. Into the boat before something takes a bite outta you.”

  Cook helped pull each man into the boat. Saks was last. Cook pulled him aboard, but didn’t like the idea. You could see that. The look in his eyes said it all. And Saks knew right then who was going to be trouble. Who was going to need his ass straightened out.

  “Nice to see you, too, dumbass,” he told Cook.

  10

  George could see nothing but the fog.

  It was white and yellow and steaming, great congested patches of it blowing around the raft by a wind that he could not feel. Maybe it moved because it wanted to move. Maybe it was alive. Maybe it was intelligent and in that godawful place, the idea of something like that didn’t seem quite so preposterous as it would have in the real world. Because this was not the real world. Not Earth. Not the Earth George had known. Maybe it was Altair-4 or Rigel-3 or one of those other quaint science fiction sort of places, but it surely was not Earth. Earth did not have fog like this. It did not have scuttling crab/spider things with too many eyes that could run across the water. It did not have big things with glowing green eyes the size of hubcaps. It did not have weird, trilling things in the fog that sounded like giant insects. And, no, it did not have a sea that was like pink gelatin clogged with rotting seaweed and it surely did not have this fog.

  Fog that swirled and swallowed and fumed, was lit with that phantasmal, dirty radiance. The fog hid things, George knew, things that might drive you mad if you saw them. So that was good. But it also hid you. Wrapped you in its dusky winding sheet and tucked you into secret crevices and shadowy spider-holes you would never find your way out of.

  “Does it seem brighter?” George said. “Not day-bright, but certainly brighter”

  Gosling nodded. “Maybe this fog will burn away yet. Maybe.”

  “Still looks pretty damn thick, though,” George said.

  But it was lighter out. It had happened incrementally, so subtly that neither man had even noticed. Now it was not like twilight really, but maybe a gloomy, overcast morning. Well, maybe not that bright, but better. Much better. Even the fog itself didn’t look so murky, so… polluted like seething fumes of toxic waste. You could actually see the ocean, that marshy run of steaming rot.

  The surface actually seemed to quiver.

  George dipped an oar into it, discovered there was actually sort of a sticky, scummy membrane over the surface… like the film over a pail of spoiled milk. That’s how the scuttler – George had christened the creature on the oar that now – had dashed over it. No magic there, just adaptive engineering.

  He figured that the day… or night or whatever it was… was brightening a bit and that was something.

  Not that it really improved their situation much.

  They were still, without a doubt, the proverbial needle in a haystack. Except the haystack in this case seemed to go on to infinity. And where that haystack was located… well, that was something else again.

  Gosling was busy with the VHF radio, seemed impervious to just about everything else.

  “You suppose we might get out of this?” George asked him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your sailor’s intuition tell you?”

  “Tells me we’re fucked,” he said.

  Gosling and his damn pragmatism. He didn’t care diddly about keeping morale up; that wasn’t his concern. He looked at everything realistically. And the reality of the situation with him was that either they’d live or die. He leaned in neither direction. What happened was what would happen.

  “You know, that’s what I love about you, Gosling, your optimism. It keeps my spirits high.”

  “I’m not your therapist. It ain’t my job to keep you happy.”

  “Yeah, but I was on board your ship. Your boys steered us into this fucking netherworld. It seems to me it’s your responsibility to get my ass out in one piece.”

  “Well, we get back, you file a complaint with the Coast Guard,” he said. “Until then, quit yer goddamn complaining.”

  He kept fiddling with the radio, seemed more intent with it all of a sudden. He kept saying, hmmm, under his breath like a dentist deciding which tooth to yank. Regardless, it was driving George up the wall.

  “You getting anything out there?”

  Gosling shook his head slowly. “No… and yes. I thought before

  … thought I caught the end of a distress call, but it was swallowed in the static. I can’t be sure. I’m thinking this fog might have some sort of electrical field to it, might be interfering with our signals.”

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  “Meaning it’s distorting the shit out of the airwaves,” he said, pulling the earplug out. “Could have been another broadcast, could have been ours coming back at us… hard to tell. That static swallows everything, vomits it back up.”

  George loved all that technical detail, but it didn’t tell him shit. He knew radios. You turned them on to get the weather. Turned them off when Neil Sedaka or the Four Seasons came on. Other than that, he knew squat.

  He got over closer to Gosling, listened to that static with him.

  It was an empty, dead sound, rising and falling. Now and again there was a distant beep or ping. But you couldn’t be sure. George kept listening to it, feeling like some astronomer with his radio telescope listening to the music of the spheres, the noise of deep space searching for an intelligent signal. Yeah, that’s what it sounded like. Dead, distant voids and the echoing blackness between the stars.

  He found it unnerving.

  It was the sound a TV makes when a channel goes off the air and you’re staring into that field of fuzz and snow. And if you stare too long, you start seeing shapes flitting about, the millions of dots and specs becoming patterns that pull you in… spirals and marching diamonds. But it’s not there, none of it. Just the human mind offended by all that confused, random nothingness and deciding to fill in the blanks. Same way it did in deserts or snowstorms, creating mirages, images it needed to see.

  George kept listening, certain he was hearing something… just not sure what.

  Out there, in that storm of white noise, a man could get lost. He could sink away into blackness and lunacy. It would suck his mind clean until there was nothing but polished skull left behind. George decided that the static sounded like blowing dust and hissing gas, hollows and low places. A haunted, almost diabolic sound not of emptiness, but of occupancy. Like something sentient was out there, not necessarily alive nor dead, but waiting, just waiting, listening and reaching out for minds to touch. It reminded him of recordings made by ghost hunters in tombs and desolate houses… static suffused with distant echoes, suggestions of awareness. Shades, shadows, ghosts.

  “Hearing something?” Gosling asked him.

  “I’m not sure.” And he wasn’t. Was it imagination or… or did something want him to think that?

  “It’s fu
nny static… never heard nothing quite like it before. Those sounds in there, buzzing sounds now and again. You listen to it long enough you get the feeling…”

  “That it’s listening back?”

  But if Gosling thought that, he would not say and maybe it was his silence that was the very worst thing of all.

  He feels it, too, George found himself thinking, he feels something out there, something listening, something cold and predatory

  … and maybe amused.

  But George knew he had to get off that track. For it was the road to dementia and once you started down it, you’d never come back. It was strictly a one-way street.

  Gosling shut the radio off. “Nothing out there,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

  George figured if the both of them kept telling themselves that, given time, they might even believe it.

  He stared off into the fog like maybe he was waiting for it to show its teeth. “You don’t have much hope for us, do you?”

  Gosling shrugged. “I don’t put much in things like hope or faith or luck. I used to hope for things, wish for things for all the good it did. Experience taught me otherwise. You make your own luck, I guess. I’m not saying luck doesn’t exist. I’m sure it does. But not for me and probably not for you. Some people have it, most people don’t.”

  George uttered a short laugh. “You can say that again.”

  They sat in silence, wishing they had something to smoke or something hard to drink. Anything. Humans loved their chemical dependencies and they never meant so much as they did in survival situations.

  “Listen,” Gosling said.

  “I don’t hear…” George began and then he did.

  It was subtle, but it was there: a sort of tapping sound. And it was coming from under the raft. It wasn’t a big sound like before when the raft had actually been lifted from the sea. This was nothing like that, this was more investigatory, probing, curious. George heard it down there, thinking with a chill that it sounded very much like fingertips scraping over the rubber. It started getting louder, bumping and squeaking, thudding.

  “Jesus-”

  “Shut up,” Gosling warned him.

  It ran up and down the bottom of the raft, creaking and bumping and scratching. Then it just touched now and again.

  When it hadn’t happened again for maybe five minutes, George said, “What do you suppose that was?”

  But Gosling just shook his head. “I don’t know… I just hope it stays gone.”

  11

  Saks was watching the boys play, thinking that he had nobody to blame but himself. That he had hired this crew of mama’s boys, dick-suckers, and all around morons.

  The fog had brightened now and the boys were all excited that the sun was coming up, would burn off that fog and deliver the lot of them into never-neverland. They knew better. They all knew better. The fog was filled with a sort of illumination, sure, but to Saks it didn’t look like sunshine at all, but more of a silvery moonlight that the fog tinted yellow. It was not a clean sort of light, but dirty like sunlight tinted through a yellow window pane.

  What it came down to, he knew, was that it was all wrong.

  Sure, it was brighter now. You could see people’s faces, make out things just fine, but it was not what you’d call a sunny day. It surely was not normal.

  After they’d reached the lifeboat and everybody had a bite to eat and some water, everybody chatted away and then one by one they’d fallen asleep… not realizing until that moment how tired they were. Saks himself had gone out hard, not waking for nearly five hours.

  But he felt better now. On top of his game.

  And his brain was firing on all cylinders again. For what he was thinking about as those idiots fooled with the fishing gear from the survival canisters, was not how they were going to stay alive, but how he was going to stay alive. How he was going to take control of this little party of stooges and make them work to his adavantage.

  Saks was a natural at things like that.

  Menhaus was rigging a lure with the sixty-pound test line. Since they didn’t have any bait… any bait that could be spared, that was… Menhaus decided to use his watch since it had seized up now anyway.

  “It’s worth a try,” he said. “I saw it in that movie.”

  Fabrini grunted. “Sounds fucking goofy to me.”

  “So let me do it. I don’t need your help.”

  Menhaus was talking about something he’d seen in the film Lifeboat. The survivors of a shipwreck used a belt and a shiny bracelet as a fishing lure to try and catch fish. But they didn’t have any real tackle, Menhaus pointed out, and that gave him a distinct advantage.

  “I gotta see this,” Fabrini said.

  “Let’s go fishing then,” Cook said, happy that they finally had something to do other than watch Saks.

  Saks was wondering exactly what they thought they were going to catch in that soup.

  Crycek was up in the bow, had Hupp’s head cradled in his lap as before. He watched the entire thing with glazed eyes. Maybe he was there and maybe he was somewhere else entirely.

  Carefully, Menhaus lowered his makeshift lure into the water and jigged it like a real lure. He kept doing this, feeding out line, going deep with it. He kept at it ten, fifteen minutes, adjusting depth, feeling around down there as he had as a boy for catfish while Fabrini told him how crazy it all was. But Menhaus kept it up, figuring it was a way to pass the time if nothing else.

  “Anything?” Fabrini asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ah, shit, this is a waste of time.”

  “No… wait. I felt something.”

  The line jerked in his hands once, twice, three times. Menhaus gave it a good yank, trying to set the hook. Nothing. He tugged it, but there was no pull, no sensation of weight on the other end. But there had been something down there. Unless he snagged the hook on something. He fed out a little more line, jigged it carefully, again and again and again.

  “There’s nothing down there,” Fabrini said.

  Menhaus figured he was right… but then the line snapped taut in his hands, burning through his fingers. The sixty-pound test was heavy stuff and it cut bleeding valleys into his palms. He cried out and Fabrini took hold of it, too, smart enough to slide on one of the gloves from the emergency bin. He got a good grip on it and, Jesus, there was something big down there.

  “We got a whopper here,” he said. “C’mon, Menhaus, this bastard’s fighting…”

  Everyone was paying attention now.

  Crycek’s eyes were wide and unblinking.

  Saks had narrowed his.

  Cook looked mildly intrigued.

  Menhaus got the other glove on his left hand and the both of them fought that line that whipped and snapped in the water, whatever was on the other end appreciating the meal of that shiny watch but downright pissed off that it was hooked to a line.

  Fabrini had never done much fishing, but Menhaus was an old pro.

  They pulled against their catch and then played out the line, kept working it that way, tiring out what was on the other end. After what seemed ten minutes of that, there was no more fight.

  They started hauling it in.

  Foot after foot of line was pulled into the boat, Saks reeling it in as the other two pulled. The nylon fishing line was stained pink from immersion in that moldering sea.

  They were getting close now.

  Fabrini kept looking to Menhaus, wanting to know what came next.

  Menhaus had sweat beading his brow.

  There was a sudden thump under the boat and then another and Menhaus directed the line out from under the hull. He directed their catch around the port side, leaning over the gunwale and trying to get a look at it. But the light… dirty alien light… only penetrated a few inches into that opaque sea.

  But there was something there. Something pretty good sized.

  “We’re going to bring him up far as we can,” Menhaus said. “Then I’ll see if I ca
n get a hold of him, pull him in.”

  Together, they brought their catch up until they saw a greenish-brown caudal fin that was broad like a fan of bony spines with a pink membrane connecting them. It slapped against the side of the boat. Slipping on both the gloves now, Menhaus reached down and took hold of its tail just above the caudal. “Jesus, sumbitch is slimy

  … heavy, Christ… get ready boys…”

  “Be careful,” Cook said.

  With everything he had, Menhaus yanked it up out of the drink and it flopped over the gunwale and fell to the deck, not far from Crycek’s boots… which he quickly withdrew.

  “What the fuck?” Saks said.

  But they were all thinking that.

  For it wasn’t a fish… exactly.

  It was segmented like the tail of a lobster, twisting and gyrating, seemed almost boneless as it thrashed and sprayed slimy water in every direction. The men were falling over each other to get out of its way.

  “You’re some kind of fisherman, all right,” Saks said, enjoying the other’s discomfort and horror.

  It was maybe four-feet in length, the body reticulated and brown, oddly serpentine at the posterior end and thickening up to the width of a nail keg towards the head. There was something obscenely fleshy about it. It was a fish… yet not a fish. Like some weird, repellent hybrid of fish and crustacean. It was muddy brown at the tail and the color faded as it moved towards the head… or what might have been a head… and became entirely translucent like the body of a brine shrimp. You could see the shadows of pulsing organs and what might have been arteries.

  The craziest thing, though, was that its head – completely eyeless as far as they could tell – terminated in dozens of snapping, whipping things like the barbels or whiskers of a catfish. But these were transparent as icicles, each ending in a blood-red needle.

  What Saks was mostly aware of, though, was its smell… like rotting fish on a beach, high and foul and moist. But with a curious after-odor like cat urine.

  “You brought it in!” Fabrini snapped at Menhaus. “Drag that fucker out!”