Dead Sea

1

George’s first impression was that he and Gosling were alone out there.

His second impression was a feeling: panic.

Combined, these things made him want to scream and thrash like some little kid drowning in a bathtub. But slowly, slowly, he got it under control. He was with Gosling. Gosling was an experienced sailor

…if anyone could keep him alive and get him to dry land, it would be the First Mate. That provided a certain sense of security. It wasn’t exactly something you could wrap yourself up in and go to sleep with, but it was something.

They heard voices in the distance from time to time, but when they called out no one answered. There were a few bits of scattered light from burning objects still afloat, but one by one, they went out. And then all there was was that ever-present fog, thick and roiling. It still had that odd luminosity to it… like it was backlit by the glowing beam of some distant lighthouse. If nothing else, it provided scant illumination.

Just enough, George figured, to make everything look weird and surreal.

And creepy.

Because there was no other word to describe it. For that’s exactly how it looked out there with that fog and the odd glow: creepy.

Sure, George was trying damn hard not to panic, but the bottom line here was that they were out in the middle of fucking nowhere without a lifeboat or a life raft and it was night and by dawn their life jackets would be saturated and they’d drown. That is if the sharks didn’t get them first. His mind had already sketched that particular nightmare out in some detail. He kept remembering scenes from that movie where the big shark gobbles people up. He kept wondering what it would feel like when those teeth sank into him. Would it be a big goddamn shark that would swallow him whole or would it be a smaller monster that would maybe bite his leg off? He’d seen a show once where a shark did that to a shipwreck victim. It just kept coming around, taking bites and pieces.

Oh, Jesus.

This can’t be fucking happening, he thought frantically. This only happens to guys on the late movie. Shit like this doesn’t come down on normal guys like me who run bulldozers for a living and are just trying to keep the creditors at bay-

“HELP!” he started screaming. “IS ANYBODY OUT THERE? GODDAMN YOU ANSWER ME RIGHT NOW FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!”

There was no answer. Just that brooding silence. And that odd sort of humming he could hear from time to time.

“You feel better now?” Gosling said. “Good. Now knock it off for chrissake. We’re not dead yet.”

George kept treading water as if he didn’t trust the lifejacket. “Oh, you’re a real fucking comfort,” he panted.

“Quit splashing around,” Gosling told him. “Just lay back like me. The jacket’ll float you. All the racket might attract interest”

“Sharks?”

“No,” Gosling said. “That’s not what I was thinking exactly.”

And George honestly didn’t have the balls to follow that one up. Not sharks? What, then?

“Don’t panic. We’ll be fine. But there’s no sense in wasting energy treading water when you don’t have to.”

George swallowed and let himself float. It wasn’t bad. It was almost relaxing just bobbing there.

“Are there really sharks out here?” he asked.

“Who can say? This is the ocean, George, lots of things call it home. It’s a food chain like any other.”

Shit. “Will they get us?”

“Not if I can help it.” He must’ve sensed the panic in George’s eyes. “All right, listen to me and listen good. There are two things that attract sharks. The first is doing what you were doing — splashing around. What you’re doing when you do that is drawing attention to yourself. You’re acting like a fish in distress. You’re sending off the same signals. The second thing that attracts sharks is blood. They can smell it in the water. I’ve heard they can smell it for miles. So don’t thrash around and don’t bleed. Simple.”

George started checking out every ache and pain in his body to see if he had any cuts. He didn’t think so. “You didn’t cut your leg back there, did you?”

“No, I just twisted it. Relax. Wait for the dawn. We’ll be fine.”

And that was easy for him to say, George thought dismally. Big, tough sailor-boy. But George was no sailor and after this little party he was moving to fucking Kansas. He never wanted to see open water again. He didn’t think he’d ever even go swimming again. And if he did, there wouldn’t be anything bigger than tadpoles in said water, thank you very much.

Which made him start remembering things. The panic… the fire and screaming and confusion… the ship going down… sure, it had all blotted out other things for awhile, darker thoughts about that awful fog and the stories circulating concerning it. You know, all that cute, amusing stuff about the Devil’s Triangle and that sort of thing.

But now it was back.

Now it was digging down inside him and it had teeth.

He thought: What if any of that crazy hoodoo bullshit is true? It’s bad enough to abandon ship, but to abandon ship in some fucking crazy dead zone that chews up ships and men, swallows ‘em alive and kicking…

Jesus, it was all bad, wasn’t it?

And not just that weird fog and all the rest, but even the sea itself. So calm, so warm. Unnaturally warm, it seemed. And its consistency just wasn’t right. Not like water really, too oily, too thick, too something. Like it was full of suspended sediment, closer to gelatin than water. It left a slimy residue on the skin.

And it stank. Like something decomposing under a log.

George sucked in a sharp breath, tried to fight the fear, the uncertainty, tried to hold it all together which was not easy. Felt like his guts, his resolve was strung together out of thread and spit.

For now there was survival. Nothing more. He had to remember that.

“Do you think it’ll be long before we’re picked up?” George asked Gosling. And from the tone in his voice — a squeaky, breathless tone — he realized he sounded like some little kid that needed reassuring that there were indeed no monsters in the closet or under the bed.

“Depends” Gosling’s voice was practically a whisper. There was something very guarded about it.

“On what?”

“On a lot of things,” he said. “If the current pushes us out of the shipping lanes, it could be awhile. If it doesn’t, I would say a boat’ll be by any time. Probably in the morning or afternoon. Hopefully. If not, well, we’ll be reported overdue in Cayenne tomorrow night… or tonight actually.”

What George was hearing in his voice he did not like at all. It sounded like Gosling was reading from a script, like he didn’t believe a goddamn word of what he was saying. If there was an undercurrent there, it was saying, sure, George, they’ll be looking for us. Same way they look for lots of ships that vanish without a trace…

“How long will these jackets float us?”

“Long enough. Maybe.”

“Shit.”

“Don’t worry. First light we’ll have a look around, see what we can find. Should be lots of junk floating around. Usually is.”

George could see his silhouette in the murky light, figured he was lying his ass off about a lot of things. And maybe it wasn’t that exactly, but it was something. So George decided to bait him a bit: “Shouldn’t somebody be here by now? A rescue ship? A plane? A helicopter?”

“Why?”

“Because of the distress signal.”

Gosling exhaled sharply. “I think they might have a little trouble finding us. Being where we are.”

“Which is?”

But Gosling would not answer him. And that seemed to be the worst thing of all.

2

“You know something, Fabrini,” Saks said. “If they ever come out with an asshole of the year award, I’m putting you up for it.”

Fabrini gave him the finger even though it was invisible in the semi-darkness.

“You think anyone else made it?” Menhaus asked.

“Course they did,” was all Saks would say.

“Yeah, well don’t hold your breath,” Fabrini said sourly.

“Shut your hole, shit-fer-brains. I told you, I told the both of you to get to the freaking lifeboats. But did you?” Saks slapped his palm into the water. “No, you two ass guppies sat there clinging to each other like you were queer for each other. So you swapped some spit and fell in love and this is where it got us.”

“Fuck you,” Fabrini mumbled.

The three of them were clinging to a large wooden crate. In addition to their lifejackets, they were safe for the time being. Saks had found the two of them dog-paddling through the surf like confused puppies. With his usual grace he’d directed them away from the boat. Until Menhaus bumped his nose into the crate. Then the trouble started. Both Fabrini and Menhaus did their best to clamor onto it. No dice. The crate spun in the water. They started screaming and hollering, fighting each other to get on top — so much for their pledge of watching each other’s behinds. Saks had to intervene and explain to them just what sort of mud-bathing, shit-eating farmyard critters their mothers had had sex with to give birth to a couple of candy-assed losers like them. After a good five minutes of abuse, they calmed down. They clung to different sides of the crate. In this way, they could float peacefully and safely.

Menhaus was watching the fog, knowing there was something damn funny about it, but not wanting to point it out to the others. Hoping, maybe, that it was just his imagination. Nothing more.

“No, Menhaus,” Saks went on, “I just don’t know what you see in Fabrini. What makes you wanna tongue him all night is beyond me. He’s hung like a pencil stub and dumber than a box of stale rat shit. I don’t get it.”

Menhaus forced a chuckle.

“We get out of this, fuckface,” Fabrini ranted, “and me and you are going to have business. You know what I’m saying, asshole?”

“Yeah, I know what you’re saying, you little ass jockey,” Saks said in disgust. “And you should see me. I’m just blushing over here. I’ve never had my dick sucked by a wop before.”

“You fuck,” Fabrini grumbled. “You suck. I’ll kill you.” He lost his grip and slid back into the water. The crate bobbed wildly. He fought to get a hold, but kept slipping and slipping. Panicking now, he began thrashing wildly in the water. Finally his fingertips caught a seam and he hoisted himself up.

“Shit,” he panted. “Jesus.”

“Quit fooling around, turd brain,” Saks snapped.

“Both of you quit,” Menhaus said flatly. “I’m sick of listening to you. For God’s sake we’re not in the poolroom here, we’re out in the middle of the ocean and I for one don’t wanna drown because you two are acting like a couple brats.”

“Shit,” Fabrini said.

“He’s right, Fagbrini,” Saks murmured. “Let’s just take it easy here. Save our strength. We might need it. I know you two’ll need all the strength you can muster once you get on dry land and start raping each other.”

“Goddammit, Saks,” Menhaus said.

“Sorry. I just never thought I’d be stuck in the middle of the goddamn ocean with a couple guys like you. Jesus H. Christ.”

“Shut up, Saks,” Fabrini said, sounding tired, finished.

“Yeah, I’ll shut up. I think we all should shut up. Do us some good. Especially Fagbrini here. We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for him stroking your salami, Menhaus, instead of seeing to the boat.”

“Fuck you and your father,” Fabrini said.

“My father? Shit, least he taught me how to follow instructions. Yer old man was too busy screwing the neighbor’s poodle to teach you any sense.”

Menhaus rested his face against the cool damp of the crate, wishing, praying for rescue. Anything. Right now, even sharks sounded better than listening to these two picking at each other.

Jesus, had to be another ship out here.

Didn’t there?

But Menhaus wasn’t so sure. In fact, you came right down to it, he wasn’t sure about a lot of things. Where they were. That damn fog. That funny smell. None of it seemed right. He couldn’t put a finger on it exactly, but something in his guts was telling him this was all terribly wrong, that being shipwrecked was the least of their problems.

“I wonder where the hell we are?” Fabrini said under his breath, but they heard him, all right.

Saks grumbled something and Menhaus didn’t say a word. Was almost afraid to. Because, like the Mara Corday herself, he simply could not find his center. His compass was spinning wildly.

“Somewhere in the Atlantic, I guess,” Menhaus found himself saying, hoping that was true.

But Fabrini just grunted. “You think so? You really think so?”

Menhaus was waiting for Saks to say something smart-assed, something crude and insulting, but humorous. Something that would defuse that awful, biting tension. But he didn’t say a thing and Menhaus felt something inside him clench just a little tighter. He stared off into that milky, shimmering mist and was seeing it now as something completely unnatural, something alive and aware and hungry.

It eats people alive, a voice in his head was telling him, echoing up from some dark, lonely place like the bottom of a well. It sucks down ships and tosses people into this godawful soup and then slowly, patiently, it devours them.

But that was just nerves talking. Nerves hot-wired by stress and anxiety and fear of the unknown. And Menhaus was not going to listen to them. He was going to be as tough as the other two, take it all with a grin or a smirk.

Yeah, right.

Bobbing there at the crate, he stuck his hand into the water, knowing just as George Ryan knew that there was something damn funny about it.

“What the hell are you doing, Menhaus?” Saks wanted to know. “You’re not drinking that stuff, are you?”

Menhaus assured him he wasn’t. “It feels funny, doesn’t it? The water? Thick or something?”

“It’s like Jello right before it sets,” Fabrini said. “Goddamn soup.”

“Just oil from the ship. That’s all it is,” Saks put in.

And it sounded pretty good. Problem was, nobody was buying such a pat explanation and you could hardly blame them. Because it wasn’t just the water here, but everything. Everything was off in this place, everything was missing the mark somehow… not feeling exactly like it should and there was just no way to account for it.

“It ain’t oil, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Jesus… feel this stuff… it’s like slime, it’s heavy, swampy, I don’t know what.”

And as they argued back forth about it-they would argue pretty much about anything-Menhaus started getting some ideas, but he wasn’t about to voice them. Wasn’t about to say that, yes, it was slimy and not only that but salty and tepid and thick like watered-down gelatin. And that if he had to say what it reminded him of, he would have said amniotic fluid. A warm, vaporous bath of organic broth, seething and simmering like they were floating in the world’s largest placenta. Because he remembered reading once, back in high school, that placental fluid was chemically very close to the composition of earth’s primordial oceans. An organic flux of potential.

“This isn’t worth arguing about,” he finally said, sick of listening to the both of them.

Fabrini snorted. “Who’s arguing?”

“Shut up,” Saks said. “Both of you. Listen… I hear something out there.”

And that pretty much shut everyone down. They listened, feeling their own hearts beating, breath in their lungs. Because out there, out in that churning mist, they were expecting nothing good.

Menhaus heard it right away and was surprised he hadn’t before: a distant thudding sound, like something was scraping harshly against something else. Thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk.

“Oars,” Fabrini said. “Those are oars… somebody’s rowing out there.”

And he was right, they all suddenly realized.

For what they were hearing were the sound of oars rasping against oarlocks, creaking and groaning in the night. The sound began to get closer, though it was truly hard to say from what direction it was coming.

“Hey!” Fabrini cried out, certain rescue was coming. “Hey! Over here! We’re over here!”

And then Saks was shouting, too, both of them calling out into the fog, their voices coming back at them with an eerie sibilance. Menhaus did not join them, for he did not like the sound of that rowing. It was too frantic, too hurried, too panicked-sounding.

It was not a gentle, searching rowing here, but the sound of escape.

But Saks and Fabrini did not seem to notice or want to and they kept at it… kept at it until a high, keening sort of scream came echoing out of the fog. It was shrill and hysterical, almost feminine or girlish in its wailing.

Nobody was saying anything then.

And out in the mist, there was more than one scream now. Men were howling and crying out and the sound of their voices were absolutely terrified. Menhaus and the others heard the timbre of those voices and it shut something down in them, pulled each man into himself. For whatever was happening to those unknown men in that unseen boat, it must have been horrible.

The screams were intermittent now.

“Somebody’s in trouble,” Fabrini said low in his throat. “Maybe we should paddle our crate over there, maybe we should… should do something.”

And Saks said, quite calmly: “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.”

And, for once, Fabrini did not disagree.

The three of them waited in the torpid water, listening and hearing and wanting dear God to be anywhere but where they were. Because they were locked down with terror now, three little boys hearing something dragging itself up the cellar stairs in the dead of night.

And maybe had it ended there with a big, fat mystery, they could have written it off. But it did not end. For they heard splashing and thudding sounds, men stumbling in a boat. Hollow, knocking sounds. Wet sounds. And then coming through it all, the tormented, insane voice of a man screaming, “Oh God oh God oh God help me help somebody help me don’t let it touch me don’t touch me DON’T TOUCH ME-”

And then it was cut off by a violent smashing sound like a steel girder had slammed into the boat out there. Menhaus felt something evaporate inside of him, maybe his blood and maybe his soul, and his skin went tight and his muscles bunched and compressed involuntarily as if they were trying to make his body smaller, less of a target. He had no spit in his mouth and no will to do anything but grip that crate harder.

For what came next was worse.

It sounded at first like something immense and fleshly had pulled itself up out of a swamp and then there was a low, bellowing snarl that reminded Menhaus of maybe a tiger roaring into a tunnel. It rose up, savage and guttural, echoing through the night. And then… then it was followed by tearing and rending noises, splattering sounds and a wet snapping. And finally, the chewing, grating sound like a dog gnawing on a steak bone.

Menhaus was breathing so hard he was nearly hyperventilating. He didn’t mean to speak, but his voice came bubbling from his lips. “Make it stop, dear Christ, make it stop…”

And he felt Saks’s hand gripping his arm like maybe he wanted to tear the limb free. “Quiet,” he said sharply. “For the love of God, be quiet.”

And out in the fog, there were a few more splashing and sliding sounds and then the night went quiet and dead and there was only the three of them.

Waiting.

Wondering when it would be their turn.

3

“I think it’s a hatch cover,” Cushing said, running his hands along the long rectangular object before them. It was thick and sturdy and seemed about large enough for six men.

“It won’t sink?” Soltz said.

“No, not this. Hang on.”

Cushing pulled himself up on it. It received his weight easily. He crawled over its wet, smooth surface. It was an overturned hatch cover, all right. Maybe the one that was blown off the starboard cargo hold, he figured.

“Help me up,” Soltz said. “Please hurry.”

Cushing grabbed him by his lifejacket and heaved him forward. After some frantic clawing, Soltz was onboard.

“We are the only survivors,” Soltz said. “I know it now.”

Cushing sighed. “No, we’re not. We can’t be.”

“We might as well accept the inevitable, my friend,” Soltz said, filled with sadness like a little boy who’d lost his puppy. “We are dead men. It’s only a matter of how and when.”

“Stop talking like that. Somebody’ll pick us up after first light.”

Soltz chuckled grimly. “Yes, yes, of course.”

Cushing stared out into the nebulous mist, saying nothing. If Soltz was going to die, he only hoped it would be soon.

Soltz cradled his head in his hands “My sinuses are aching. This damp chill… I can’t take it for long. I’ll be dead of pneumonia long before any boat arrives” He started hacking, then sneezing. “It’s this awful air… I can barely breathe it.”

“We’ll drift clear of it sooner or later,” Cushing told him.

But Soltz didn’t seem to believe that. “Why… why does it smell like this? Like something dead and gassy? That’s not normal, is it? Well, is it? C’mon, Cushing, you know things like this… should air be smelling like that, even at sea?”

Cushing rubbed his eyes. Soltz. Jesus. The guy was a wreck under the best of circumstances, but this… well, it was even worse now. Of all the people to be shipwrecked with. But he did have a point there. That smell was not normal. It was stagnant, cloying like a malarial swamp in the armpit of the Amazon.

No, it wasn’t right.

No more than any of this was right.

“Yeah, it smells funny, but don’t worry about it. It’s just the fog. When morning comes… well, it’ll burn the fog off.”

“Then what?”

Cushing just studied his shape in the dimness. “What do you mean?”

Soltz kept swallowing, like he was trying to keep his stomach down. “When the fog lifts… what will we see out there?”

4

The lifeboat was big enough for a dozen men.

Cook and the crewmen he’d found floating — Crycek and Hupp — were the only ones on board. Just the three of them with plenty of room to stretch out in that sixteen-foot orange fiberglass hull. Everything they needed to survive, including an inflatable canopy, was onboard. They had everything from burn cream to seasickness pills, fishing line to survival blankets, chocolate bars to purified water. The Mara Corday’s emergency equipment was top-notch, well-maintained and updated before each voyage. It was the first mate’s responsibility and Paul Gosling did not take it lightly. Yes, Cook knew, they had everything to survive, but they still had no idea where they were.

Basically, what they had was a roomy prison cell floating in the sea, at the whim of the elements and current or lack of the same. There was food. There was water. There were oars.

But there was no escape.

All dressed up, Cook thought, and nowhere to go.

“Christ,” Crycek said. “When will this goddamn fog lift?”

Cook didn’t bother answering that, because he was of the opinion that it might never lift. And if it did… well, no matter. He’d heard the stories the sailors had been telling before the ship went down. He was certain Crycek had heard them, too.

“Is he still unconscious?” Cook asked, looking over at Hupp.

“Yes,” Crycek said. “I rather doubt he’ll wake at all.”

Hupp was the first assistant engineer and he was in a bad way. He was badly burned and banged-up from one of the explosions. Like Crycek, Cook’s knowledge of medicine was strictly limited. He’d examined Hupp in the glow of a chemical lightstick, but that didn’t tell him much. But judging from the fever boiling in his blood and the awful, hot stink wafting off of him, it looked very grim.

Cook had been the first to see the lifeboat. It had probably been blown clear of the ship’s davits — along with its equipment during one of the final thundering detonations, Cook figured — and had managed to right itself in the flat seas. He found it within minutes after swimming clear of the ship. Sometime later, an hour or so, he’d found the two crewmen. Crycek was wearing a survival suit and Hupp just a lifejacket. Crycek had been holding onto Hupp, in order to keep his head out of the water. Said he found him floating like that, barely conscious.

So there they sat, waiting.

Thinking.

Worrying.

Cook could’ve asked for better companionship than Crycek. The man just sat there brooding in the gloom, clutching a lightstick and refusing to part with it. Much as he refused to part with his day-glo orange survival suit. Like he was expecting them to sink at any moment. But there was more to it than that, Cook knew, for Crycek had been one of the sailors that had manned the rescue boats when that crew member-Stokes, Cook remembered-had lost his mind and jumped overboard. He kept watching the fog like he was expecting something.

Now, Cook was quiet by nature. Not much of a conversationalist, but even when he tried, he couldn’t get much out of Crycek about their search in the fog for Stokes. Crycek got real nervous when Cook brought it up just to pass the time.

And why was that?

All Crycek would say was, “The fog, there’s funny things in the fog” And from the way he said it, you could tell real easy he wasn’t alluding to clowns and dancing bears.

Which made Cook think about all those stories running through the ship, bits about the Devil’s Triangle and things about Stokes being bloodied by something that drove him mad. And that other tidbit he’d gotten from one of the porters, something about the search team having some weird, spooky experiences out in the fog.

Cook didn’t like it.

Didn’t like a lot of this.

Among the equipment stowed on the boat were signaling devices and flares, a manual radio beacon and even a portable VHF radio. Cook had been sending out distress signals for what seemed hours now, calling out for help on the VHF.

So far, nothing but static.

And it was that very static that was bothering him. For it almost sounded at times as if there was something buried in it, a strange distant buzzing sound that came in short, irregular pulses. It rose up and faded away, it seemed, before his ears really got a chance to separate it from the background noise. But it was there, he was sure it was there.

Maybe it was nothing… yet, Cook didn’t believe that. The few brief instances when he’d heard it, it had unsettled him for it did not seem random or undirected. And that should have been a good thing

…but for some crazy reason he didn’t think it was.

What? he asked himself. What is it that bothers you about it so much? What you might be hearing could be just dead noise, atmospheric interference… or maybe the Coast Guard searching you out. Isn’t that a good thing?

He just wasn’t sure.

For nothing was reading right here, from the fog to this soupy becalmed sea, and part of him was certain that if there was an intelligence behind that buzzing, then it was not benevolent in nature.

That was crazy, paranoid thinking, but there was something about the fog that encouraged such wild leaps of irrationality. The buzzing pulses or pings or whatever they were only occurred moments after Cook sent out a voice signal. Maybe that meant absolutely nothing… but what if somebody out there was locking onto those signals and was seeking them out?

This is the very thing that unnerved Cook, the very thing he dared not even admit to himself. Because he couldn’t get one central idea out of his mind: whatever came out of the fog would not be a good thing.

Crycek had heard those sounds when he used the VHF, too. And when he did, he pulled the plug from his ear, said, “Fucking weird… that sound, you hear it? A buzzing. Like there’s some locust out there wanting to talk.”

And that’s exactly what Cook had thought, what had gotten under his skin and stayed there: it did sound like a locust. Like some loathsome insect was trying to make contact.

Of course, if there was someone or something trying to find them, then all it would have to do is follow the emergency radio beacons the boat sent on auto.

You gotta stop it, Cook was telling himself, and you gotta stop it right now.

And he knew he had to. He was not nervous or high-strung by nature and that’s why him feeling this way, thinking these dark things, was even more disturbing.

But he had to keep his head, because he had the feeling that Crycek was right on the edge. And one little push is all it would take.

Cook kept wondering about the others. Had any of the ship’s crew made it? Had any of the construction crew? He found it hard to believe that even the sea could take Saks. It was silly to think of a man like that simply drowning. Maybe a bullet or a knife, but nothing so prosaic as drowning.

And the others?

Well, yes, he could picture the sea taking them.

But not Saks.

Saks was too much like Cook’s father, the belligerent, opinionated sonofabitch who’d beaten his mother to death. Cook had watched it go on for years. Every Friday night his father finished his shift at the mill, sauced himself up on Jack Daniels, and came home walking ten-feet tall and bulletproof, just looking for a fight. And men like that, they always found one sooner or later. And if they couldn’t find one, they created one.

Whether it was genetics or environment, Cook only knew that his father was trash. Asshole is as asshole does.

It was just not Cook’s mother who took it, but Cook himself. Anybody who got in the way. Then the old man lost his job, decided drinking was a vocation, and the beatings became daily. In time, they became extremely vicious. His mother was in and out of the hospital. Broken ribs. Broken jaw. Sprained wrist. A punctured lung. Bruised kidney. And she always covered for the bastard. But she couldn’t cover for him when he threw her down the stairs in a drunken rage and her neck snapped like a twig.

Cook had come home from school and discovered his father weeping over her body, drunk and ugly.

“She fell, goddammit,” he snapped. “And that’s all you gotta know, you little bastard.”

Cook could still remember the sense of acceptance he’d felt. The sense of calm knowing the worst had finally happened. He’d set his books down, went into the den and got the shotgun. He remembered grinning as he chambered a shell. Grinning as he pumped it into his father’s chest.

Self-defense, they’d said.

They were wrong.

It wasn’t self-defense, but it wasn’t murder either; it was eradication, extermination. Much as you eradicated a weed that threatened your garden or exterminated termites that infested your home. Some things had to be done for the good of all.

Yes, Saks was his father reincarnated.

Cook didn’t doubt this.

And if the two of them washed up on a desert island or they were the only ones in a lifeboat, Cook knew what would happen. As soon as Saks closed his eyes, he would kill the bastard.

And smile as he did so.

5

“You ever been shipwrecked before?”

“Once,” Gosling said, “off the coast of Labrador.”

“How long?”

“Six hours before I got picked up. I was a mate on an ore freighter. She was improperly loaded, they said. Ore shifted, snapped her in half. Lost twenty men. I was one of the lucky ones. I floated on a piece of planking until I saw a channel buoy. I made my way to it, waited there. A Coast Guard ship picked me up.”

George floated in the slimy water, wondering maybe if it was contaminated with something. Maybe the ship had been carrying chemicals and maybe that weird water quality was due to the fact that they were bobbing in a sea of toxic waste. Sure, he found himself thinking, you’re probably already poisoned, shit’s eating through your skin.

A normal explanation like that would have been almost preferable.

“Was it better or worse than this?” George asked. “That other time?”

Gosling wouldn’t qualify it, though. “Well, water was cold. And there was this shark that kept circling me. Never came close. Just circled. When I was on the buoy, he finally gave up.”

“Shit, you must’ve been terrified.”

“Was. At first. But after a time and he didn’t attack, I got used to him. Called him Charlie. I talked to him all the time. The only time I was really afraid was at night when I couldn’t see him.”

“And he never attacked?”

“Nope. Never even came close.”

“Well, if a shark comes along,” George said, “you talk to him.”

That made Gosling laugh, only it wasn’t a good sort of laughter.

They floated on, the water around them gelatinous and syrupy, clumps of weed drifting past from time to time. The water was warm like a mud bath, but the air was chill and dank. It made steam boil from the surface. And the fog? Yellow and white, billowing and thick like a fine cottony weave, charged with that ghostly radiance. It was moist on their faces, left a greasy residue on their skin.

That stink was there, too, but they were used to it now and didn’t smell it much more than a bum smells his own body odor.

George was wondering when his lifejacket would get saturated and he’d go down like a brick, down into those awful black depths. The idea of that made him shiver, despite the heat surging around him. It was hard to imagine all that water beneath him. Like some huge alien world that only fish, crawling things, and dead men ever saw. He could almost see it down there himself. Desolate mountain ranges and abyssal pockets of blackness. Like the geography of some distant planet, some submerged graveyard.

George was thinking this, knowing such morbid thoughts were probably not a good idea, and that’s when he saw something drifting in their direction not ten feet away. That crazy shine in the fog was reflecting off its surface which looked smooth and wet and oddly circular.

“Hell is that?” Gosling said, a note of panic in his voice.

George was looking at it, shivering again now, thinking it looked like some immense, rubbery eyeball rising from the depths. And the idea of that made him go hollow inside.

“Jesus… I think,” Gosling began, “I think… I think it’s a survival raft.”

They started paddling over there, Gosling in the lead. George trying to keep up with him. As they got close, George could see it was nothing so fantastic as an eyeball, but something the general shape of a donut. It didn’t look much like a raft, but then he realized it must have inflated upside down. When they boarded the Mara Corday, Gosling went through the drill with all of them. Lifeboat stations and the like. He had explained to them that the survival rafts were in containers and would inflate automatically, that if the containers were submerged in ten or twelve feet of water-like if the ship sank-a hydrostatic mechanism would release the rafts and they’d bob to the surface, inflating.

Gosling and he took hold of the righting strap and heaved back with everything they had. On the third try, the raft broke the suction of the water and flipped over, sending George underwater momentarily. He came back up, gasping and spitting water from his mouth. Maybe he couldn’t smell the stink of it any more… but the taste, the feel of it in his mouth was horrible. Like a mouthful of slime warm as bathwater. Sickening.

Gosling thought it was pretty funny. “I told you she’d come over quick when she did,” he said.

George ignored him. The raft was big now that it was floating right side up, looked something like a tent floating on tubes. Just the feel of it made George feel safer, stronger. His fingers closed on the rungs of its small boarding ladder. He and Gosling hung there for a moment and caught their breath. This, they decided, was an unbelievable bit of luck. And when you considered that heavy fog, it was surely that.

Gosling pulled himself aboard and then helped George in.

“Home sweet home,” George said, curled up on the deck plates.

He was grateful to be out of that water. The raft had a canopy overhead that you could zip free if you needed to. It was wonderful to be in there, to be in a dry enclosed space. The raft was built to accommodate a dozen men, so there was plenty of room.

“She’s a beauty,” Gosling said, “our savior is.”

And she was.

It was well-equipped, George found out, as Gosling pointed out all the features. There were countless pockets for equipment, flares, inflation valves that you could pump with a bellows (included), and a survival kit. The survival kit, probably the most exciting feature, came in a waterproof, rubberized box. It contained 18 pints of fresh water, 8 flares, 2 bailers, fishhooks, fishing line, a signal mirror, flashlight, extra paddles, bellows, a first aid kit, and food. The latter consisted mainly of chocolate, bread, freeze-dried soups and stews, glucose and salt tablets.

There was a line running from one end into the water. George was examining it. “What’s this do?”

“That’s our sea anchor,” Gosling explained. “Sort of like a water parachute. It keeps us from drifting due to the wind.”

“They think of everything,” George said. And they had.

There was even a small waterproof flashlight and extra batteries, a bunch of lightsticks. Using one of them, Gosling set up the radio beacon and VHF radio. He started transmitting right away.

George swigged from a plastic water bottle. “Hell, we should be okay now. I mean, hell, at least we won’t drown. Sooner or later, this fog has to lift and then…”

But he didn’t finish that and Gosling did not comment on it. For that was really what they were both wondering: what came next? What would happen next? Because something had to and that something could either be good or bad. Sure, they were safe and sound in the raft and Gosling was an old hand with survival equipment. He’d keep them alive. But beyond that?

No answers.

No nothing.

Gosling finally gave up on the radio. “Nothing out there. Just static. Kind of a buzzing sound now and then.”

“Do you think it’s a signal?” George asked, trying to keep that hopeful tone from his voice.

Gosling just shrugged, his face artificial-looking in the glow of the lightstick. “If it is, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before.”

George sat there, telling himself he had to be satisfied with what they had because things had definitely improved. And he had to be happy with that. But he wasn’t happy with that, he was not satisfied by any of it.

“Paul,” he said, realizing it was probably the first time he’d called Gosling by his Christian name. “Paul… what the hell is this all about? The fog, the wreck… all of it, it’s not right and we both know it. You had to watch what you said before when we were aboard ship because I was a passenger and you were in charge. But now you might as well come clean… where in the Christ are we?”

Gosling pressed his lips tight, looked stern. Maybe he was formulating a lie, a half-truth, something that would keep George’s spirits buoyant. But in the end, he just shook his head and ran fingers through his graying crewcut. “Don’t know, George. Don’t know where we are or how we got here anymore than you do” He took a sip of water. “Sailors, they like to tell stories and one they’ve been recycling for ages is the one about the Sargasso Sea, the Devil’s Graveyard, the Sea of Lost Ships and all that… some awful place where ships and their crews never return from…”

He recounted the tales of the mythical Sargasso for him, explaining that there was nothing truly mysterious about it. That, yes, lots of ships had disappeared there, many derelicts had been found drifting, but he couldn’t say as to whether it was worse than any other body of water. It was a seaweed-sea, he told George, a floating desert of weed and those weed banks were as large as islands in some places. It was like a whirpool of sorts, with conflicting currents at its edges creating a great dead, weedy area. In the age of sail, ships had been becalmed there and quite a few never escaped. They were found crewed by skeletons. When men did come out, they told unpleasant, disturbing tales of things they’d seen.

“But it doesn’t mean anything, George. It really doesn’t. None of it proves a goddamn thing,” he said, trying to dispel the import of what he’d already said. “There are sane, logical explanations for most of that business. But most sailors? They prefer the more outlandish explanations. Makes for a good spooky tale to pass the hours with.”

George didn’t like any of it, didn’t actually believe it any more than Gosling did… but it accounted for a few things and that’s what dried the spit up in his mouth.

“And you’re saying our last confirmed position was at the edge of the Sargasso Sea? The real Sargasso Sea?” he asked.

Gosling nodded. “Yes. And then…”

But George knew that part.

That fog rolling at them, the air being sucked away… and then they were lost, navigational instruments acting funny. Sure, he knew that part just fine. Gosling wanted very much to dismiss it all, but once the cat was out of the bag, just try and get it back in.

“What if there is something to it, Paul? What if we’ve sailed into one of those dead zones you mentioned, a dead sea? What then? Where in Christ does any of that leave us? What can we do?”

But Gosling just shook his head.

He took his lightstick and went over to the doorway of the canopy, adjusting the drag of the sea anchor. He explained that while there was no wind, they were still moving, being pulled gradually by what he surmised were subsurface currents.

“The anchor will keep us moving in pretty much a straight line,” he said. “Because… yeah, we’re moving, all right… there’s tension on the line. We’re being dragged somewhere.”

George was at the doorway with him, watching the mist out there, moving around them. Patches of red were reflected against it from the flashing beacon atop the raft. Other than that, sometimes the mist was dim and other times brighter. The illumination it threw was about what you got at twilight… things were visible, just not terribly distinct.

Gosling took up a handful of water, examined it by the light of the stick. It was not water as such, but a slime of liquid jelly and sediment in an aqueous suspension. And it was pink in color, almost red it seemed. It smelled like rotten eggs up close.

“That’s not right,” George said. “I’ve never seen water like that.”

Gosling admitted he hadn’t either, but said it reminded him of “red tide”, when patches of ocean went crimson from dense concentrations of microscopic algae. “I don’t recommend drinking it.”

It was the first time George had seen the stuff by true light. And it made him remember that when they’d righted the raft, he’d gotten a mouthful. But he hadn’t swallowed any… he didn’t think so, anyway.

“Fucking place,” he said.

Gosling laughed. “You got that right.”

George cleared his throat, remembering the taste of that slop in his mouth. “I wonder if the others-”

He never finished that, for out of the fog there came a high, keening wail that was strident and ear-piercing. It rose up sharp and whining like a cicada in a summer field, then faded away just as quickly.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, digging at his left ear with a finger. “What the fuck was that?”

Gosling just shook his head.

They sat there in silence, waiting for it to come again, but it never did. There was something about the quality of that wail that was alarming, that got right inside of them and made them want to hold on tight. It reminded George of some high-pitched version of an air raid siren… except he didn’t think it was a mechanical device. He had the crazy, frightening idea that something living had made it. But what that could be, he did not know. Regardless, it left him feeling numb, helpless, wanting to cry out, but not daring to.

“Well,” Gosling said. “Well.”

That pretty much summed it up, for what else was there really to say?

And maybe, given time and peace, they would have tried to figure it out, tried to come up with something rational that would have wrapped it up nicely, but there was no time. For something thudded into the bottom of the raft. Something big, for it lifted the raft up five or six inches and dropped it back down again. George cried out in surprise, maybe it was more of a scream than a cry for Gosling grabbed him by the arm and his grip was like a clamp.

Again, they were waiting.

Whatever it was, it did not strike the raft again. But it passed beneath several times and its wake made the raft bob and sway, sent that jellied sea to rolling in slow, slushy undulations like ripples in a mud hole. George could barely breathe, could barely pull a breath past his lips they were pressed so tight. Gosling’s hand was still on his arm, tight and crushing.

Five minutes later, it had not returned.

“Must have been big,” Gosling finally said, releasing George’s arm. “Must have been goddamn real big.”

Which was exactly what George was thinking. Except the word bouncing through his head was colossal. It was the only one that satisfied his runaway imagination. He was thinking something like a whale or the mother of all sharks. Jesus.

“It’s gone,” Gosling said, his voice a little forced. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

“But-”

“But nothing. It didn’t attack us, so the hell with it. Just because something’s big, don’t mean it’s nasty.”

George supposed there was logic to that.

He stayed by the doorway, watching, guarding against he did not know what. Gosling went back to his radio and George was glad of it. For what was there to say? What could they possibly manufacture to explain that one?

But he got to thinking: Still don’t mean shit and you know it. Still don’t mean you’re lost in the Bermuda fucking Triangle or something like that. It could have been a whale for chrissake. Quit panicking already.

George started going through every whale he’d ever seen on every nature documentary on the Discovery Channel. He tried to remember their names and what they looked with. For reasons he wasn’t even sure of, this calmed him. This put something to bed in his imagination and locked the beasts of childhood terror in their respective cages.

He looked at the sea anchor line. It was clotted with weeds and green nets of something like an aquatic moss.

“Scrape it off,” Gosling told him, handing him one of the little rubberized oars.

George took it, leaned over, started peeling the stuff away, a big and heavy clump of it was tangled on the oar. It smelled rank. He tossed it aside, heard it splash, and then saw that there was something still stuck on the blade of the oar. It was about the size of a shoe. In the dim light he could see it was a clot of something… something odd. He pulled the oar in, made to brush the mass aside with his fingers.

The mass moved.

George cried out in shock, dropped the oar. It floated just behind the raft, the mass still intact. Gosling was there by then, he cursed George for dropping the oar and brought the lightstick out so he could grab it.

But he didn’t grab it.

He didn’t dare.

George saw it and just stared. Sitting on the end of the oar was something like a round, thick spiderish body, ringed by dozens and dozens of legs. They were segmented and dirty-brown in color. Two of them were up in the air, shuddering. From the top of its body there was a cluster of things like yellow grapes that he realized must have been eyes. As Gosling brought the light closer, a pink membrane slid over them.

George wasn’t sure if it was an insect or a crustacean or a mollusk for that matter. Only that it was disgusting and he had a mad desire to smash it.

“What in the Christ?” Gosling said.

It just sat there, looking oddly grotesque and comical at the same time with all those eyes. George could see that they were set on stalks and jerked slightly as it looked about.

Carefully, Gosling grabbed the end of the oar, tried to shake that beastie off, but it held on tenaciously. Taking up another of the oars, he swatted at it and it moved. George had a nightmarish image in his mind of the thing running up the oar and wrapping itself around Gosling’s arm, but it didn’t happen.

Gosling swatted it again, this time making contact.

It made a weird, almost birdlike peeping sound and ran off. Actually ran over the surface of the water, skimming along easily like a water strider. Then it vanished in the fog.

“What do you suppose that was?” George asked, more amused than anything. The idea of it being on you was offensive, but he didn’t really think it was dangerous. “What sort of critter is that? And please tell me you’ve seen one before, Paul, or I’m going to start thinking hard on that Sargasso-shit you told me”

“No, never seen a critter like that before. Like a sea spider gone all crazy,” was all he would say.

He went back to his radio and George sat there, wishing he had a cigarette or a drink, just about anything to pass the time with. Because with that ever-present fog, time was distorted and he just couldn’t seem to get his internal clock moving.

Again he waited, wondering what the next thing would be and whether it would amuse him or scare the shit out of him. Gosling was suddenly very talkative, going on and on about an old Chevy Bel-Air he was fixing up.

But George wasn’t paying attention.

He was seeing something out in the fog… or thought he was. He kept watching it, his skin feeling so tight it felt like it might split open. His eyes would not blink. Yes, there it was again. A huge amorphous shadow, passing deeper into the mist.

“There’s something out there,” he said, his voice dry as sand.

“Could be another raft,” Gosling said, grabbing a flare pistol to signal with. He got up by George and watched, saw something vague out there, but just for an instant

“It’s not a raft,” George said.

“It’s too far, you can’t tell.”

“Oh,” he breathed, “I could tell.”

Gosling just looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is unless rafts have big green eyes that shine in the dark, that was no raft.”

6

“Hey, Fabrini,” Saks said, “what’s the difference between your mother and a refrigerator?”

“Just fuck off,” Fabrini said.

“Wrong. The difference is that your meat don’t fart when you pull it out of a refrigerator.”

Menhaus giggled. “That’s a good one, Saks. I’ll have to remember that.”

“Yeah, you remember it, dipshit.”

Saks was figuring, according to the luminous dial of his watch, that the sun would be up in an hour or so. And maybe when that happened, it would burn off the damn fog. But he had his doubts. He had doubts about a lot of things, only he wasn’t voicing them. These two… Menhaus and Fabrini… they weren’t much. They were both scared white and maybe, inside, Saks was, too. But he couldn’t let them see that. Way he was figuring things, he was in charge and he had to set an example for those two wet-ends. He started telling them what he was really thinking about all this, that it was the mother of all clusterfucks, and those two pussies would be pissing themselves and calling for their mothers.

No, somebody had to exhibit some balls here and Saks figured the mantle had fallen to him.

What he was really thinking about this whole mess was not good. Maybe they were still in the Atlantic and maybe they’d been vomited somewhere else. Didn’t much matter when you came down to it. What mattered is how they handled it and how they were going to stay alive.

Fabrini was the real problem here. He kept saying things that were getting Menhaus all worked up. And Saks couldn’t have that. Couldn’t have him going on about sea monsters and shit like that. Sure, they’d all heard those sounds out in the fog, the sounds of men being eaten, but if they were going to keep their heads out here, they couldn’t be dwelling on those things.

That’s why Saks was riding Fabrini all the time. Keep him in line, keep him on edge so he couldn’t spend his time undermining authority here. That and the fact that he didn’t like Fabrini, him and his Mediterranean good looks and muscles. Kind of guy women went for. Kind of guy that, down deep, maybe Saks felt threatened by.

Fabrini kept muttering something under his breath. Saks could hear him. Figured maybe he was losing it. That happened, Saks figured he’d feed his dumb wop ass to the fishies… or whatever else might be out there.

“Fabrini? What the hell are you doing? Whispering sweet nothings to Menhaus or what?”

“I think he’s praying,” Menhaus said.

“Are you praying, Fabrini?”

“What the hell’s it to ya?”

“Maybe,” Menhaus began, choking on his words, “we should just leave him alone, Saks. You don’t wanna bother a guy when-”

“Yeah, maybe you’re right, Menhaus. I’d sure as hell hate to interrupt John the Fucking Bapist in his daily devotion.”

Fabrini kept mumbling. He was making a conscious effort to ignore Saks and the world in general. Not that Saks was going to put up with it.

“Maybe we should pray too, Menhaus. Whaddya say?”

“I’m not much on that.”

“Oh, come on, let’s. Me and you and shit-fer-brains here can hold hands and pray to God and when we’re done hail-Marying we can have a nice little circle jerk, just the three of us.” He laughed shallowly. “How’s that sound, Fagbrini? Maybe we can work our way up on this crate and have a clusterfuck.”

Fabrini kept praying, his eyes squeezed tight, his ears all but shut to the insults being directed at him. He hadn’t prayed since he was boy. He’d pretty much written off God and religion as a bullshit sedative for the masses. But like any man in crisis, he was willing to try anything.

In the gloom, Saks was keeping an eye on Menhaus. They’d both started losing it after those sounds in the fog, but Menhaus more than Fabrini because Fabrini had some balls and Menhaus was the sort that needed to be led. He was the sort that needed someone to hold his dick for him, show him where to piss and what to wipe. He wanted somebody to make his decisions for him, tell him what he was supposed to think and how he was supposed to feel about things.

Guy like that, you could lead real easy.

Right then, Menhaus wasn’t doing so good. That business in the fog, those sounds, it was unraveling him.

“Listen to Fabrini there, Menhaus, what a fucking waste. Lucky you got me here. You got any good jokes so I don’t have to listen to Fagbrini praying for a bigger rod?”

Menhaus could fire one off after another most days. He was a repository of dirty jokes and salty anecdotes. Right then, though, he was having trouble. Staring into the fog and having trouble with a lot of things. “Um… let me think here… I… oh yeah, what did one condom say to the other condom when they passed by the gay bar?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let’s go in there and get shitfaced.”

Saks laughed until he started coughing. “I gotta better one. What does a sunken ship and Fabrini’s asshole have in common?”

“Can’t say.”

“Dead sea-men.”

Menhaus started chuckling and stopped.

“Listen, motherfucker,” Fabrini growled, snapped out of his devotions, “you better knock this shit off. I’m warning you, fatass. I’m not in the mood for yer crap.”

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Saks said.

“He’s just kidding you,” Menhaus said.

Saks sighed. “Sure I am, Fabrini. You know I’d never do anything to hurt your feelings. You mean too much to me, sweetheart.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I would but you’d get all excited.”

Fabrini resumed praying.

“Hey, Menhaus,” Saks said. “You hear about the time Fagbrini got VD? He goes to the doctor and the doctor tells him, yeah, you got the clap. ‘You know who gave it you?’ the doc says. Fabrini says, ‘No, silly, I never saw his face, he was behind me all the time.’”

Menhaus couldn’t keep from laughing at that one. He could feel Fabrini glaring at him, yet he couldn’t stop laughing. He laughed and laughed and then he stopped because he got to thinking maybe was laughing too much. Maybe it wasn’t that funny after all. Maybe, maybe-

“Jesus Christ, Saks, what the hell is this all about? I think I’m losing my mind or something. Where are we?”

“He don’t know, Menhaus,” Fabrini said, his words full of dread. “Nobody knows where we are. This place… this is where all those ships go, the ones that disappear. Sometimes they drift back out, but there ain’t no people on ‘em.”

“Shut the hell up, fuckhead,” Saks snapped at him. “You don’t know shit. Goddamn moron.”

All Fabrini did was laugh. And that laughter was bitter and haunted, filled with cynicism and a hint of stark madness. “You still think we’re on earth, Saks? That what you think? Well, guess again, because we got sucked into some dark closet just this side of hell and we ain’t ever getting out.”

“Shit,” Menhaus said. “Oh, shit…”

“Don’t listen to him, Menhaus. Don’t let him get to you. See? That’s what he wants. He wants to tear your guts out, wants to bring you down to his level,” Saks said, trying to sound smart and urbane and sympathetic, maybe more than a little superior. “Guys like Fabrini, they don’t have any balls. They wander through their pathetic, empty lives trying to make up for their little dicks-”

“Go fuck yourself, Saks, you goddamn idiot,” Fabrini said, derailed by the master once again.

Menhaus looked from one to the other in the gloom as they traded insults, ran down each other’s manhood and mothers. He felt like a metal filing caught between two magnets. And down deep, he was starting to really wonder which of them was the craziest.

“My watch is reading almost eight in the morning,” Fabrini said. “If you’re so smart, Saks, then why ain’t the sun coming up?”

“You’re watch is fucked,” he lied. “Besides, in this pea soup, you won’t even see the sun.”

That got Fabrini laughing. “Oh really? Why don’t you just admit it, Saks, the sun don’t come up in this place. It’s always dark and foggy and out there, out in that damn fog, there’s things that’ll chew your insides out…”

Menhaus was trying not to listen, but it was all bouncing around inside his head, tearing things up. “It’ll come up… the sun has to come up, don’t it, Saks?”

“Sure. Sure it will. Once it burns this fog off, then we’ll be able to see where we are. The others’ll be able to see us, too.”

Fabrini barked that cynical laugh again. “Yeah, and so will whatever got the other boat…”

7

Thing was, nobody knew where they were.

They thought things and they said things and they repeated maritime horror tales, but not a one of them could truly guess the severity of their situation or how far it was they were from home.

Yet, each man hoped against hope. Each one carried a vision of the gleaming ship that would whisk them away to civilization. They would be given dry clothes. Beds. There would be mugs of coffee and cool water. Tables piled abundantly with eggs and pancakes, ham and bacon, bread and fruit, steak and potatoes, pie and cake.

They hoped, but none of them really expected it to happen.

They expected torment and death. They expected thirst and drowning. They expected starvation. They expected suffering in all its guises and, yes, they expected things to come at them out of the mist, the sort of things that had crawled alive and breathing from nightmares and cellars and dank, dark places.

And on this matter, they were right.

8

Cook figured he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew Crycek was digging in the supply compartments of the lifeboat. He could hear him swearing under his breath and then the boat rocked slightly as he stood up, saying, “Here! Here! Jesus Christ, we’re over here!”

He raised something up above his head, something like a cylinder, and there was a muted pop and overhead, far up in that swirling vortex of mist, a flare burst in a shower of red sparks. It drifted through the fog, creating darting shadows and casting flickering bands of red-orange light. In that eerie, strobing illumination you could see just how thick that fog was. How it was composed of billowing layers pressed upon layers like blankets of smoky ether.

“What is it?” Cook asked, springing up now. “A plane? Did you see a plane or a ship?”

Crycek just watched that flare drift off, slowly sinking into the swamp of fog, his face lit by muted flashes of red light that were going yellow now.

“What did you see?” Cook asked again.

Sighing, Crycek sank back in his seat. “I… I’m not sure. It was a light, high up there, a light passed over us.”

Cook licked his lips. They were suddenly very dry. Like chalk. “A light? What sort of light? Like a searchlight?”

But Crycek shook his head, said it wasn’t that kind of light. It was sort of bluish, funny, just a glowing ball of blue light… that he didn’t hear any engine noise. Not a thing. Just the light, the light.

Cook didn’t like it, wasn’t entirely sure why. Only that, yes, it unnerved him. A blue glowing light, but no sound of engines? Not a helicopter or plane then… because you would have heard it in this godawful graveyard silence. But if not a chopper or a plane… then what? And he supposed that’s what was getting to him. Crawling down into his guts and making something sharp prod at his bowels, making them want to void right down his leg.

Something flying up there… something glowing… something that did not make a sound.

“Gone now,” Crycek said, sounding very much like he wanted to break down and cry. “It’s gone now and we’re still here, still in this fucking fog.”

Cook wanted to reassure him… but what was there to reassure him about? He was right: they were still in that fucking fog.

But at least, he thought, we have not been seen yet.

Again, he wasn’t entirely sure why he was thinking things like that, letting that scratching paranoia open him up in all the wrong places, but he was. Because here, in this world of fog and stink and steaming rank sea, maybe keeping your head down, maybe hiding and not being seen… maybe that was the best you could hope for.

Cook popped another lightstick, took a good look at Hupp’s wounds. Crycek was cradling his head in his lap, stroking his brow. Cook looked at him and what passed between them was a prognosis and it wasn’t good. Most of the hair was singed from Hupp’s head including his left eyebrow. His face discolored by a livid purple bruise. There was dried blood on his mouth, some of it around his nose and ears. The skin of his chest and arms was raw and hurting. Where it wasn’t raw it was scorched and blackened. Rivulets of sweat ran down his brow. He was shaking and shivering. Now and again, he would moan. There was a heat coming off him, feverish and sickening… and the smell, a hot sour stink like the breath of a dying man.

“No chance is there?” Cook said.

“Not unless we get picked up real soon.”

Cook licked his lips. “What are the chances of that?”

Crycek just stared at him. “What do you think?”

“I’m just asking because you’re a sailor.”

Crycek shrugged. “Good, I guess, if someone picked up our distress signal. If that’s the case, someone’ll be along soon. Should’ve been here by now really. And there’s always the radio beacons. All the rafts and boat have ‘em. They begin transmitting the moment they hit water.”

But Crycek had already explained those. They were called EPIRBs, Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacons. They pulsed signals over marine and aviation distress frequencies. Class A EPIRBs also transmitted a signal that could be picked up by the SARSAT satellite. The lifeboat had one that started working the moment it hit the water. Cook himself had started the manual unit he found in the emergency equipment by following the directions on the container.

“And there’s the radio, of course,” Crycek said, his voice not much above a whisper now. “All those distress calls we’ve been sending

…if there’s anybody out there, they’ll hear ‘em.”

And that’s exactly what Crycek said word for word, but what Cook was hearing was more along the lines of: If there’s anybody out there, why, we’ve just invited them in, haven’t we?

No, Cook didn’t like it much. Didn’t like the idea of them being listened to, monitored, that somebody out there could find them just by homing in on the signals. The idea of it filled his mind with a shapeless, blowing blackness that made him afraid right to the core of his being.

He thought: But isn’t that what you wanted? Somebody to hear you? To find you?

Only he wasn’t so sure anymore. Wasn’t sure of a lot of things. All he was going on here was instinct maybe colored by imagination, but it was telling him that the thing to do in this place was to keep a low profile. He didn’t know what he was expecting really, but he was getting some bad vibes about it. And hour by hour, they were getting worse. Like some latent sixth sense in him was trying to warn him of impending danger.

And what it really came down to, the very thing Cook couldn’t even bring himself to admit to, was that he didn’t know where they were, but he had a nasty feeling you wouldn’t find it on any map… at least, not one drawn by anyone sane. Nothing about this place was right. According to his internal clock the sun should have been up (he was guessing) an hour or more by now… but there was no sign of it. Not so much as a smudge of brightness up there. And while it wasn’t dark exactly, it was not actually light either. Things seemed to be caught somewhere in-between like a drawn-out midsummer twilight. That wasn’t right. That brooding, suffocating fog wasn’t right. The slopping, jellied sea was not right. And that pervasive gassy stench… no, that was certainly not right either. So, with that in mind, Cook was pretty much figuring that if there was an intelligence here that could monitor radio signals, then it wouldn’t be of the human variety.

And that, most assuredly, scared the hell out of him.

Sighing, deciding he was probably losing his mind an inch at a time, he looked out over that stagnant sea, wondering, thinking. Now and then he caught sight of wreckage-charred bits of wood, splintered beams, a crate or two, but never anything more than that. Unless you wanted to count clumps of floating weeds, spreading near-submerged things that steamed as if they’d just been pulled out of a boiling pot.

“I guess we just drift,” Crycek said, the words coming out of him like air from a leaking tire. “We just drift and we wait.”

None of that gave Cook any real hope. He was not an optimist by nature, but neither was he a pessimist. He was balanced on the borderline in-between, what his mother had once called a realist. Both he and Crycek could live for weeks with what was in the boat, but Hupp was doomed if help didn’t come soon. And maybe it was already too late.

Already too late for everyone concerned.

Cook had never felt quite so alone in his life.

He had always been something of a loner. It was the way he was, had always been. He didn’t trust people. He decided early on that they were basically evil creatures hiding beneath a veneer of civilization

…that is, when they bothered to hide at all. Many didn’t. And he wasn’t sure whether he liked these better than the others or not.

Crazy as it sounded at this stage of the game, he still entertained fantasies of washing up on some deserted tropical isle. All by himself. No one to bother him, give him trouble or pain. Just nature and he. He could catch his meals from the sea, scavenge for edible plants and berries. It would be a simple life. One that he was psychologically suited for.

Hupp began to moan and thrash around noisily.

“Here, here,” Crycek said. “I’ve got you now. You’re okay.”

At the sound of his voice, Hupp quieted down. Crycek was very good with him, Cook thought. A born nursemaid. It took the right kind of person to care for others like that. And it was exactly what Crycek needed. There was something brewing in him, something hot and sharp that was cutting him open from the inside. Caring for his shipmate gave him an anchor, it cemented him to the here and now.

And without it? Cook didn’t want to think about that.

“You better try that radio again, don’t you think?” Crycek said and Cook was pretty certain there was something behind his words, something like sarcasm.

“I suppose.”

But he didn’t want to do that. It was about the last thing in the world he really wanted. And that’s when he decided it was all a sick fucking game between the two them. They both knew that it was hopeless, that the Coast Guard couldn’t send out a rescue mission even if they wanted to. But they weren’t going to admit that out loud. Something in them just refused to. For maybe once such things were voiced there was no going back. Like calling up some demon from the formless ebon pits of the universe, once you said its name aloud, you admitted its reality.

So Cook went through the bit of transmitting a distress call and it was funny how his voice got on that radio now. Where before it was loud and clear and insistent, now he practically mumbled the words into the mic like he didn’t want anybody hearing him.

“You hearing… anything out there?” Crycek was asking him.

But Cook just shook his head. Just dead air and white noise. A raging storm of static that his mind pictured to be white and blowing like some electrical blizzard, a vast and tangled sound full of fuzz and friction and emptiness. It was a sound the human mind had trouble with. It grasped and fought to separate something, anything it could identify. And after a time, if it couldn’t get a hold of anything, it would create something before it went mad.

Cook kept listening, knowing he had to.

He began to hear odd patterns in it, the static rising and falling in gentle oscillations that sounded very much like breathing, respiration, something pulling air into its lungs and exhaling. But not air… static, in and out, in and out. He was hearing it and knowing it was his imagination, but unable to stop listening. There was something morphic, hypnotizing about it and you couldn’t pull your mind away. You could only listen to the static breathing, filling its lungs with that droning white noise and feel yourself being pulled away, floating.

And about that time, Cook heard something come up out of that static, a voice that was clear and crisp and evil. A woman’s voice: “That’s right, Cook… you just keep dreaming and drifting… I’m out here in the fog, I’m waiting for you out here, waiting to touch you-”

And maybe the voice itself wasn’t so evil, but its intent was unmistakable. Cook dropped the radio and fell backward onto the deck. Crycek was saying something, but he could not hear him. Could not hear anything but the static now and maybe the fog whispering and that clotted sea sluicing and that voice echoing in his head.

“Christ, Cook… what’s wrong?” Crycek was saying, sounding desperate now.

Cook poured some steel into his rubbery limbs, pulled himself up, just shaking his head. “Nothing,” he said. “It was nothing.” And he knew that sounded foolish, ridiculous, but it was the truth. Because he hadn’t really heard a woman’s voice out there, some malefic female ghost inviting him to doom and madness. Just imagination. He was tired and scared and confused and his imagination had spun all that into the worst thing it could imagine.

His breathing slowed now and he felt foolish. Utterly foolish. He reached over to turn the radio off and, yes, it was still blaring static, but mixed in with it were those buzzing pulses he’d heard earlier. Something his mind had tagged as Morse Code for wasps.

He shut the radio off.

“Better conserve batteries,” he said, feeling, really feeling that fog out there now. Certain it was reaching out for him, wanting to drag him into a murky, enclosing shroud of itself.

“What did you hear?” Crycek wanted to know.

“Thought… well, I thought I heard a voice. Just my mind playing tricks on me. I need some sleep.”

Crycek nodded. “There’s funny things in the fog. Funny, weird things. I know all about that. Maybe some of it’s imagination, but not all of it… no sir.”

Cook just sat there, not saying a thing. Crycek was ready to talk now. He wanted to say things and none of it was going to be good.

“I was out there, Cook. I was one of the ones that went to look for Stokes, the guy who jumped overboard. Gosling, the First, he picked me. Picked me because he must have known I was scared of the fog,” Crycek said, his voice low and even and somehow unpleasant. “We went out in the boats to look. Out into that goddamn fog. And I’m not too proud to admit I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment that boat touched water. Terrified. Because that fog wasn’t right then and it’s not right now. Yeah, I knew there were things out in that fog.. . crawling, pallid things… abominations… things that would drive you mad just to look upon them. Yes, I knew that.”

Cook swallowed. “C’mon, Crycek. Just take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” He uttered a short, sharp laugh that was more like the bark of a dog. It was flat and empty-sounding. Cook was glad, really glad he could not see Crycek’s face then, because he knew it would have been bad, a shroud chewed by lunacy. “Sure, I’ll take it easy. Out in that fog… we were hearing things. Things like voices calling us… awful, clotted voices spoken through mouths full of seaweed… and once, just the once, I heard laughter. A cackling laughter that almost finished me. And then, oh yes, then I saw something. I saw it and it saw me.”

Cook’s arms were full of gooseflesh. He could barely find his voice. “What? What did you see?”

But Crycek could only shake his head back and forth, make a weird whimpering sound low in his throat. “It… it was staring at me out of the fog. Something slimy and stinking with a long neck like a light post. It had a head, something like a head, but all curled-up like a snail shell. Jelly was dripping from it and there was some kind of growth hanging from it, like weeds or dangling roots, only they were crawling and twisting. And its eyes… oh dear God, those eyes, huge and yellow and wicked, staring at me, staring right into me like they meant to eat my soul raw…”

Crycek’s voice faded out and maybe he with it. He was shaking and making sobbing sounds, his fist shoved up against his mouth so maybe he wouldn’t scream his mind away.

Hupp began to moan and thrash.

“Easy,” Crycek said. “Easy… I won’t let it get you, I swear to God I won’t… when it comes for us, I’ll cheat it. Yes, I’ll cheat it.”

He started giggling then.

Cook had all he could do not to join him.

And then there was a sound.

Something was coming out of the fog.

9

It was Fabrini who saw the flare.

The flare Crycek fired off. And that’s how they found the lifeboat in the fog.

“Paddle, you goat fuck,” Saks snapped at Menhaus. “It’s a goddamn boat!”

“I’m doing my best,” Menhaus said under his breath.

“So do better.”

But it wasn’t easy. Not for any of them. Fabrini had sighted the boat just as Saks was asking him if his parents had any children that lived. They’d swung right into action, but it was tough going. It wasn’t easy to hang onto the wet, slimy crate and paddle your feet at the same time. And the crate wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to navigate or steer.

“Let’s just abandon it,” Menhaus panted, “and swim for it,”

“No way,” Fabrini said.

“He’s right, Menhaus. If we don’t make the boat and we ditch the crate, we won’t have anything. Keep going.”

Saks was getting damn tired of the both of them. Why, if this had to happen at all, couldn’t he have found himself adrift with say George Ryan or Cushing? Two smart guys there. They kept their wits about them. Not a couple of idiots like Menhaus and that dumb-fuck Fabrini. Fabrini was like some kind of poster child for incompetence and in-breeding. And Menhaus… Christ, what a piece of work. God must’ve been laughing when he brought those two into being. Some kind of heavenly practical joke. Fabrini’s old lady should’ve kept her legs closed… or dropped him into the toilet with the rest of the turds when the time came. One little flush and the world would have been spared so much.

“It’s one of the lifeboats,” Menhaus gasped. “From the ship.”

And it was. They could see someone — Saks thought it was Cook — waving and waving to them. There was someone else in there waving, too.

Why don’t the stupid fucks row over to us? Saks wondered.

He didn’t know why but he had a pretty good feeling he was going to have to knock a few melons together when he reached the boat. Goddamn lazy sonsofbitches. But it was just like Cook. A guy like that didn’t do squat until you told him so. When he took a shit, you had to show him which end to use.

“We’re going to make it,” Fabrini said.

“Yeah,” Saks said. “Your prayers worked, camel dung. What else did you wish for? A bunch of horny pirates to pick you up and gangrape you?”

“Your turn’s coming, Saks, just you wait.”

“Yeah, if you can get your tongue out of Menhaus’ bum long enough.”

They kept swimming, gripping the crate, and paddling with their feet. It was slow going and exhausting work, swimming through that turgid, oily slop but no one was complaining. They would’ve swam through a septic tank to get to that boat. It was the light at the end of the tunnel… or at least a glimmer of it.

“Okay,” Saks said, “swim for it! We don’t need the crate!”

They all pushed away and made a beeline for the boat which was mere yards away now. It seemed like the longest distance any of them had ever traversed.

“I can’t,” Menhaus panted, coming to a rest, feeling that water around him, warm and thick and oddly comforting. “I can’t… do.. . it.”

“Come on,” Fabrini said, grabbing him by the lifejacket and towing him along. “You can do it, goddammit. You can.”

“Oh, leave him,” Saks said. “Let the fishies play with him.”

They paddled and fought their way to the boat. Through that marshy, miasmic sea, fingers clawing through islands of decomposing seaweed. A yellow, rank mist rose from the water. When they reached the boat, each man was too exhausted to climb aboard. They just hung off the gunwale and sucked in sharp, salty breaths, feeling heavy like they’d been dipped in liquid cement.

“I’m glad you guys made it,” Cook said, unsmiling.

“You too,” Fabrini said.

“Thank God,” Menhaus rasped.

Saks rolled his eyes. “All right, girls. You can make love later. Into the boat before something takes a bite outta you.”

Cook helped pull each man into the boat. Saks was last. Cook pulled him aboard, but didn’t like the idea. You could see that. The look in his eyes said it all. And Saks knew right then who was going to be trouble. Who was going to need his ass straightened out.

“Nice to see you, too, dumbass,” he told Cook.

10

George could see nothing but the fog.

It was white and yellow and steaming, great congested patches of it blowing around the raft by a wind that he could not feel. Maybe it moved because it wanted to move. Maybe it was alive. Maybe it was intelligent and in that godawful place, the idea of something like that didn’t seem quite so preposterous as it would have in the real world. Because this was not the real world. Not Earth. Not the Earth George had known. Maybe it was Altair-4 or Rigel-3 or one of those other quaint science fiction sort of places, but it surely was not Earth. Earth did not have fog like this. It did not have scuttling crab/spider things with too many eyes that could run across the water. It did not have big things with glowing green eyes the size of hubcaps. It did not have weird, trilling things in the fog that sounded like giant insects. And, no, it did not have a sea that was like pink gelatin clogged with rotting seaweed and it surely did not have this fog.

Fog that swirled and swallowed and fumed, was lit with that phantasmal, dirty radiance. The fog hid things, George knew, things that might drive you mad if you saw them. So that was good. But it also hid you. Wrapped you in its dusky winding sheet and tucked you into secret crevices and shadowy spider-holes you would never find your way out of.

“Does it seem brighter?” George said. “Not day-bright, but certainly brighter”

Gosling nodded. “Maybe this fog will burn away yet. Maybe.”

“Still looks pretty damn thick, though,” George said.

But it was lighter out. It had happened incrementally, so subtly that neither man had even noticed. Now it was not like twilight really, but maybe a gloomy, overcast morning. Well, maybe not that bright, but better. Much better. Even the fog itself didn’t look so murky, so… polluted like seething fumes of toxic waste. You could actually see the ocean, that marshy run of steaming rot.

The surface actually seemed to quiver.

George dipped an oar into it, discovered there was actually sort of a sticky, scummy membrane over the surface… like the film over a pail of spoiled milk. That’s how the scuttler — George had christened the creature on the oar that now — had dashed over it. No magic there, just adaptive engineering.

He figured that the day… or night or whatever it was… was brightening a bit and that was something.

Not that it really improved their situation much.

They were still, without a doubt, the proverbial needle in a haystack. Except the haystack in this case seemed to go on to infinity. And where that haystack was located… well, that was something else again.

Gosling was busy with the VHF radio, seemed impervious to just about everything else.

“You suppose we might get out of this?” George asked him.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your sailor’s intuition tell you?”

“Tells me we’re fucked,” he said.

Gosling and his damn pragmatism. He didn’t care diddly about keeping morale up; that wasn’t his concern. He looked at everything realistically. And the reality of the situation with him was that either they’d live or die. He leaned in neither direction. What happened was what would happen.

“You know, that’s what I love about you, Gosling, your optimism. It keeps my spirits high.”

“I’m not your therapist. It ain’t my job to keep you happy.”

“Yeah, but I was on board your ship. Your boys steered us into this fucking netherworld. It seems to me it’s your responsibility to get my ass out in one piece.”

“Well, we get back, you file a complaint with the Coast Guard,” he said. “Until then, quit yer goddamn complaining.”

He kept fiddling with the radio, seemed more intent with it all of a sudden. He kept saying, hmmm, under his breath like a dentist deciding which tooth to yank. Regardless, it was driving George up the wall.

“You getting anything out there?”

Gosling shook his head slowly. “No… and yes. I thought before

…thought I caught the end of a distress call, but it was swallowed in the static. I can’t be sure. I’m thinking this fog might have some sort of electrical field to it, might be interfering with our signals.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning it’s distorting the shit out of the airwaves,” he said, pulling the earplug out. “Could have been another broadcast, could have been ours coming back at us… hard to tell. That static swallows everything, vomits it back up.”

George loved all that technical detail, but it didn’t tell him shit. He knew radios. You turned them on to get the weather. Turned them off when Neil Sedaka or the Four Seasons came on. Other than that, he knew squat.

He got over closer to Gosling, listened to that static with him.

It was an empty, dead sound, rising and falling. Now and again there was a distant beep or ping. But you couldn’t be sure. George kept listening to it, feeling like some astronomer with his radio telescope listening to the music of the spheres, the noise of deep space searching for an intelligent signal. Yeah, that’s what it sounded like. Dead, distant voids and the echoing blackness between the stars.

He found it unnerving.

It was the sound a TV makes when a channel goes off the air and you’re staring into that field of fuzz and snow. And if you stare too long, you start seeing shapes flitting about, the millions of dots and specs becoming patterns that pull you in… spirals and marching diamonds. But it’s not there, none of it. Just the human mind offended by all that confused, random nothingness and deciding to fill in the blanks. Same way it did in deserts or snowstorms, creating mirages, images it needed to see.

George kept listening, certain he was hearing something… just not sure what.

Out there, in that storm of white noise, a man could get lost. He could sink away into blackness and lunacy. It would suck his mind clean until there was nothing but polished skull left behind. George decided that the static sounded like blowing dust and hissing gas, hollows and low places. A haunted, almost diabolic sound not of emptiness, but of occupancy. Like something sentient was out there, not necessarily alive nor dead, but waiting, just waiting, listening and reaching out for minds to touch. It reminded him of recordings made by ghost hunters in tombs and desolate houses… static suffused with distant echoes, suggestions of awareness. Shades, shadows, ghosts.

“Hearing something?” Gosling asked him.

“I’m not sure.” And he wasn’t. Was it imagination or… or did something want him to think that?

“It’s funny static… never heard nothing quite like it before. Those sounds in there, buzzing sounds now and again. You listen to it long enough you get the feeling…”

“That it’s listening back?”

But if Gosling thought that, he would not say and maybe it was his silence that was the very worst thing of all.

He feels it, too, George found himself thinking, he feels something out there, something listening, something cold and predatory

…and maybe amused.

But George knew he had to get off that track. For it was the road to dementia and once you started down it, you’d never come back. It was strictly a one-way street.

Gosling shut the radio off. “Nothing out there,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

George figured if the both of them kept telling themselves that, given time, they might even believe it.

He stared off into the fog like maybe he was waiting for it to show its teeth. “You don’t have much hope for us, do you?”

Gosling shrugged. “I don’t put much in things like hope or faith or luck. I used to hope for things, wish for things for all the good it did. Experience taught me otherwise. You make your own luck, I guess. I’m not saying luck doesn’t exist. I’m sure it does. But not for me and probably not for you. Some people have it, most people don’t.”

George uttered a short laugh. “You can say that again.”

They sat in silence, wishing they had something to smoke or something hard to drink. Anything. Humans loved their chemical dependencies and they never meant so much as they did in survival situations.

“Listen,” Gosling said.

“I don’t hear…” George began and then he did.

It was subtle, but it was there: a sort of tapping sound. And it was coming from under the raft. It wasn’t a big sound like before when the raft had actually been lifted from the sea. This was nothing like that, this was more investigatory, probing, curious. George heard it down there, thinking with a chill that it sounded very much like fingertips scraping over the rubber. It started getting louder, bumping and squeaking, thudding.

“Jesus-”

“Shut up,” Gosling warned him.

It ran up and down the bottom of the raft, creaking and bumping and scratching. Then it just touched now and again.

When it hadn’t happened again for maybe five minutes, George said, “What do you suppose that was?”

But Gosling just shook his head. “I don’t know… I just hope it stays gone.”

11

Saks was watching the boys play, thinking that he had nobody to blame but himself. That he had hired this crew of mama’s boys, dick-suckers, and all around morons.

The fog had brightened now and the boys were all excited that the sun was coming up, would burn off that fog and deliver the lot of them into never-neverland. They knew better. They all knew better. The fog was filled with a sort of illumination, sure, but to Saks it didn’t look like sunshine at all, but more of a silvery moonlight that the fog tinted yellow. It was not a clean sort of light, but dirty like sunlight tinted through a yellow window pane.

What it came down to, he knew, was that it was all wrong.

Sure, it was brighter now. You could see people’s faces, make out things just fine, but it was not what you’d call a sunny day. It surely was not normal.

After they’d reached the lifeboat and everybody had a bite to eat and some water, everybody chatted away and then one by one they’d fallen asleep… not realizing until that moment how tired they were. Saks himself had gone out hard, not waking for nearly five hours.

But he felt better now. On top of his game.

And his brain was firing on all cylinders again. For what he was thinking about as those idiots fooled with the fishing gear from the survival canisters, was not how they were going to stay alive, but how he was going to stay alive. How he was going to take control of this little party of stooges and make them work to his adavantage.

Saks was a natural at things like that.

Menhaus was rigging a lure with the sixty-pound test line. Since they didn’t have any bait… any bait that could be spared, that was… Menhaus decided to use his watch since it had seized up now anyway.

“It’s worth a try,” he said. “I saw it in that movie.”

Fabrini grunted. “Sounds fucking goofy to me.”

“So let me do it. I don’t need your help.”

Menhaus was talking about something he’d seen in the film Lifeboat. The survivors of a shipwreck used a belt and a shiny bracelet as a fishing lure to try and catch fish. But they didn’t have any real tackle, Menhaus pointed out, and that gave him a distinct advantage.

“I gotta see this,” Fabrini said.

“Let’s go fishing then,” Cook said, happy that they finally had something to do other than watch Saks.

Saks was wondering exactly what they thought they were going to catch in that soup.

Crycek was up in the bow, had Hupp’s head cradled in his lap as before. He watched the entire thing with glazed eyes. Maybe he was there and maybe he was somewhere else entirely.

Carefully, Menhaus lowered his makeshift lure into the water and jigged it like a real lure. He kept doing this, feeding out line, going deep with it. He kept at it ten, fifteen minutes, adjusting depth, feeling around down there as he had as a boy for catfish while Fabrini told him how crazy it all was. But Menhaus kept it up, figuring it was a way to pass the time if nothing else.

“Anything?” Fabrini asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Ah, shit, this is a waste of time.”

“No… wait. I felt something.”

The line jerked in his hands once, twice, three times. Menhaus gave it a good yank, trying to set the hook. Nothing. He tugged it, but there was no pull, no sensation of weight on the other end. But there had been something down there. Unless he snagged the hook on something. He fed out a little more line, jigged it carefully, again and again and again.

“There’s nothing down there,” Fabrini said.

Menhaus figured he was right… but then the line snapped taut in his hands, burning through his fingers. The sixty-pound test was heavy stuff and it cut bleeding valleys into his palms. He cried out and Fabrini took hold of it, too, smart enough to slide on one of the gloves from the emergency bin. He got a good grip on it and, Jesus, there was something big down there.

“We got a whopper here,” he said. “C’mon, Menhaus, this bastard’s fighting…”

Everyone was paying attention now.

Crycek’s eyes were wide and unblinking.

Saks had narrowed his.

Cook looked mildly intrigued.

Menhaus got the other glove on his left hand and the both of them fought that line that whipped and snapped in the water, whatever was on the other end appreciating the meal of that shiny watch but downright pissed off that it was hooked to a line.

Fabrini had never done much fishing, but Menhaus was an old pro.

They pulled against their catch and then played out the line, kept working it that way, tiring out what was on the other end. After what seemed ten minutes of that, there was no more fight.

They started hauling it in.

Foot after foot of line was pulled into the boat, Saks reeling it in as the other two pulled. The nylon fishing line was stained pink from immersion in that moldering sea.

They were getting close now.

Fabrini kept looking to Menhaus, wanting to know what came next.

Menhaus had sweat beading his brow.

There was a sudden thump under the boat and then another and Menhaus directed the line out from under the hull. He directed their catch around the port side, leaning over the gunwale and trying to get a look at it. But the light… dirty alien light… only penetrated a few inches into that opaque sea.

But there was something there. Something pretty good sized.

“We’re going to bring him up far as we can,” Menhaus said. “Then I’ll see if I can get a hold of him, pull him in.”

Together, they brought their catch up until they saw a greenish-brown caudal fin that was broad like a fan of bony spines with a pink membrane connecting them. It slapped against the side of the boat. Slipping on both the gloves now, Menhaus reached down and took hold of its tail just above the caudal. “Jesus, sumbitch is slimy

…heavy, Christ… get ready boys…”

“Be careful,” Cook said.

With everything he had, Menhaus yanked it up out of the drink and it flopped over the gunwale and fell to the deck, not far from Crycek’s boots… which he quickly withdrew.

“What the fuck?” Saks said.

But they were all thinking that.

For it wasn’t a fish… exactly.

It was segmented like the tail of a lobster, twisting and gyrating, seemed almost boneless as it thrashed and sprayed slimy water in every direction. The men were falling over each other to get out of its way.

“You’re some kind of fisherman, all right,” Saks said, enjoying the other’s discomfort and horror.

It was maybe four-feet in length, the body reticulated and brown, oddly serpentine at the posterior end and thickening up to the width of a nail keg towards the head. There was something obscenely fleshy about it. It was a fish… yet not a fish. Like some weird, repellent hybrid of fish and crustacean. It was muddy brown at the tail and the color faded as it moved towards the head… or what might have been a head… and became entirely translucent like the body of a brine shrimp. You could see the shadows of pulsing organs and what might have been arteries.

The craziest thing, though, was that its head — completely eyeless as far as they could tell — terminated in dozens of snapping, whipping things like the barbels or whiskers of a catfish. But these were transparent as icicles, each ending in a blood-red needle.

What Saks was mostly aware of, though, was its smell… like rotting fish on a beach, high and foul and moist. But with a curious after-odor like cat urine.

“You brought it in!” Fabrini snapped at Menhaus. “Drag that fucker out!”

“I ain’t touching it,” he said.

“Keep away from it,” Cook warned them. “I don’t trust those whiskers… they could sting.”

Saks just watched it, wondering what sort of sewer of evolution it had wriggled from. Something like that… it had no right to live.

Its pectoral fins were spines like the tail, webbed with pink flesh, but the lower pelvic fins were something between fins and stubby walking legs. And back toward the caudal, there were tiny appendages which could have been nothing but swimmerets like those of a crayfish.

But for all of this, it seemed to be a fish.

Somehow. Some way. For it was incontrovertibly fish-like.

“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini cried. “Somebody kill that fucking thing!”

And they all wanted to, for it was so incredibly appalling that it offended them on some basal level. It was a horror. Something that had slithered out of the backwash of a primeval sea… snaking and undulating and disgusting. But nobody dared get near it.

Saks took up an oar, staring down at it, figuring it would be up to him to smash this monstrosity.

It was dying now, he could see that much. Getting sluggish and dopey. It wouldn’t last much longer. Each of those plates or segments were expanding to take in air, deflating again with slushy sounds. He figured it didn’t have the normal forward gill slits of a fish, but that the openings between the segments must have been gills of some sort.

“Get the hell out of my way,” he told Fabrini, moving around it with the oar.

Hupp was moaning, gagging, sounding like he was going to wretch. He slid out of Crycek’s grip and Crycek let out a little cry… but too late. Hupp’s leg got too close to the fish and those whipping barbels grazed the open flesh, leaving red vertical blisters like blood poisoning or burns. Hupp screamed and flopped and blood came from his mouth. His leg where the barbels had grazed it went blue as a blister, then black. Swelling up like bread dough. He shuddered and slumped over, dead as dead can be.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody did anything.

Crycek whimpered a bit, but didn’t touch Hupp’s body. Was afraid to, maybe.

Saks was watching that thing.

It had no eyes, but all those whiskers or whips were ringed around a flat, flabby gash further in which he supposed was a mouth. Each time the plates expanded to take a breath, that repulsive mouth yawned wide. There were things in there, maybe tongues but looking more like a nest of slender blue worms.

Saks figured then how this sucker hunted.

It used those wormy-tongues to lure in fish much as an alligator snapping turtle did with its own tongue. And once prey got past that flabby cave of a mouth, those whips would come in and seize it, inject it with some nerve agent that would paralyze it. For that’s what those red thorns were: nematocysts, stinging cells like those of jellyfish. Those whips acted like the tentacles of a sea anemone… they captured and killed what the tongues lured in. Saks figured that might explain the thing’s fins… they were like legs because it probably crawled over the bottom.

“You sure you ain’t gonna filet this bastard?” he said to Menhaus and Menhaus stupidly shook his head as if it had been an option he decided against.

Saks stood near the fish… but not too near.

It was growing very still now. Even the whiskers were barely shuddering. And there was a ripe, decomposing stench wafting off it like a bucket of steaming entrails. Saks brought up the oar and smashed it down on the head. Those plates weren’t as rugged as he first thought. The impact of the oar split one like a peanut shell.. . black, inky fluid oozing out. He brought the oar up and then down, crushing those barbels to paste. He kept hammering at it until it ruptured completely open, pissing a stew of meaty organs and black juice and vomiting out a bile of yellow jelly.

Opened up like that, it didn’t smell too sweet.

Fabrini upchucked over the gunwale.

Menhaus was green as moss.

Cook, however, was unmoved by any of it. If he was anything more than offended by the fish, he would not let Saks see it. He sat in the stern, eyes hard as forged iron. Pale and pinched-looking, but nowhere near as bad as the others.

“Who’s gonna clean up this fucking mess?” Saks asked. “How about you, Cook?”

Cook offered him a thin smile. “Not likely.”

“Well,” Saks said, dipping his oar in the water and washing it off best he could, “guess it falls to you, Menhaus. Be careful of them tentacle-things. They still can sting. Hurts like a motherfucker, too. Just ask Hupp.”

Menhaus looked like he was going to be sick, but he knew that he’d pulled the job. He brought the fish in and he would have to throw it back out. It took him a few moments to get his stomach under control, but when he did he went right over to the fish and, using the gloves, took hold of its tail and heaved it over the side. The fish bobbed there for a few seconds, then slowly began to sink.

“Wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said to them. “Goddamn babies. Just a fish”

But then all there was to do was think about Hupp’s corpse and what they were going to do with it. And nobody seemed to want to touch that one. No one but Saks. While the others looked at just about anything else, Saks eyed the handle of a knife sticking out of Hupp’s boot. Making sure no one was looking, he plucked it free and stuck it in his own boot.

Nobody seemed to notice.

Except Cook. He saw it, of course. But Saks flashed him a smile, just to let that sono-fabitch know that he had his number. That when the time came, he’d be punching his ticket.

“What about Hupp?” Fabrini finally said.

But got no reply.

So Saks said, “Looks like we’re a little shy on a good burying hole, so he goes over the side.”

“You… you can’t do that,” Crycek stammered.

“Why not?”

“Jesus Christ, Saks, we should say something,” Fabrini said.

“Okay, you’re right. Goodbye, Hupp.” Saks seemed to find it amusing. “There. I said something.”

“You’re an asshole,” Cook told him, meaning it.

Saks grinned. “Good, glad you feel that way. You can help… take him by the feet there. On the count of three…”

12

Since they’d gotten on the hatch cover, Cushing had heard it all again and again. Soltz had a nervous stomach, sensitive skin, arthritis in both knees, countless allergies, angina, myopia, a scalp condition, and was prone to gingivitis, bladder infections, and unexplainable pains in his legs. He was like a walking textbook of hypochondria. Back on the ship, he’d had medications for all these things-pills, salves, drops-but now he had nothing.

And he made sure Cushing knew it.

Cushing didn’t know how much more he could take. Soltz was bad enough with his constant litany of complaints and ailments, but there were worse things happening than that. And the bottom line was that they were trapped in some terrible ocean and Cushing was pretty sure it wasn’t a backwash of the Atlantic.

He kept telling Soltz not to worry. That the fog would lift and they’d be rescued… but how much longer could he keep that up?

“There really is no chance, is there?” Soltz said.

“Sure there is,” Cushing lied once again. “Patience is the key. You just gotta be patient.”

But Soltz looked defeated. “No doubt we’ll be long dead before help arrives. If it ever does arrive.”

“It will. It has to.”

“I need water,” Soltz moaned. “I think I’m dehydrating.”

“You’re not dehydrating. It takes longer than this to dehydrate.”

Soltz fingered his balding scalp. “Maybe for you. I’m different.”

“You’re not different.”

“Yes, I am. I always have been. I’m more sensitive to these things than most. To just about everything.”

Cushing sighed. How the hell did I end up with this guy? he wondered.

“Soltz, why the hell did you sign up for this?” he asked. “I mean, why would a guy like you want to go down to South America and chop a runway out of the jungle for chrissake? It looks to me like day-to-day living is too much for you.”

“Money. Isn’t that why we all do things, Cushing? Isn’t that why we all take foolish chances and put our lives on the line?” Soltz said to him. “Well, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Besides, I have high insurance premiums.”

“You’re kidding me,” Cushing said. “A guy like you?”

“Oh no, it’s true. I have terribly high insurance premiums. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

Cushing buried his head in his hands as Soltz went into graphic detail about enlarged tendons and fluid being drained from his knee with needles. The only time Soltz seemed to be happy is when he was either complaining or discussing some medical procedure.

“I need water,” Soltz said again when he’d finished making Cushing queasy. “I’m beginning to feel dizzy.”

“You’re fine.”

“You don’t know.”

“Yes, I do, dammit. You’re not dehydrated. Not yet. When your lips start cracking open and your tongue bloats up and turns black, then you’re dehydrated. You’re just thirsty now. There’s a difference.”

Soltz licked his lips. “Already my lips hurt.”

Cushing gave up. If he wanted to think he was dying, who gave a damn? Let him think it. As long as he did it quietly and without drama, Cushing didn’t have a problem with it. Right now, save for rescue, all Cushing could think of was his brother-in-law, Franklin Fisk. The same dumb bastard who’d organized this little party. And the very same bastard who’d drafted Cushing to go along as a spy. A spy. Jesus Christ, but it was hard to believe. Hard to believe that Cushing himself had gone along with it. Who gave a good goddamn what Saks was up to? If Saks was alive, floating around out there somewhere, and they bumped into him, Cushing was going to tell him the truth. And he wasn’t going to stop there. This would be more than an admission. He was going to tell Saks everything he needed to take old Frank Fisk down. And nobody knew the Fisk dirty laundry like Cushing did.

The idea of this and only this made him smile.

Payback.

“What is that?” Soltz said.

Cushing looked. He saw clumps of yellow-brown weed floating in patches. “It’s Sargasso weed, Soltz. It won’t bite you… unless you get too close.” He was thinking of telling Soltz the truth about it. That it was just seaweed, really, that collected in patches. That it was the mainstay of a colony of different creatures who used it for food, for shelter, for breeding. He was going to tell him about the tiny shrimp and chubs, the sargassum pipefish, the crabs and sea slugs, the eels that called it home. The larger fish that fed off the smaller ones in its shoots and tendrils. All the things he’d read about.

But was it the truth? Sure, it looked pretty much like pictures of Sargasso weed he’d seen… but was it? Cushing couldn’t be sure, couldn’t be sure about a lot of things in this place. Maybe being trapped in that winding fog made a man start thinking funny things, things he had no right thinking in the first place. Cushing didn’t doubt that at all. But the sea… oddly pink or red-tinted, steaming and fetid and oozing… nobody could tell him that was normal. The air, the sea, the fog, everything was fucked-up and if the water itself wasn’t exactly kosher — Cushing likened it to something drained from a stagnant tidal pool — then who in Christ was he to say that this was indeed Sargasso weed?

Yeah, it was all insane and it got under your skin and you could tell yourself all you wanted that it was some strange fogbank and a peculiar sea brought about by some atmospheric anomaly… but shit was shit no matter how you chewed it or dressed it up and you could only swallow so much before it came back up again.

“I’ve seen seaweed floating before, Cushing. I’m not stupid, much as it delights you to think so. I’ve never seen seaweed like that, seaweed that sparkles.”

Well, he had something there. The seaweed did seem to sparkle. Maybe it was just a reflection from that damn fog. And maybe it had something to do with the day brightening up so that you could actually see things now. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Soltz said, “You know, I appreciate your lies, Cushing. You’re a good man to be concerned about my state of mind. But you don’t have to bother. I heard what those sailors were saying when we steered into that fog.” Soltz fixed him with those rainy gray eyes of his, held him like a bug on a needle. “We’re in the Devil’s Triangle, aren’t we? I mean, we’re in the place people call that. All those planes and ships and missing people… well, we know where they went, now don’t we? A patch of glowing fog sucked them up and spewed them here.”

“Don’t let your imagination run away on you, Soltz,” Cushing said without much faith.

“I saw a TV show about this years ago, Cushing. Vortices. That’s what they call these things. Vortices. They suck you up and dump you some place else. And maybe that place is just five-hundred miles away from your last position and maybe… yes, maybe it’s so far away physics couldn’t even measure it.”

Cushing didn’t have any spit left or he might have disagreed on general principles or for the sake of morale. But Soltz was on a run now and there was no slowing him down. He was spewing all the crap he’d sucked in about the Bermuda Triangle from years of pseudo-documentaries. Thing was, it all would’ve been casually amusing a week ago, but now? Anything but.

“I heard one of the sailors mentioning the Sargasso Sea… do you know what that is?” Soltz asked him.

“Just a big, becalmed seaweed sea in the Atlantic. Your Devil’s Triangle touches its boundaries. That’s the official take,” Cushing told him. “There’s also a mythical side to it the old mariners used to spin tales about. Seaweed everywhere. No wind, no nothing but weeds. Ships would get stuck there because there was no wind for their sails. But that wasn’t the worse part. The seaweed was so thick there ships would get stuck in it and never leave. The weeds would grow right over the ships and hold them there while the crews died of thirst. A ship’s graveyard.”

Soltz stared around nervously. “I guess that’s where we are then. See that’s how those tales started, Cushing. Men or ships must have been passed into this place, saw terrible things here, then passed out of it again and told the story.”

Sure, that’s exactly what Cushing had been thinking.

But to hear Soltz saying it without a shred of doubt, well it was disturbing, disheartening, something. He was right, of course. What other explanation was there? Cushing didn’t accept any of it lightly. He’d been fighting against the idea since before the ship went down, but step by step he’d been pushed into belief. There was no other choice.

“There’s things here,” Soltz said, almost too calmly, “things you won’t see other places. Terrible things. You know it and I know it.”

Cushing knew it, all right.

As yet, they’d had no encounters with what was in the fog, but they’d heard sounds… bad sounds… and Cushing knew it was only a matter of time.

Apparently, Soltz knew that, too.

13

On the lifeboat, it was pretty much the same thing:

“What is that shit?”

Crycek looked over where Saks was pointing. There was a clumpy expanse of yellow weeds, floating stalks and bladders. “Gulf weed,” he said. “It’s all over the Atlantic.”

“Don’t look like Gulf weed to me.”

Crycek smiled. “No? What do you think it is?”

Saks said, “Hell if I know.”

“Sometimes things look like one thing when they’re actually another,” Crycek said, just filled with mysticism or dementia… take your pick.

Which got Saks glaring at him. “No shit? And sometimes sailors look like men, but they’re really pussies looking for their mama’s tit. Ain’t that right, Crycek?”

Cook sighed. Crycek was baiting Saks. He’d been baiting them all since Saks and his crew had climbed aboard the lifeboat. It was a game to him, you see. His mind was getting softer than a pumpkin two weeks past Halloween and now he was acting like a little boy with a dread, dirty secret. Only he wasn’t going to tell, because that’s not how it worked. So he just kept needling the others, hinting at dark things and unseen things and just plain awful things. Hinting, mind you, but never framing said terrors into words.

Crycek was not only losing it, Cook decided, he’d already lost it.

Hupp was dead now, tossed overboard under Saks’s direction with all the ceremony of an emptied chamber pot. And that had been the catalyst, Cook figured. Only Hupp and caring for him had kept Crycek’s oars in the water. Even then, he was on the verge of hysteria, but it had been something. Something to call his own. Something to balance out the madness. Now, however, there was nothing. And Crycek was giving into his dementia like a junkie giving into the needle, knowing that all things were eventual somehow.

Cook had been noticing that the clumps of weeds were getting more and more numerous now. The one in question Saks was studying was a little island easily six feet in circumference. And, no, it didn’t look much like Gulf weed or any other weed Cook had ever seen before. It was a collection of matted, weedy growths, stalks and bladders, and white greasy-looking pustules about the size of teacups that looked very much like the caps of Death Angel mushrooms. And maybe the strangest and most disconcerting thing was it had a red jelly glistening on it like snot.

Maybe it was perfectly harmless.

Maybe.

“Hey, Fabrini,” Saks said. “Why don’t you jump in there and play with it? Take Menhaus with you. Maybe you two can catch a nice fish for supper. That last one… boy, now that was a real keeper.”

“Why don’t you piss up a rope?”

“You wanna suck on my what?” Saks said.

Menhaus laughed nervously.

Crycek just grinned.

Cook and Menhaus caught each other’s eyes for a moment and they were both thinking the same thing: this was trouble. There was tension here. Something that might turn violent and bloody at any moment. A poisoned sore ready to burst, ready to spread infection throughout the body… the body in this case being the sum total of those in the boat. Maybe they were disguising it with this high school locker room banter, but there was bad blood between Saks and Fabrini. A potentially volatile situation brewing. Saks was staying in the stern and Fabrini in the bow, but sooner or later Saks was going to mouth off and Fabrini was going to be all over him. You could see it in Fabrini’s eyes. The festering hate that was just waiting, waiting for the right moment like a tiger deciding when to unsheath its claws and open some bellies.

“Sure,” Crycek said. “Why don’t you touch that stuff, Fabrini? That would be interesting. What do you suppose would happen if you touched that stuff?”

But Fabrini wasn’t having it. The smile on his face was like a paper cut, just a slit. You could see it in his eyes, how he was getting damn tired of Crycek, too. Was maybe thinking that after he punched Saks’s fucking ticket he was going to do the same with Crycek, just keep it up, keep it up.

Menhaus said, “I just wish we’d drift free of this shit already.”

“You hear that, Fabrini? Menhaus wants us to drift free of this shit already,” Saks said. “What do you suppose the chances of that are?”

“About the same as you getting a personality,” Fabrini said.

Which got Saks laughing. “You’re great, Fagbrini, you’re really great. Why didn’t your old man shoot his load into the sink and save us all this grief?”

That almost did it. Fabrini’s eyes went dark and simmering, like hot tar bubbling up from a crevice. He looked about as close to murder as anyone Cook had ever seen. But then that look melted from his eyes and that smile came back, only it was sharp enough now to slit a throat. “Keep it up, Saks. Just keep it up,” was all he said.

“I always do. Just ask your mother.”

Crycek was still grinning. He couldn’t seem to lose that grin any more than a clown could lose one painted on his face. “Childish. You’re both so goddamn childish. You sit and argue and call each other fucking names while we drift farther into the mouth of Hell. Because that’s where we’re all going, each and everyone of us, right into Hell. And you know what, Menhaus? We’re never getting out. Never, ever.” He started giggling with a high, jittery sound that seemed to have the same tonal quality as fingernails scraping a blackboard. “Just like… heh, heh… just like Alice in Wonderland, eh? We went through the looking glass and now there’s no way out, no way at all.”

“Shut up,” Saks told him. “Goddamn freak.”

“No, no,” Fabrini said. “Let him speak. Let him get it off his chest. Maybe it’s about high time somebody around here speaks what’s really on their minds, really tells the truth.” Cook said, “Everyone’s overwrought.”

“Shut up, moron,” Saks told him. “Okay, Crycek. Spill it. You’ve been chewing on a bone ever since we came aboard, so out with it. What kind of crazy shit have you got for us?”

Crycek didn’t like that. Didn’t like being called crazy any more than a prostitute likes being called a whore. Because sometimes the truth not only hurts, it wounds, it scars. “What bone have I been chewing on? Same one you’ve all been chewing on, except not a one of you has the balls to come out and admit it. You’re all scared, you’re scared fucking white and I know it. I can see it in your eyes. Shit, I can smell it on you. You’re all ready to piss your pants! Big tough construction workers scared like little old ladies of the dark! I love it! I just fucking love it! Look how I love it!”

Cook said, “C’mon, Crycek… take it easy for chrissake. We’re your friends here.”

That got Saks laughing. “Friend? I ain’t his friend, Cook, anymore than I’m yours. And I also ain’t his mommy and ain’t about to baby this goddamn pussy.”

“Jesus Christ, Saks,” Fabrini said. “Give the guy a break.”

“Kiss my ass, you dumb wop. And that goes for the rest of you fucking sissies. Jesus H. Christ. Not a man among you.” He looked over at Crycek, looked at him like the very idea of his existence disgusted him. “Go ahead, Crycek. Vent yourself. Have your little nervous breakdown. When you decide you’ve got the balls to slit your wrists, I’ll give you the knife. Hell, I’ll hold it for you.”

Cook was beginning to feel tense and uncomfortable now, too. It was like reality and sanity were sewn together and some crazy bastard was pulling the seams open. He felt alone and paranoid and vulnerable.

Maybe they all felt that.

For if there had ever been any camaraderie here, it had just gone black to its core. Saks was a big part of that, of course. He was the proverbial rotten apple, the seed of malice. Sure, he was everything that was wrong with the race, all the intolerance and selfishness and cheap hatred rolled into a big fucking mess that called itself a man. Survival situations, like war, brought out the best and worst in people. And there was no doubt where Saks fit in. He was vile and crude and callous, the sort of guy that would slit your throat for a crust of bread.

And wasn’t it just damn funny, Cook got to thinking, how trash like him always survived? Always lived another day to poison a few more minds?

But if any of Saks’s cruelty was intended to make Crycek fold up like a flower in a frost, it just didn’t work. “That’s what I like about you Saks… you’ve got the biggest mouth of the bunch. Thrusting your chest out and running the others down, big boss man, big tough guy… and you know what’s really funny about that? What’s killing me is that you’re the most scared of all. You hide behind that macho shit because inside you’re a scared little boy… we weren’t here to show off for, you’d be crying and sucking your thumb.”

Saks was pissed. And everyone thought he was going to read Crycek the riot act, go up one side and down the other and not miss much real estate in-between… but he didn’t. He just stared at him, stared with such intensity he could’ve burned holes through him.

Menhaus said, “Okay, Crycek, enough. Both of you, enough.”

Fabrini just looked puzzled by it all. “What’s this ‘through the looking glass’ shit… what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Crycek, still grinning, said: “We aren’t in the Atlantic anymore. We’ve passed beyond, to another place. A bad place and you all know that. Just like Alice, right through the fucking looking glass… only this Wonderland, things aren’t so brightly lit, are they? You can call it the Devil’s Triangle or the Sargasso Sea or the Graveyard of Lost Ships… what does it matter? That fog grabbed us, vomited us out here… wherever in Christ here is. Another dimension, another planet, I don’t know, but I do know one thing and that’s that not a one of us is getting out. We’re here to stay.”

“Bullshit,” Menhaus said, looking angry for the first time. “I don’t buy that shit. Goddamn sailor’s stories, that’s all they are and you won’t get me to believe it, no sir. How about you, Saks? You don’t believe that, do you?”

Saks just looked at him. “All I’m going to say here is that wherever we are, whatever clusterfuck Crycek and his butthole sailors got us into, if we got here then we can get out again.”

There was a simple child’s logic to that and everyone felt it, understood it. Even Fabrini was nodding.

“There you go,” he said. “What we got to do is stick together, stay alive until we sort this out. That’s what we got to do.”

“Exactly,” Cook said.

But that only made Crycek start tittering. “Alive? Alive?” He looked at them all like they were nuttier than he was and maybe they were. He kept up that awful tittering, his yellow teeth chattering together as he did so. “Do you think what’s out there will let us live? You’ve all seen things and so have I. Monstrous, evil things. Alien things. Out in that fog, out there right now, they’re waiting, they’re listening to us. Nightmares, that’s what they are just as sure as this is Hell. Things with teeth and empty bellies and yellow eyes and-”

Menhaus slapped him across the face. Menhaus. Mellow, mild, goodtime, joke-telling, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly Menhaus. And he did it almost involuntarily. His hand just came up and swatted Crycek across the face and it was hard to say who was more shocked: Crycek or Menhaus himself.

“Good one,” Saks said.

Crycek looked like he was ready to leap, ready to start swinging, but Cook held him back. Wouldn’t let it happen. Wouldn’t give Saks the satisfaction of letting the men go at each other like animals.

“All right,” Fabrini said. “We all know there’s crazy shit here, we’re all on the same page. But-”

“But what?” Crycek said, practically raving now. “Don’t you get it? Don’t any of you get it? This fairy tale never-neverland we’re in is like some kind of dumping ground. Things too horrible to exist other places end up here. Maybe things God doesn’t want to look on or admit he created, things he’s ashamed of. This is where they end up, in this fucking sewer. They live and breed and multiply here… in this damnable pit, this cauldron of filth!” He started cackling again, only now no one had the guts to stop him. His eyes were huge and bloodshot, his lips trembling, cords jumping at his throat. “Sure, this is the bad place. This is where the things are, the crawling, squealing things! Unborn things and inhuman things! Things without eyes, without souls! Slinking, slithering, creeping nightmares and they’re out there right now! Can’t you feel them in the fog? Can’t you? Can’t you feel their hunger?”

“That’s enough,” Fabrini finally said. “Jesus Christ, that’s enough…”

But it wasn’t enough. They’d goaded Crycek into this, they’d wanted it and now they were getting it. They’d opened the can of madness and now he was shaking its contents all over them, wetting them down with the stinking, abominable, deranged reality of it as he saw it. “Those things… oh, Jesus, I can feel them hungering… they’ll be coming for us. Don’t you doubt that. None of you. Today or tonight they’ll take another and then tomorrow night and the night after and the fucking night after that! They’ll take us one by one and if you’re the last one… God help you if you’re the last one because you’ll slit your own throat rather than look those things in the face, look ‘em in the face alone”

His mind was gone and they all knew it, but the impact of what he said was inescapable. For they’d all seen things now. Heard things. Sensed things and imagined still others. And what Crycek was telling them was exactly what had been echoing through their minds.

“You think I’m nuts? That it? You think I’m nuts?” he put to them, shuddering and quaking, his eyes darting madly. “Sure. Why not? Why shouldn’t I be? You give it a day or two and you’ll be as fucking loopy as I am! Oh, yes, yes, yes!”

Saks hit his seat with his fist and everyone jumped. “That’s it,” he said. He pulled out the knife he’d taken from Hupp: a lockblade with a seven-inch blade. Everybody saw that steel and they saw what was in his eyes, too. “One of you guys… somebody don’t shut this fucking nutjob up, so help me I’ll cut his fucking tongue out!”

Crycek was beyond danger now. He just laughed and then tears rolled from his eyes. He made a whimpering sound that quickly turned into a more ragged, horrid laughter. “You think I’m crazy, Saks? Sure, sure, sure, hee, hee, hee, crazy I am! Fuck it! But I’ll tell you people one thing and I’ll tell you it only once: you’re all in danger. And it isn’t just the wildlife, either. It ain’t just the things in the water, because this world… this zone or dimension or whatever in the Christ it is… it ain’t no different from the one we’re from. Because just like our world, this one… yeah, this one has a Devil, too.”

That even stopped Saks from using his knife which he was actually getting ready to do. And Cook knew that no one was going to stop him, but this stopped him. This stopped everyone. This filled them with something cold and shifting and made them all look out into the churning fog and wonder if something was looking back.

Menhaus was breathing hard. “I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I just want to get back home. That’s all I want.”

“Ask Cook,” Crycek said, his voice dead and emotionless now. “Go ahead, ask him. Ask him why he’s afraid to listen to the VHF, why he’s afraid to broadcast on it. Ask him.”

They were all looking at Cook now. But he just shook his head. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

But in their eyes, all their eyes, he could see that they did not believe him.

Crycek said, “Tell them, Cook. Tell them why you don’t like that static on the radio, how you can feel something out there, something listening. Go ahead, tell them.”

“Shut up,” Cook snapped.

“Cook doesn’t have the guts to say what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling,” Crycek said and his sudden, rational calm was even worse than his earlier hysteria. “Because he knows it’s out there, just like I do. It makes a buzzing sound like… like an insect. And maybe it is an insect. But it’s out there, believe that. Something cold and cruel… out there in the fog, listening, watching us. It wants to eat our souls, it wants to devour our minds…” He held a finger to his lips. “Ssshh. Just. Listen. You can hear it out there, hear it listening, hear it waiting, feel it thinking about us… in here.” He massaged his temples. “It’s in here, in all of us, eating us from the inside with fear.”

And the thing was, they were all listening.

Listening to the fog and hearing distant things and things that were not so distant. Suggestions of movement. Whispers of motion. And underneath it all, a low constant thrumming sound like a generator on stand-by, waiting to power up.

For a long time after that, nobody said a thing.

But they were thinking things.

Things that were not good, especially trapped in that fog.

Things about the horrors in the fog and how they could be positively minor in comparison to an evil that was huge and cosmic and had come to eat their souls.

14

There were things in the fog and there were things in the minds of men and sometimes it was truly hard to say which was the worst. That which you could see and which could kill you… or that which remained unseen that slowly ate away your mind, your resolve, your sanity. And then, according to Crycek’s psychosis, there was that forbidding third grouping: that which you could not only see, but what could see you. Could feel you. And to this devil, if Crycek was correct, flesh and blood were of only marginal interest. What it wanted were minds to fill with gnawing pestilence and souls it could eat raw and squirming.

George Ryan was not in the lifeboat and he didn’t need to be, for he had felt this other and more than once. He could sense it on the VHF, something hidden in that static like a hive of wasps hidden in the trunk of a blasted oak. Something that used the static for camouflage or maybe was the static itself. Both, maybe, and neither.

The easiest thing to do was to tell yourself that you were being paranoid, imagining soul-eating bogies out in that draping fog. For imagining such a thing under such conditions was perfectly natural. For the human mind was like that, wasn’t it?

If it had no answers, it created them.

It filled in the blanks so it didn’t burn out circuits and relays trying to answer that which was ultimately unanswerable. Maybe there was no discarnate intelligence out there, no depraved puppet master working the strings. Maybe it was just nature, raw and ravenous and alien. Such a thing was entirely possible, George decided. But it did not satisfy that very human sort of logic that declared that there always had to be someone in charge, if not God then the Devil and if neither of them, something vile and nameless so above us on the evolutionary scale that it might as well have been a god.

Humans had need of such higher powers.

Maybe it was because our society was empirical, based on social pecking order and always had been. Everything had to have levels and classes, we decided, a food chain of sorts. And every food chain had its apex predator… the big guy, the boss man, the chief.

And in that awful void of fog and nightmares, well, there had to be one, too. It definitely was not man so it had to be something else. For the idea of a place existing, being left under the chaotic charge of old Mother Nature… that was not acceptable.

For every ship had a captain and there had to be one here, too.

Didn’t there?

Well, didn’t there?

Yes, George had been thinking these things, trying to root out superstitious fear with modern weapons like reason and hard-headed logic. He’d come up with a pretty good theory to explain away this theoretical Fog-Devil. But he had to. There really was no choice in the matter. If you didn’t erect some kind of wall between yourself and the unexplainable, well… you were going to be in trouble. And especially here. George had gone through it for a time after hearing that phobic white noise. It had gotten to him. Gotten to him bad. Gotten to him to the point that he had pulled down inside himself, crouched down in his own cellar, hidden there, trying to be small and silent and safe like a mouse avoiding an owl in some great, misting killing field. And there he had waited, scared and helpless, smelling the rubber of the raft and the dankness of his own soul. But paranoia found him even there, hiding in the shadows, told him that this… this whatever it was, could find him anywhere. That even then it could hear his breathing, smell the fear-sweat on him, sense the hot blood rushing through his veins and the electrical impulses threading the synaptic networks of his brain.

It was out there, thinking about him. Feeling him. Getting stronger and stronger on the sour bile of his fear.

It was then that George put it to bed.

He climbed out of the cellar and filled his lungs with that moist, musty air and pretended real hard that he could not feel something out there. It was easier that way. Through ignorance there was ascension, through self-denial there was purity. Because the only other option was gradual mental deterioration, a rabid and all-encompassing paranoia that would eat his mind right down to cinders and polished bone.

So, without a doubt, George did not need to be on the lifeboat with the others. He did not need Crycek’s madness for he had enough of his own, thank you very much.

God, he thought, what’s it going to be like after two or three days? A week? A month?

But he wasn’t going there.

“It’s funny,” he said to Gosling, “how it puts everything in perspective.” Gosling smiled. “It does that, doesn’t it?”

“I mean, you blunder through your life taking everything for granted. You worry about mortgages and bills and money. You dream about all the things you’d like to buy. The lifestyle you’d like to have. Never once do you look around and think, ‘hey, this isn’t so bad. I’ve got a roof over my head, food in my belly, I can afford a few nice toys. It’s a good life’. It’s not until everything goes to hell that you appreciate it. What I wouldn’t give for a lazy Sunday afternoon in my recliner, snacking and watching the tube. A nice cold beer in my hand. Lisa always makes a big dinner on Sunday — roast beef or fried chicken, all the trimmings. You know what I’d give for that now?”

Gosling said, “Just about anything, I’d imagine.”

George sipped water from the cap Gosling handed him. Already they were on strict rations. “How about you? Do you appreciate what you have or do you worry about what you don’t have?”

“I like to think I appreciate what I’ve got.”

“But do you?”

“Not enough.”

“Are you married?”

“I tried it once. Didn’t work. I’m gone too much.”

“Kids?”

“No. No time.”

George thought it didn’t seem like much of a life flitting about from one place to the next. No roots. No nothing. Just a lot of time to think while you were out at sea. It sounded lonely.

“When we get rescued,” George said, “I want you to come over for supper, Gosling. I mean it. It’ll be good for you.”

“Maybe,” Gosling said. “Maybe I will.” He kept staring out the doorway of the raft. “What’s so interesting out there?”

“Look.”

George went over to the doorway with him, stared out into the fog and murk and saw it right away. It was brighter now, of course, and visibility was up to maybe two hundred feet or so. And that’s where George was seeing it, right where the mist became the water and the water became the mist… a series of luminous objects just beneath the surface heading in their direction. Whatever they were-they looked lozenge-shaped, a few feet in length each-there had to be hundreds of them and they were coming fast. More all the time.

“What the hell are they?” George asked.

Gosling just shook his head. “Something… I don’t know… like a school of luminous fish”

And there was no time for further discussion, for the school was closing in on them, moving just a few inches beneath the surface of the water and creating a surging, boiling swell in their wake.

Gosling zipped the door shut.

Eyes wide and panicked, they waited for the first impact.

15

Cook never took his eyes off Saks.

Crycek was crazy, of course, and Fabrini was trouble. Maybe Menhaus, too, and mainly because he was such a follower. But Saks.. . he was another story. Saks reminded him of his father. But unlike his father who had good days and kind words from time to time, Saks pretended to be nothing but what he was: a bully.

What they needed right now was a sense of unity.

The common enemy was this terrible sea. They could only survive if they worked together. Cook was no survival expert, but even he knew this. And the greatest threat to their unity was Saks. Not what lurked out in the fog or even this hypothetical devil of Crycek’s. Just Saks. He would destroy the survivors much faster than any of those factors. He was a self-involved, self-indulgent macho bastard who would have fed his mother to the sharks if he thought it would keep him alive a few more hours.

If the others had risen up and decided to kill the man, Cook knew he would happily join in. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, anyway.

But if he was lucky, maybe in time.

And nobody was more patient than Cook because he knew Saks was a dead man, it was just a matter of when now.

16

“I’m so thirsty,” Soltz kept saying. “I need water.”

“You’re okay. Just try to think of something else,” Cushing said, scanning the fog with his bright blue eyes, looking for something, anything out there. Anything that might give him even the thinnest ray of hope. Because, Jesus, this was bad.

Real bad.

Cushing wasn’t a pessimist by any stretch of the imagination, but there were limits to everything. Just the two of them, he was thinking, floating on that fucking hatch cover in that turgid, alien sea. What were their chances here? Death could come in so many different ways. And if it wasn’t from some of the wildlife — he’d heard enough sounds out there now to be convinced that there was some seriously nasty shit prowling around-then what? Dehydration? Starvation?

Damn, but it wasn’t looking real peachy right about then.

He hadn’t slept in… well, he wasn’t sure how long now. Since his berth in the ship. Every time his eyes started drifting shut, he snapped awake with the dread certainty that something was coming out of the fog, something was reaching out for him. Even when he was wide awake and alert, it was hard to shake that feeling.

He wondered if Soltz felt it, too. But he didn’t dare ask him.

The man had enough anxieties to deal with.

“No boats will come here,” Soltz sighed. “Not into this Sargasso Sea.”

“I told you that’s a myth. I was pulling your leg.”

“I think we both know better, don’t we?”

Cushing just shrugged. Okay, the kid gloves were off. No more trying to talk reason to the man… even if it was less like reason and more like out and out bullshit. Let Soltz believe they were lost in some alternate dimension, that they’d fallen through the back door of the Devil’s Triangle.

Why not? Because they probably had.

“What is that?” Soltz said excitedly. “Look! What is that? A shark? A whale?” Cushing looked and saw nothing. “Where?

“There!” Soltz said, jabbing his finger at the water.

Cushing saw a gigantic shadow pass beneath them. Soltz, trembling, his jaw sprung open like a trap, moved to the very center of the hatch cover. Cushing crept out to the edge, tried to get a look at their visitor. It was a huge fish, at least forty feet in length. Its body a dusky brownish green speckled with white dots and darker transverse bands. It could have been a whale… except that as it passed, Cushing saw that its head narrowed into an angular probocis that was lit up like a Christmas tree, seemed to twist in the water, corkscrewing.

Crazy, impossible fish.

It swam off, did not return.

“It’s just some kind of whale, I guess,” Cushing said, not sure if he was relieved or terrified by the idea of something that size. “Harmless, I think.”

“You think? Well, it didn’t look harmless to me.”

“It’s gone. Don’t worry about it.”

Soltz stared out through his thick glasses. “You know a lot about nature, don’t you? The sea and its animals, things like that. How is it an accountant knows about things like that?”

“I’m a frustrated naturalist,” Cushing admitted. “I read books on everything. Sea life happens to be one of those things I’ve studied.”

“With my eyes, reading is a chore. I get headaches. Did I ever tell you about my headaches?”

Cushing figured he was about to learn all about them.

17

“Get ready,” Gosling said and there was dire import behind his words. George said nothing.

He’d never felt quite so helpless before in his life. His knuckles were white as they gripped his knees. He was tense and waiting, his heart hammering wildly.

His throat was so dry, his voice would barely come. “I’m afraid,” he admitted. “Jesus, I’m afraid.”

“Stay calm,” Gosling said.

The waiting, of course, was the worse part. Not knowing what was going to happen and when, if anything at all. George was now very much thinking about Lisa and his son Jacob and those pleasant Sunday afternoons. The worst part, the very worst part, about it all now was that he honestly didn’t think he’d see them again. He’d never know another Sunday.

Just stay calm, he told himself. Just like Gosling says. That’s what you gotta do. Stay calm.

Bullshit.

“They’re almost on us,” Gosling said.

But how he could know that with the door zipped shut was beyond George. Maybe he just felt it because George was feeling it, too, now: a gradual, almost lazy pressure building in the sea behind the raft. George was certain he could feel it coming right through the rubberized deckplates… a weight, an expectancy, a surging motion like air forced before a train. Right before impact.

There was no way to stay calm. Even Gosling didn’t look so good. He was clown-white under his tan, his eyes jittering in their sockets like roulette balls. He was gripping the plank for dear life.

There.

George felt it and so did Gosling. Something or many somethings had just moved beneath them with such speed and power its aftershock actually lifted the raft up a few inches. The sea exploded with activity.

“They’re under us,” Gosling said.

And they were.

Dozens and dozens of those luminous fish or animals or whatever they were. They swam close to the surface and now they were bumping against the raft, one after the other. The funny thing was that their light — sort of a pale, thrumming green — filled the interior of the raft, actually lit the bottom like an x-ray so that you could see the outlines of the air chambers, every seam and stitch.

Yes, it was amazing. Truly amazing.

But neither George or Gosling had the time to truly appreciate it, for being in the raft was like being on a roller coaster. Thump, thump, thump in rapid succession. The sea boiled and the raft careened and George clenched his teeth down hard, waiting for those chambers to start popping and for them to start sinking.

But that it didn’t happen.

The raft was engineered to handle rough seas and no amount of jolting and jarring was going to pop it. That’s why it was designed with a series of air chambers, rather than a single one.

Gosling had told him this and more than once, but George couldn’t remember any of that. All he was seeing was that weird glow and feeling the raft beneath him in constant motion, spilling him this way and that, into Gosling and then back to the deck.

Then the bumping stopped and the glow went out as if somebody had switched off a lamp.

After a moment or two, Gosling went to the door and unzipped it. Nothing but the fog and the sea again, moving as one when they moved at all.

“Gone,” he said. “And we’re still here.”

18

“Well, I’m hungry,” Saks said, after a long period of silence. “What do you guys say we cut up Fabrini and have a snack?”

This elicited a low, dry laugh from Menhaus. Cook said nothing. Crycek just stared. Fabrini clenched and unclenched his fists.

“I mean, if this goes on for a long time,” Saks went on, “we’re going to have to eat someone. Fabrini’s my choice. Let’s face it, he’s the most expendable.”

“No, you’re wrong, Saks,” Fabrini said. “I’m too thin. What you want is some lardass. Like you for instance. A big, fat blowhard. A blubbery hothead that’ll cook in his own juices.”

Saks cackled. “You hear that, Menhaus? He wants my juices. All he ever thinks of is my dick.”

Cook tuned them out. He was watching the fog, watching Crycek, and mostly just watching Saks. Crycek’s diatribe earlier of some devil out there, waiting, was not lost on him. It seemed, that he could feel this other when he closed his eyes. Some presence nipping at the back of his mind. And maybe that was sheer imagination and maybe not, but there was a much more clear and present danger and that was Saks.

“Right now, food don’t sound so good,” Menhaus grumbled. “What I need is a cold beer.”

“Shut up,” Fabrini said.

“There’s no point in talking about that,” Cook said. “We have to be realistic.”

Saks held his hands out before him in surprise. “Shit, was that you, Cook? Who rattled your cage? Let’s be quiet, guys, he might speak again.”

Cook narrowed his eyes. “I’m just saying we must be realistic here. There’s no point in talking about beer. We’ll have to get by on our survival rations until… until something else shows up.”

“Well there you go,” Saks said. “Mr. Realism has spoken.”

“Oh, just shut up,” Fabrini said.

“Why don’t you go fuck your mother, Fagbrini?” Saks snarled.

Fabrini rose to his feet, the boat rocking slightly. “I’ve had as much as I’m going to take from you, Saks. You’ve been asking for this.”

Saks grinned without mirth. He stood up slowly, knowing that he had been asking for this. He’d been trying to push Fabrini to violence ever since the ship went down. And the fact that the moment had come gave him no end of satisfaction. He liked to be able to manipulate people. It gave him a feeling of power knowing he could push the right buttons and get someone to act accordingly. Like Fabrini, for instance. Hotheads were the easiest to control.

“Stop this,” Cook said. “You can’t fight in the boat.”

And in his brain he was trying to think of a reason why they couldn’t. Because it was wrong? Because it was immature? Because they might tip the boat? But, no, none of that was what he had been thinking at all. It had been something a little higher and a little mightier. They couldn’t fight because, dammit, they were men, they were both men and that had to count for something. For men were a rarity in this new savage world and if indeed there was some malefic devil out there, some puppet master, then they had to stick together. Had to show this thing that men always stuck together, always presented a unified front against adversity.

Sure, maybe it was all a little idealistic, a little pretentious, but Cook figured it was important. They could not allow themselves to become puppets, playthings, amusement for something wicked and inhuman. For negativity amongst their numbers made them weaker… and made it stronger.

“Please,” he said to them, “just stop this. Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

But they didn’t and continued to hurl insults back and forth, most of which were getting damned unfunny by this point.

Crycek said, “You should listen to Cook. Maybe some of you don’t know, but Cook? Oh, he knows, all right. He knows what’s out there, what waits for us. Divide and conquer, that’s what it’s doing. It feeds on fear and hopelessness and anxiety, violence and anger… and you’re feeding it. Oh, you certainly are. Filling its belly with your filth, making it strong…”

Crycek launched into another of his insane sermons about this mythical other who watched and waited and listened, amused, constantly amused. That both Saks and Fabrini were idiots because they didn’t really want to fight, that they were being manipulated by this thing, that it was in their heads seeding their actions. Crycek told them that they had to fight it, force it out of their minds… didn’t they see? Didn’t they see anything?

Cook knew Crycek was crazy, but that didn’t necessitate that he was wrong. Because Cook himself had been thinking along those lines. What if they were being manipulated, forced into this? Sure, they were both idiots when you came down to it, drowning in their own testosterone, and this is exactly how you’d figure they’d act. But what if Crycek was right?

Cook thought: It makes sense, doesn’t it? This thing, this devil, it would go after those with weakest minds, those it could bend the easiest. Saks and Fabrini might be physically strong, but mentally-like all such men-they’re simplistic, simple-minded. Everything’s black and white and minds like that are the easiest to exploit… that’s how countries got men to go to war, by exploiting their base instincts. This thing would know that. It would know the weakest psychological links instinctively…

Mind control… Jesus.

“Both of you stop it,” Cook said, trying one last time.

They both ignored him, edging closer by the moment.

Menhaus opened his mouth to say something, then closed it once more. He slipped around Fabrini to the bow and sat beside Cook.

“This is madness,” Cook said. “Grown men acting like this! We are in a life and death situation here and-”

“Let ‘em go, “ Menhaus said, enjoying it immensely. “Let ‘em get it out of their systems.”

Like a boxing match or a football game… Menhaus was relieving his own tensions and frustrations vicariously. These two were his pressure-release valve.

When they were a few feet apart, Saks stopped smiling. “Okay, you little shitfuck, let’s see what you got.”

The words had barely left his lips when Fabrini made his move. He swung roundhouse at Saks and Saks ducked under it easily. He came up quickly pounding Fabrini twice in the face with tight, economical jabs. Fabrini did not go down. He lunged forward with a stumbling grace, blood running from his nose, and tackled Saks. They both went down in the stern, the boat rocking wildly. Saks fended off two punches and took a third and fourth in the face. Fabrini was swinging like a man possessed. Very few of his blows found their intended target, but those that did were devastating. Saks was being battered badly. He got his foot in Fabrini’s crotch and kicked out with everything he had. Fabrini cried out and, arms flaying madly, went over the side of the boat.

Cook and Menhaus went to his assistance.

Saks wiped blood from his face. “Leave the bastard!” he howled.

But Cook and Menhaus were already pulling him onboard. “He was bleeding in the water,” Cook kept saying frantically. “He was bleeding. In the water.”

But the import of that was lost on Saks. “Yeah, and he’s going to bleed a lot more,” Saks said, coming at them. He had a knife in his hand. The same one he’d pulled from Hupp’s boot. Before anyone could hope to stop him, he slashed out with it, taking off the top of Fabrini’s left ear.

Somebody shouted. Maybe Cook, maybe Menhaus.

Fabrini didn’t seem to know what was happening. A look of rage swept across his features followed by one of dazed confusion and finally pain. His hand went to his ear, blood gushing between his splayed fingers. He saw the knife, felt the warm wetness course down his neck and started to scream, crawling away towards the bow on all fours.

Menhaus tripped over one of the seats trying to get away from the glinting silver of the knife. “Oh shit,” he gasped. “Oh Christ.”

Apparently, Menhaus didn’t like it when his thrills spilled over in his own lap.

Cook stood his ground, his eyes like shining metal balls. “Give me the knife, Saks,” he said in a low, hard voice. “Give me that fucking knife!”

Saks cackled, blood running down his chin from a split lip. “You want the knife, fuck-face? You want the fucking knife?”

Cook knew he was in a dangerous position. He could see the raw animal rage in Saks’s eyes. It was like fire and rusting metal. The man was about as close to insanity as anyone he’d ever seen. Anyone save his father.

Saks slashed at him with the blade, driving him back. “You be good, asshole, you be real good,” he panted. “You get over there with your buddies or I swear to God I’ll slit you open.”

Cook backed away slowly, hands held out before him peacefully. “Sure, Saks, sure. We don’t want no trouble here. You just relax and keep cool.”

“Oh, I’ll be cool, shitbag, don’t worry about that,” he said, still smiling like a skull in the desert. “Just as long as you do what I say. Otherwise, heh, there’s things out there… hungry things. You know what I’m saying?”

In the bow, Cook found Fabrini splashing water on his ear. Washing blood from it and his neck, but also putting blood in the water.

“You idiot,” he said. “Stop it.”

“What?” Fabrini said. “What?”

“You’re getting blood in the water.”

“What of it?” Fabrini said.

“The blood,” Cook said breathlessly. “Sharks can smell it in the water.”

He didn’t need to say more. Nobody was really worried about sharks, but there was bound to be other things. Worse things. Hungry things, as Saks had said.

Menhaus licked his dry lips. “I think you’re right.”

Cook decided he’d better derail that one. “Besides… this water… it doesn’t look real clean to me. You might get some sort of infection from that slop.”

He got out the first aid kit and bandaged Fabrini’s ear for him, sprayed a little disinfectant on it. Fabrini complained, but he wasn’t too bad about any of it. Which got Cook to thinking that there was hope for him. The fact that he hadn’t tried to grab an oar or something and go at it with Saks, proved there was something very human in him.

But Saks?

No, he was too far gone.

19

“Right there,” George was saying. “Do you see it… right over there…”

Gosling was looking through the doorway with him and he saw it, all right. Tangled in a mass of weeds, something bright orange. Looked like styrofoam. He was thinking it might have been an EPIRB tube that had floated free of the ship or one of the lifeboats. At least, that’s what it kind of looked like.

“What do you think?” George asked.

Gosling figured it was worth checking out. “Help me unzip the canopy.”

The canopy was zippered to the inflated arches of the raft. Together, they began taking it down. Maybe it put them at risk, Gosling was thinking, but it was nice not being enclosed in the canopy. To feel the air again… even if it did smell like something mossy and rotting.

Gosling passed out oars and they began rowing over there, feeling the drag of the sea anchor behind them. The weeds were growing more numerous and none of that had escaped Gosling’s attention. Before, there had been little drifting clumps, an occasional island, now the islands were getting more numerous. They rowed on, parting the mats of weed, moving towards their target.

When they were maybe six feet away, Gosling saw the orange of an EPIRB. “Just a radio beacon,” he said. “We already have two of them.”

“Fuck it,” George said. “Let’s just keep rowing. Feels good to be doing something.”

Gosling figured he was right. It did feel good. And maybe, just maybe, with weeds becoming more concentrated it meant they were nearing some landmass. Maybe.

So they rowed and watched the weeds, the tendrils of steam wafting off the water, the heavy fog shimmering and glimmering. It felt good to put their muscles to work.

George suddenly said, “What the hell?”

He was yanking on his oar, managed to free it. He studied the end and began rowing again. Gosling figured he’d caught it on the weeds, paid it little mind… until something seized his oar. Held it tight.

“I’m caught on something,” he said, struggling with it, trying to pull it up and out of the mire. He managed to work it free of that dark, sluicing water a few inches and then it was pulled back down again. No, it surely wasn’t weeds, it had to be-

There was a thump under the raft. And then another. A rubbery scraping sound that made Gosling’s hackles rise. It was like the sound they heard earlier, a sort of slow investigative motion. More scraping, another thump. Then something down there hit the raft hard and it lurched to the left.

“Christ,” George said.

He had his oar out of the water by then and Gosling gave his a yank and there was nothing holding it. They sat silently, waiting for what would come next for they both knew something would. Something was about to happen here. They were froze up, looking at each other, the sea.

There was a ripple of motion just beneath the surface on the port side. George’s side. Then another. He let out a little involuntary gasp and then water sprayed up and over him like he’d been hit by a big comber.

And then something big moved in the water.

Gosling caught a quick glimpse of something dark and shiny-looking, like oiled rubber.

“What in the hell?” George said, moving away from the gunwale, maybe feeling whatever it was in his mind and not liking it at all.

Gosling was thinking about a weapon, something other than the wet oar in his hands when another gout of water splashed into the boat and George cried out and… and something huge and serpentine came winding out of the drink. It was big around as a man’s thigh, brown and leathery, with a long snaking body and a huge, eyeless head that looked bony and plated. It had a mouth and it was a big one.

George ducked down as it snapped at him, darting its head in his direction like a python trying to snatch a rat. The head was about the size of a mailbox, set with a hinged jaw that allowed the mouth to open wide enough to take hold of a man’s head.

Gosling hit it with his oar and then hit it again.

It backed off, slid under the water and came back up again.

It lashed out at where it thought the men were, but it was blind. Completely blind, something engineered to haunt the black depths far below. It looked, if anything, like some immense moray eel. Its body in the water was coiling and twisting. Gosling figured it had to be fifteen or twenty feet in length. It had fins like an eel and that awful length of corkscrewing, boneless body. There were bright yellow gill slits set just behind the head. It hammered into the raft with its head and body, not sure what to make of it. Every time those jaws came open, Gosling could feel a rush of hot, briny air

George was dodging that swooping head, swinging wildly with his oar. “Get it the fuck away from me!” he cried out.

Both he and Gosling kept cracking it with their oars.

If the situation hadn’t been so terrifying, it might have been comical. For the eel, or whatever it was, might have been a slick, evil predator in that slimy sea, but above in the open air it was clumsy and drunken, seemed to have no true equilibrium whatsoever. It nudged the sides of the raft again and again with its nose, then seemed to lose balance and rolled in the thrashing water, flashing a pale speckled belly at them. Its fins fanned out like the wings of a bird, but could get no purchase in the air.

Growing tired of the games and obviously getting winded if those gasping, fluttering gill slits could be any indication, it yawned its jaws and took hold of the port gunwale, began to shake it.

Gosling cracked it over the head until it let go, seeing gladly that there were no punctures in the rubber.

The creature slid back into the water to suck in some air from that filth no doubt. But it wasn’t gone. They could hear it under the raft, bumping and squeaking along.

Gosling pulled a flare gun from the survival equipment, thinking that the beast, the worm, whatever it was, reminded him of gulper eels that fishermen sometimes pulled up in their nets. It had that same undulating body and oversized head and like many creatures from the abyss, it looked like something from a B movie out of the water.

George was in the stern now, breathing hard, soaked and staring, oar raised.

“Come on, you prick,” Gosling said, tensing.

And then it did, it shot up out of the water, jaws wide and Gosling moved fast. He brought up the flare gun and fired a flare right into its mouth and maybe down its throat for all he knew. There was a sudden explosion of light and red sparks from inside its mouth and it began going wild, shaking its head madly back and forth, pissing sparks and smoke and the stink of burned flesh.

Then it dove back into the water with a hissing sound.

That was it.

Five minutes later, it still had not come back.

When he was able to catch his breath, George said, “Let’s put that fucking canopy back up.”

“Yeah,” Gosling said.

20

Saks kept his eye on his “friends.”

He watched them like a mother bird watches a nearby snake. He knew and knew very well what they were thinking. He knew what kind of plots were even now hatching in their brains. They were all fantasizing about overpowering him, about killing him or throwing him overboard to

…to those hungry things. Maybe not all of them. Menhaus was too chickenshit to try something like that and Crycek was just a basket case. But the other two? Oh yeah. You could bank on it.

Fabrini and Cook. They were going to be trouble. They were going to try and take the knife.

But it was going to be a cold day in hell when that came to pass.

“I wonder what’s out there?” Saks said almost jovially. “What kind of things… bad things, I bet. Just like Crycek said. Things with teeth that can smell blood in the water. Like that thing we heard eating those guys in that other boat. Remember that? The way it sounded… those chomping, tearing sounds. You remember that, Menhaus? Awful sounds, eating sounds, bones crunching.”

“All right, Saks,” Cook said. “That’ll do.”

“No, I don’t think so. See because I’m just wondering who’s gonna be first to fill their bellies.”

“Maybe it’ll be you,” Fabrini said.

“Not likely.”

“Hey, Saks,” Menhaus said, “why don’t you just stop this shit? Just call it quits right now. What do you say?”

“Sorry. Don’t think it’ll work. First time I set this knife down, your buddies there’ll kill me. They’ll take this knife and slit me up for bait. Isn’t that what you’re thinking, Cook? Feed old Saks to the monsters in the mist. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Listen,” Cook said. “The last thing I want to do is hurt anybody. We need each other. Can’t you see that?”

“I only see that you’re a liar.”

Saks kept staring, taunting them with the knife. He really wished they’d try something. They’d find out good and fast just how handy he was with a blade. He’d killed two slopes in ‘Nam with one and he hadn’t forgotten a thing. Just let ‘em try. Slash, slash. He’d get one of them across the eyes, the other in the belly. Then he’d feed their sorry asses to those horrors out there. Menhaus, he knew, wouldn’t be one of them.

“Anytime you pussies feel man enough,” Saks said, “you just come and get me. I’m right over here. Here and waiting. I think you’re in for a world of hurt, but you’re more than welcome.”

“You gotta sleep sometime,” Fabrini said.

“Oh, but I’m a real light sleeper, Fabrini.”

And that’s probably what they were planning, Saks realized. They were waiting for him to nod off. That’s when they were going to do it. Had it all planned, sneaky little fucks. They were playing it safe right now. Acting all inoffensive and harmless to put him off his guard. But it wasn’t going to work.

He’d kill anyone who got close to him.

“Yeah, I’m a real light sleeper,” he told them in a dry, menacing voice. “I hear anybody creeping around by me, well, I just start slashing. And I don’t care which one of you sweethearts dies.”

Let ‘em suck on that, Saks thought.

“I hope it’s you, Fabrini, I sure do. You see, you and me aren’t done dancing yet. Not by a long shot. You can bet on that. You can swear to that on the grave of that dick-sucking whore you call a mother.”

“You sonofabitch,” Fabrini growled.

Cook held onto him, restraining him. But he made no real effort to get at his tormentor. Fabrini had a bad temper, a violent temper if you cornered him, but he was no fool. Saks was crazy and you didn’t mess with a crazy man holding a knife.

Saks laughed at it all.

Oh, Fabrini was a gem. Just a real fucking pearl. You push button A, he gets pissed off. You push button B, he wants to beat your brains in. Button C, he’s your buddy. Just a dumbass robot. If it weren’t for the other two holding him back, he would’ve been a dead man by now.

“Let him go,” Saks said. “You know that sooner or later he’s going to try it. Sooner or later he’s going to do something stupid and I’ll have to kill him. Let’s get it over with. Fucking shitrat like him is a liability to you guys. To all of us. C’mon, Fabrini, be a hero.”

He didn’t move and Saks giggled.

“About what I expected from a wop.”

“Enough already,” Cook said.

“Quit it, Cook. Quit with the voice of reason here. You ain’t fooling me,” Saks said. “I got your number. I know a scheming killer when I see one. Oh yeah. I know you. I know what you’re all about.”

“C’mon, Saks,” Menhaus said without much effort.

But Saks just smiled. Smiled and waited for them to make their move. Because, sooner or later, they would. And Crycek could go fuck himself, because you didn’t need no devil to make men act like animals. It was their nature.

And Saks knew it.

21

Cushing couldn’t believe it when the raft came into view.

He looked and looked again, squinting beneath that dome of sparkling, angry mist, certain what he was seeing was a mirage. But it was no mirage, because Soltz saw it, too. It was real enough and so were the men waving from it.

No, it wasn’t rescue as such, but at the same time after countless hours on a hatch cover, that’s exactly what it was.

“I guess… I guess we won’t die on this hatch cover after all,” was all Soltz could say, cheated out of his whiny, dramatic death once again.

Quickly then, they began paddling over to the raft.

When Cushing first saw it, that shape come drifting out of the mist… he thought the worst possible things, of course. Although he couldn’t see exactly what it was — just a shadow moving against that field of yellow and gray — he started imagining plenty. Was certain that whatever was out there was about to show itself.

That was what he had originally thought.

And sometimes in life, it was just damn great to be wrong.

When they got up near the raft… or it got up near them… Cushing saw George Ryan and Gosling, the first mate of the Mara Corday. It was the best company he could have hoped for.

“You’re late,” was the first thing George said to him as he hauled him aboard, up the little boarding ladder. “Least you could have done is called. Was that asking too much?”

Cushing laughed. Laughed loud and full like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard and maybe it was. It got him an odd look from Gosling, like maybe he was losing it, but that was okay. After all those hours on that hatch cover listening to Soltz bitch, a man was allowed a certain level of joyful delirium. And Soltz, true to form, complained the entire time Gosling yanked him aboard.

The raft was big and roomy, Cushing noticed, and could have accommodated a dozen men without crowding. That was a good thing because what he needed more than anything else was to stretch his legs without fear something was going to nip one of them off.

After George had given them a quick encapsulated version of the plight of himself and Gosling, leaving out certain unpleasant experiences concerning giant eels and luminous fishies, Soltz began.

“We must’ve drifted for days,” he told them, wiping his glasses against his shirt. “It had to be at least that long… an endless fever is what it was. Just a blur for Cushing and me. Yes, I was pretty certain that we were nearing our last breaths.”

Gosling was just staring at him.

When he was done doing that, he looked at Cushing as if to say, is this guy for real here? But the look Cushing gave him back assured him that, yes, this was Soltz in the flesh. The weakest link? Yeah, and then some.

After they had some freeze-dried food and water that tasted a bit brackish after being stored in plastic bags, the novelty of their new position wore off some, at least enough where they could relax and discuss things in depth.

And after it was hashed-out, what was really to be said? They didn’t know where they were or if by luck or providence they’d ever find their way out.

“About all we can do is take it day by day,” Gosling said. “What else is there to do?”

He was right and they all knew it.

Except maybe Soltz. “What we have to do, I think, is accept that we’re lost far from home, in an ocean I don’t think exists on any map.”

“He thinks we’re in the Devil’s Triangle or something,” Cushing added.

“No, not exactly,” Soltz pointed out. “We were somewhere like that. But that fog reached out for us and dumped us here, in this place… wherever this is.”

Gosling just studied him. “What do you mean it reached out?”

“I mean it took us, transported us somewhere else. I don’t know… another plane or dimension, call it whatever you want,” he said to them, eyes huge behind his spectacles. “I know it sounds impossible and far-fetched and you all probably think I’m crazy or having a nervous breakdown. Please yourself. Think those things all you want, but down deep you know I’m right. This is the Twilight Zone. This place is neither here nor there, but caught in-between, a world or dimension stuck in the mist and shadows. Nothing’s right here. Nothing’ll ever be right.”

It was all very sobering stuff, of course, but nothing they hadn’t all been through in their minds dozens of times.

“Don’t get carried away,” Gosling finally said.

“I don’t think I am. I think, given the circumstances, I’m being entirely realistic. This fog is not right. The sea is funny. Even the air… have you noticed, that even the air feels-”

“Like it isn’t put together right?” George said. “Too thick or too thin, too moist or too dry. But too damn something. Yeah, I think we’ve all felt it. Like… like maybe the atoms are turned inside out.”

They looked at each other for a time after saying that, nobody speaking at all.

Finally, it was Cushing who broke the silence. “Well, I tell you boys something. This place is fucked-up. We all know it. And I think it’s a dangerous place, too. But the fact is that something pulled us in here and I’m willing to bet that whatever it was, can throw us back out again. Any time it chooses.”

22

The first thing Saks realized was that he was looking at a body.

“Hey, you guys,” he said, deciding just this once not to insult any of them. “We got ourselves a floater over here”

The four of them peered anxiously into the water. The body was floating face-down. Its clothing was burst open due to bloating, the flesh brilliantly white and puckered obscenely. As it drifted closer, they could see it wore no lifejacket.

“It’s got fatigues on,” Fabrini said. “What the hell would a soldier be floating out here for?”

“Same reason we are,” Menhaus said.

“Maybe a troop transport went down,” Cook suggested.

And that got Crycek going on one of his conspiracy theories again. This one concerning the military toying around with technologies they did not understand like children with their fingers on remote controls, having no true conception of what doors they might be opening or what things or forces they might be waking up.

“What the fuck are you babbling about?” Fabrini put to him.

But Crycek just giggled. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

Fabrini looked to Cook for a translation, but Cook just shrugged. He knew very well what Crycek was taking about, of course, but he wasn’t about to launch into some half-baked diatribe concerning Crycek’s theory about the military trying to smash holes into other dimensions. Maybe it was true and maybe it just belonged up on that dusty high shelf along with the Philadelphia Experiment.

“All of you shut up,” Saks said. “Quit listening to that fucking monkeyskull. He’s crazy, that’s all.”

When they drifted close enough, Saks stuck his knife in the web belt around the soldier’s waist and pulled him or her or it to the boat.

“Menhaus, get your thumb out of Fabrini’s ass and lend a hand here,” he said. “The rest of you… stay put.”

Fabrini and Cook eyed him coolly.

Crycek grinned.

“What’re you girls staring at?” Saks said. “Find something to do. Go shave your pussies or something. Jesus Christ, what a bunch.” He shook his head. “Soon as our backs are turned, Menhaus, they’ll be pumping each other. Got that look in their eyes. It’s a big day for both of ‘em. Soon as Fagbrini gets home, he’ll be writing, ‘Dear Diary, Cook shot his load into me. It was the greatest day of my life since I blew Liberace.’ What a guy, what a guy.”

“What the hell do you want me to do?” Menhaus said, looking at the soldier’s corpse. “Jesus, what a stink.”

“Just hoist him up, bright boy.”

“Me?” Menhaus said.

“No, the gay midget in your pants. Yes, you. Maybe Sergeant York’s carrying something we can use.”

“C’mon, Saks, he’s rotten,” Menhaus whined.

“So’s Fabrini’s asshole, but that never stopped you before.”

Cook said, “C’mon, Saks, push that body away… it might attract something.”

“Yeah, we don’t want that,” Menhaus said. “We don’t want something coming for it.”

Saks scowled. “Just grab him under the arm. He won’t bite you.”

Fabrini laughed and shook his head. “Why don’t you do it, big chief?”

Saks features were cut by a knife blade smile. “Because I told Menhaus here to do it, dipshit. And like you said, I’m the big chief.”

Fabrini cracked a fart. “There’s one for you, big chief”

Menhaus saw it was a no-win situation. Pale as flour, he took hold of the corpse under the arm and lifted. It seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds. The flesh was spongy beneath the fatigue shirt. “Oh, God,” he gasped, breathing through clenched teeth, turning away from the sick/sweet stink of putrescence. “Oh my Christ… oh my God…”

The body was lifted a few feet out of the water, a great fleshy, waterlogged balloon. Its face had been chewed away by fish… or something like fish. Nothing there but a grisly hollow of bleached muscle and knotted cartilage. Lipless, skinless, it grinned with jutting yellow teeth set in withdrawn, shriveled gums the color of oatmeal. Water ran and dripped from the empty eye sockets and collapsed nasal cavity.

Saks paid no attention.

He felt along the huge, distended belly, ignoring the whimpering of Menhaus and the parasites that clung in twisting loops around the navel. His fingers found something and pulled it free. A gun. Sunlight winked off its cruel metal lines. Dread settled into the faces of Cook and Fabrini. A three-inch worm slid like a greasy noodle from the cadaver’s mouth, wriggling in the light.

“Oh, good God,” Menhaus said.

There was a sudden wet, ripping noise followed by a fleshy snap and the body slapped back into the water. The arm had pulled free of the shoulder joint. With a strangled cry, Menhaus dropped the limb and vomited over the side.

“You don’t need that gun, Saks,” Cook said.

“Oh, yes I do,” he said, grinning proudly, happily, like an old man who’d copped his first feel in years. “Nice, isn’t it?” He waved the gun around for all to see and admire. “A Browning nine millimeter auto. Nice weapon.”

“Shit,” Fabrini said. “Thing’s been soaking for days. It won’t shoot.”

Saks smiled and aimed the barrel just left of Fabrini’s head and pulled the trigger. The report was like thunder. Fabrini felt the bullet whiz by his temple. The shell casing hissed into the water.

“You stupid fuck!” Fabrini shouted. “You stinking stupid fuck! You could’ve killed me!”

Saks chuckled. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now.”

Menhaus just looked ill. Cook looked alarmed, hopeless. He knew very well that the balance of power had shifted even further in Saks’s direction. This was not a good thing.

“Big tough man with a gun,” Fabrini grumbled.

Saks aimed the Browning square between Fabrini’s eyes. “This time you die.”

“Stop it,” Cook said. “This is crazy.”

“Yeah, c’mon, Saks. We’re all friends here.” Menhaus’ smile was trembling and quivering like an earthworm desperate to get out of the sunshine.

Fabrini spat. “Go ahead, tough guy. Shoot.” He said this with a strong, even voice. But underneath he was scared shitless and they all knew it.

“Saks,” Cook said.

Saks lowered the gun. He was thinking that, yeah, he should’ve greased the mouthy little wop. There wouldn’t be jack the others could do about it. One pull of the trigger and no more Fabrini, two more pulls and he could waste them all. But, for some reason, he didn’t. Even he wasn’t sure why. There were no laws in this place, only the ones you made up as you went. And it wasn’t that his conscience was bothering him or even the fact that it would be murder. He could live with that. No, it wasn’t any of those things and although Saks couldn’t admit it to himself, the real reason was that he could not face the fog alone. The idea of it… and what called it home… was just too much.

“Maybe,” Menhaus said sheepishly, “you could shoot us something to eat with that. We can’t live on that shit in the pouches forever.”

“Sure,” Saks said.

“Or maybe just kill anything… anything that comes after us.” Saks smiled. “Why not? As long as I got three bullets left in case you sweethearts try to get funny with me.”

And that, of course, was it in an eggshell, the others realized. Saks would kill them if they didn’t do what he said. He wanted to be boss, needed to be in charge. And if they didn’t play the game by his rules, then he’d shoot them and feed them to the wildlife. It was a simple arrangement. An age old one.

“As long as you play by my rules, everything’ll be fine,” Saks told them.

“And if we don’t, you kill us,” Fabrini said.

Saks kept smiling.

Cook was watching Saks as they were all watching him. He was becoming less and less afraid of what might be waiting in the mist and more afraid of what was in the boat. Particularly now that it had a gun. But Saks was right about one thing: they were quite a bunch. They were led by a violent, arrogant asshole with a gun. And Fabrini had that dark, slow burn in his eyes like all he was living for was the chance to kill Saks. And Menhaus? He was useless, because he’d just go with the flow as he probably had his entire life. Then there was Crycek… well, no point going into that. Crycek was nuttier than peanut brittle.

And what about you? Cook asked himself. Do you really think you’re any better than the rest? You can sit there and play the voice of reason all you want, but the bottom line is that you’re as fucked up as the rest. You get your chance, you’ll kill Saks. Let’s not forget that. Maybe you’ll be killing your father all over again, but you’ll kill him all the same.

Yeah, they were quite a crew to dump into the same lifeboat and particularly in this haunted sea. Anyway you served it all up, Cook figured, it wasn’t exactly peaches and cream.

“See, you got it all wrong,” Saks said. “I don’t want to kill anybody. I want us to live through this, one way or another. But being that I got the gun and that I’m in charge, I’m pretty much God. And it’ll be up to me to sort out any of your sorry asses if I decide you’re a danger to the rest. Keep that in mind, Fabrini. Because I swear to God, I’m not fucking around here.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. They watched the body drift away. Maybe Gosling was right about there being subsurface currents, fingers of unseen motion. For the body gradually moved off or the lifeboat did. The body hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet before it rose up suddenly with a bubbling gout of foam and came back down, seeming to thrash and jerk in countless directions like an epileptic having a massive seizure.

But it was no seizure.

Seizures didn’t have cutting wet-leather dorsals and tearing razor teeth. Only sharks did. Cook saw them hit the body like torpedoes, maybe a dozen of them. In that murky water, they looked very much like sharks… but they weren’t sharks. Not exactly. These fish ranged in size from maybe fifteen inches to three feet. They had long, slim bodies and heavy heads plated like armadillos, seemed to move with a serpentine eel-like propulsion.

Whatever they were, they shredded the body to bone within minutes. And then they tore the skeleton apart, too.

No, they weren’t sharks.

They were worse.

23

While Cushing and Soltz slept, George kept watching the fog, waiting for it to vomit something else out at them. He kept seeing shapes and shadows out there and could never really be sure if they were actually there or he was dreaming them. In the back of his mind, despite himself, he was still sensing something out there. Something big and encompassing and… well, evil. Because that was the word his brain kept throwing at him.

Evil.

Something incalculably evil.

A cancer waiting out there that would eat a man’s mind straight down to the marrow.

But he wouldn’t let himself think too much on it because he didn’t want to go insane. It would just be too damn easy, all things considered. But the bottom line was that he didn’t have to consciously think about it, maybe his imagination was just permanently stuck on high-rev… or maybe it was thinking about him. Some grinning, loathsome god of maritime wastes, some dark lord of black depths and ghost ships, of haunted seas and drowned sailors. A demented, slithering malignance that was vast and empty like the black spaces between the stars, something that could only fill itself with human terror and anxiety, madness and dread and desperation.

The very embodiment of the fear that the seas had always inspired. This thing given flesh… or something like flesh.

Enough, George told himself. This shit has to stop. If you get out of this horrid dead zone you can spend the rest of your goddamn life being dry and sassy and spinning tales about spooks and ghosts and all that shit. You can wake with the sweats at four a.m. from nightmares about this place… but at least then, they’ll really be nightmares, not reality. But for now, keep your head, because there’s no waking from this one and danger every time you close your eyes.

Well, now, that was food for thought.

George scratched his beard and ran fingers over his torso. He could feel his ribs. But this wasn’t from starvation; he’d always been thin. Wiry. He had a supercharged metabolism and found it nearly impossible to gain weight. The diet gimmicks and infomercials on TV always made him laugh. He’d tried most of his adult life to put on weight and simply couldn’t.

The fantasy question everyone kept toying with on the raft was: What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home? The answers came in all shapes and sizes. Gosling wanted to pay a visit on a lady friend in New Orleans and get drunk for a week… in bed. Cushing intended to quit his job and tell his brother-in-law to get fucked, for reasons he wouldn’t elaborate on. Soltz just wanted to rest and get some medication… particularly since Gosling had forbid him from touching the medical kit and the pills and ointments within.

But what did George want?

He wanted to spend day after day with his wife and son. He wanted them to know exactly how much they meant to him. He wanted to spend days telling his boy, Jacob, tales of high adventure at sea. The kid would eat it up. He’d want to hear the stories again and again. And George would oblige as generations of father’s had. The three of them would have cookouts and picnics and lazy Sunday afternoons spent doing absolutely nothing. And the nights, after Jacob was fast asleep, would be spent in sweaty embrace with Lisa.

God, but it sounded good.

He’d never realized until the shipwreck just how wonderful his life was. It was just a damn shame it took a disaster to make him see this.

But wasn’t that always the way?

The memory of his wife and son, if nothing else, gave him strength. Gave him something to set his teeth into. And he decided that right then and there, he was going back to that life. And God help anyone or anything that interfered with that.

Even that old devil in the mist.

24

Everyone handled it differently.

Because that was how things like that worked. What turned one man’s guts to sauce, made another smile. And what made one smile, made another scream. And that’s how it was out in the lifeboat which was a paper cup tossed into a misting, saline pond where the fog was moist, sparkling, and thick as goosedown.

The lifeboat was surrounded by the shark-fish now.

Like slavering dogs circling a bin of butcher’s scraps, they knew there was meat and blood in the boat, they just weren’t sure how to get at it. So they circled. Swam under the boat, around it, nudged it, slapped it with their tails. They hadn’t resorted to brute force yet… this was still a casual flirtation from the wolfpacks of that fathomless, primal sea… but it was coming. As more and more of them swam through the drifting clots of weeds and from unknown depths below, gathered in numbers and got in each other’s way, something was going to happen. And once blood got in the water and the feeding frenzy began, it was only a matter of time before they tipped the boat and its tender morsels into the water.

At least, that’s the way Saks was figuring things. “Lookit ‘em out there, boys… did you ever see such horrors? Lookit the mouths on them fucking things. Mouths like that… Jesus, made to bite off limbs and tear out throats and crunch bones…”

If he was practicing his usual brand of sardonic humor, then it just wasn’t working. Nobody was amused. Cook was surely not amused and neither was Fabrini. Even Crycek looked scared now.

“I feel like I’m floating in a bucket in a crocodile tank,” Fabrini said. “Just waiting to see which one of those wicked bastards figures out how to tip me out.”

Saks seemed to like that, so he improved upon it: “Like a rat in a snakepit. You gotta love the comparison.”

“Goddamn sharks,” Menhaus said.

“Ain’t sharks,” Saks told him. “I’ve seen sharks. These ain’t sharks.”

He knew that much. These pricks would have polished off Jaws in about five minutes. No, not sharks… but something like sharks. Saks was thinking they were familiar. That maybe he had seen them before. Not living, of course, but maybe hanging in a museum or on one of those nature documentaries on fossil life. Because, dammit, more he was watching those greedy, shit-ugly excuses for fish, more he was thinking there was something ancient about them. Prehistoric.

Too bad Cushing wasn’t along, he’d probably know what Saks was trying to get at. The pictures in his mind he just didn’t have words for. Cushing knew a lot of damn useless, trivial nonsense like that.

Saks had dubbed them “boneheads” because their heads were more skull than flesh. All plated and angular with sharp bony ridges and hollows. First time one of them got real close to the boat, Saks had almost pissed himself. Like the little monster was wearing a skull mask… or was a living, swimming skeleton. They were as ugly as ugly got. Made sharks looked almost kind of sweet and inoffensive.

“They look…” Menhaus began, cocking his head to the side like maybe he was hoping something relevant would drop out “… I don’t know, just goddamn spooky, goddamn devilish, don’t you think? Them bony faces and black eyes sunk in those pits, jaws opening and closing like they only live to bite and tear…”

That got Saks smiling. That’s right, you idiot, he thought.

Sharks or boneheads, they were vicious streamlined things that could go through flesh and bone like living chainsaws. They came in a wide variety, that was for sure. Some were less than a foot in length, shaped roughly like eels; others were two or three feet in length with massive bullet-shaped bodies that were mostly head; still others — the really big ones — were eight and ten feet long with immense bony jaws that could have bitten through steel cable.

They were all predators. There was no doubt about that. And whether the men in the lifeboat could scientifically classify them and assign them a place in the natural order of things or not, it didn’t really matter. For they were here and it didn’t look like they were going to leave anytime soon.

Saks was getting a real kick out of them.

But mainly, he supposed, from the absolute fear they inspired in his little crew.

So he watched them, found them interesting.

They were brown or green and sometimes yellow. Speckled, banded, a few of the smaller ones the bright, electric red or shiny sunset orange of carnival glass. Almost artificial looking, you came right down to it.

Menhaus stared at his feet, rocking slowly back and forth, stroking his mustache, maybe thinking and maybe afraid to.

Fabrini cursed the fish, calling them everything but white men.

Cook studied them without emotion, his eyes as flat and dead as those of the predators circling them. But inside, he was coiled tighter than a fireman’s hose.

And Crycek? You just never knew what sort of happy shit was bouncing through the haunted ruins of his mind. He watched them, his lower lip quivering a bit.

Saks was the only one who seemed to be enjoying any of it.

In his mind, he viewed the boneheads and his shipmates in a similar vein. Enemies. That’s what they were. If he went into the water the boneheads would get him, would take his life quick as a knife across the throat. And it was no different here in the boat. Fabrini and Cook (maybe even Menhaus, too) wanted to take his life as well. Crycek was too withdrawn to do much more than scratch his balls and breathe, but the other three? Traitors and cutthroats. The only thing stopping the murdering bastards was the gun and the knife. They made Saks lord and master. And like any lord, he had his enemies.

Saks didn’t want to kill them.

But he would.

At the first sign of trouble.

But he’d only kill one of them. Toss them into that churning sea of teeth, let the others see what the boneheads did with fresh meat. If they’d tear apart a corpse, they’d gobble down a fresh bleeding body in seconds.

“Dammit, Saks,” Menhaus said, “why don’t you just shoot those goddamn things? They’re driving me buggy.”

Saks just laughed.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Cook said hopelessly. “The blood in the water… it might drive them mad.”

“That’s right,” Saks said. “Haven’t you ever seen it on TV? They call it a feeding frenzy. Sharks go crazy, start biting everything, including each other. More blood flows, the crazier they get. And those are sharks we’re talking about, not… not these bastards.”

“How many more can there be?” Fabrini moaned. “I mean, shit, they just keep coming and coming.”

“Hundreds,” Cook said, cheerful as ever.

The lifeboat was made to handle rough seas with a dozen or more men aboard. The hull was rigid fiberglass. It would’ve taken a torpedo to breech it, but you just never knew. You just never knew anything in that place. The dead sea was a bottomless bag of dark tricks. You didn’t believe that, your death could get real ugly.

“If we start sinking,” Saks said ghoulishly, practically reading Cook’s mind, “we’ll just have to rid ourselves of some excess weight.”

No one wanted to comment on that.

The fish circled and circled, occasionally nipping at one other or breaking the surface with jaws snapping and tails slapping. There had to be about two or three dozen different species out there. Most were armored, but some were more like typical fish but with exaggerated jaws and teeth.

Saks started toying with them, making the others nervous. He was dipping an oar into the water, stirring up that briny soup. As soon as he did that, they came in numbers, thumping against the boat and trying to find something to bite which was very often each other.

“Stop that for chrissake,” Fabrini said. “You’re pissing ‘em off.”

But Saks wouldn’t stop; he was enjoying himself now. He giggled and dipped his oar back in and this time it was hit immediately. And hit with such force he almost lost it. And the gun. Whatever was on the other end was either real hungry or really pissed-off.

“Look what I caught, Menhaus!” Saks said, recovering himself quickly. Because he had been scared there for a moment or two. Was certain he was about to be pulled in.

He lifted his oar out of the water and they all saw his “catch”.

It was even uglier than the boneheads.

It was about two feet long, round as a basketball, shaped much like a pufferfish with a stubby tail. But its flesh was jet black and leathery, wrinkled and convoluted. Its mouth was huge. Big enough, it seemed, that it could have swallowed itself. It had tiny milky-blue eyes lacking pupils. Its jaws were yawned open, dozens of long needle-like fangs imbedded in the oar. They were about the thickness of sewing needles, but easily five or six inches in length.

“It’s… it’s glowing,” Menhaus said.

And it was. Deep in its mouth were a series of tiny luminous barbels that probably attracted prey fish into the mouth where the teeth took care of them.

It was flopping and thrashing and Saks could barely hold the oar up. Its sides were expanding with frantic, gulping breaths.

“Hurry up, Menhaus,” Saks said. “Grab the little pisser.”

Menhaus just stared with wide eyes.

But then the fish dropped back into the murk, disappeared. It left two of its teeth in the oar, though. Saks laughed and threw the oar at Menhaus who almost jumped out of the boat to avoid it.

Then the fun and games ended and they all just watched and waited, hoping and praying the fish would move on. But thirty minutes later, they still hadn’t.

“Shit,” Fabrini said in a panicked voice, “check that out.”

They did.

The fish passing by the boat was a monster. It was easily fifteen or twenty feet long with a spiny dorsal fin that jutted from that decayed sea like an inverted rudder, scathed with ancient scars and threaded with stray weeds. It was a dirty olive brown with a massive head that was plated in shields of ridged bone that looked sharp enough to slit open a belly. Its hinged jaws were gigantic, serrated not with teeth as such but jagged tooth plates, natural and lethal extensions of the armor covering its head and upper thorax.

It moved past the boat, those razored jaws opening and closing, opening and closing. Its eyes were the size of softballs, flat black and dead, remorseless. You could see death in those eyes. Evil, relentless death. Though its upper body was huge and armored, its tail was almost snakelike ending in a huge asymmetrical caudal fin that pushed it through the water gradually.

“Jesus, look at the size of it,” Fabrini said.

The other fish, none of which exceeded ten feet and of which most were considerably smaller, gave the big fish room. It swam with a slow, even gait, almost lethargically. It seemed to be almost lazy in comparison with the others that darted around it and out of its way, moving with great heavy strokes of its scythe-like tail. That was until a smaller bonehead swam too close and the big one rocketed forward with a smooth flex of muscle and ingested it with slashing bites. The water became a boiling soup of blood as the others went crazy snapping and nipping at one another. Tails were thrashing, fins knifing, bony jaws slashing in and out of the water.

“They’d tear a man to bits,” Fabrini said sickly.

“Two bites!” Saks said. “Did you see that? That goddamn fish had to be five feet and it took it in two bites! Shit and shinola.”

Menhaus kept looking at his feet. He didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. Cook studied it all with almost clinical detachment. He looked, if anything, like a Nazi sub commander watching a torpedo speed toward its target with cruel indifference. The effect was heightened by his sparse blond hair and sharp, predatory features.

The boat suddenly reeled as if struck by something big. Menhaus let out an involuntary scream. He hung onto his seat like a man on a roller coaster. The boat shuddered again, rocked with motion, then settled down.

“It’s that big one,” Saks said grimly. “He knows there’s something to eat in this boat and he wants it.”

“Break out them fucking oars,” Fabrini said. “Let’s try and pull away from these goddamn things.”

“You don’t give orders here, Fabrini,” Saks said.

“Oh, fuck you.”

“Fuck me? Fuck me?” He had the gun on Fabrini. “You wanna rephrase that you little cockmite?”

Fabrini just glared. Oh, it was coming. One way or the other, it was coming.

Saks clenched his teeth, shook his head. “You see, Fabrini,” he said patiently, “what you don’t understand is that I am in charge here. Get it? And if I tell you to jump in and swim with the fishies, you better by Christ do it. Even if it’s that big one. And you don’t touch them fucking oars until I give the word.”

Fabrini gave him the finger. “You ain’t shit to me, Saks. You ain’t nothing or nobody. You ain’t a damn thing.”

Saks sighed dramatically. “Who brought you dipdunks together? Who hired you? Who was in charge?” Saks asked of him. He waited a moment for an answer. Two. Three. Then he shook his head and jabbed a thumb at his chest. “I was. Me. I organized all this and got the show on the road.”

“And it’s been some show,” Menhaus said in a rare moment of defiance.

“Yeah, it’s been a party right from the beginning,” Fabrini said with contempt. “Merry Fucking Christmas.”

Crycek was giggling, but nobody seemed to notice.

“What I’m saying, you goddamn shitrats,” Saks grumbled, “is that I’m in charge. Gun or no gun, I’m the one who should be in charge. I’m the only one here with enough goddamn smarts to run the show.”

Fabrini scowled and watched the fish. “Yeah, you’re a real fucking Mensa genius, Saks.”

“Keep it up, shit-for-brains. See what happens.”

Cook cleared his throat. “We don’t need a foreman out here, Saks. There’s no need.”

“You see, you’re wrong about that. You need one and I’m it. Who else is up to it? You? You can’t keep your hands out of your shorts long enough to crack the whip. And Fabrini? Shit. Fabrini can’t find his own asshole without Menhaus’ crank in his hand. And Crycek? Shit.”

Saks waited for more argument, but got none. And he knew why. Oh yes, he knew very well why. Because they were just putting up with him until he closed his eyes. Then they were going to kill him. Or so they thought.

But they were in for a big surprise.

A very big one.

Menhaus said, “Looks like the big one swam off.”

“But his friends haven’t,” Fabrini said.

Saks, unlike the others, was hoping it hadn’t gone too far. Come tonight or what passed for night, he might just need all the man-eating fish he could lay his hands on. Because tonight was going to be trouble. Tonight the shit was going to fly. And when the shit came down, there was no one better at dodging it than old Saks. Saks was just about to tell them he was onto their little bullshit plot and if they wanted a piece of him now was the time, baby, when something-something goddamned huge-bumped into the bottom of the boat. The boat seemed to be actually lifted out of the water. To heave up from the sea and crash back down again with an explosion of foam and sediment, tossing the men from their seats.

Somebody screamed.

Maybe Menhaus, maybe Fabrini, maybe even Saks himself for all he knew.

But not Crycek. His eyes were hazy-looking like steamed-up windows. He was just gone. Nothing was touching him.

Well, well, Saks thought, guess old Jaws didn’t abandon us after all.

“What the hell was that?” Fabrini stammered.

“I’ll give you one guess,” Cook said.

Saks pulled himself to his feet and leaned out over the gunwale, the Browning in hand. He saw something pass beneath the boat. A huge amorphous blur. Whatever it was, it was much bigger than the boat. Yeah, it was old Jaws again. Back for more and getting randy by the looks of things… except, no, it wasn’t Jaws, it was his bigger brother this time.

“The big one again? That monster?” Menhaus asked carefully.

But Saks shook his head and kept watching. Fabrini and Cook did the same. Menhaus stayed on the bottom of the boat where the impact had thrown him. He’d gone a nasty shade of pale. His face was pinched, withdrawn. He was, in effect, a man who did not want to know.

“It looked bigger this time,” Saks said.

Nobody said anything to that.

“It couldn’t have been bigger,” Cook said. “No way.”

“Yeah, and what the fuck do you know?” Fabrini snapped. “You think there couldn’t be one bigger than that other one?”

“It just seems unlikely.”

Saks grunted. “Yeah, you tell the sea monster that when it’s biting you in fucking half.”

Cook seemed to be looking at something, following it beneath the fouled water with his eyes. “There,” he said. “Right there. Look! Can you see it? Can you see it?”

They did. It was a very big fish. Sort of a dirty, almost green-brown in color. Looked to be the same species as Jaws, only far larger.

“Gotta be twenty feet at least,” Fabrini said with awe. “Maybe thirty.”

“Fucking monster.”

“Shoot it,” Menhaus raved. “Just shoot it. You gotta shoot the goddamn thing, Saks. You hear me? You gotta shoot it!”

“I bet that baby could just about swallow a man whole,” Saks said, enjoying Menhaus’ discomfort. It was the little things in life, he knew, that gave you the most pleasure.

“He may have just bumped into us,” Cook said optimistically. “It may have not been on purpose. It’s possible.”

Saks laughed. “And it’s possible your mother might have raised some children that lived, but I doubt it.”

Cook gave him an acid look that could’ve peeled paint from a door. But as quick as it had appeared, it was gone. His face became lifeless clay again. “What I’m saying, Saks, is that there’s no reason to start shooting the thing. No reason to provoke it. It might just swim off.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet,” Fabrini said.

“It won’t swim off,” Menhaus moaned. “Oh no. Not yet. Not just yet. Not until its belly is full.”

Fabrini made like he was going to slap him. “Knock it off with that shit, you goddamn pussy.”

“He’s stressed,” Cook said, defending him.

“Fuck you, too,” Fabrini told him. “I’m sick of the lot of you.”

Saks sat back with his arms folded over his barrel chest. He was enjoying this immensely. Cracks were beginning to form in their ranks. Sooner or later, if this kept up, they’d be at each other’s throats. Saks couldn’t help but smile.

“Now, now, boys, all for one and one for all. Remember?” Saks chortled.

“Piss off.” Fabrini looked very much like he wanted to hurt someone.

“Five men in a boat, “ Saks said. “Five men in a boat and not a broad amongst us. Life’s a beach and then you die.”

“Life,” Fabrini said. “Shit.”

For once, Saks had to agree with him. Life was shit no matter how you sliced it or how sharp your knife was. He’d had his share of hardship. Of pain. Of deprivation. He knew about life. Life was your old man getting killed in an industrial accident when you were twelve. Life was your old lady drinking herself to death and spreading her legs for every shitbag sailor with a bottle of vodka. Life was quitting school when you were sixteen and going to work in a hellhole foundry. Life was when your kid brother got knifed for his lunch money when he was ten fucking years old. Life was joining the Navy when you were eighteen to be a Seabee because you loved that old John Wayne flick and getting your ass sent to Vietnam as a joke. Life was pushing back the jungle with dozers for a Marine compound while gooks with Russian rifles sniped at you. Life was getting killed because you were digging latrine pits or drainage ditches or laying a runway. And life was payback, too. It was opening up on a gook patrol with heavy machine guns and watching those gutless slant-eyed shits dance like marionettes with clipped strings. Yeah, that was life, baby. And life was also years later in another goddamn jungle watching the only friend you ever had get dragged downriver by a crocodile the size of a Buick. Yeah, that was life. And life was being in a boat in the middle of a godforsaken, monster-infested ocean just this side of Hell with three guys who wanted you dead and a fourth who was too crazy to care either way.

That was life and life was just fucking peachy.

Saks shook his head, clearing it all away. “Hey, Cook,” he said. “You look hot, friend. Why don’t you jump in and have a swim with that motherfuck of a fish? Take your fishing line with you, maybe you can hook that bastard, fry his ass up in a pan. Fabrini’ll help you. He’s that kind of guy.”

But they didn’t even look at him.

Just at those fish, big and small, weaving around the boat, keeping an eye out for the gigantic shadow of something much bigger.

25

Cook could take it.

He could take it very well, thank you. He could take every ounce of shit Saks could dish out and keep coming back for more. Nobody could take more than he could.

He could take it and take it and take it.

But give it back? No, that wasn’t his way. Unless you wanted to count that little instance of him killing his father. But he hadn’t wanted that. He just hadn’t been given a choice. He didn’t want to kill anymore than any other sane person. Just like he didn’t really want to kill Saks. But, sooner or later, there might just not be a choice in the matter. He might have to kill him.

If I get that gun, he thought icily, then maybe. Just maybe I’ll do him out of general principles.

But it wouldn’t be in cold blood.

Saks would be given the chance to act like a rational human being. And there was the difference. Saks probably wouldn’t give any of them the same chance. Because deep down, Saks was not a civilized man. He was a crazy, bloodthirsty animal who drew his only true pleasure from the suffering of others.

And there was no denying that.

The big fish hadn’t come back and slowly the tension had drained out of everyone, drop by drop. But like sponges, they were still soaked full. Only getting out of that dead zone would ever really squeeze them out. The smaller fish were still around, though not as many now. They bumped the boat and fought from time to time, but other than that, it was quiet. Real quiet.

Slowly then, the men began talking again and especially after Saks ordered Menhaus to dole out some chocolate and crackers and a few sips of water.

“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get home, Cook?” Menhaus said, shifting effortlessly back into denial of where they were and what they were facing.

“If you get home,” Fabrini said morbidly.

Saks laughed.

“Well, I’ll probably take a hot bath and have a good dinner and sleep for three days,” he said. “That sounds good to me.”

Menhaus smiled. “That does sound good. Me, I think I’m going to collapse on the couch and let the wife pamper me for a week.”

“Shit,” Fabrini said. “You guys got no imagination. Me, I’m going to get a bottle of booze and a couple whores and have me a good old time.”

“How about you, Saks?” Menhaus asked.

Saks smiled, all teeth. “I think I’ll reserve judgment. Some of us aren’t going home again.”

26

Although it was hard to tell what was night and what was day and how long of a duration either might be, Gosling posted his little crew in shifts of two hours each. Their job was to keep their eyes and ears open. Not only for danger, but for signs of survivors or land.

Because he was still holding out hope that there was land here. Had to be somewhere. There had to be land under all that oily water and it only stood to reason that sooner or later, some of it had to poke up and form an island or a continent.

This is what Gosling told himself.

This is what he was clinging to.

He didn’t know what was out there and what terrible forms it might take, but if he could get some dry land under his feet, he figured that they’d all stand a chance. A chance of living and just maybe, figuring a way out of this.

And maybe his hopes of this weren’t much, but it was the only game in town so he held onto it and held onto it tight.

27

“You guys kill me, sitting over there like that,” Saks said in a dry, raw voice. “Not talking. Not moving. Not doing a damn thing.”

“What’s there to do?” Menhaus said. “And, besides, maybe what we ought to do is be quiet. Crycek said-”

“Fuck Crycek,” Saks said. “He’s certifiable. Ain’t you, Crycek?”

Crycek did not say anything; he stared out at the fog and the water and weeds, maybe thinking things, but not saying them.

“Leave him alone,” Cook said. “What’s he hurting? What are any of us hurting?”

But Saks didn’t comment on that. At least not with his voice. But his eyes, well, they were saying things and they were the sort of things nobody wanted to hear.

“What?” Fabrini said. “We’re not allowed to just sit now, big boss man? What the hell do you want us to do?”

Saks laughed deep in his throat and it sounded like a low rumble of thunder. “Man, you’re slick. The lot of you. Slick as fucking oil. You think I don’t know what you’re whispering about over there? What you murdering bastards are planning? I know, trust me, I know everything.”

Cook put a hand on Fabrini, to keep him calm. “We’re not planning anything, Saks. All anybody wants is to go home.”

Saks licked his lips even though his tongue was getting dry. He looked at each of them in turn. He let his eyes hang on each man for a moment or two as if to say, lying bastards, I know what you’re thinking, I know, I know…

Then he grinned.

A huge, moony grin like a cat with a mouse. He started laughing. He kept laughing for several minutes. “Stupid dumb shits,” he cackled. “Don’t you know I’ll kill you? That I’ll kill each and every one of you mutinous goddamn dogs before I’ll let you lay a hand on me? Don’t you see that?”

Jesus, he’s cracking up, Fabrini thought nervously.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Saks ranted.

“Come on, Saks,” Cook said. “You’re being paranoid. Quit wasting your energy with this. For God’s sake, look where we are and what we’re facing… how can you act like this?”

“He’s right,” Menhaus said quietly. “We have to pull together.”

Saks had a confused, dopey smile on his face. He was humoring the lot of them. Sure, guys, pull together. Let’s all pull together. All for one and one for all, eh? That’ll come in handy when you shitrats jump me and throw me to the damn fishies. Oh, and then you’ll laugh, you’ll laugh and laugh, won’t you?

Cook watched him and didn’t like what he saw. “Easy,” he said.

Saks kept shifting in his seat restively like there were splinters in his ass. “You guys better start using your heads cause old Saks is in charge and he’s a hard master. Goddamn, yes.”

“Please, Saks,” Menhaus said. “Just relax.”

Saks started laughing again. But there was even less humor in that laughter now than there was before. It was more like an insane cackling, rising up high and hollow like dead laughter in an empty room before becoming a low, evil chuckle. “You bastards. You assholes. You fucking shitbugs,” he said. “How stupid do you think I am? Don’t you see that I’m on to you? That I know your game? You’re not waiting for dark anymore, you’re just waiting for an opportunity, any opportunity. Any chance you can get to kill me. Oh, I see it in your eyes. I see it just fine.”

Cook and Fabrini looked at each other. Their eyes said volumes. Saks was starting to crack and there was no denying it any longer. The man was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Menhaus studied his feet for a time, then said, “Why should we kill you, Saks? Christ, we need you. You’re the only one who can pull us through this. You’re the only guy here who has any sea experience. If you can’t save our asses, nobody can.”

“Yeah,” Saks said.

Something like that, coming from anyone but Menhaus, would have been greeted with a hateful outburst. But there was something harmless about Menhaus. Something almost brotherly. It was hard to imagine the big jolly man hurting anything or anyone. He seemed incapable. The sort of guy who was a sucker for kids and small animals.

Menhaus saw his opening and went for it. “I’m not a violent man, Saks. I’ve lost just about every fight I’ve ever been in. And most of ‘em I ran away from. It’s just not in me to hurt anyone. I don’t have what it takes. So when I tell you that I wouldn’t let these guys hurt you, you can believe me. If it comes down to that, I’ll warn you. And I’ll stand by you.”

Fabrini, whose brain worked very simply, looked like he’d been slapped. “What are you, Menhaus? Fucking crazy? This guy’s a psycho.”

“Shut the fuck up, Fabrini, or I swear to God I’ll kill you,” Saks snapped, his voice hot and electric.

Tendons strained in his neck when he said this. His eyes bulged. A vein throbbed at his temple. His face was the color of blood. He wasn’t fooling around and they all saw it now.

“What I said is-” Menhaus began, trying to undo the damage.

“What you said I want to believe,” Saks told him. “You don’t know how much I want to believe that. But I don’t know. I just don’t know. You’re either real sincere or real slick. I don’t know which.”

Menhaus was breathing heavy now. “I meant it, Saks. I meant every word.”

Saks stared him down. Maybe looking for something that would tell him it was all a lie. He found nothing.

“If you mean that,” Saks said, “then come over here with me.”

28

George watched that dead, misting sea and it almost felt like it watched him, too. You watched that graveyard expanse long enough, you started thinking of the sea as more than a natural force but as a living, breathing entity. Something sentient and calculating, a huge evil intelligence that plotted your death with inhuman patience.

And when you were talking about the sea George was watching, those ideas came to you real easy.

Like someone or something wants me to think that.

But he wasn’t going back there again.

That was Fog-Devil territory.

So George kept his mind busy by thinking of food, of drinks. Cigarettes. He was pretty sure he would’ve sold his soul for a can of beer.

He kept watching the sea and that’s when he saw… well, he didn’t know exactly what he was seeing. Something in the fog. Nothing gigantic or especially threatening this time, just, well a shadow or shape flitting around in the mist.

He looked and it was gone. But it had been there. Something had been there.

George swallowed, figured he was hallucinating. It wouldn’t have been the first time. You stared into that dirty fog long enough, you could see just about anything. Some things you wanted to see and others you’d rather not look upon. It was the nature of the fog, always slowing drifting and churning like the steam coming off a bubbling pot, but slower and thicker and almost curdled-looking.

Again, a suggestion of movement out there.

He looked over at Soltz and Cushing. They were sleeping. Gosling was, too. It was George’s watch. And what had Gosling said to him? Just sweep your eyes back and forth, George, never stare at anything too long or you’ll start seeing things that ain’t there. Gosling had been dead serious when he said that. There was not so much as a glimmer of humor in his eyes. Gosling had spent a lot of his life on watches and he knew the funny things you might see out there.

George saw that flutter of motion again and shook his head. Jesus, but a cigarette would have been good. A cigarette and a cup of hot coffee. They would have straightened his head right out.

He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked around in the raft. Just those three men dozing in the roomy interior beneath the canopy and George himself at the door, the fog moving out there, drawing him in.

You need me, Gosling had said, you wake me, hear?

Gosling. Jesus. Mother Hen.

George looked away from the fog, had to force himself to, and studied the water instead. It was steaming and rank, filmed with a rotting membrane that seemed to be equal parts sediment, slime, and decaying organic matter. From time to time it quivered like jelly, as if some underwater current was stirring it. Little islands of weed and knotted creepers floated on it, a scum of pink algae.

The mist itself seemed chilly and damp, but the sea was warm. Like a mud bath, it was warm and oddly inviting.

Something moved out in the fog again.

When George looked up, it was gone.

Every time he averted his eyes, it moved. Like maybe it did not want to be seen, not yet. Which got George to think something was playing with him. Something was playing headgames with him, maybe wanting to scare him or disturb him or just make him goddamn uneasy. If that was the case, then they or it were doing a fine job for George was all those things. Gooseflesh had spread out on his lower belly and his balls had sucked up now, like they were afraid of being exposed.

Motion again.

Then it was gone.

Like some child, it occurred to George, some kid out there flitting about in the fog, playing hide-and-seek and catch-me-if-you-can. Wanting George to get a peek, but no more. Not yet. Not until he or she was ready, because then it was going to be real funny-

But it wasn’t funny.

George badly wanted to pop a flare out there and see what was lurking beyond the fog, sliding in and out of it like a naughty little boy hiding in the curtains.

George kept swallowing, but he couldn’t seem to moisturize his throat. It felt like old machine parts, rusty and seized-up, choked with dust and mouse droppings.

The sea was quivering a bit, those clots of fetid weeds sluicing about as if something was pushing them from below. A great dark mass of them swept against the side of the raft with a weird, whispering motion like somebody breathing.

George caught the movement this time.

And this time, it did not try to hide.

What he was seeing was a figure standing just at the periphery of the fog bank, enshrouded in wisps of fog, yet very visible. So visible that he could see that the figure was small and that it was a little girl of all things. She stood stock still like a mannequin or a puppet waiting for fingers to work her.

George blinked and rubbed his eyes.

When he looked back, she was still there.

There was a chill moving up his spine now, spreading out over his shoulders and forearms. He was telling himself that he could not be seeing a little girl standing out there. She would have sank like a rock and what would a little girl be doing out in the mist in the first place?

George looked back toward Gosling, wanted to say something, wanted to rouse him, but his throat was simply too dry. It had constricted down to a pinhole now and he could barely draw a breath.

You need me, you wake me, hear?

But George could not. He was barely breathing. Locked tight, motionless, his heart just a shallow pattering in his chest.

The girl was waving to him now.

And George could do nothing, not a goddamn thing. He didn’t have the strength to wave back. And the idea of waving, of drawing attention to himself… it was unthinkable. For in that little girl was the embodiment of every fear he’d ever known, every adult anxiety and childhood terror alive and breathing and rustling.

The girl was moving now.

George could see it happening and was telling himself madly that he had to push these awful images from his mind, because it was all hallucination, just some dark fiction vomited up from the depths and if he let it root in his mind, if it got too strong of a hold there…

But he didn’t think he was hallucinating.

He was seeing some little girl in what appeared to be 19 ^th century period dress moving in his direction, getting closer and closer and he was absolutely helpless to do anything but watch it happen.

He told himself: You are not seeing a little girl out there. I don’t know what in Christ that is, but it cannot be a little girl. It’s something else. Either a fiction your mind created and fleshed out… or something worse. Something that wants you to think it’s a little girl.

And that made perfect sense to him.

Yes, something vile and degenerate, the sort of thing that haunts black submarine valleys and lives in the rotting hollows of sunken ships. Something that picks through the bones of drowned men and howls through high masts and calls ships down into abyssal plains. Yes, that’s what it was. The living, phobic personification of all the men, women, and children lost at sea and drawn into murky graveyards of swaying kelp and gutted coffin-ship and barnacle-encrusted bone that no light would ever touch.

George thought maybe she was standing on an island of weed, but that wasn’t so. She was moving, yes, but standing perfectly still, drifting in his direction very slowly, just above the water. She was wrapped in tendrils of fog, but he could see that she wore a royal blue silk taffeta dress trimmed in white ribbon and braid. A party dress. There was a gold Celtic cross around her neck.

A ghost, his mind told him, a ghost of some little girl sucked down into the dead sea, a shade that haunts the mist…

As she got closer, he saw her hair was done in golden ringlets and her face was smooth and white like porcelain. A Victorian doll. She looked exactly like a Victorian doll.

No, not at all.

That face was corpse-white, bleached by seawater, the eyes just huge black pits punched into it and filled with a misty yellow glow like full moons sinking into a cloudbank. Hazy and misty and ghastly. She was only ten or fifteen feet away now and he could see that she was fouled with strands of weed that draped over her shoulders and were tangled in her hair. Her dress was a dingy rag spotted with mildew. Fog was steaming from her, boiling inside her and blowing out through innumerable holes torn through her like she was burning up inside. She came on with a wake of churning, smoky mist, tendrils of fog seeping from her outstretched fingertips.

George felt something shatter inside his head like glass in a faraway room.

Closer and closer yet. He could see the fog bank through the fissures eaten through her, could see the green marine worms burrowing at her throat. Her eyes were wide and glistening and yellow, a rope of drool hanging from her lips.

There was something building in George, something raging and sharp and violent: a scream scraping up the back of his throat.

Your soul… she’s come to suck away your soul.

Those puckered white fingers reached for him and her mouth opened like a black, seething blowhole.

And George screamed.

Screamed until she was gone, dissipated like vapor, and he could hear his voice echoing through the fog, becoming something else and coming back at him like a dozen taunting voices. None of which sounded like his own.

Then there was a hand on his shoulder shaking him and Gosling was yelling something.

“What?” George said. “What?”

“Was is it?” Gosling demanded, his hands on George strong and sure. “What in the fuck is it?”

Both Cushing and Soltz were staring at him with barely-concealed horror.

But George couldn’t tell what he saw, because he just wasn’t sure. So, instead, he let go with the first lie his mind produced: “I… I must have fallen asleep, had a nightmare…”

But they didn’t look like they believed him anymore than he believed himself.

He only hoped they couldn’t hear what he was hearing. A high, mocking childish giggling from somewhere deep in the fog.

29

“Either you’re with me or against me,” Saks said, aiming the Browning in the general direction of Fabrini and Cook and Crycek. “You’re either with me, Menhaus, or you’re with them. What’s it going to be?”

“Saks,” Menhaus said breathlessly, “come on now.”

He was directly in-between the opposing sides now. Saks was in the stern and the others were up near the bow and he himself was seated roughly amidships. This is where things got complicated and dangerous. If he went to Saks, the others would never trust him again. And if he stayed with them, Saks would think everything he’d said was bullshit.

“What I would like, everyone, what I would really like is for all this to stop,” Menhaus told them, trying desperately to sound calm and reasonable, but probably only succeeding in sounding like a scared little boy. Which was pretty much how he felt. “This can’t go on. It just can’t.”

Saks’s reply to this was to aim the gun directly at Menhaus. There was a deadly gleam in his eye. He looked very much like a man who wanted very badly to hurt someone.

He’s going to kill me, Menhaus thought.

“Get your ass over here now,” Saks said, “or get over there with them. If you’re with me, you’ll live to tell the tale. With them… you get the picture, don’t you?”

Menhaus looked around uncertainly. He was almost wishing those horrible fish would come back, even the big one. Or maybe that something even worse would come sliding out of the mist. At least then, they’d have a common enemy.

But he supposed they already did: each other.

“Don’t do it,” Fabrini said. “Don’t go over there. You get involved with that gutless shit, you’re going to be an accomplice to murder. Mine or one of the others. And you don’t want that, do you?”

No, Menhaus certainly did not want that.

“Don’t listen to that goatfuck,” Saks said. “He don’t know shit, Menhaus. Besides… look around you. All of you, look right fucking around you. You think we’re adrift in the Gulf of goddamn Mexico here? Well, we ain’t. Where we are there are no laws. It’s survival of the fittest. You come with me, Menhaus, I’ll keep you alive and I just might get your ass out of here. But you stick with them…”

“He’s talking nonsense,” Cook said. “We can only survive together.”

But he didn’t understand. Neither did Fabrini. It was the only way. The only possible way to pacify Saks.

Swallowing, Menhaus went and sat in the seat directly in front of Saks.

“You cheap fuck,” Fabrini spat.

Cook said nothing.

Crycek smiled, then pointed upward… as if that made a lick of sense. Then he nodded, thinking he’d made his point. But like most things with him, it was just too damn abstract.

They think I’m a traitor, Menhaus thought, but they just don’t get it.

“That’s the way,” Saks said happily. “Now we can both watch ‘em.”

Saks and Fabrini engaged in a staring contest. It lasted only a few minutes. The hatred between them was like a pall hanging in the air and it smelled of raw meat and gunpowder.

Saks smiled. “Well, I guess you boys are fucked,” he said.

Cook and Fabrini just stared, waiting for the bullets.

But as usual, Crycek looked like he was waiting for something else entirely.

“Which one of you should I kill first?” Saks said. “Which one?”

“Kill me,” Fabrini rasped, “you fucking pussy.”

“It’s not that simple, Fagbrini. Not that simple at all.” He patted Menhaus on the shoulder. “In fact, I’m going to let my pal here decide.”

“No,” Menhaus said flatly. “I won’t.”

“Yes, you will. If you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

The barrel of the gun was shoved into Menhaus’ spine. It was death and he knew it was death. He’d thought he could join Saks and pacify him. Keep him from killing the others, but it wasn’t that simple. He’d simply underestimated the twisted, sadistic turn of Saks’s madness. The man was so far gone now he just didn’t realize how crazy he was. Right and wrong had become vague concepts. And maybe, just maybe Saks wasn’t so crazy as Menhaus might have thought. Maybe he’d planned it this way all along. He only wanted Menhaus on his side because it fit into his plans. He had an unwilling participant now in murder.

“Well, old buddy, which one?” Saks asked, almost lighthearted.

Menhaus had no saliva left. Yet, he attempted to lick his lips. “This is insane, Saks. We’ll go to prison for this.”

Saks started laughing. “Christ, Menhaus! Look around! You see any fucking cops or jails or judges? No, we do what we want here. Frontier justice, eh?” The gun was pressed deeper into his back. “Now decide.”

Fabrini and Cook maintained their cold, hateful stares. Menhaus admired the both of them like he’d never admired anyone ever in his life. They were men. Real men. Real human beings. Scared shitless inside, but facing death bravely. Neither of them would ever stoop to doing what he did. They’d die first.

But they don’t understand, they just don’t understand. I did this to save them, I really did…

And he was right: they didn’t understand. They thought he was weak and selfish and empty inside. That’s what they thought and Menhaus knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could say to change their minds.

“Well?” Saks said.

“I guess Cook is the one,” Menhaus said in airless voice.

Cook just stared, unblinking.

Crycek started tittering. “All the little puppets in a row,” he said in a dry, ragged voice. “Doing what they’re told to do. You’re all so fucking stupid, every one of you. And especially you, Saks, you’re the dumbest little puppet of all. He’s out there, watching and listening, getting stronger as we get weaker. Only it isn’t a him, it’s a they, a them. Them ones hiding in the fog, they’re the ones that pull your strings and make you dance and you, you silly fucking little man, you let them! You let them! They own your mind, they make you walk and talk and hate and kill… you’re the stupidest one of all! The stupidest!”

“Shut your goddamn hole!” Saks ordered him, pulling the gun out of Menhaus’ back and aiming it right at Crycek’s staring face. Right at that sallow mask with the crooked, lunatic grin.

But Crycek just shook his head. “I don’t have to shut up and I won’t shut up! They already own you, but my mind is my own. They can’t get in my head because I won’t let them in there, won’t let them get fat sitting in their web sucking the juices of my mind dry!” He pressed the tips of his fingers to his temples. “I make my own decisions, do you hear? Not you and not them!”

“You’re goddamn nuts,” Saks told him.

But Crycek assured him that he was completely in control of his faculties. He dared Saks to shoot him, because he didn’t honestly believe that those bullets would kill him. “It might look like they did and it might look like I die… but will I? Or is it just something they’ve planted in your little mind? Is that even a gun you hold, Saks?” He started giggling afresh, wiping spit off his chin with the back of his hand. “Think about it, Saks! Go ahead, think about what I say! This might be your last chance! For all you know, for all you really know, you might be alone right now. Lost in this hungry fog all alone… and you just think we’re here. We might have all gone down with the ship… just ghosts, memories. C’mon, Saks, close your eyes, when you open them we won’t be here… ghosts..”

“SHUT UP!” Saks roared, unable to listen to that droning, insane voice any more. He could feel Crycek up there, in his head, like dirty fingers sorting around, making him think things and feel things, filling his mind with lies and doubts. “YOU BETTER SHUT THE FUCK UP IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”

But Crycek just giggled. “Can you feel them, Saks? Can you feel them up there draining you dry? Sucking your mind away?”

Saks was trying to sort it out, because none of it was true. It couldn’t be true. It was all madness what Crycek was saying. There was nothing out in that fog, no devil, no evil presence that ate minds. And… and in the boat, Cook and Fabrini and Crycek were there. They were not ghosts, because if they were ghosts that would mean that Saks himself was the crazy one. Talking to shadows. It would mean that he was by himself out there, that he was totally alone…

So Saks did what came natural to him.

He pulled the trigger on the Browning. The shot rang out and the bullet passed harmlessly over Crycek’s head. And that shut him up. It didn’t wipe that smirk off his face, but it sure as hell shut him up. The others weren’t saying much either, just staring with those sweaty, sooty faces. Accusing faces.

Finally, Fabrini said, “Nice try, Crycek. It almost worked.”

But you could see from the look on Crycek’s face that it had not been a ruse. He believed everything he had said.

“Next one goes right between your eyes, Crycek.” Saks had calmed now, but still looked a little confused. He put the gun back on Menhaus. “Okay… you said Cook and Cook it’s gonna be. You sure now?”

“I’m sure.”

Saks raised the gun and took aim.

And then Menhaus made his move.

30

It happened fast.

As Saks took aim Menhaus moved with a speed he’d thought abandoned him years ago. Saks hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t even remotely expected it. He probably just assumed Menhaus would curl up and pout. And that was his mistake. Menhaus threw his body against Saks, upsetting his aim and knocking him into the gunwale. The gun went off, but the bullet went into the sky. And then Menhaus had his hands on it, struggling against Saks. Saks kicked him in the stomach, in the thigh, but he would not let go.

By then, Cook and Fabrini were at his side.

Fabrini punched Saks in the face about four or five times while Cook and Menhaus wrestled the gun away.

The fight gone out of him, Saks let it go and sunk to the deck plating. Used up and empty, all the hot air gone now like somebody had bled him empty.

He did not look at them or even speak.

Cook took the gun to the bow where it would be out of harm’s way.

Fabrini took the knife from Saks’s boot while Menhaus held him.

It was all over very quickly.

“There,” Fabrini said, giving Saks a good kick in the ribs. “There you are, asshole. What’re you going to do now?”

Saks just stared at him, his face smeared with blood.

“I’m going to kill you,” Saks said and dove at him.

31

The three of them managed to put down Saks’s latest rebellion without too much trouble. But they knew now that he was too far gone to reason with. He had to be tied up. They used Fabrini’s belt. They knotted his arms behind his back and threaded the belt through an oarlock, knotting it again. At last, Saks was harmless. He wouldn’t hurt them or himself now.

But it was pathetic, Cook thought, having to do something like that in the first place.

What was it all coming to?

“At least, at least now we can breathe, now we can relax,” Menhaus said, still not sounding so sure of it. “We can figure out things.. . maybe get out of here.”

“There’s no getting out,” Crycek said. “Not yet, maybe not ever. We’re drifting… can’t you feel it? We’re being drawn deeper into this place.”

He had a point and nobody dismissed it. Where before the weeds had been in isolated little patches and clumps drifting about, now there were great banks of them. The water was still open for the most part, but the islands of weed were so huge you couldn’t see where they ended. They just faded off into the mist like headlands. And they were massive and thick, steaming and verdant and stinking of jungle swamps.

“He’s right, you know. Crycek. We’re all going to die,” Saks said almost cheerfully. “Each and every one of us. Look at those weeds.. . sooner or later they’re gonna snare us up and that’ll be all she wrote.”

“Shut the hell up,” Fabrini said.

“You better shoot me if you want to shut me up,” Saks told him.

It looked like Fabrini was indeed considering it.

“Maybe… maybe some day the weeds will part and this lifeboat’ll drift out same way we drifted in… except there’ll be five skeletons in it. It’s happened before. A whole ship one time.. . went missing three years, then it just showed up one day and-”

“Want me to gag him?” Fabrini asked.

Cook seemed to be in charge now. He was the most level-headed one of the bunch. “I don’t know. We’ll leave it up to Saks. Why do you say, dumb ass, do we have to gag you or are you gonna be a good boy?”

Saks went quiet, but you couldn’t wipe the look of grim certainty off his face or erase the mad dog glare of insanity from his eyes. These were constants. Things the others had to pretend they weren’t seeing. But it was no simple matter to look lunacy in the eye and ignore its ramifications. To know, deep down, that under the right conditions, it could take anyone, anytime.

And no one knew this better than Cook.

Nobody in the world.

He’d felt it that day he’d killed his father. The blinding, white-hot, ice-cold slow burn that was true madness, whether temporary or permanent. And until you experienced it, tasted it, filled your belly with it, you could never appreciate it or how ugly it all really was. Because once you’d tasted it, you never got that awful flavor out of your mouth.

Cook didn’t like the idea of being in charge. He would have preferred a very democratic sort of leadership, a council made up of him and Fabrini and Menhaus. Maybe even Crycek because now and then he made sense. But it wasn’t going to be that way. Surely Fabrini was tougher and more physically able than he. Menhaus had been around more, had more experience. And Crycek… if he wasn’t so loopy.. . he was an experienced sailor. Yet, they seemed to be looking to Cook for leadership. He seemed to have the final say whether he liked it or not.

But all he really wanted was to sleep.

He was dead tired… yet he didn’t dare close his eyes. He had to watch Saks and watch him close. If trouble was going to come, it would come from his direction.

At least, that’s what Cook was thinking.

And then something hit the boat.

And then hit it again.

32

Soltz was pretty certain about it. “I know what I heard,” he told Gosling and the others. “It was a gunshot. My hearing is more acute than yours. I know what I heard.”

George had heard something, too. They all had. A sort of muted cracking in the distance. It could have been a gunshot… but it could have been a lot of other things, too.

“Maybe we ought to get on that radio,” Cushing suggested. “See what we can pick up… somebody might have been trying to signal us.”

Gosling considered it. George knew very well what he was thinking, how he didn’t like the idea of listening to that static. It got to a man and particularly when you had that odious sense that it was not just static, but something alive and aware.

“That’s what we should do,” Soltz said.

Gosling looked to George and he just shrugged. What else could he do?

Gosling went up to the bow where all the survival equipment was stowed in waterproof, zippered compartments. He took out the VHF and began to set it up.

George stayed by the doorway, watching.

The others went with Gosling and George just sat there, thinking, thinking about what he’d seen coming out of the fog earlier. Even now, it left him with a dread sense of horror. Something like that, it got under your skin and stayed there like mites. The image of that horrible little girl… he couldn’t shake it nor the idea of what she might have done to him.

He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. She had been there, all right. But where did that leave him… believing in ghosts?

No, absolutely not, he told himself, I do not believe in ghosts and spooks. I didn’t believe in them before I was lost in this terrible place and I don’t believe in them now.

But if she hadn’t been a ghost, then what?

This is what George had been threading through the reels of his brain ever since it happened. She had been dressed in what he thought was 19 ^th century clothing. He figured he wasn’t too far off there. He rather doubted that if it was all a hallucination, that his mind would have conjured up such convincing antique fashions. And it had been convincing… her hair, her dress, everything. He’d been around and around on this and he kept coming back to the same thing: the little girl was not a ghost, not really, it was just something else pretending to be the ghost of a little girl.

It was no less spookier than the ghost bit, but it made sense.

Because George could remember, right before it happened, thinking he saw something moving out there and his mind had been filled with images of ghost ships and spooks rising from their watery graves. Just imagination… but something out there, maybe his hypothetical Fog-Devil, had read his mind and gave him that which would scare him the most.

It was an aberrant line of thinking… yet he almost believed it.

The dead sea… for that’s how he thought of this place, as in Dead Sea, proper noun… was filled with horrible things. But most of them were merely biology run wild, but this other, this Fog-Devil… the presence he sensed out in that static… maybe it was the original boogeyman, a thing that knew what scared you, pulled it raw and dripping from your mind and set it loose. Maybe it got off doing that. Maybe it was the very thing that had haunted not only this sea but dozens of others, the very thing that terrified sailors since men first took to the water. The thing that created ghost ships and sea demons and crawling, nameless things that scared sailors to death or became the stuff of legend.

Fantasy? Maybe, but it would explain some things, wouldn’t it? George did not think it created monster eels or schools of weird luminous fish or odd little leggy critters that sat on oars-things like that were nature’s creations, a seriously fucked-up and alien nature, but nature all the same. No, whatever this thing was, it was not so crude in its creativity, it was not so general. When it scared someone, it made things personal, intimate.

Just as it had with George.

George started getting the creeps looking into the fog and thinking these things, so he joined the others up front. The VHF was operating and Gosling was sending out signals. The static was rising and falling with an almost morphic sound that made you want to sleep. And dream.

“What is that?” Soltz was saying. “What am I hearing there? That pinging, shrilling sound in there…”

George had heard it before. A high-pitched pinging like that of a tuning fork, but barely discernable in the static. It came and went. There almost seemed to be a pattern to it, a code, something. You’d hear that pinging, then there would be a strange buzzing pulse that rose up and died. But each time George heard it, he was certain there was a pattern to it. That it was not random and certainly not natural in origin.

“Just noise,” Gosling said. “Atmospheric noise.”

That sounded good and maybe Cushing and Soltz were buying it, but George certainly wasn’t. For there was direction behind those sounds, there was intelligence. Something was making them and he honestly didn’t want to know what it was.

“I guess,” Cushing began, “I guess it’s just some weird interference… that’s what it must be.”

“Sure,” Gosling said, but his voice sounded awfully hollow.

If it indeed was static, what they heard next certainly could not be. It happened about three or four minutes later, just about the time Gosling was going to shut the unit off, that static beginning to bother all of them in ways they could scarcely fathom. It started out as a low, distorted whining like a shortwave radio trying to lock on a channel and then it grew high and echoing, became something like a broken up voice full of panic that was saying, “… help us… oh God help us… it’s getting close now… it’s getting close.. . oh dear God…” It faded away and then came back clearer, so clear you could hear the man on the other end breathing and something in the background, a huge and booming sound getting louder and louder. It almost sounded like a great, hollow heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom. “… anyone can hear us… it’s… it’s coming out of the fog.. . it’s coming right out of the fog… it’s on the decks and… it’s knocking at the door… at the door…”

It then it faded back into the static.

They listened for another minute or two and then Gosling wisely shut the unit off. His fingers were trembling.

33

“Untie me, you fucking idiots,” Saks was crying out at the others. “Don’t leave me… don’t leave me tied up like this…”

But they had other problems.

They were now in some sort of wide channel cut between two banks of weed and the fish, the boneheads were hammering against the hull of the boat, filled with frenzy and appetite.

But it wasn’t them that really scared the men in the lifeboat.

It was their big brother.

He was back.

The huge, ugly twenty-footer with the armored snout and the dead eyes. For something of its sheer bulk, it moved with incredible speed. With eel-like gyrations of its tail, it launched itself at the boat. The impact was hard and fast. It threw the men to the deck and nearly flipped the boat over.

Then it rocketed in and hit them from the other side, then from the stern, propelling the lifeboat forward like it had an outboard hooked up to it. Most of the smaller ones had scattered, but that big ugly mother was standing his ground.

“Jesus Christ,” Fabrini said, “it’s gonna get us, it’s gonna flip the boat…”

“Damn right it is,” Saks said, enjoying their terror. “It’s going to get one of you in the water and swallow you whole.”

I don’t wanna see that, Fabrini kept telling himself. I don’t wanna see a man get bitten in half by a giant fish. I don’t care what else happens out here, but, by Jesus, I don’t wanna see that…

The fish came alongside the boat, so close they could not only see it, but smell it. It stank of brine and blood and bad meat, like something that had been chewing on waterlogged corpses. And that probably wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Cook!” Menhaus said. “Do something! We got to do something!”

The fish hit them again, knocking everybody to the deck again and almost pitching Menhaus into the drink. He let out a high, girlish scream and sank back down to the deck, gripping the uprights of his seat.

The fish came again, riding right on the surface, spiny ventral fins spread out like Chinese fans and sharp enough to cut timber. Cook was right on the gunwale watching it, watching it bump the boat with its iron snout and pass by. Those thick, bony plates that ran from the tip of its nose to its thorax were actually jointed he saw and it gave the fish incredible flexibility.

Cook took out the gun.

He didn’t want to shoot, but he didn’t see where he had much of a choice.

It nudged up against the lifeboat, those hinged jaws spread wide… wide enough to literally bite a man in half… and those dermal tooth bones that were like long, jagged shards of glass grated against the fiberglass hull. It could not bite through the hull and mainly because it could not get a grip on it. Had it been wood and not a single piece of formed fiberglass, it would have been able to butt its head through the hull planking.

Cook kept studying it.

He didn’t think there was any way in hell that a 9mm round could punch through that armored flesh, just no way. Back around mid-thorax, those bony plates ended and the fish had smooth skin like that of a shark or ray.

It vanished from view for a few moments.

The lifeboat was still moving forward with momentum from the hilt to the stern, cutting through those weedy, congested waters and going God knew where.

“It’s coming back,” Fabrini said in a defeated voice. “I can see it…”

And it was.

It was coming straight on, jaws wide and spraying foam, launching itself at the boat like a torpedo. The impact threw Cushing, Menhaus, and Fabrini into each other. The lifeboat swung in a lazy arc, riding on its gunwale a moment before righting itself. Saks screamed and roared like a wild animal.

It swam alongside the boat and Cook brought up the Browning and put three rounds in it at close range. It didn’t seem to have any effect… and then without warning, the fish rose up out of the water like a hooked salmon and they could see that it was probably closer to twenty-five feet than twenty. It rose up straight as a peg and for one horrifying moment they thought it was going to come back right down on the boat like a fallen tree. But it missed by scant inches, making the boat rock wildly.

Its huge tail splashed in the water and then it was gone.

Ten, tense, expectant minutes later, it still had not returned.

“I think we made it,” Cook said.

But nobody commented on that.

The boat was still moving forward, slicing through the weeds and those coiling tendrils of steam that came off them. The fog blew over and around them in great glistening patches and they were suddenly locked in a fog bank. They couldn’t see two feet in any direction. Just hear the bow moving through the weeds that were getting as thick as briars now.

And then the fog receded a bit.

“Holy Christ in Heaven,” Fabrini said. “Do you see it? Do you fucking see it?”

They did.

Coming out of the mist was a freighter.