Hell Rig

by J. E. Gurley

  Jeff saw Lisa had been busy also. Beads of perspiration ran down her grease-streaked face as she handed Ed a crescent wrench. The generator was down and the silence was eerie. Every sound echoed hollowly in the fog, now slowly climbing the stairs from the landing deck as if investigating the sudden silence.

  “The lights are ready,” Jeff reported. He looked at Lisa and smiled. It was strange how his heart could disregard the dangers and beat so loudly when she smiled at him.

  “I replaced the plugs and tightened down the valves a bit,” Ed said from beneath the generator. “With a richer fuel mixture, we should get another 80-90 rpms.” He looked up at McAndrews. “Check the breaker box before you wire in the lights. Make sure it can handle the extra amperage.”

  “I’ll stick my tongue in it if it’ll make with the juice for us.”

  Ed got up stiffly. Jeff noticed he looked every day of his sixty-two years if not older. Deep crow’s feet radiated from the corners of his eyes, and his eyes were sunk into his skull. Jeff offered his boss his hand but Ed ignored it.

  Lisa shivered. “It’s getting colder.”

  Jeff nodded. “I noticed. The fog seems to be getting thicker, too. It’s near noon but it looks like dusk. It’ll get even colder when the sun sets.”

  Lisa looked at him in surprise. “We’ll be gone by that time, won’t we? The ship should be here soon.”

  He looked away to avoid answering. He didn’t want his doubt to show. By all rights, the supply ship should have been there already.

  As if reading his thoughts, Ed checked his watch. “Even if the ship left a day later than scheduled, it ought to be here just before dark, maybe five-thirty. We’ll wait until then to turn on the lights, less risk of blowing a circuit breaker and we can conserve the diesel. This thing’s jury rigged enough as it is.”

  “It will hold,” McAndrews said, returning from hooking up the lights. “I put the lights on two separate circuits to spread out the load more evenly.”

  Ed nodded his approval. “Good.” He looked at all of them. “I guess we wait.”

  Jeff was a little surprised at Ed’s change in attitude. Earlier, he had been adamant about finishing the job no matter what. Now, he looked defeated. He knew five workers couldn’t get much done, no matter how hard they worked, especially with the fog destroying their handiwork. Even if they radioed the mainland and got some new men sent out, it would be too late. He felt sorry for the old man and wished there was something he could do. He and the others would only be out a job. Ed would be out a company, maybe even his home.

  “Maybe we should look for Gleason while we wait,” Lisa suggested. “The fog seems benign, for now at least.”

  As if in response to her words, the fog began to move more quickly. It rolled over the sides of the platform, spilling onto the deck like creeping gray flesh, undulating obscenely as gusts of air sent it spiraling into little eddies that looked obscenely human before collapsing back into the main mass of mist. It was luminescent, grayish-white, bathing everything it touched in a wan ghost light. Will ’o the wisps raced along the rails, painting them in unearthly St. Elmo’s fire.

  “I don’t like this,” McAndrews said, eying the slowly advancing mass. “It’s too damn creepy.”

  “It’s just fog,” Lisa said, mocking him.

  McAndrews glared at her. “Have you ever seen fog like this? This shit’s as thick as the stew you made last night. Look at it. It looks oily on the surface.”

  Jeff had noticed that too, a sheen on the fog. That bothered him. He knew that something as insubstantial as fog should not be able to support drops of oil on its surface. “We had better get back inside. Mac, maybe we had better turn on those lights now. Ed, let’s crank the generator.”

  McAndrews nodded his head vigorously. “I read you.”

  He ran to the breaker panel and pulled the two circuits. Ed primed the generator and hit the starter button. Instead of the high-pitched hum of the generator starting up, there was silence. He tried again with the same results.

  “What the hell, Ed?” McAndrews shouted. “Fix it.”

  Ed scratched his head. “I didn’t do anything. It should run.”

  They were all growing apprehensive as the fog rolled closer. Shapes, dark and sinister moved in the fog. Muffled sounds, not quite human, echoed around them.

  “Ed,” Lisa pleaded. She took Jeff’s arm and clung to it.

  “Ah, here it is,” Ed announced holding up a wire that had come loose from the starter. “How did that happen?” He wrapped it around the contact, tightened it with his screwdriver and hit the button.

  Sparks flew and Ed sprawled backwards on his ass, but the diesel generator coughed and wheezed before sputtering to life. The lights flickered several times as the generator revved up. The fog reacted immediately, peeling away from the light stands as if hurt by the bright illumination and retreated across the deck into the shadows.

  “Come on,” Jeff shouted. “Let’s go. Now.”

  Sims was already waiting for them, holding the door open as they rushed in.

  “What the hell was that?” he asked. “The fog…” He shook his head in confusion.

  “Shut the door,” Jeff told Sims, “and lock it.”

  Sims looked puzzled but Ed nodded his agreement, and locked the door. The fog blocked out the sun bringing an early darkness to the platform. Just a few bulbs burned in the hall, casting deep shadows. The others watched the fog while Lisa went to her room. She passed Tolson’s room.

  “Where is he?” she asked, pointing to Tolson’s empty cot.

  Sims looked around dumbfounded. “I don’t know. He was out cold just a minute ago.”

  Ed took charge. “Look for him. He couldn’t get far in his condition.”

  Jeff and Lisa took the recreation room and dining hall. The rest took other parts of the building. We are beginning to get good at looking for missing people, Jeff thought wearily.

  “I don’t understand,” he confided in Lisa. “If he’s hurt that badly, how can he be up walking around?”

  “He shouldn’t be.”

  They searched the dining room, kitchen, and the recreation room but saw no sign of Tolson.

  “I’ll check the cooler,” Jeff told her.

  He noticed she did not look inside as he opened the door. Both Bale and Easton lay as they had placed them, wrapped in plastic.

  “Not in here,” he said.

  They looked in the utility room where they had imprisoned Waters. Jeff saw the still tied ropes that had bound his hands.

  “Neat trick,” he commented on Waters’ ability to get free. He noticed something lying on the floor. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a gris-gris,” Lisa said as Jeff picked it up. “It must have belonged to Waters.”

  “He didn’t look the voodoo type to me.”

  “And I do?” Lisa said, hands on her hips.

  “I meant…oh, hell,” he said, giving up. He shoved the gris-gris in his pocket. He checked the back door. His amulet was still there but the door was slightly ajar. “It’s unlocked.” They both stood looking at the door. Neither wanted to open it and go back out there with the fog.

  The lights along the perimeter of the platform were barely visible through the dense fog. It had advanced to within a few yards of the door and stopped as if repelled by the single bulb shining there, or the amulet; Jeff wasn’t sure which. He peered into the fog but saw nothing but vague shapes. As he turned away, a shadow moved near the warehouse but quickly vanished.

  “See anything?” Lisa asked.

  He shook his head. “I guess not.”

  Locking the door, he said, “Let’s see if the others had better luck.”

  * * * *

  “How the hell could you lose him?” Jeff snapped at Sims.

  “I didn’t lose him.” Sims scowled at Jeff a few seconds before adding, “He was out cold when we went to work on the lights. He had enough codeine in him to keep him asleep for hours, and he was still down
when I looked in on him after we finished. He must have regained consciousness and slipped out when I came up front and waited for you.”

  “Well, he’s gone now. Gleason, Tolson and Waters—You would think it would be easy to find three men on a platform this small.”

  “Do we go look for them?” McAndrews asked.

  “In that?” Jeff waved his finger at what lay outside the door. He shook his head. “Not me. They are either dead already or someplace safe. We would just be sitting ducks out there.”

  “Then we wait,” McAndrews agreed. He sat down heavily on a chair.

  Jeff cursed silently and looked over at Sims. Sims was staring out the window at the fog, smiling.

  “You find this humorous,” Jeff lashed out at him.

  Sims turned from the window and glared at Jeff. “Not humorous, maybe, but exciting, invigorating.”

  “Invigorating? Two of my friends are dead.”

  “Friends?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “I didn’t think you cared much for Sid Easton and you obviously didn’t know Bale well enough for him to confide in you.”

  Sims’ retort confused him; put him on the defensive. “They were co-workers and didn’t deserve what happened to them!” he shouted.

  The others stared but he ignored them.

  Sims smiled. “No one deserves death, but it comes to us nevertheless.” He shrugged. “The manner of their deaths matters little to the dead, only to the living who feel some inner need to justify their lives by a belated show of emotion.”

  “It’s called grieving,” Jeff snapped. “Honoring their memory.”

  “People are so concerned with their afterlives—heaven or hell? There is a vast plane of existence stretching between the two where most souls wind up.”

  “Do you mean purgatory?” Lisa asked.

  Sims shook his head. “No, purgatory is a waiting room the Catholic Church created to mollify squeamish people about their departed loved ones—a chance to pray them into heaven. The place I speak of is much worse than that. There, you are required to witness your sins, relive them. That alone can be much worse than paying for them.”

  “That’s quite a bit of sophistry. Are you some kind of closet priest as well, or what?” Jeff asked.

  “Like Bale?” Sims shook his head. “No, just a man who has brushed death’s sleeve and has seen…things a man should not.” He looked at Jeff with sadness in his eyes. “There is no life after death, but there is an existence of a sort. You do not want to go there.”

  “Help us get off this rig,” Lisa implored.

  “There is no getting off this rig,” Sims said almost gently. “Can’t you see that? We’re all here for a reason. Waters is right about that.”

  “Waters is insane,” McAndrews added.

  “Insane? Anyone who stares into Death’s blind eyes loses a bit of himself. He thinks he’s come back here for redemption but you know better.”

  “What do you mean?” McAndrews challenged. Jeff noticed his face pale as McAndrews realized Sims meant Waters’ condition was his fault.

  Sims shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters now.”

  He turned to stare out the window. McAndrews closed his eyes but Jeff thought he saw a tear rolling down his cheek. He didn’t hold McAndrews to blame for Waters’ condition, in spite of his earlier outburst. McAndrews had acted out of love for his brother and his need to understand the reason for his brother’s death and the deaths of all the others. Waters was the key. He was obviously insane, but in his more lucid moments, he sounded almost convincing enough, at least, to impart a sense of fear to all the others.

  Jeff was concerned about the voodoo amulet. By all rights, it should not have worked. Placing it on the door was just an act of desperation. He didn’t believe in voodoo, any more than he believed in magic, but somehow the amulet had worked. It had repelled the living fog. He had seen it with his own eyes. Growing up in southern Louisiana, he could not escape tales of voodoo and voodoo rituals. They were as ubiquitous as magnolias and mint juleps. He had dismissed them as fantasy, but now was beginning to wonder just how fantastical they were.

  He would have to talk to Lisa about it. She was their in-house voodoo specialist.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Ric Waters stalked the deck like a shadow zombie. The fog enveloped him like a living cloak, comforting and succoring him. He existed in two worlds. Around him, the familiar steel and wooden structures of the platform collided with ancient stone and shadow, shifting from one to the other as he watched. The deepest shadows were doorways leading to places he did not want to venture. They were devourers of souls.

  He knew the fog could have gotten to Gleason or the others easily enough. The lights were no safe havens, but some part of Waters, the thing he was becoming, knew the fog savored the taste of fear flowing from its next victims. The part of Waters that was still human remembered other victims, other fears. There was still time for death.

  When Waters had received the radio message from Trey Dixon before the hurricane, his own fear had been pouring from his body like sweat on a hot, muggy Louisiana day. August was a sweltering month in Louisiana. The heat came early and lay on the land day after day without release. Even the nights offered no relief. The humid nights simply vomited the heat the land had swallowed during the day. Even the occasional ocean breeze offered little break from the monotony. The intense humidity was palpable, cloying. It smothered the body and attacked the spirit. The Gulf was even worse. The humidity rose from the warm waters and slowly broiled the life from everything it touched.

  When Katrina had begun to build out in the Gulf, it had fed ravenously on the sun-baked waters, growing massive and wild, a creature of force without boundaries, without mind, without guidance. Even land, colder than the sea, could not stop it. This was Louisiana in August, the season of storms. Landfall would merely slow its progress. Hurricane Katrina reared above the horizon, a black fist preparing to strike. Waters knew he was in a race for his life to return to Global Thirteen.

  The seas were rough, sending eight-foot waves crashing into his twenty-five foot crew boat. The radio was ominously dead. Through the driving rain, he caught his first glimpse of the platform as a layer of black smoke swept horizontally across the water. Fire on an oil platform was a monstrous thing, a living creature at times. It spewed from fractured natural gas pipes under tremendous pressure, coating everything in a thin film of liquid flame. It ignited crude oil, releasing poisonous toxins and black smoke and soot that seeped into the lungs and hardened. It burned metal and wood, destabilizing entire platforms. Retardant foam could not stop it. Water merely spread it. Men had no place to go but into the sea. “In seas such as these, men would die.”

  The platform was portentously silent as he tied his heaving boat to the dock and leaped the five-foot chasm of churning water between platform and boat. One mistake could easily leave him with a broken leg or worse. He noted that the flames were low, not pressurized gas but mostly buildings burning and thankfully near empty storage tanks, already dying under the onslaught of rain. Someone had managed to shut off the main gas pressure manifold, saving the rig. Smoke and rain, whipped by the wind, blinded him, obstructing his vision. What he could see dismayed him.

  Two men, he did not know their names, lay on the deck near the stairs. Both were mercilessly hacked and disemboweled. Waters almost heaved but managed to quell the tremors that ran through his body. He entered the main building by the rear door near the dining room and came upon the scene of another massacre.

  Bodies and hacked limbs lay scattered on the floor like some gruesome butcher shop display. Streaks of blood indicated more bodies dragged unceremoniously from the room. He recognized the corpse of Mike Wilson, a driller, his head lolling at an obscene angle from its half severed neck, dead eyes staring wide open in wonder at his cold plate of meat and potatoes.

  Another worker, Chuck O’Shea, head cook, his whites stained crimson with blood, lay draped over the
dish sink, his back split open like a piece of beef. In all, he counted six bodies, plus the two outside. How could one man, the Digger Man, do all this?

  Waters rushed outside past the empty sleeping quarters to the engineering shack. He passed the smoking hull of the portable metal trailer that had served as a crew quarters but did not stop to check it. The acrid, burnt-flesh smell was overpowering and he knew he could not bear to see what atrocities lay inside it.

  The front of the metal building that served as engineering shack and supervisors’ offices looked as though a bomb had gone off. Metal panels lay smashed forward. The forklift sat at an angle jammed into the room. Waters shivered remembering Dixon’s separate radio description and plea with the Digger Man. No one was there, though pools of blood not yet washed away by the rain told their own obscene story. Two more bodies, one might have been Charles McMann—Waters wasn’t sure because of the massive amount of blood—lay on the deck, disemboweled and lifeless.

  Waters turned the corner and froze, his eyes pulled upward by the horrendous sight of Digger Man swinging from the crane. The red headed mechanic had rods running through his chest that connected to cables and the hook. He had hung himself like a slab of meat. Even this was not enough to satiate his killing frenzy. Once aloft, he had disemboweled himself. His intestines lay in a pile beneath him on the deck. His eye sockets were empty, staring down at Waters like shadows. Waters stood there watching Digger Man’s body swinging in the gathering wind, shuddering as large waves crashed into the platform. The rig shuddered in death spasms. Or birth pains, he thought half deliriously of what evil erupted there.

  Waters went crazy at that moment, he supposed, his mind began to slide slowly into that safe place where emotions could not touch him, watching Digger Man’s corpse gloat over his evil deeds, and this was indeed the Digger Man, not some horrible murdering monster. Looking at him, Waters remembered the quiet man with whom he spent many nights ashore drinking. This was the Digger Man, tortured and mutilated, the victim, not the monster he had become.