Dead Sea (10 page)

Nobody needed prompting.

They threw the hatch cover in place and started turning those bolts into the flange until they could turn them no more. All the while, gagging on the cloud of CO
²
and the stench of the beast. Coughing, Marx put the ratchet on the bolts and locked the cover in place.

There were no more sounds from below.

Everyone was panting and gasping, just beside themselves with a combination of horror and nausea and bunched nerves.

When Morse found his breath, he said, “Seal off those outlets below, Chief. And … drain that goddamn tank. Flood it with bleach or bug spray or anything you fucking got.”

Under the circumstances, it made perfect sense.

“Hey, Paul.”

Gosling heard his name spoken and nearly jumped. Lots of things made him jump now. But it was just George Ryan, out taking a walk or something. He was leaning up in the corridor outside the crew’s mess smoking a cigarette.

“Are you doing a little detective work?”

Gosling cleared his throat of whatever had been stuck in it. “No. Why the hell would I be doing something like that?” he said a little more sternly than he intended.

“Why wouldn’t you? You’re just as curious as the rest of us, aren’t you?”

“There’s nothing to be curious about.”

George ran thin fingers through his matted beard. He dragged slowly off his cigarette. “Isn’t there?”

“No, there isn’t.”

Christ, this was the last thing Gosling needed right now. It hadn’t even been an hour yet since they danced the nasty with that fucking worm and he was beginning to wonder if it had happened at all. Morse was up in his cabin, trying to figure out their next move. Gosling himself had taken a hot shower and still he could smell that thing on him … that sharp stink of carrion. What he didn’t need right now was George Ryan reading his mind.

George laughed. “No, I guess getting lost in some weird fog and having a deckhand go crazy is par for the course at sea. I gotta get out more.”

“Jesus bloody Christ, George. I thought you were smarter than that. I was starting to think that you and Cushing were the only ones with brains on this goddamn ship. I guess I was wrong.”

George was smiling. “Save it,” he said. “Save it for Saks and those other idiots, okay? All the dumb swabbies who’ll swallow anything you guys tell ‘em. I know better”

“And what is it you know?”

“I know you guys are clueless. You don’t know what’s going on here or where we are or how we’re going to get out of any of this. And I also know there’s a lot more to that bit with that deckhand than any of you guys want to let on about. Why don’t you just admit it?”

Gosling just stood there, feeling completely defenseless. There were a lot of things he could have said. Countless lies he could have manufactured. But it would have all been pointless. George had him and he knew it.

“You want me to tell you we’re lost in the Bermuda fucking Triangle, George? You want that?”

“If it’s the truth”

“Well, it’s not, so if you don’t mind, I got work to do,” he said, walking away and leaving George standing there, that amused little grin on his face. Sonofabitch was just too damn smart for his own good.

Gosling made his way topside and coming up that companionway, he started to get a bad feeling. There was no real reason for it. But, regardless, it descended on him and filled him with a bitter sense of hopelessness, an anxiety that left him feeling utterly helpless. He paused there, leaning up against the bulkhead, and he honestly didn’t have the strength to face any of it. Things had already happened that were beyond anything rational and they would keep happening. Keep happening, he figured, until he was drained dry, without an ounce of fight left in him. And that was really the problem, wasn’t it? Gosling was a handson sort of guy. Very blue-collar, very working class. He was not the imaginative sort. His world was very black and white, the perimeters very well-defined. He asked very little of reality other than for it to always be the same.

And now this.

It was just too goddamn much.

He started up the steps again, telling himself in no uncertain terms to suck it in. He was the First and that meant people looked to him. Looked to him for strength and stability. Sometimes, when the going got rough, the First was the only thing standing between chaos and calm.

Gosling came out of the hatch into that boiling fog and right away, he knew there was trouble. Just as something in him had suspected. Somebody was hollering, crying out frantically.

“Now fucking what?” Gosling said under his breath.

It was coming from somewhere in front of the superstructure, somewhere out on the bow. Gosling made his way forward, that fog thicker than pillow down. He could hear one of the men shouting about something and then the sound of feet running in his direction. The fog whistle sounded, as it did every few minutes, but this time it made him jump.

One of the deckhands — Pollard — came bounding out of that soup, his eyes wide and wet and his mouth trying to form words.

Gosling took hold of him and slammed him up against the bulkhead. “What in the Christ are you yelling about?” he snapped at him.

“It … it was … I saw … oh Jesus, Mr. Gosling, he was right there and then he was gone and I saw it! I fucking saw it!” He was blabbering on and not making a lick of sense so Gosling shook him like a rag doll. Things like this he could handle. Men out of control, men about to shit their drawers because the sea had kicked their legs out from under them. “There was … there was … shit, I was out on the bow and Burky, you know Burky, First … well he was on watch, out on the bow and something got him! Just fucking
grabbed
him! He was four feet from me and I saw it, I saw something come out of the fog, First!” He slid down the bulkhead, making a pained, sobbing sound. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
“It came out of the fog and grabbed Burky! Pulled him away and there wasn’t anything I could do!”

Gosling pulled him to his feet. “All right, take it easy. Take a deep breath. I think you’re hyperventilating, by Christ.”

Pollard was just a kid. This was his second run on the
Mara Corday.
He’d spent a couple years in the Coast Guard and signed on as a deckhand, wanted nothing better than to get his mate’s ticket. He chewed his lips, pulling air hard through his nose.

“Now what did you see?” Gosling put to him.

“Something …” He shook his head. “Something came out of the fog … I saw a dark blur … and, damn, it was big, whatever it was it was real big.” He looked at Gosling, maybe to see if the first mate and his superior was going to laugh dead in his face. But Gosling was not laughing; he was just staring. “It just grabbed him, First, grabbed him real quick … I think, I think it had wings … big, black wings … and it just yanked Burky off his feet and pulled him off the deck and out into the fog.”

Gosling gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Listen to me now. I want you to go below to your cabin and I want you to lay down. That’s an order.”

“But I got watch,” he said. “I was going to replace Burky.”

“You let me worry about the watch. Just go below and take it easy and don’t go telling anybody about this. We don’t need a general panic here.”

Pollard nodded. “Okay, okay I will. But … what’s with this fog, First? What the hell gives here?”

Gosling just sent him below. He stood there, watching that awful fog billow and surge. It was bad. By God, it was real bad. But Gosling was almost glad it
was
there, hiding things, masking others. For if it cleared, he was almost afraid of what they might see out there.

And what might see them.

Iverson was at the wheel, steering the freighter through the fog, and Gosling was at the chart table making computations the old fashioned way. With a pencil and quadrant laid over a chart of their last confirmed position, he had plotted their course … he hoped. But without working compasses, LORAN, GPS, or even a plain old star to pinpoint their position, they were sailing blind and he knew it.

He was just going through the motions.

But, honestly, he didn’t know what else to do.

“Come left to one-twenty-three,” he told Iverson.

“Aye, sir, one-twenty-three and holding.”

“Rudder amidships and keep her so,” Gosling said. He scribbled a few figures on the chart. “Mark your head.”

“One-twenty-three, sir, steady on”

Gosling sighed, staring down at the chart. In the old days with a good compass and a few stars, it was all you needed. Gosling was a good navigator and he had complete faith in his ability to navigate the old-fashioned way. But out here, out in this damnable sea on the far side of the Devil’s asshole, all he was doing was making wild, desperate guesses. He was changing their heading just about every hour on the hour, hoping they’d sail clear of that damn fog.

But it wasn’t happening and he had a nasty feeling it never would.

“Sir … the radar,” Iverson said, a note of panic in his voice.

But Gosling was already on his feet, the alarm of the collision-avoidance radar pulling him from his daydreaming. He stood before the console. What he was seeing nearly filled the screen and the
Mara Corday
was on a collision course with it. Something, according to the radar, that was about the size of a football field.

“Right hard rudder!” he called out.

Iverson spun the wheel and the ship canted to starboard. Everybody on board was feeling it now, that sudden drastic shift. Gosling was staring intently at the radar screen. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t a ship. It was big as one, but it was just too low in the water. The
Mara Corday
missed it by a matter of feet. As whatever in the hell it was swung past the freighter’s port side, it vanished from radar … then reappeared, only it wasn’t a single immense object, but a school of smaller blips each about the size of a station wagon, according to the screen. As it or
they
passed, they vanished from radar again and did not come back.

Gosling felt something in him drop. It had been close. Damn close. He exhaled, wiped a dew of sweat from his face. “Come left to one-twenty-three,” he said.

“Aye, one-twenty-three,” Iverson repeated. He was breathing hard himself. “What in the fuck was that?”

“Hell if I know. Whatever it was, we almost hit it.” Gosling sank into his chair at the chart table. “I thought … I thought maybe it was an overturned hull riding that low … then it broke up into something like a pod of goddamn whales. You log it.”

The door at the rear of the pilothouse opened and Morse appeared. He did not look happy. “What in the hell’s going on, Mister?”

“We came over hard,” Gosling told him. “Something … something bearing down on us.”

“What?”

The question was addressed to Gosling, but Iverson couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Ghosts, sir,” he said, tittering under his breath. “Just ghosts.”

The captain’s Christian name was Arlen Morse.

The sea was in his blood and always had been. When other boys had wanted to be Major League ball players or pilots or locomotive engineers, Morse had only wanted to be a sailor. He wanted to be ship’s master and have a craft of his own. Something big, something powerful, something important. In his twenty years in the Navy he’d helmed destroyers, tankers, minesweepers, patrol boats, light cruisers, and even tugs. It was his life and he wanted no other.

Then one day the Navy soured for him. He’d been a petty officer. Then, through ROTC, had made ensign. He climbed through the ranks to captain almost effortlessly. He did what he was told and in the way he was told to do it. There were only two types of men in any navy — those who followed orders and went by the book and those that didn’t. And those that didn’t went nowhere.

Morse played the game by the rules.

And in the end, the rules turned on him.

He had command of his own ship but that was it. Because he was not an Annapolis graduate he would never go beyond where he already was. His career was over. And this is why he left the Navy. Took his retirement at twenty years and went into the commercial service. He had no regrets. Life had been good to him.

Then came this voyage.

Like any other sailor, he’d heard stories and yarns from day one. Some sailors, it seemed, were more afraid of the water than kids were of dark closets. They made up stories. Missing ships were snatched by malefic forces or gobbled up by sea monsters. Howling winds were the moaning, disembodied voices of the drowned dead. Odd patches of mist were ghost ships. Stories of spooks and monsters and haunted seas were numerous.

Every sailor had a story.

But they were just that.

Stories.

But now Morse was really beginning to wonder.

The next bad thing happened toward morning.

The night seeped by like tar, slow and drawn-out, just as black and enveloping. Every man on board wanted daylight, hoping, praying maybe that it would burn off the fog and bring the world back to them. For everyone, even the ones who had not witnessed any of the true madness with their own eyes, was certain that they were lost now, lost in some terrifying plane of madness. Maybe it was the stories circulating like colds bugs, tall tales certainly no worse than the raw, unflinching reality of the situation. And maybe it was just something every man felt right down to his marrow, a sense that Hell had unzipped beneath them and swallowed them whole.

So the night moved toward day.

According to the ship’s digital chronometer, it was just after four a.m. when the shit duly landed and sprayed in every conceivable direction. Gosling, unable to sleep, unable to close his eyes without seeing immense mutant sea worms, was in the pilothouse. Pierce was at the wheel. At the chart table Gosling was drifting off, his eyes finally closing.

Then Pierce started shouting, spinning the wheel and moving the rudder hard to the right. About that time, the deckhand out on watch was on the intercom:
“Barge… bearing down on us! We’re gonna collide! Hard over! Hard over! She’s running with no fucking lights on, no fucking lights…”