Dead Sea

“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.