So the five of them boarded the Cyclops, made their way to the aft deckhouse and the cabins below. Crew’s quarters, is what Saks told them. Simple, spartan, efficient. They chose two of the cabins and began cleaning them out, which was a matter of dusting them and opening portholes to get some air in. The bunk mattresses and bolsters were mildewed and patched with rot and they dragged them out and dumped them in the corridor. After a time, the cabins weren’t exactly the Holiday Inn, but they were livable.
What neither Cook nor Fabrini especially cared for was turning Saks loose, but sooner or later, they would have had to anyway.
“I’ll even do you a favor,” Saks told them. He motioned with his thumb to Crycek. “I’ll bunk with the nut, so you two girls can spend some quality time sucking tongue.”
Fabrini just glared at him. “We starting that shit again, Saks?”
And Saks just grinned. Broad, full, filled with secret delight. And you could just see what was in his eyes, what was bouncing through his head: unfinished business. There was unfinished business between Fabrini and him. And when it came time to dance again, it wouldn’t be in the confines of a lifeboat.
Menhaus, some color back in his cheeks now that they were out of the water, said, “I’ll be bunking in with them. There won’t be any trouble.” There was almost something fierce beneath his words. “There better not be any trouble.”
Saks thought that was funny. “Not from me, not from me. You might want to keep an eye on Crycek, though.”
“Oh,” Cook said, “Crycek’s got his feet under him now, I think.”
“More or less,” Crycek said.
All in all, none of them liked that somehow pernicious atmosphere of the ship, but they all agreed on one thing: it beat the shit out of the lifeboat. At least they could move here. At least they could stretch their legs and get out of one another’s hair. And if something came after them, at least there was room to fight and evade. And the way they were looking at things, that was definitely something.
Later, once they had a snack of crackers and cheese washed down with tepid water and Cook had given them their glucose tablets like the survival manual said, Fabrini and Cook sat in their cabin and chatted. Even with the porthole open, the air was still dank and clammy. Not necessarily chilly, just heavy and moist and stale.
“I don’t want the others knowing about that log book,” Cook said, knowing that Saks was up on deck and Crycek was out foraging for things… what those things were, he would not stay. “It won’t do them any good.”
Fabrini chuckled. “You think any of that would bother Saks? Not on your life. Boarding a fucking ghost ship wouldn’t bother him… long as he was free to plot and scheme.”
“Which he’s probably doing right now.”
Neither of them doubted that. You could count on certain things in life and Saks being a low-down, underhanded weasel was one of them. But was he really a danger? That was something they could not decide. Even with the shit he’d put them through on the raft – he claimed it was a temporary madness, a hysteria that had run its course – they could not be sure. Fabrini didn’t like it, but Cook explained to him that Saks probably wouldn’t harm them. That he knew one thing about Saks now and he knew it well: Saks was deeply afraid of being alone.
Cook said, “Crycek seems like he’s starting to get a grip on things, I don’t want to upset him with any of that shit in the log. Maybe it’s all a load of bullshit, but somehow I doubt it.”
Fabrini just nodded. “What do you think about it, though? About all that shit Forbes wrote in there… do you think it’s all really true?”
“Yes,” Cook said, “I do.”
Given that Cook was pretty much in charge now – something he still was not real crazy about – he wondered if such an admission was a good idea. Surely, the leadership manual would have advised against it. When you were the man in charge, you had to consider morale. But there was absolutely no way Cook could lie about any of it. And particularly not to Fabrini who had read the log and had been there when Cook had been touched by the long-dead mind of Forbes… or whatever that had been. Impression, reflection, call it what you will.
“So where does it leave us?” Fabrini said pretty calmly.
“Hell if I know.” Cook sat on his bunk, staring at his knees. “I guess we just have to accept that we’re lost in some terrible place and that there’s terrible things here.”
Oh boy, how was that for building morale?
“I was thinking about what Forbes said about that other ship out there,” Fabrini said. “And I’m thinking there’s got to be lots more. I mean, you’ve heard all that Devil’s Triangle shit same as me. If half of it’s true, this place has to be like a fucking junkyard of lost ships.”
“And planes.”
“Exactly. Maybe after we sort ourselves out a day or two, we ought to think about doing a little exploring a little further out. Never know what we might find”
No, Cook was thinking, you just never know what you might find. Or what might find you.
But Fabrini definitely had a valid point. The Cyclops was just one of hundreds if not thousands. Ships and planes had been getting funneled into this dead zone for as long as there had been ships and planes. And, no doubt, the Mara Corday was not going to be the last. Out there, just maybe, there would be other ships and boats and maybe even if they didn’t have people on them, they would probably have food and water, maybe motorboats and gasoline, weapons, you name it.
“Yeah, I like the way you think, Fabrini,” Cook told him. “If there’s other ships out there, we might just find some supplies and make a go of this.”
And not only did he like Fabrini’s sudden pioneer resourcefulness, but he liked his sudden positive turn of mind. He’d been scared before, Cook knew. Bad scared… and who hadn’t and who still wasn’t? But he had emerged from that with a refreshing can-do sort of spirit. And that was good. Because in this place, Cook decided, your mind could destroy you just as quick as what waited out in the fog.
Fabrini waited a moment, then said, “Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, Cook. I mean, shit, it would take a lot to rain on my parade now being that it’s already fucking sunk.”
“Who said there’s anything on my mind?”
“Nobody had to.”
Cook nodded. “All right. All this is bad enough, sure, but now here’s a little icing on the cake.” He got up and walked over to the porthole, surveying the mist and weeds. “You read what Forbes said. About that white jelly being inside those dead men and how they’d found globs of it other places… what did he say? It had a funny shine to it? That the doctor had burned his hands touching it? That the burns on those corpses looked like radium burns? You see what I’m getting at here?”
But Fabrini just shook his head. “Cook, I dropped out in the tenth grade. Spell it out for me.”
Cook smiled, but not for long. “Radiation,” he said.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, those burns and all the crew getting sick after they came off the Korsund… it sounds like radiation exposure, doesn’t it? Radiation sickness. Forbes wouldn’t have known about radiation back in 1918 and that Dr. Asper probably only knew a little, but it sure fits the bill, doesn’t it?”
Fabrini looked pale. “That thing Forbes talked about… he thought it got the crew on the Korsund and his own crew on this tub. .. shit, do you think this ship is still full of it? For all we know, we might already glow in the dark.”
“If we’ve been exposed, it’s probably too late,” Cook told him. “We’re probably saturated… but remember now, I’m just guessing here. That’s all. Besides, not all radiation stays active for a long time like when they drop a bomb. I read once where the majority of radioactive materials have a half-life – disintegration rate – of days or weeks, something like that. So I’m guessing that after almost ninety years, we’re probably safe.”
“Until it comes again.”
“Yes,” Cook said.
He knew he was reaching with a lot of this. But it sure sounded like whatever that thing was, radioactivity was part of its natural properties much like exhaling carbon dioxide was part of man’s. And maybe it wasn’t radiation as they understood it, but it was something damn close.
“If it’s gonna come for us,” Fabrini said, “I just wish it would already and fry our brains. Get it done with.”
