“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
