by Tim Curran
Somebody shouted. Maybe Cook, maybe Menhaus.
Fabrini didn’t seem to know what was happening. A look of rage swept across his features followed by one of dazed confusion and finally pain. His hand went to his ear, blood gushing between his splayed fingers. He saw the knife, felt the warm wetness course down his neck and started to scream, crawling away towards the bow on all fours.
Menhaus tripped over one of the seats trying to get away from the glinting silver of the knife. “Oh shit,” he gasped. “Oh Christ.”
Apparently, Menhaus didn’t like it when his thrills spilled over in his own lap.
Cook stood his ground, his eyes like shining metal balls. “Give me the knife, Saks,” he said in a low, hard voice. “Give me that fucking knife!”
Saks cackled, blood running down his chin from a split lip. “You want the knife, fuck-face? You want the fucking knife?”
Cook knew he was in a dangerous position. He could see the raw animal rage in Saks’s eyes. It was like fire and rusting metal. The man was about as close to insanity as anyone he’d ever seen. Anyone save his father.
Saks slashed at him with the blade, driving him back. “You be good, asshole, you be real good,” he panted. “You get over there with your buddies or I swear to God I’ll slit you open.”
Cook backed away slowly, hands held out before him peacefully. “Sure, Saks, sure. We don’t want no trouble here. You just relax and keep cool.”
“Oh, I’ll be cool, shitbag, don’t worry about that,” he said, still smiling like a skull in the desert. “Just as long as you do what I say. Otherwise, heh, there’s things out there… hungry things. You know what I’m saying?”
In the bow, Cook found Fabrini splashing water on his ear. Washing blood from it and his neck, but also putting blood in the water.
“You idiot,” he said. “Stop it.”
“What?” Fabrini said. “What?”
“You’re getting blood in the water.”
“What of it?” Fabrini said.
“The blood,” Cook said breathlessly. “Sharks can smell it in the water.”
He didn’t need to say more. Nobody was really worried about sharks, but there was bound to be other things. Worse things. Hungry things, as Saks had said.
Menhaus licked his dry lips. “I think you’re right.”
Cook decided he’d better derail that one. “Besides… this water… it doesn’t look real clean to me. You might get some sort of infection from that slop.”
He got out the first aid kit and bandaged Fabrini’s ear for him, sprayed a little disinfectant on it. Fabrini complained, but he wasn’t too bad about any of it. Which got Cook to thinking that there was hope for him. The fact that he hadn’t tried to grab an oar or something and go at it with Saks, proved there was something very human in him.
But Saks?
No, he was too far gone.
19
“Right there,” George was saying. “Do you see it… right over there…”
Gosling was looking through the doorway with him and he saw it, all right. Tangled in a mass of weeds, something bright orange. Looked like styrofoam. He was thinking it might have been an EPIRB tube that had floated free of the ship or one of the lifeboats. At least, that’s what it kind of looked like.
“What do you think?” George asked.
Gosling figured it was worth checking out. “Help me unzip the canopy.”
The canopy was zippered to the inflated arches of the raft. Together, they began taking it down. Maybe it put them at risk, Gosling was thinking, but it was nice not being enclosed in the canopy. To feel the air again… even if it did smell like something mossy and rotting.
Gosling passed out oars and they began rowing over there, feeling the drag of the sea anchor behind them. The weeds were growing more numerous and none of that had escaped Gosling’s attention. Before, there had been little drifting clumps, an occasional island, now the islands were getting more numerous. They rowed on, parting the mats of weed, moving towards their target.
When they were maybe six feet away, Gosling saw the orange of an EPIRB. “Just a radio beacon,” he said. “We already have two of them.”
“Fuck it,” George said. “Let’s just keep rowing. Feels good to be doing something.”
Gosling figured he was right. It did feel good. And maybe, just maybe, with weeds becoming more concentrated it meant they were nearing some landmass. Maybe.
So they rowed and watched the weeds, the tendrils of steam wafting off the water, the heavy fog shimmering and glimmering. It felt good to put their muscles to work.
George suddenly said, “What the hell?”
He was yanking on his oar, managed to free it. He studied the end and began rowing again. Gosling figured he’d caught it on the weeds, paid it little mind… until something seized his oar. Held it tight.
“I’m caught on something,” he said, struggling with it, trying to pull it up and out of the mire. He managed to work it free of that dark, sluicing water a few inches and then it was pulled back down again. No, it surely wasn’t weeds, it had to be-
There was a thump under the raft. And then another. A rubbery scraping sound that made Gosling’s hackles rise. It was like the sound they heard earlier, a sort of slow investigative motion. More scraping, another thump. Then something down there hit the raft hard and it lurched to the left.
“Christ,” George said.
He had his oar out of the water by then and Gosling gave his a yank and there was nothing holding it. They sat silently, waiting for what would come next for they both knew something would. Something was about to happen here. They were froze up, looking at each other, the sea.
There was a ripple of motion just beneath the surface on the port side. George’s side. Then another. He let out a little involuntary gasp and then water sprayed up and over him like he’d been hit by a big comber.
And then something big moved in the water.
Gosling caught a quick glimpse of something dark and shiny-looking, like oiled rubber.
“What in the hell?” George said, moving away from the gunwale, maybe feeling whatever it was in his mind and not liking it at all.
Gosling was thinking about a weapon, something other than the wet oar in his hands when another gout of water splashed into the boat and George cried out and… and something huge and serpentine came winding out of the drink. It was big around as a man’s thigh, brown and leathery, with a long snaking body and a huge, eyeless head that looked bony and plated. It had a mouth and it was a big one.
George ducked down as it snapped at him, darting its head in his direction like a python trying to snatch a rat. The head was about the size of a mailbox, set with a hinged jaw that allowed the mouth to open wide enough to take hold of a man’s head.
Gosling hit it with his oar and then hit it again.
It backed off, slid under the water and came back up again.
It lashed out at where it thought the men were, but it was blind. Completely blind, something engineered to haunt the black depths far below. It looked, if anything, like some immense moray eel. Its body in the water was coiling and twisting. Gosling figured it had to be fifteen or twenty feet in length. It had fins like an eel and that awful length of corkscrewing, boneless body. There were bright yellow gill slits set just behind the head. It hammered into the raft with its head and body, not sure what to make of it. Every time those jaws came open, Gosling could feel a rush of hot, briny air
George was dodging that swooping head, swinging wildly with his oar. “Get it the fuck away from me!” he cried out.
Both he and Gosling kept cracking it with their oars.
If the situation hadn’t been so terrifying, it might have been comical. For the eel, or whatever it was, might have been a slick, evil predator in that slimy sea, but above in the open air it was clumsy and drunken, seemed to have no true equilibrium whatsoever. It nudged the sides of the raft again and again with its nose, then seemed to lose balance and
rolled in the thrashing water, flashing a pale speckled belly at them. Its fins fanned out like the wings of a bird, but could get no purchase in the air.
Growing tired of the games and obviously getting winded if those gasping, fluttering gill slits could be any indication, it yawned its jaws and took hold of the port gunwale, began to shake it.
Gosling cracked it over the head until it let go, seeing gladly that there were no punctures in the rubber.
The creature slid back into the water to suck in some air from that filth no doubt. But it wasn’t gone. They could hear it under the raft, bumping and squeaking along.
Gosling pulled a flare gun from the survival equipment, thinking that the beast, the worm, whatever it was, reminded him of gulper eels that fishermen sometimes pulled up in their nets. It had that same undulating body and oversized head and like many creatures from the abyss, it looked like something from a B movie out of the water.
George was in the stern now, breathing hard, soaked and staring, oar raised.
“Come on, you prick,” Gosling said, tensing.
And then it did, it shot up out of the water, jaws wide and Gosling moved fast. He brought up the flare gun and fired a flare right into its mouth and maybe down its throat for all he knew. There was a sudden explosion of light and red sparks from inside its mouth and it began going wild, shaking its head madly back and forth, pissing sparks and smoke and the stink of burned flesh.
Then it dove back into the water with a hissing sound.
That was it.
Five minutes later, it still had not come back.
When he was able to catch his breath, George said, “Let’s put that fucking canopy back up.”
“Yeah,” Gosling said.
20
Saks kept his eye on his “friends.”
He watched them like a mother bird watches a nearby snake. He knew and knew very well what they were thinking. He knew what kind of plots were even now hatching in their brains. They were all fantasizing about overpowering him, about killing him or throwing him overboard to
… to those hungry things. Maybe not all of them. Menhaus was too chickenshit to try something like that and Crycek was just a basket case. But the other two? Oh yeah. You could bank on it.
Fabrini and Cook. They were going to be trouble. They were going to try and take the knife.
But it was going to be a cold day in hell when that came to pass.
“I wonder what’s out there?” Saks said almost jovially. “What kind of things… bad things, I bet. Just like Crycek said. Things with teeth that can smell blood in the water. Like that thing we heard eating those guys in that other boat. Remember that? The way it sounded… those chomping, tearing sounds. You remember that, Menhaus? Awful sounds, eating sounds, bones crunching.”
“All right, Saks,” Cook said. “That’ll do.”
“No, I don’t think so. See because I’m just wondering who’s gonna be first to fill their bellies.”
“Maybe it’ll be you,” Fabrini said.
“Not likely.”
“Hey, Saks,” Menhaus said, “why don’t you just stop this shit? Just call it quits right now. What do you say?”
“Sorry. Don’t think it’ll work. First time I set this knife down, your buddies there’ll kill me. They’ll take this knife and slit me up for bait. Isn’t that what you’re thinking, Cook? Feed old Saks to the monsters in the mist. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Listen,” Cook said. “The last thing I want to do is hurt anybody. We need each other. Can’t you see that?”
“I only see that you’re a liar.”
Saks kept staring, taunting them with the knife. He really wished they’d try something. They’d find out good and fast just how handy he was with a blade. He’d killed two slopes in ‘Nam with one and he hadn’t forgotten a thing. Just let ‘em try. Slash, slash. He’d get one of them across the eyes, the other in the belly. Then he’d feed their sorry asses to those horrors out there. Menhaus, he knew, wouldn’t be one of them.
“Anytime you pussies feel man enough,” Saks said, “you just come and get me. I’m right over here. Here and waiting. I think you’re in for a world of hurt, but you’re more than welcome.”
“You gotta sleep sometime,” Fabrini said.
“Oh, but I’m a real light sleeper, Fabrini.”
And that’s probably what they were planning, Saks realized. They were waiting for him to nod off. That’s when they were going to do it. Had it all planned, sneaky little fucks. They were playing it safe right now. Acting all inoffensive and harmless to put him off his guard. But it wasn’t going to work.
He’d kill anyone who got close to him.
“Yeah, I’m a real light sleeper,” he told them in a dry, menacing voice. “I hear anybody creeping around by me, well, I just start slashing. And I don’t care which one of you sweethearts dies.”
Let ‘em suck on that, Saks thought.
“I hope it’s you, Fabrini, I sure do. You see, you and me aren’t done dancing yet. Not by a long shot. You can bet on that. You can swear to that on the grave of that dick-sucking whore you call a mother.”
“You sonofabitch,” Fabrini growled.
Cook held onto him, restraining him. But he made no real effort to get at his tormentor. Fabrini had a bad temper, a violent temper if you cornered him, but he was no fool. Saks was crazy and you didn’t mess with a crazy man holding a knife.
Saks laughed at it all.
Oh, Fabrini was a gem. Just a real fucking pearl. You push button A, he gets pissed off. You push button B, he wants to beat your brains in. Button C, he’s your buddy. Just a dumbass robot. If it weren’t for the other two holding him back, he would’ve been a dead man by now.
“Let him go,” Saks said. “You know that sooner or later he’s going to try it. Sooner or later he’s going to do something stupid and I’ll have to kill him. Let’s get it over with. Fucking shitrat like him is a liability to you guys. To all of us. C’mon, Fabrini, be a hero.”
He didn’t move and Saks giggled.
“About what I expected from a wop.”
“Enough already,” Cook said.
“Quit it, Cook. Quit with the voice of reason here. You ain’t fooling me,” Saks said. “I got your number. I know a scheming killer when I see one. Oh yeah. I know you. I know what you’re all about.”
“C’mon, Saks,” Menhaus said without much effort.
But Saks just smiled. Smiled and waited for them to make their move. Because, sooner or later, they would. And Crycek could go fuck himself, because you didn’t need no devil to make men act like animals. It was their nature.
And Saks knew it.
21
Cushing couldn’t believe it when the raft came into view.
He looked and looked again, squinting beneath that dome of sparkling, angry mist, certain what he was seeing was a mirage. But it was no mirage, because Soltz saw it, too. It was real enough and so were the men waving from it.
No, it wasn’t rescue as such, but at the same time after countless hours on a hatch cover, that’s exactly what it was.
“I guess… I guess we won’t die on this hatch cover after all,” was all Soltz could say, cheated out of his whiny, dramatic death once again.
Quickly then, they began paddling over to the raft.
When Cushing first saw it, that shape come drifting out of the mist… he thought the worst possible things, of course. Although he couldn’t see exactly what it was – just a shadow moving against that field of yellow and gray – he started imagining plenty. Was certain that whatever was out there was about to show itself.
That was what he had originally thought.
And sometimes in life, it was just damn great to be wrong.
When they got up near the raft… or it got up near them… Cushing saw George Ryan and Gosling, the first mate of the Mara Corday. It was the best company he could have hoped for.
“You’re late,” was the first thing George s
aid to him as he hauled him aboard, up the little boarding ladder. “Least you could have done is called. Was that asking too much?”
Cushing laughed. Laughed loud and full like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard and maybe it was. It got him an odd look from Gosling, like maybe he was losing it, but that was okay. After all those hours on that hatch cover listening to Soltz bitch, a man was allowed a certain level of joyful delirium. And Soltz, true to form, complained the entire time Gosling yanked him aboard.
The raft was big and roomy, Cushing noticed, and could have accommodated a dozen men without crowding. That was a good thing because what he needed more than anything else was to stretch his legs without fear something was going to nip one of them off.
After George had given them a quick encapsulated version of the plight of himself and Gosling, leaving out certain unpleasant experiences concerning giant eels and luminous fishies, Soltz began.
“We must’ve drifted for days,” he told them, wiping his glasses against his shirt. “It had to be at least that long… an endless fever is what it was. Just a blur for Cushing and me. Yes, I was pretty certain that we were nearing our last breaths.”
Gosling was just staring at him.
When he was done doing that, he looked at Cushing as if to say, is this guy for real here? But the look Cushing gave him back assured him that, yes, this was Soltz in the flesh. The weakest link? Yeah, and then some.
After they had some freeze-dried food and water that tasted a bit brackish after being stored in plastic bags, the novelty of their new position wore off some, at least enough where they could relax and discuss things in depth.
And after it was hashed-out, what was really to be said? They didn’t know where they were or if by luck or providence they’d ever find their way out.
“About all we can do is take it day by day,” Gosling said. “What else is there to do?”