Dead Sea

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.