Cook said, “C’mon, Saks, push that body away… it might attract something.”
“Yeah, we don’t want that,” Menhaus said. “We don’t want something coming for it.”
Saks scowled. “Just grab him under the arm. He won’t bite you.”
Fabrini laughed and shook his head. “Why don’t you do it, big chief?”
Saks features were cut by a knife blade smile. “Because I told Menhaus here to do it, dipshit. And like you said, I’m the big chief.”
Fabrini cracked a fart. “There’s one for you, big chief”
Menhaus saw it was a no-win situation. Pale as flour, he took hold of the corpse under the arm and lifted. It seemed to weigh hundreds of pounds. The flesh was spongy beneath the fatigue shirt. “Oh, God,” he gasped, breathing through clenched teeth, turning away from the sick/sweet stink of putrescence. “Oh my Christ… oh my God…”
The body was lifted a few feet out of the water, a great fleshy, waterlogged balloon. Its face had been chewed away by fish… or something like fish. Nothing there but a grisly hollow of bleached muscle and knotted cartilage. Lipless, skinless, it grinned with jutting yellow teeth set in withdrawn, shriveled gums the color of oatmeal. Water ran and dripped from the empty eye sockets and collapsed nasal cavity.
Saks paid no attention.
He felt along the huge, distended belly, ignoring the whimpering of Menhaus and the parasites that clung in twisting loops around the navel. His fingers found something and pulled it free. A gun. Sunlight winked off its cruel metal lines. Dread settled into the faces of Cook and Fabrini. A three-inch worm slid like a greasy noodle from the cadaver’s mouth, wriggling in the light.
“Oh, good God,” Menhaus said.
There was a sudden wet, ripping noise followed by a fleshy snap and the body slapped back into the water. The arm had pulled free of the shoulder joint. With a strangled cry, Menhaus dropped the limb and vomited over the side.
“You don’t need that gun, Saks,” Cook said.
“Oh, yes I do,” he said, grinning proudly, happily, like an old man who’d copped his first feel in years. “Nice, isn’t it?” He waved the gun around for all to see and admire. “A Browning nine millimeter auto. Nice weapon.”
“Shit,” Fabrini said. “Thing’s been soaking for days. It won’t shoot.”
Saks smiled and aimed the barrel just left of Fabrini’s head and pulled the trigger. The report was like thunder. Fabrini felt the bullet whiz by his temple. The shell casing hissed into the water.
“You stupid fuck!” Fabrini shouted. “You stinking stupid fuck! You could’ve killed me!”
Saks chuckled. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now.”
Menhaus just looked ill. Cook looked alarmed, hopeless. He knew very well that the balance of power had shifted even further in Saks’s direction. This was not a good thing.
“Big tough man with a gun,” Fabrini grumbled.
Saks aimed the Browning square between Fabrini’s eyes. “This time you die.”
“Stop it,” Cook said. “This is crazy.”
“Yeah, c’mon, Saks. We’re all friends here.” Menhaus’ smile was trembling and quivering like an earthworm desperate to get out of the sunshine.
Fabrini spat. “Go ahead, tough guy. Shoot.” He said this with a strong, even voice. But underneath he was scared shitless and they all knew it.
“Saks,” Cook said.
Saks lowered the gun. He was thinking that, yeah, he should’ve greased the mouthy little wop. There wouldn’t be jack the others could do about it. One pull of the trigger and no more Fabrini, two more pulls and he could waste them all. But, for some reason, he didn’t. Even he wasn’t sure why. There were no laws in this place, only the ones you made up as you went. And it wasn’t that his conscience was bothering him or even the fact that it would be murder. He could live with that. No, it wasn’t any of those things and although Saks couldn’t admit it to himself, the real reason was that he could not face the fog alone. The idea of it… and what called it home… was just too much.
“Maybe,” Menhaus said sheepishly, “you could shoot us something to eat with that. We can’t live on that shit in the pouches forever.”
“Sure,” Saks said.
“Or maybe just kill anything… anything that comes after us.” Saks smiled. “Why not? As long as I got three bullets left in case you sweethearts try to get funny with me.”
And that, of course, was it in an eggshell, the others realized. Saks would kill them if they didn’t do what he said. He wanted to be boss, needed to be in charge. And if they didn’t play the game by his rules, then he’d shoot them and feed them to the wildlife. It was a simple arrangement. An age old one.
“As long as you play by my rules, everything’ll be fine,” Saks told them.
“And if we don’t, you kill us,” Fabrini said.
Saks kept smiling.
Cook was watching Saks as they were all watching him. He was becoming less and less afraid of what might be waiting in the mist and more afraid of what was in the boat. Particularly now that it had a gun. But Saks was right about one thing: they were quite a bunch. They were led by a violent, arrogant asshole with a gun. And Fabrini had that dark, slow burn in his eyes like all he was living for was the chance to kill Saks. And Menhaus? He was useless, because he’d just go with the flow as he probably had his entire life. Then there was Crycek… well, no point going into that. Crycek was nuttier than peanut brittle.
And what about you? Cook asked himself. Do you really think you’re any better than the rest? You can sit there and play the voice of reason all you want, but the bottom line is that you’re as fucked up as the rest. You get your chance, you’ll kill Saks. Let’s not forget that. Maybe you’ll be killing your father all over again, but you’ll kill him all the same.
Yeah, they were quite a crew to dump into the same lifeboat and particularly in this haunted sea. Anyway you served it all up, Cook figured, it wasn’t exactly peaches and cream.
“See, you got it all wrong,” Saks said. “I don’t want to kill anybody. I want us to live through this, one way or another. But being that I got the gun and that I’m in charge, I’m pretty much God. And it’ll be up to me to sort out any of your sorry asses if I decide you’re a danger to the rest. Keep that in mind, Fabrini. Because I swear to God, I’m not fucking around here.”
There wasn’t much to say after that. They watched the body drift away. Maybe Gosling was right about there being subsurface currents, fingers of unseen motion. For the body gradually moved off or the lifeboat did. The body hadn’t gone more than a hundred feet before it rose up suddenly with a bubbling gout of foam and came back down, seeming to thrash and jerk in countless directions like an epileptic having a massive seizure.
But it was no seizure.
Seizures didn’t have cutting wet-leather dorsals and tearing razor teeth. Only sharks did. Cook saw them hit the body like torpedoes, maybe a dozen of them. In that murky water, they looked very much like sharks… but they weren’t sharks. Not exactly. These fish ranged in size from maybe fifteen inches to three feet. They had long, slim bodies and heavy heads plated like armadillos, seemed to move with a serpentine eel-like propulsion.
Whatever they were, they shredded the body to bone within minutes. And then they tore the skeleton apart, too.
No, they weren’t sharks.
They were worse.
23
While Cushing and Soltz slept, George kept watching the fog, waiting for it to vomit something else out at them. He kept seeing shapes and shadows out there and could never really be sure if they were actually there or he was dreaming them. In the back of his mind, despite himself, he was still sensing something out there. Something big and encompassing and… well, evil. Because that was the word his brain kept throwing at him.
Evil.
