those factors. He was a self-involved, self-indulgent macho bastard who would have fed his mother to the sharks if he thought it would keep him alive a few more hours.
If the others had risen up and decided to kill the man, Cook knew he would happily join in. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, anyway.
But if he was lucky, maybe in time.
And nobody was more patient than Cook because he knew Saks was a dead man, it was just a matter of when now.
16
“I’m so thirsty,” Soltz kept saying. “I need water.”
“You’re okay. Just try to think of something else,” Cushing said, scanning the fog with his bright blue eyes, looking for something, anything out there. Anything that might give him even the thinnest ray of hope. Because, Jesus, this was bad.
Real bad.
Cushing wasn’t a pessimist by any stretch of the imagination, but there were limits to everything. Just the two of them, he was thinking, floating on that fucking hatch cover in that turgid, alien sea. What were their chances here? Death could come in so many different ways. And if it wasn’t from some of the wildlife – he’d heard enough sounds out there now to be convinced that there was some seriously nasty shit prowling around-then what? Dehydration? Starvation?
Damn, but it wasn’t looking real peachy right about then.
He hadn’t slept in… well, he wasn’t sure how long now. Since his berth in the ship. Every time his eyes started drifting shut, he snapped awake with the dread certainty that something was coming out of the fog, something was reaching out for him. Even when he was wide awake and alert, it was hard to shake that feeling.
He wondered if Soltz felt it, too. But he didn’t dare ask him.
The man had enough anxieties to deal with.
“No boats will come here,” Soltz sighed. “Not into this Sargasso Sea.”
“I told you that’s a myth. I was pulling your leg.”
“I think we both know better, don’t we?”
Cushing just shrugged. Okay, the kid gloves were off. No more trying to talk reason to the man… even if it was less like reason and more like out and out bullshit. Let Soltz believe they were lost in some alternate dimension, that they’d fallen through the back door of the Devil’s Triangle.
Why not? Because they probably had.
“What is that?” Soltz said excitedly. “Look! What is that? A shark? A whale?” Cushing looked and saw nothing. “Where?
“There!” Soltz said, jabbing his finger at the water.
Cushing saw a gigantic shadow pass beneath them. Soltz, trembling, his jaw sprung open like a trap, moved to the very center of the hatch cover. Cushing crept out to the edge, tried to get a look at their visitor. It was a huge fish, at least forty feet in length. Its body a dusky brownish green speckled with white dots and darker transverse bands. It could have been a whale… except that as it passed, Cushing saw that its head narrowed into an angular probocis that was lit up like a Christmas tree, seemed to twist in the water, corkscrewing.
Crazy, impossible fish.
It swam off, did not return.
“It’s just some kind of whale, I guess,” Cushing said, not sure if he was relieved or terrified by the idea of something that size. “Harmless, I think.”
“You think? Well, it didn’t look harmless to me.”
“It’s gone. Don’t worry about it.”
Soltz stared out through his thick glasses. “You know a lot about nature, don’t you? The sea and its animals, things like that. How is it an accountant knows about things like that?”
“I’m a frustrated naturalist,” Cushing admitted. “I read books on everything. Sea life happens to be one of those things I’ve studied.”
“With my eyes, reading is a chore. I get headaches. Did I ever tell you about my headaches?”
Cushing figured he was about to learn all about them.
17
“Get ready,” Gosling said and there was dire import behind his words. George said nothing.
He’d never felt quite so helpless before in his life. His knuckles were white as they gripped his knees. He was tense and waiting, his heart hammering wildly.
His throat was so dry, his voice would barely come. “I’m afraid,” he admitted. “Jesus, I’m afraid.”
“Stay calm,” Gosling said.
The waiting, of course, was the worse part. Not knowing what was going to happen and when, if anything at all. George was now very much thinking about Lisa and his son Jacob and those pleasant Sunday afternoons. The worst part, the very worst part, about it all now was that he honestly didn’t think he’d see them again. He’d never know another Sunday.
Just stay calm, he told himself. Just like Gosling says. That’s what you gotta do. Stay calm.
Bullshit.
“They’re almost on us,” Gosling said.
But how he could know that with the door zipped shut was beyond George. Maybe he just felt it because George was feeling it, too, now: a gradual, almost lazy pressure building in the sea behind the raft. George was certain he could feel it coming right through the rubberized deckplates… a weight, an expectancy, a surging motion like air forced before a train. Right before impact.
There was no way to stay calm. Even Gosling didn’t look so good. He was clown-white under his tan, his eyes jittering in their sockets like roulette balls. He was gripping the plank for dear life.
There.
George felt it and so did Gosling. Something or many somethings had just moved beneath them with such speed and power its aftershock actually lifted the raft up a few inches. The sea exploded with activity.
“They’re under us,” Gosling said.
And they were.
Dozens and dozens of those luminous fish or animals or whatever they were. They swam close to the surface and now they were bumping against the raft, one after the other. The funny thing was that their light – sort of a pale, thrumming green – filled the interior of the raft, actually lit the bottom like an x-ray so that you could see the outlines of the air chambers, every seam and stitch.
Yes, it was amazing. Truly amazing.
But neither George or Gosling had the time to truly appreciate it, for being in the raft was like being on a roller coaster. Thump, thump, thump in rapid succession. The sea boiled and the raft careened and George clenched his teeth down hard, waiting for those chambers to start popping and for them to start sinking.
But that it didn’t happen.
The raft was engineered to handle rough seas and no amount of jolting and jarring was going to pop it. That’s why it was designed with a series of air chambers, rather than a single one.
Gosling had told him this and more than once, but George couldn’t remember any of that. All he was seeing was that weird glow and feeling the raft beneath him in constant motion, spilling him this way and that, into Gosling and then back to the deck.
Then the bumping stopped and the glow went out as if somebody had switched off a lamp.
