11
Saks was watching the boys play, thinking that he had nobody to blame but himself. That he had hired this crew of mama’s boys, dick-suckers, and all around morons.
The fog had brightened now and the boys were all excited that the sun was coming up, would burn off that fog and deliver the lot of them into never-neverland. They knew better. They all knew better. The fog was filled with a sort of illumination, sure, but to Saks it didn’t look like sunshine at all, but more of a silvery moonlight that the fog tinted yellow. It was not a clean sort of light, but dirty like sunlight tinted through a yellow window pane.
What it came down to, he knew, was that it was all wrong.
Sure, it was brighter now. You could see people’s faces, make out things just fine, but it was not what you’d call a sunny day. It surely was not normal.
After they’d reached the lifeboat and everybody had a bite to eat and some water, everybody chatted away and then one by one they’d fallen asleep… not realizing until that moment how tired they were. Saks himself had gone out hard, not waking for nearly five hours.
But he felt better now. On top of his game.
And his brain was firing on all cylinders again. For what he was thinking about as those idiots fooled with the fishing gear from the survival canisters, was not how they were going to stay alive, but how he was going to stay alive. How he was going to take control of this little party of stooges and make them work to his adavantage.
Saks was a natural at things like that.
Menhaus was rigging a lure with the sixty-pound test line. Since they didn’t have any bait… any bait that could be spared, that was… Menhaus decided to use his watch since it had seized up now anyway.
“It’s worth a try,” he said. “I saw it in that movie.”
Fabrini grunted. “Sounds fucking goofy to me.”
“So let me do it. I don’t need your help.”
Menhaus was talking about something he’d seen in the film Lifeboat. The survivors of a shipwreck used a belt and a shiny bracelet as a fishing lure to try and catch fish. But they didn’t have any real tackle, Menhaus pointed out, and that gave him a distinct advantage.
“I gotta see this,” Fabrini said.
“Let’s go fishing then,” Cook said, happy that they finally had something to do other than watch Saks.
Saks was wondering exactly what they thought they were going to catch in that soup.
Crycek was up in the bow, had Hupp’s head cradled in his lap as before. He watched the entire thing with glazed eyes. Maybe he was there and maybe he was somewhere else entirely.
Carefully, Menhaus lowered his makeshift lure into the water and jigged it like a real lure. He kept doing this, feeding out line, going deep with it. He kept at it ten, fifteen minutes, adjusting depth, feeling around down there as he had as a boy for catfish while Fabrini told him how crazy it all was. But Menhaus kept it up, figuring it was a way to pass the time if nothing else.
“Anything?” Fabrini asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Ah, shit, this is a waste of time.”
“No… wait. I felt something.”
The line jerked in his hands once, twice, three times. Menhaus gave it a good yank, trying to set the hook. Nothing. He tugged it, but there was no pull, no sensation of weight on the other end. But there had been something down there. Unless he snagged the hook on something. He fed out a little more line, jigged it carefully, again and again and again.
“There’s nothing down there,” Fabrini said.
Menhaus figured he was right… but then the line snapped taut in his hands, burning through his fingers. The sixty-pound test was heavy stuff and it cut bleeding valleys into his palms. He cried out and Fabrini took hold of it, too, smart enough to slide on one of the gloves from the emergency bin. He got a good grip on it and, Jesus, there was something big down there.
“We got a whopper here,” he said. “C’mon, Menhaus, this bastard’s fighting…”
Everyone was paying attention now.
Crycek’s eyes were wide and unblinking.
Saks had narrowed his.
Cook looked mildly intrigued.
Menhaus got the other glove on his left hand and the both of them fought that line that whipped and snapped in the water, whatever was on the other end appreciating the meal of that shiny watch but downright pissed off that it was hooked to a line.
Fabrini had never done much fishing, but Menhaus was an old pro.
They pulled against their catch and then played out the line, kept working it that way, tiring out what was on the other end. After what seemed ten minutes of that, there was no more fight.
They started hauling it in.
Foot after foot of line was pulled into the boat, Saks reeling it in as the other two pulled. The nylon fishing line was stained pink from immersion in that moldering sea.
They were getting close now.
Fabrini kept looking to Menhaus, wanting to know what came next.
Menhaus had sweat beading his brow.
There was a sudden thump under the boat and then another and Menhaus directed the line out from under the hull. He directed their catch around the port side, leaning over the gunwale and trying to get a look at it. But the light… dirty alien light… only penetrated a few inches into that opaque sea.
But there was something there. Something pretty good sized.
“We’re going to bring him up far as we can,” Menhaus said. “Then I’ll see if I can get a hold of him, pull him in.”
Together, they brought their catch up until they saw a greenish-brown caudal fin that was broad like a fan of bony spines with a pink membrane connecting them. It slapped against the side of the boat. Slipping on both the gloves now, Menhaus reached down and took hold of its tail just above the caudal. “Jesus, sumbitch is slimy
… heavy, Christ… get ready boys…”
“Be careful,” Cook said.
With everything he had, Menhaus yanked it up out of the drink and it flopped over the gunwale and fell to the deck, not far from Crycek’s boots… which he quickly withdrew.
“What the fuck?” Saks said.
But they were all thinking that.
For it wasn’t a fish… exactly.
It was segmented like the tail of a lobster, twisting and gyrating, seemed almost boneless as it thrashed and sprayed slimy water in every direction. The men were falling over each other to get out of its way.
“You’re some kind of fisherman, all right,” Saks said, enjoying the other’s discomfort and horror.
It was maybe four-feet in length, the body reticulated and brown, oddly serpentine at the posterior end and thickening up to the width of a nail keg towards the head. There was something obscenely fleshy about it. It was a fish… yet not a fish. Like some weird, repellent hybrid of fish and crustacean. It was muddy brown at the tail and the color faded as it moved towards the head… or what might have been a head… and became entirely translucent like the body of a brine shrimp. You could see the shadows of pulsing organs and what might have been arteries.
The craziest thing, though, was that its head – completely eyeless as far as they could tell – terminated in dozens of snapping, whipping things like the barbels or whiskers of a catfish. But these were transparent as icicles, each ending in a blood-red needle.
What Saks was mostly aware of, though, was its smell… like rotting fish on a beach, high and foul and moist. But with a curious after-odor like cat urine.
