Dead Sea (74 page)

Yes, maybe it was all these things and none of them.

A living furnace of shadow-matter that had come to devour the world, the universe, something that was pulling gravity inside-out and collapsing time-space in its wake.

Greenberg saw what his mind told him was a vast, living, breathing honeycomb descending on him, fluttering and blurring, unable to hold its shape or form. It was blown with noxious clouds of searing, scalding vapors and incremating heat. And his last true sensory impression was of …
eyes.

What his disintegrating brain told him were eyes … colossal, luminous-red globular orbs leering from nests of wiry tentacles like whips or eyelashes. Eyes that were steaming like melting reactor cores, burning holes through the dimensional fabric and turning Greenberg’s brain to hot, bubbling mud.

Eyes, eyes, eyes … a million eyes, a billion eyes staring out from a slime of protoplasmic mist.

Eyes that destroy, eyes that devour, eyes that violate and consume and burn, burn, burn, oh dear Christ the burning burning burning static breath …

Eyes that were black holes and quasars and the ravening charnel wastes of dead-end space. Depthless crystalline eyes that burned with a green smoke, chromatic graveyards and diseased moons that washed him down in cosmic rays and gamma rays and phosphorescent streams of cremating atoms that found his mind and gnawed the meat from it and sucked its blood and vacuumed-free its marrow and gnawed its charred bones.

Yes, it found Greenberg and Greenberg pleased it, filled it, satisfied its relentless and voracious appetite. He was burnt offerings beneath the fission of its nuclear winter breath.

Greenberg’s flesh became bubbling wax.

His bones liquified like melted candlesticks.

His skull became a boiling, steaming pot of cold, white radioactive jelly.

And even as his mind was stripped to bone and his muscles and nerve endings and anatomy became running tallow, he felt his hand jerk the cord.

Heard from some distant room, the noose drop over the Fog-Devil, that extradimen-sional abomination, that distortion out of space, out of time.

“Okay,” George was saying, “veer to the left, to the left …”

Menhaus jerked the wheel and they went too far, the needle of the compass swinging far to the right and almost stopping George’s heart with it. But without being told, he brought the boat back until the needle was pointing straight up, attracted by an unknown magnetic influence.

“Hold it there now,” George said. “We’re moving straight at whatever it is …”

Behind them, far, far behind them there was a rumbling sound like thunder. A deafening hollow boom. The fog behind them was lit with a flickering green light.

They knew what it was.

The anti-matter bomb. The collision of dimensions, the big bang.

Seconds now, mere seconds before that shockwave found them, atomized them into mist.

Oh, it was a breathless time. A frenzied time. An insane time. A time when all and everything were balanced on the head of some celestial pin and George could feel the world trembling, waiting to fall, readying itself for that great, godless fall to the pavement far below. He could almost feel that pavement rushing up at him, feel himself impacting with a splatter of blood and bones and memory.

The compass needle began to spin.

George’s heart leaped.

Menhaus muttered, “I think, I think …”

George held the teleporter in his hands. They were shaking badly and he almost dropped it. He held it steady, placed one hand on the scope and the boat began to vibrate, static electricity snapped and crackled all around him making his hair stand on end. The generator hummed, the scope shot out a blue pencil of light that was refracted, boosted, amplified, turned back upon itself and a stream of blue pulsing, ionzed particles shot out into the fog … made the fog glow and seem to momentarily freeze like frost on a window pane.

And then, then …

And then there it was, the fog within a fog, a breath of interdimensional lunacy surging out at them. A vortex, a hole, a tear … and they were plowing right into it, Menhaus jerking the throttle down out of sheer exhileration. There was a blinding flash of light that knocked them right out of their seats and a sickening sense of falling, of drifting, of tumbling through white space and cosmic noise … and, yes, a sensation of speed and distance and time and particulated matter.

And then blackness.

It lasted for less than a minute, but when they opened their eyes and found their bodies, they were gasping for breath. Coughing, gagging, delirious and disoriented. George made it to his knees and crashed back down onto the deck of the cigarette boat.

Panic, just panic … that weird, inexplicable sense of pressure and lack of it, of fullness and emptiness and countless leagues of nothing. Then even that was gone and they were breathing air, good clean air that filled their lungs and revitalized them.

Panting, George sat up.

It was black, blacker than black.

The boat was rocking as small, choppy waves bumped it to and fro. And overhead, overhead George could see-

Stars.

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

I
N THE END THERE was irony.

Irony in that after all those days or weeks spent in that other place, that bad place, they came out in what George figured was the Atlantic and they were just as lost as ever. When they got their bearings and decided they were actually home, really and honestly home, George turned on one of the cockpit lights and looked at the compass. It was pointing to what he figured was magnetic north. No deviation, no nothing.

And when that happened and the wonder of it all had faded, if only momentarily, George read the compass and pointed his finger. “That way’s east, Olly, that’s where land will be.”

So Menhaus fired up the cigarette boat and they headed east, the cigarette boat glad to be back in the sea, the real sea, back in water it understood. In reacted in kind, firing off into the night like a rocket, cutting through those black waters and kicking up a gout of spray in its wake.

George turned on the radio.

What he was hoping for was a station. Any station. News or music or anything that would tell them, yes, you’re back in the right century. But all they got was static. Maybe it was the radio and maybe atmospheric disturbance and maybe, just maybe, the worse sort of portent.

“We’re home,” Menhaus kept saying. “I know we’re home.”

George knew they were, too. The only question was, what year it might be.

But there would be time for that, wouldn’t there?

Because right then the air smelled salty and fresh and cool, no fog or stagnance or floating seaweed. No, nothing but the sea and the night and the boat beneath them taking them to a place either they would know or to one where they and their boat would be freaks, out of place and out of time. Regardless, breaking free of the Dead Sea, there was hope. It burned brightly and their souls burned with it. With the lifting of that perpetual fog, even in the darkness and starlight, they felt free, absolutely unbound. Around them they could feel the spaces and distance and it was good to be free of the fog and its claustrophobia.

But, there was irony.

The next day the sun burned hot and the sea became a mirror and the heat was almost unbearable. George had forgotten just how bright the sun was. By late afternoon, the cigarette boat had exhausted the last of the fuel and there was nothing to do but drift and hope.

When night came, George fell asleep.

Maybe for an hour, maybe less. But when he woke up, Menhaus was shaking him roughly.

“Wake up, Sleeping fucking Beauty! Wake up!”

When George did he saw what Menhaus was seeing: a plane. Far overhead, its lights blinking on and off. George fumbled out the flare gun and popped a flare into it. Then he took aim on the plane like he wanted to shoot it down.

The flare lit up the sea and sky.

Then there was nothing to do but wait and hope.

It was the next morning when they caught sight of the Coast Guard cutter. She had a high, ice-breaker bow and, thankfully, no sails. She looked modern in every respect. In every possible detail. George even saw a helicopter waiting on the flight deck like a wasp sunning itself. The cutter caught sight of them, circled and dropped two rubber boats into the sea.

“This is it, George,” Menhaus said. “This is really fucking it.”

“Yes,” George said, overwhelmed by it all.

He felt a curious sense of disorientation, like he’d just woken from a dream. And that’s what it had been, right? A dream? All a crazy, insane dream? Sure, it had to be, he got to thinking. For chrissake, George decided he did not believe in magnetic vortices and other dimensions, did not believe in fog-shrouded anti-worlds and sea monsters and aliens and ship’s graveyards and Fog-Devils. No, he did not believe in any of that and he certainly didn’t believe in the Dead Sea and Dimension X.

Only a crazy man believed shit like that.

But when he closed his eyes, heard those boats getting closer, he could see it all and he could see Gosling and Marx and Cook and Fabrini and, yes, Saks. And Cushing. Good old Cushing with that wonderful mind of his. And Elizabeth who never escaped that place. Sure, in the bright daylight, places like that could not be … but when you closed your eyes? You knew they existed.

Menhaus said, “I can’t wait to see my bitchy, fat wife and my garage. Isn’t that funny? I been thinking about my garage.” He laughed, then stopped. “George … what the hell are we going to tell these people?”

George thought it over and the lie came easy. “We don’t really know what happened. Got lost in the fog, hit something and went down. You and me were on a lifeboat, then we found this boat drifting. We jumped on board.”

“They won’t believe that … will they?”

George put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “Sure they will. Trust me, buddy, that’s exactly what they want us to say. Nothing more, nothing that will look funny on their reports, just simple bullshit they can write down and will let them sleep at night.”

The lead boat came in closer and the sailor in the rear cut the engine.

“Ahoy there!” an officer in khaki dress said from the front of the boat. “You in trouble here?”

Menhaus laughed. “Brother, don’t you know it.”

He helped Menhaus aboard, but George hesitated. “What the hell year is it?”

The officer and sailors looked at one another and then the officer told him.

George and Menhaus were smiling.

They’d done it, they’d actually done it.

Before he climbed onto the rubber boat, George picked up the teleporter and tossed it overboard. It floated for a moment and then went underwater, down into the depths below where it belonged.

“What was that?” the officer asked.

“Oh, that?” George laughed as he came aboard. “That’s just my science project … but I don’t care much for science anymore.”

Then he was in the boat and Menhaus couldn’t seem to stop grinning.