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.