Dead Sea

“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.