by Tim Curran
Saks pulled his sleeve down. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“You better let me look at it, Saks. Doesn’t look good at all. Fabrini? Grab me the medical kit.”
But Saks said, “Keep away from me, Cook! All of you just fucking keep away from me! Be a cold day in hell I’d let a cock-monkey like you dress my wounds.”
“Then dress ‘em yourself.”
“Mind your own goddamn business.”
Cook folded his arms, shaking his head. “C’mon, Saks, you’re talking to the Big Cheese here. The health and well-being of all of you is part of the Big Cheese’s job.”
Saks recoiled a bit when Cook moved toward him and Cook stopped. Saks’s eyes had gone feral and simmering. He looked suddenly like he was capable of just about anything.
“If that shit’s catchy, Saks, you’re going over the fucking side,” Fabrini said.
And the thing was, even with the brief look at it Cook had had, those ulcerations did look catchy. There was something unpleasant and unnatural about them like skin tumors. Something morbid.
“You just try, Fagbrini.”
Saks shifted and they were all watching him, ringing him in now like wild dogs and he was feeling it, too, feeling cornered and threatened. A guy who liked to be the center of attention, but not prey. His hand inched towards the knife in his belt and Cook knew he’d cut anyone that got close.
Fabrini got a little closer. “What is that? Between your legs.. .”
Saks recovered now. “That’s my dick, and, no, I’m not putting it into your mouth.”
But it wasn’t his dick they were all looking at. There was a little greasy flannel sack that he had hidden under his leg. And now everyone saw it.
“Okay, Saks, what is it?” Cook put to him.
Saks grinned, knew they had him. He was caught in their snare with nowhere to run. He did two things real fast right then: he brought out his knife and picked up his little flannel-wrapped package that was about the size of a fist. “It’s mine and you fucks don’t get any.”
Cook said, “Saks-”
“Fuck you, too, Big Chief.”
He unwrapped it and it held something pale and fleshy marbled with pinkish-brown lines. Salt pork. They could smell its saltiness and meatiness in the air and everyone began to drool almost immediately. And Saks was loving it. He brought it up and licked it.
“Where’d you get that?” Menhaus said, slavering like a dog now.
“You cheap, selfish sonofabitch,” Fabrini said.
Crycek just blinked his eyes rapidly.
Cook shook his head. “He got that off the Cyclops.”
Everyone stopped salivating about then. To them, the idea of eating anything off that hoodoo ship was akin to stuffing your mouth with worms. They wanted meat and fat… but they weren’t ready to go that far.
Cook said, “Saks, Jesus Christ, don’t eat that stuff… you don’t know what kind of germs got into it. That shit is almost a hundred years old.”
Fabrini was looking sick, like maybe Saks was licking a piece of carrion.
Cook didn’t like this at all. The salt pork had an odd grayish cast to it.
Saks wouldn’t let them near it even if they wanted some. “It was in a sealed cask, you knothead, it’s just fine.”
“You mean you’ve been eating it?” Cook said.
“Sure, just like this.” Saks took a bite out of it and then another.
“Jesus, Saks! Don’t!” Cook cried out.
But he was powerless to stop him. Saks ate the entire wedge of salt pork and seemed to enjoy every bite. When he was finished, he licked his lips.
“How much, Saks… how much did you eat?”
But Saks just smiled.
“Let him poison himself,” Fabrini said. “Who gives a shit?”
Cook was watching him and thinking about those sores on his arm. Maybe there was no connection. Maybe it meant absolutely nothing and maybe it meant everything.
After that, nobody said a thing, but they were all thinking plenty.
The lifeboat drifted through that bunched, leafy weed and into the perpetual mist that floated over it in tarps and sheets. There were occasional sounds out there… splashings, but they never saw a thing. Not until they rammed into something.
“What the hell?” Fabrini said.
Crycek was in the bow. “It’s… shit, I think it’s a boat.”
Then everyone was up there, trying to pull the boat alongside. It was another lifeboat, a dead ringer for their own. Crycek tried to read the stenciled letters on her bow, but there were weeds everywhere. Somehow, some way, those profuse and winding weeds had climbed right up into the lifeboat, filled it like a window box. But they could still easily make out its general shape and bright orange fiberglass hull.
“How’d all those weeds get in there?” Fabrini wanted to know and you could hear something cracking just under his voice like ice.
Cook was up there, too, now.
He and Crycek were trying to bring the lifeboat around, but it was knotted and braided with creeping weed, just way too much of it and they were all painfully aware of that fact.
So much weed… had it grown in there? Cook pulled and the lifeboat would only move a few feet before it reached the end of its leash. The weeds were lush and bountiful and fibrous, tangled and snaking like the roots of an old banyan tree. You would have needed a chainsaw to free that lifeboat. As Cook and Crycek pulled, their own boat swung around until it was next to it lengthwise… or as close as those verdant weeds would allow.
Cook leaned over and Crycek did, too, while Fabrini and Menhaus held the lifeboat so it would not snap back from the elasticity of the weeds that held it.
Using their knifes, they began cutting through all those creepers and rootlets, tendrils that were thick as fingers and strong as cable. There was a dank heat coming off those weeds, heavy and steaming and sickening to smell. They were set with small, greasy leaves and damp fans, bulbous little floats and thorny stalks. Cook was certain more than once, that he felt them move in his hands… but it must have just been gravity. He took his knife… a knife he’d liberated from the Cyclops… and hacked and cut and sheared away green, glistening stems and hot-feeling vines.
“These things… they’re moving,” Crycek said, pulling his hands away.
Fabrini said something, but Cook wasn’t listening. Yes, they were moving, but very slowly, sluggishly. They were actually pulsing like newborn things, hot and vibrant, unpleasantly fleshy to the touch.
Cook found a bloated tuber that just struck him as wrong. It was pink like a vein, throbbing beneath his fingers and it disgusted him. Plants could not feel like this. They could not be like this. He slashed his knife against it and a dark, inky fluid sprayed against the back of his hand.
Fabrini swallowed something thick in his throat. “It looks like. ..”
“Blood,” Cook said. “It’s… I think it’s blood…”
Maybe it was the others’ unwillingness to help him hack through those pulsing vines and tentacles of green and pink growth and maybe it was just his instinctive hatred for them, but Cook began to slash and cut his way deeper into the mass and soon wished he hadn’t.
There was a body under the weeds.
The body of a man, probably a crewmember from the Mara Corday.. . but it was really hard to tell. He was lying in the bottom of the boat in about two inches of slopping black water, noosed in garlands of pulsing weed. His face was sharp and bony, sallow and lifeless, his body terribly wrinkled and shrunken. And he was breathing. Shallowly, but breathing all the same.
“He’s alive,” Cook said.
But the others wanted no part of this. There was something diabolic and utterly macabre about a man entwined in all those stalks and tubers and pink tentacles. Cook started pulling the weeds away from him… and recoiled as a single distended and oily run of weed came away from the man’s throat with a popping sound like suction cups pulled from vinyl. There were oval suc
ker marks on his neck. Yes, the weeds had encircled him, tucked him down deep in their own vegetable profusion and-
“They’re… they’re sucking his blood,” Menhaus said in a high voice, just absolutely filled with an irrational horror at the idea of it. “Those fucking weeds… they’re sucking his blood away… ”
And there was no arguing against it.
For that’s what those weeds were doing. The pulsing pink tendrils had suckers on their undersides like little rubbery mouths. They felt like viscid arteries in Cook’s hands. The man beneath them was slowly being leeched, he was being bled white drop by drop by drop.
Cook looked down at his hands and they were red with blood.
Something like a dry, rasping scream came from his mouth. He fell back into the lifeboat and the other one pulled back into the mist and they all distinctly heard the sounds coming from it. Busy, stealthy sounds. Rustlings and slitherings as if the lifeboat were filled with serpents. But it wasn’t serpents, it was something far worse.
Cook hung over the gunnel, washing the blood off his hands manicly.
“Unclean,” Crycek said in a hurting voice. “Oh, so terrible and unclean…”
4
“That ain’t no boat,” Marx was saying, squinting through the thickening mist. “Not sure what the hell it is.”
Thing was, nobody was sure. Just another vague gray shape licked by tongues of fog, murky and indistinct. Large, like a ship, but splayed out and low in the weed. Gosling’s idea was, with night apparently coming on, to find a ship they could rest on. Not the haunted skeleton of some old fungus-shrouded sailing vessel, but something more recent. A bulk carrier or container ship, something he was intimately familiar with. Something that would have fresh water in her tanks and possibly real food in the pantry. But whatever they were seeing at the edge of the fog, it had everyone’s curiosity up.
“Maybe we don’t want to know what it is,” Pollard said.
That got a quick affirmative from Chesbro, who was only interested in finding shelter and food, nothing more.
“Oh, shut your mouth,” Marx said.
So, they rowed deeper into the ship’s graveyard and the mist settled over them like a canopy, obscuring everything and making all those old dead hulks look incorporeal and ethereal. They rowed around shattered bows and masts dripping with weed and belts of fungus. The seaweed was so very thick they could barely move through some of it. Huge banks of it rose above the water and even that which was at the waterline or just submerged, was tangled and ropy, ensnarling oars and the bow of the lifeboat. The raft took it easier, sliding over the stuff except where it grew in great islands of steaming vegetation.
The farther they got into the graveyard, the thicker the stuff was
… and the more ships were captured in it. Some riding on top of it and some on their sides sinking into it… or somewhere in-between. They passed overturned hulls crusted with sea shells and the mastless wreck of a racing yacht and once, they saw something like the prow of a Viking dragonboat jutting up, but it was so blanketed in that engulfing sea grass that it could have been just about anything.
The closer they got to the mysterious object, the more certain they were it was no boat, no ship. They came around the side of a fishing trawler, its high derricks and winches rising above them in the fog like Medieval gallows, and then they got a good look at it.
“It’s a plane,” Cushing said. “A goddamn plane.”
And it was. It was a dusky green in color, easily over a hundred feet in length, just laying there in a great reef of weeds like a toy plane in a bed of peat moss. It had high-mounted wings with turboprops and an upswept finned tail section. The weeds had not begun to grow over it yet.
“That’s a Hercules,” Marx said. “A C-130. Transport plane… Army and Navy use ‘em, all the services do. The old workhorse of the military.”
“What’s it doing here?” George said.
But they just ignored him, awed by this huge bird that had fallen from the sky and died in the seaweed sea. It was a stupid question anyway and he knew it. It got there the same way everything else did. .. it was pulled in. They had only seen two other planes so far. One was a little Piper Cub immersed in trailing weeds and the other was just the wing of some unknown craft rising from the waterlogged vegetation like the dorsal of a shark, slicked green with mildew.
“Hasn’t been here too long by the looks of it,” Cushing said. He shook his head. “Makes you wonder how many ships and planes the military loses in this damned place.”
“Yeah, and how many they really admit to,” Marx said.
George could imagine what it must have been like for that big, proud plane. Getting sucked into this place, instruments gone haywire, the crew going out of their minds circling in the grim fog until they had to ditch. He wondered what had become of them… or what had gotten to them.
As they got in closer, they could see that the cargo bay doors in the massive tail were open, the aft loading ramp down, pressed into the weed. And maybe they were all thinking the same thing: a fresh transport plane beat the shit out of an old freighter any day.
They rowed in as close as they could get, which was about thirty or forty feet. At which point the weeds became so thick the lifeboat was stopped dead. They all climbed into the raft, cutting the lifeboat free and tying it off with a length of nylon line which George fed out loop by loop as they pushed the raft in closer to the boarding ramp. When they got there, Marx hopped out, securing the raft with the line from its sea anchor. Gosling helped George tie off the line to the lifeboat and they went inside.
It was dark in there.
Gosling broke out the two flashlights they had and everyone went in. It smelled damp and musty inside, but it was great to be walking again. To feel a firm surface beneath their feet. The interior of the C-130 was immense. You could have packed a hundred men comfortably in the cargo bay. There was a row of a dozen pallets to one side, each stacked up to a height of eight feet, and, to the other side, two Hum-V reconnaissance vehicles with more pallets in front of them. All of which were secured with trusses and stanchions to the floor. There was a walkway in between.
“Now, if we just had some land to go for a spin,” George said.
“I wonder where all this stuff was going,” Cushing said.
“Middle East or Europe, probably,” Gosling said.
Marx climbed up atop one of the Hummers, played his flashlight along a heavy gun mounted on top. “This would be a fifty-caliber machine gun, boys. If we just had some ammo for it, we could cut anything in half out there with it.”
Up front of the vehicles, there was an open space with web seats on either wall. There was some loose gear stored there in green nylon canvas bags. Gosling checked them out one after the other. “Medical gear,” he said. “We can use this stuff… antibiotics, pressure bandages, disinfectants. Must have been some medics on board…”
They found a few battery-powered lanterns and used them, conserving their flashlights. Marx and Gosling kept checking everything out.
“I don’t see any survival rafts here, First,” Marx said. “My guess is these boys ditched and headed off across the weed.”
They moved forward up to the cockpit and it was empty, save for a lot of avionics and navigational systems which were beyond them. Many of the screens were still lit which meant the batteries still had a charge. Marx turned on the VHF and scanned the channels, picking up nothing but that breathing, listening static. He turned it off before they heard something worse.
George and Cushing stepped down to the passenger door just behind the cockpit. It was open, too, weeds and water having insinuated themselves there now. It was getting dim out in the seaweed sea, the fog hanging in a ghostly membrane, flowing and covering, shimmering like burning marsh gas, will-o’-the-wisp. Great patches of it drifted over the weeds and assorted wreckage.
But maybe ten feet out in the weeds was what they were looking at.
Snagged in green mats of
the stuff were the remains of three bodies, possibly a fourth. You couldn’t see much of them, just slats of white bone showing through greasy emerald and yellow-green ropes and flaps of creeping weed. Though the others were face-down, sinking in the growth, one of the skulls was grinning up at them, tendrils of pinkish slime oozing from its eye sockets and seaweed on the crown dangling like hair. Down there, in that misty growth, that skeleton looked like it wanted to get at them.
“Oh, boy,” George said. “That must be the crew… or some of them…”
A fat brown worm slid from the skull’s nasal cavity and sought the weed.
“They’re just dead. They can’t hurt you,” Gosling said, leading the both of them away.
But George was thinking that it had already hurt him, seeing those men stripped to bone like that had hurt him in ways he could not begin to catalog. But that was the reality of this place: one wound on top of another. One heartbreak and nightmare after another. You could expect no more here in this feral dimension.
Like gravity, it sucked.
5
Cook thought: Look at them, just sitting and waiting, hoping. They all have something to return to. Lives. Things they want and need to take up again. All except me. I was alone in the old world and I’m alone in the new one. And they know it, they all goddamn well know it. They talk about girlfriends and wives, sisters and brothers and children. Me? I say nothing. They want to get back. And look at their eyes, will ya? They all doubt that I’m the man that can get them there.
Cook could feel it all draining out of him now. All the poison, all the doubts and uncertainties and anxieties. It came out of every pore and nearly drowned him, left him gulping for air up in the bow. He sat there, staring off into the mist and the weeds, not wanting any of them to see the weakness on his face. He was wrung out and just plain out of answers. All of this had gone on too long and these men were going to die and it would be his fault, all his fault, because he didn’t have a goddamn clue as to what to do next.