“Don’t you know what I’ve been through? Stuck out in the darkness where there’s nothing to touch and nothing to feel? Open this door, boy. Open it right now. That’s a goddamn order…”
Crycek felt tears welling his eyes.
Felt his hand going up to the latch, his fingers brushing it, something on the other side of that door getting excited, breathing hard, almost panting now with a wet, drooling sound. Oh yes, it was happy, so very happy.
“Crycek.”
It was Cook. He was sitting up in his bunk. His eyes were shining black bb’s. “What the hell are you doing over there?”
Crycek started to say something, but stopped… he honestly wasn’t sure what he had been doing. “There was someone… someone at the door. They wanted to come in”
Cook’s voice was thin, dry. “Who? Who was at the door?”
“It… it was Morse,” he said. “Captain Morse.”
“Morse is dead, Crycek.”
Crycek nodded. “Yes, he is… but he wanted to come in anyway.”
With that he went back and laid on his bunk, something like a distant scream sounding in his head.
17
Maybe they were expecting a sea monster.
Maybe they were expecting something worse. Truth was, in that goddamn place, they wouldn’t have been truly surprised to see Santa and his reindeer come winging out of the mist with the Easter Bunny bringing up the back door. Got so you were willing to believe anything in that place. It was easier that way.
But what they got was another lifeboat from the Mara Corday.
“Hey, you bums over there!” a voice called. “You got any damn beer?”
“Yeah,” Cushing said, “we got a keg we just tapped.”
“Don’t forget to tell ‘em about the strippers,” Gosling said.
They rowed over to the lifeboat and saw that Marx, the chief engineer, from the ship was on board. He had two deckhands with him, Pollard and Chesbro, both kids that hadn’t yet seen twenty-five. When introductions were made, George saw that while Marx – biker-bearded and bald, tough as lizardhide – seemed okay with all of it, the two deckhands were not. Pollard looked shellshocked, like he’d just crawled from the trenches. His eyes were glazed and staring, looking into the mist at something no one else could see. And Chesbro… he kept saying how it was all God’s will.
George liked that.
He wasn’t big on religion, but he didn’t have a problem with faith, figured it could be a good thing if you were leading it and it wasn’t leading you. Problem was, you said something was God’s will, it was just another way of throwing up your hands and giving up. And looking at Chesbro, you could see he’d definitely given up. He was a thin kid with sparse red hair and freckles, like Richie Cunningham with dead gray eyes, despair clinging to him like lichen to a rock.
It was almost heartbreaking looking at these two.
So young and so… empty.
Not that George himself was exactly full. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was these days. It was hard to be sure. Sometimes he was filled with a nagging hope and at other times, bleak with pessimism wondering what in Christ they were going to do when the food and water ran out. When he thought about it, he could not be honestly sure how long they had been in the fog now. A few days probably… no more than three or four, but, dammit, sometimes it seemed like it must have been a week or a month or a year. And when he tried to remember life before the Dead Sea, life back in the real world… he had trouble. It all seemed blurry and indistinct like a photo of a flying saucer or bigfoot. Purposely out of focus. Like trying to recall a dream clearly half way through the day. Seemed that maybe he’d never been anywhere else but here and the rest of it was just something he’d dreamed about.
And Christ, he knew that sort of thinking was trouble.
But he thought it all the same.
He kept thinking: I got a wife and a kid out there somewhere, light years from this place probably. Somehow, some way I got to see them again. I just have to. I can’t die in this hellhole, I just can’t. The idea of them spending their life with some half-baked idea that I was lost at sea is unthinkable. I gotta get out of here… if only for them and not for myself.
Marx was talking about the supplies in the lifeboat and how if they pooled everything they had, they could survive well over a month. “By then, First,” he said to Gosling, “we had better come up with something.”
“God will grant us what’s needed if he wants us to survive,” Chesbro said.
“Oh, shut the hell up with that,” Marx said, a big man with tattooed arms, looked like he’d could hurt somebody bad, he got the notion to.
George was thinking that was something Chesbro might want to remember.
Gosling seemed to forget about George and Cushing right away, was just happy to be reunited with his old shipmate… and drinking partner, if the stories they were swapping were even half-true.
Cushing climbed over into the lifeboat, tried talking with Pollard, tried drawing him out of his shell.
George just sat there, taking it all in. New blood. It was exciting and somehow depressing at the same time.
“Can’t say exactly where this shitter is,” Marx said, “south of the goddamn Twilight Zone and north of the Devil’s Triangle. You go figure. But, way I’m seeing it, if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Gotta be a back door around here somewhere.”
“You wanna be careful of that,” Pollard said, not looking at any of them.
They all stared at him. He had been silent for days, Marx said, and him speaking was big news, like Ghandi busting a move.
“Careful of what?” Gosling said.
“That back door,” Pollard said. “Never know where it might lead.”
And that was it. Pollard’s jewel of the day. He would speak no more of it and even Marx bullying him brought no results.
“Just leave him alone,” Chesbro said. “He’s scared. He’s been through a lot.”
“No shit?” Marx said. “Has he really? Well, I haven’t. I just been sitting here pulling my meat and hoping Jesus would see us through this pigfuck. I haven’t been trying to hold you goddamn pussies together for the past three days with spit and hope and snot, now have I? Trying to keep you alive when things came out of the sea with empty bellies and big shitting teeth. Guess again, Chesbro, we’ve all been through a lot. Each and every one of us. But you don’t see me shutting down, do you? Or the First here? Not even Mr. Cushing or Mr. Ryan. No sir. They’re all ready to slap ass and slide dick. They got their peckers out and are just looking for some sweet hole to fill. You know what that is? That’s called being a man.”
Chesbro, true to form, was mumbling prayers under his voice. He looked up at Marx. “I put my faith in God,” he said. “Whatever happens here, will be His will. I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, Chief, there’s things here a lot tougher than you.”
“Sure as shit there are, dumbass. I’m just saying that we got to buck up and take it. We all wanna get out of here, don’t we? Well, if we’re dead, that ain’t gonna happen… now is it?” He looked over at Pollard, shook his head, looked like maybe he wanted to clop him upside the head. “Case in fucking point, Chesbro. Goddamn Pollard here. You want us all to drop to his level? Sit there with that hang-dog, where-is-my-fucking-mommy look about us? I mean, hell and ice, look at him. Looks like he got cornholed by a striped ape with a bowling pin for a pecker, got his shit packed so tight he don’t know whether to squat and push or call the Roto-Rooter man. You want us all to sink to that?”
But Chesbro was praying again, looking close to tears.
“It’s been a tough business from square one,” Gosling said. He was looking on Pollard with a sort of compassion and that much was obvious. “It’s been tough on everyone.”
