by Tim Curran
And all that was bad enough, but as they went to him he began to have a seizure.
8
It was Fabrini’s idea really, but Cook went along with it. Crycek told them they were inviting death and Menhaus said it would be like living in a coffin. Saks thought it was amusing, told them if they cut him lose he’d even let Fabrini have his sister.
So the five of them boarded the Cyclops, made their way to the aft deckhouse and the cabins below. Crew’s quarters, is what Saks told them. Simple, spartan, efficient. They chose two of the cabins and began cleaning them out, which was a matter of dusting them and opening portholes to get some air in. The bunk mattresses and bolsters were mildewed and patched with rot and they dragged them out and dumped them in the corridor. After a time, the cabins weren’t exactly the Holiday Inn, but they were livable.
What neither Cook nor Fabrini especially cared for was turning Saks loose, but sooner or later, they would have had to anyway.
“I’ll even do you a favor,” Saks told them. He motioned with his thumb to Crycek. “I’ll bunk with the nut, so you two girls can spend some quality time sucking tongue.”
Fabrini just glared at him. “We starting that shit again, Saks?”
And Saks just grinned. Broad, full, filled with secret delight. And you could just see what was in his eyes, what was bouncing through his head: unfinished business. There was unfinished business between Fabrini and him. And when it came time to dance again, it wouldn’t be in the confines of a lifeboat.
Menhaus, some color back in his cheeks now that they were out of the water, said, “I’ll be bunking in with them. There won’t be any trouble.” There was almost something fierce beneath his words. “There better not be any trouble.”
Saks thought that was funny. “Not from me, not from me. You might want to keep an eye on Crycek, though.”
“Oh,” Cook said, “Crycek’s got his feet under him now, I think.”
“More or less,” Crycek said.
All in all, none of them liked that somehow pernicious atmosphere of the ship, but they all agreed on one thing: it beat the shit out of the lifeboat. At least they could move here. At least they could stretch their legs and get out of one another’s hair. And if something came after them, at least there was room to fight and evade. And the way they were looking at things, that was definitely something.
Later, once they had a snack of crackers and cheese washed down with tepid water and Cook had given them their glucose tablets like the survival manual said, Fabrini and Cook sat in their cabin and chatted. Even with the porthole open, the air was still dank and clammy. Not necessarily chilly, just heavy and moist and stale.
“I don’t want the others knowing about that log book,” Cook said, knowing that Saks was up on deck and Crycek was out foraging for things… what those things were, he would not stay. “It won’t do them any good.”
Fabrini chuckled. “You think any of that would bother Saks? Not on your life. Boarding a fucking ghost ship wouldn’t bother him… long as he was free to plot and scheme.”
“Which he’s probably doing right now.”
Neither of them doubted that. You could count on certain things in life and Saks being a low-down, underhanded weasel was one of them. But was he really a danger? That was something they could not decide. Even with the shit he’d put them through on the raft – he claimed it was a temporary madness, a hysteria that had run its course – they could not be sure. Fabrini didn’t like it, but Cook explained to him that Saks probably wouldn’t harm them. That he knew one thing about Saks now and he knew it well: Saks was deeply afraid of being alone.
Cook said, “Crycek seems like he’s starting to get a grip on things, I don’t want to upset him with any of that shit in the log. Maybe it’s all a load of bullshit, but somehow I doubt it.”
Fabrini just nodded. “What do you think about it, though? About all that shit Forbes wrote in there… do you think it’s all really true?”
“Yes,” Cook said, “I do.”
Given that Cook was pretty much in charge now – something he still was not real crazy about – he wondered if such an admission was a good idea. Surely, the leadership manual would have advised against it. When you were the man in charge, you had to consider morale. But there was absolutely no way Cook could lie about any of it. And particularly not to Fabrini who had read the log and had been there when Cook had been touched by the long-dead mind of Forbes… or whatever that had been. Impression, reflection, call it what you will.
“So where does it leave us?” Fabrini said pretty calmly.
“Hell if I know.” Cook sat on his bunk, staring at his knees. “I guess we just have to accept that we’re lost in some terrible place and that there’s terrible things here.”
Oh boy, how was that for building morale?
“I was thinking about what Forbes said about that other ship out there,” Fabrini said. “And I’m thinking there’s got to be lots more. I mean, you’ve heard all that Devil’s Triangle shit same as me. If half of it’s true, this place has to be like a fucking junkyard of lost ships.”
“And planes.”
“Exactly. Maybe after we sort ourselves out a day or two, we ought to think about doing a little exploring a little further out. Never know what we might find”
No, Cook was thinking, you just never know what you might find. Or what might find you.
But Fabrini definitely had a valid point. The Cyclops was just one of hundreds if not thousands. Ships and planes had been getting funneled into this dead zone for as long as there had been ships and planes. And, no doubt, the Mara Corday was not going to be the last. Out there, just maybe, there would be other ships and boats and maybe even if they didn’t have people on them, they would probably have food and water, maybe motorboats and gasoline, weapons, you name it.
“Yeah, I like the way you think, Fabrini,” Cook told him. “If there’s other ships out there, we might just find some supplies and make a go of this.”
And not only did he like Fabrini’s sudden pioneer resourcefulness, but he liked his sudden positive turn of mind. He’d been scared before, Cook knew. Bad scared… and who hadn’t and who still wasn’t? But he had emerged from that with a refreshing can-do sort of spirit. And that was good. Because in this place, Cook decided, your mind could destroy you just as quick as what waited out in the fog.
Fabrini waited a moment, then said, “Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, Cook. I mean, shit, it would take a lot to rain on my parade now being that it’s already fucking sunk.”
“Who said there’s anything on my mind?”
“Nobody had to.”
Cook nodded. “All right. All this is bad enough, sure, but now here’s a little icing on the cake.” He got up and walked over to the porthole, surveying the mist and weeds. “You read what Forbes said. About that white jelly being inside those dead men and how they’d found globs of it other places… what did he say? It had a funny shine to it? That the doctor had burned his hands touching it? That the burns on those corpses looked like radium burns? You see what I’m getting at here?”
But Fabrini just shook his head. “Cook, I dropped out in the tenth grade. Spell it out for me.”
Cook smiled, but not for long. “Radiation,” he said.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, those burns and all the crew getting sick after they came off the Korsund… it sounds like radiation exposure, doesn’t it? Radiation sickness. Forbes wouldn’t have known about radiation back in 1918 and that Dr. Asper probably only knew a little, but it sure fits the bill, doesn’t it?”
Fabrini looked pale. “That thing Forbes talked about… he thought it got the crew on the Korsund and his own crew on this tub. .. shit, do you think this ship is still full of it? For all we know, we might already glow in the dark.”
“If we’ve been exposed, it’s probably too late,” Cook told him. “We’re probably saturated… but remember now, I’m just guessing here. That’s al
l. Besides, not all radiation stays active for a long time like when they drop a bomb. I read once where the majority of radioactive materials have a half-life – disintegration rate – of days or weeks, something like that. So I’m guessing that after almost ninety years, we’re probably safe.”
“Until it comes again.”
“Yes,” Cook said.
He knew he was reaching with a lot of this. But it sure sounded like whatever that thing was, radioactivity was part of its natural properties much like exhaling carbon dioxide was part of man’s. And maybe it wasn’t radiation as they understood it, but it was something damn close.
“If it’s gonna come for us,” Fabrini said, “I just wish it would already and fry our brains. Get it done with.”
“If it’s still even here,” Cook said.
Fabrini just shook his head. “Oh, it’s here, all right. Crycek might be crazy… but it don’t mean he’s wrong.”
9
They did what they could for Soltz, which wasn’t much.
Gosling, who had a pretty good working knowledge of first aid, bandaged his wounds and stopped the bleeding. Gave him some pain killers and washed out his eye with sterile solution, put a bandage over it. But that was about it. That was all they could do under the circumstances. They covered him with one of the waterproof blankets and pretty much hoped for the best.
“He isn’t going to make it, is he?” Cushing said.
Gosling just shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Soltz had lapsed into something like a coma now. He moaned from time to time and shivered violently. He was feverish and sweating, a sweet unpleasant smell coming off him that reminded Cook of burnt hot dogs.
George was watching the bat-thing.
It was dead now.
Just drifting through the weed same as they were. He wasn’t sure what had killed it. Not really. Only that it had died maybe twenty or thirty minutes after it had fallen into the water. The only damage they had done it was smashing up its antennae. Would that have been enough? Could it have died from damaged sensory apparatus? George didn’t think so. Cushing was of the mind that it had asphyxiated, that it had been a water breather and it had just been out of the water too damn long. Simple, pat. But it did not explain why the thing had those streamers of yellow pulp floating from its mouth like it vomited out its own intestines.
George was thinking change in pressure.
Like one of those deep-sea fish brought up in a trawl net, the kind that sort of explode from the loss of pressure.
“I don’t know,” Cushing said. “That bastard seemed pretty lively to me, George. Abyssal creatures tend to be pretty sluggish when they come up, if they’re alive at all.”
Point. The bat-thing had been hovering for some time behind the raft. If it was suffocating, why hadn’t it just dived back in? Curiosity? It didn’t understand what the raft and the pink creatures in it were so it had to find out even at the cost of its own life? No, that was silly. Animals could be curious, but only to a point.
Maybe it was sick, George got himself to thinking as he prodded its carcass with the oar, maybe that’s what it was about.
But then looking over at Soltz, he figured it out.
Or thought he did.
Soltz was either dying or close to it. Gosling said his cuts were severe, but not life-threatening… yet he was feverish and shaking, seemed to be in some sort of a coma. Like the guy had contracted some weird tropical disease or was full of infection. And maybe, just maybe, it was both. The bat-thing’s saliva had burned him, gotten into his cuts… and who knew what kind of parasites and germs it carried? Things deadly to human biology perhaps, alien things our immune system couldn’t hope to fight against. So, if that was true, maybe the same was true in reverse: the biology of that thing was killing Soltz, but maybe his biology had killed it off first.
He told Cushing this and Cushing liked it. “Makes sense, George. You’ve got a logical, scientific turn to your mind and you never even knew it.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but if he’s infected with something… we could all be in danger.”
“Does that worry you?” Gosling asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “And what are our alternatives?”
George knew what they were. “We don’t have any.”
And they didn’t. Living in a raft at close quarters pretty much ruled out the possibility of quarantine and there were no emergency rooms handy. Soltz was one of them. Infected or not, they had to care for him even if it meant getting sick themselves. They could not abandon him… if they did that, they were no better than, well, Saks for example.
“You’re right, we don’t have any. So?”
George just shrugged. “So I suppose there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Figured you’d say that.”
Good old Gosling. The supreme pragmatist. You could always count on him to see the practical side of just about anything.
Gosling had repaired the tears in the gunwale of the raft using the repair kit and had aired it back up using the hand-pump. They had taken some water, but not enough to be alarmed about. The inflated arches were pretty much toast, though. The creature’s barbed tail spines had literally shredded them and that was that.
George was starting to drift off when he realized that there was something in front of the raft. Another shadow, though this one was larger than the devil ray beast. Much larger. Whatever it was, it had to be easily twenty-feet across and seemed to be getting larger by the moment.
Maybe it was a submerged bank of weed, maybe something else.
He was about to draw Gosling’s attention to it when Soltz came out of his fugue, started babbling about the rusted chain on his bicycle in-between ragged breaths of air. Gosling went to him with Cushing at his side. Cushing mopped sweat from his brow and Gosling checked his vitals.
“How is he?” George asked, to which Gosling just shook his head.
And that pretty much said it all.
Soltz was fading and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. Just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and watch him die. And the idea of that just about sucked the lot of them dry.
That shadow was closer now. Easily within ten feet of the raft. Whatever it was, either they were drifting toward it or it was drifting toward them. Take your pick.
“You see it?” George said, knowing Cushing had.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
Gosling had seen it, too, but was preoccupied with trying to make Soltz comfortable. Maybe he had, for Soltz had gone back to his dream-island again which was about all you could hope for under the circumstances. If he had to die, it would be better if he went in his sleep.
Even with the semi-brightening of the day and the use of a flashlight, you could only see maybe five or six inches down into the sea. Light would penetrate no farther. That shadow, George figured, was about that far down, maybe less. Just visible as a shape, but no more.
“I don’t like it,” Cushing said.
Gosling was watching it. “Row around it then.”
There’s a mad dog in your path, just walk around it.
He was being Mr. Realism again, of course, but it was obvious that he did not like that big dark mass being on a slow collision course with them either. But he could not come right out and say it. It was not his way. He was used to being in charge of men and that had not left him. Even in this godforsaken place. And when you were in charge, you didn’t admit to trouble very easily.
George was thinking: I don’t know what in the Christ you are, Mr. Shadow, but you’re giving me a real funny feeling in my belly and I don’t like it one fucking bit. Just go away now, go away. Leave us be. We don’t need another flying manta ray from Mars…
And wasn’t that a cheerful thought? That the dead bat-thing might have a big brother or a pissed-off father?
“Here,” Cushing said, putting an oar in his hands. “Let’s get away from it.”
George had his oar on the port side and Cushing had his starboard. Feeling something evaporating in their throats and the patter of their hearts begin to pick up, they began to paddle madly away from the mass. Neither thought they would, but then, when it was maybe five feet from the raft, they broke away and to the right and skirted it, came around it into open water.
There.
Simple.
It was behind them now. Just a huge, spreading shadow. In five, ten minutes, it would be out of sight, another nasty little secret tucked away in the fog.
“Probably wasn’t anything to begin with,” Cushing said, almost like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. “Nothing alive. Just something drifting around… some junk.”
And George wanted badly to disagree with that, because he didn’t think that mass was just some harmless patch of submerged weed or clot of muck. It had approached the raft because it wanted to approach the raft.
“Wait a minute now,” Gosling said. “It’s coming back… maybe it’s caught in the line from the sea anchor.”
Sure, George thought, maybe.
It sounded good, sounded damn reasonable… but he didn’t believe it. Whatever was out there it was indeed coming back. Not like something snared on the anchor, but like something moving under its own power.
“Shit,” Cushing said, which summed it up nicely.
The mass was coming back and coming back fast. It was still down deep enough in that foul water where they could not see what it was and maybe it wanted things that way.
Gosling had an oar now, too. “Row for chrissake,” he told them. “Row your asses off.”
And they did, splashing through the water, sliding over patches of weed and cutting across those occasional channels of open, dark water. They were moving, but it was still gaining. Coming even faster now and George thought he saw it moving with an odd pulsating sort of motion.
“It’s gonna hit us,” Gosling said. “Get into the center of the raft.”