Something incalculably evil.

A cancer waiting out there that would eat a man’s mind straight down to the marrow.

But he wouldn’t let himself think too much on it because he didn’t want to go insane. It would just be too damn easy, all things considered. But the bottom line was that he didn’t have to consciously think about it, maybe his imagination was just permanently stuck on high-rev… or maybe it was thinking about him. Some grinning, loathsome god of maritime wastes, some dark lord of black depths and ghost ships, of haunted seas and drowned sailors. A demented, slithering malignance that was vast and empty like the black spaces between the stars, something that could only fill itself with human terror and anxiety, madness and dread and desperation.

The very embodiment of the fear that the seas had always inspired. This thing given flesh… or something like flesh.

Enough, George told himself. This shit has to stop. If you get out of this horrid dead zone you can spend the rest of your goddamn life being dry and sassy and spinning tales about spooks and ghosts and all that shit. You can wake with the sweats at four a.m. from nightmares about this place… but at least then, they’ll really be nightmares, not reality. But for now, keep your head, because there’s no waking from this one and danger every time you close your eyes.

Well, now, that was food for thought.

George scratched his beard and ran fingers over his torso. He could feel his ribs. But this wasn’t from starvation; he’d always been thin. Wiry. He had a supercharged metabolism and found it nearly impossible to gain weight. The diet gimmicks and infomercials on TV always made him laugh. He’d tried most of his adult life to put on weight and simply couldn’t.

The fantasy question everyone kept toying with on the raft was: What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home? The answers came in all shapes and sizes. Gosling wanted to pay a visit on a lady friend in New Orleans and get drunk for a week… in bed. Cushing intended to quit his job and tell his brother-in-law to get fucked, for reasons he wouldn’t elaborate on. Soltz just wanted to rest and get some medication… particularly since Gosling had forbid him from touching the medical kit and the pills and ointments within.

But what did George want?

He wanted to spend day after day with his wife and son. He wanted them to know exactly how much they meant to him. He wanted to spend days telling his boy, Jacob, tales of high adventure at sea. The kid would eat it up. He’d want to hear the stories again and again. And George would oblige as generations of father’s had. The three of them would have cookouts and picnics and lazy Sunday afternoons spent doing absolutely nothing. And the nights, after Jacob was fast asleep, would be spent in sweaty embrace with Lisa.

God, but it sounded good.

He’d never realized until the shipwreck just how wonderful his life was. It was just a damn shame it took a disaster to make him see this.

But wasn’t that always the way?

The memory of his wife and son, if nothing else, gave him strength. Gave him something to set his teeth into. And he decided that right then and there, he was going back to that life. And God help anyone or anything that interfered with that.

Even that old devil in the mist.

24

Everyone handled it differently.

Because that was how things like that worked. What turned one man’s guts to sauce, made another smile. And what made one smile, made another scream. And that’s how it was out in the lifeboat which was a paper cup tossed into a misting, saline pond where the fog was moist, sparkling, and thick as goosedown.

The lifeboat was surrounded by the shark-fish now.

Like slavering dogs circling a bin of butcher’s scraps, they knew there was meat and blood in the boat, they just weren’t sure how to get at it. So they circled. Swam under the boat, around it, nudged it, slapped it with their tails. They hadn’t resorted to brute force yet. .. this was still a casual flirtation from the wolfpacks of that fathomless, primal sea… but it was coming. As more and more of them swam through the drifting clots of weeds and from unknown depths below, gathered in numbers and got in each other’s way, something was going to happen. And once blood got in the water and the feeding frenzy began, it was only a matter of time before they tipped the boat and its tender morsels into the water.

At least, that’s the way Saks was figuring things. “Lookit ‘em out there, boys… did you ever see such horrors? Lookit the mouths on them fucking things. Mouths like that… Jesus, made to bite off limbs and tear out throats and crunch bones…”

If he was practicing his usual brand of sardonic humor, then it just wasn’t working. Nobody was amused. Cook was surely not amused and neither was Fabrini. Even Crycek looked scared now.

“I feel like I’m floating in a bucket in a crocodile tank,” Fabrini said. “Just waiting to see which one of those wicked bastards figures out how to tip me out.”

Saks seemed to like that, so he improved upon it: “Like a rat in a snakepit. You gotta love the comparison.”

“Goddamn sharks,” Menhaus said.

“Ain’t sharks,” Saks told him. “I’ve seen sharks. These ain’t sharks.”

He knew that much. These pricks would have polished off Jaws in about five minutes. No, not sharks… but something like sharks. Saks was thinking they were familiar. That maybe he had seen them before. Not living, of course, but maybe hanging in a museum or on one of those nature documentaries on fossil life. Because, dammit, more he was watching those greedy, shit-ugly excuses for fish, more he was thinking there was something ancient about them. Prehistoric.

Too bad Cushing wasn’t along, he’d probably know what Saks was trying to get at. The pictures in his mind he just didn’t have words for. Cushing knew a lot of damn useless, trivial nonsense like that.

Saks had dubbed them “boneheads” because their heads were more skull than flesh. All plated and angular with sharp bony ridges and hollows. First time one of them got real close to the boat, Saks had almost pissed himself. Like the little monster was wearing a skull mask… or was a living, swimming skeleton. They were as ugly as ugly got. Made sharks looked almost kind of sweet and inoffensive.

“They look…” Menhaus began, cocking his head to the side like maybe he was hoping something relevant would drop out “… I don’t know, just goddamn spooky, goddamn devilish, don’t you think? Them bony faces and black eyes sunk in those pits, jaws opening and closing like they only live to bite and tear…”

That got Saks smiling. That’s right, you idiot, he thought.

Sharks or boneheads, they were vicious streamlined things that could go through flesh and bone like living chainsaws. They came in a wide variety, that was for sure. Some were less than a foot in length, shaped roughly like eels; others were two or three feet in length with massive bullet-shaped bodies that were mostly head; still others – the really big ones – were eight and ten feet long with immense bony jaws that could have bitten through steel cable.

They were all predators. There was no doubt about that. And whether the men in the lifeboat could scientifically classify them and assign them a place in the natural order of things or not, it didn’t really matter. For they were here and it didn’t look like they were going to leave anytime soon.

Saks was getting a real kick out of them.

But mainly, he supposed, from the absolute fear they inspired in his little crew.

So he watched them, found them interesting.

They were brown or green and sometimes yellow. Speckled, banded, a few of the smaller ones the bright, electric red or shiny sunset orange of carnival glass. Almost artificial looking, you came right down to it.

Menhaus stared at his feet, rocking slowly back and forth, stroking his mustache, maybe thinking and maybe afraid to.

Fabrini cursed the fish, calling them everything but white men.

Cook studied them without emotion, his eyes as flat and dead as those of the predators circling them. But

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