deaths of three local men in a blasting accident. The story went that Saks had set the charges to clear a shelf of rock that was obstructing the road there were laying… but neglected to inform the workers.
Saks was, in essence, a public relations nightmare.
The sort of man who could give Fisk Technologies and its parent, Fisk International, a bad reputation. Still, Fisk used him. He was always the lowest bidder. But on this job, Cushing was put in place to watch him.
Cushing didn’t like it.
But he owed everything to Fisk.
So he was going to watch and learn.
Of course, if Saks learned about any of it and the rumors were true, Cushing was a dead man. Crocodiles and snakes would be the least of his worries.
Laying there, he thought about death.
Felt it reaching out for him…
12
The ship was now thoroughly encased in the fog.
Even the running lights only cut into its churning, drifting mass a few feet. Gosling stood there, watching it, feeling it, getting to know it. It didn’t look much like any fogbank he’d ever been through before. It was too yellow, too luminous. He’d never seen mist sparkle like that, almost as if there was electricity in it, some kind of surging, dormant power. And it was cold.
Jesus, cold like a blast of air from a freezer or an icehouse.
Abnormal.
And it left an almost wet, slimy residue on the skin. And that wasn’t right. It was crazy fog, this stuff. And, deep down, he knew it was bad. He knew it was what had knocked out their radio, had made their compass go crazy, shutdown the GPS. The very idea of that compass not being able to find magnetic north, just spinning aimlessly, bothered him in ways that he couldn’t even begin to fathom.
Lighting his pipe, he studied the fog more intently. It seemed not to be just blowing past them now, nudged by unseen winds, but actually mushrooming before the bow. Spiraling and twisting and sucking like some awful vortex that the ship was being inexorably drawn into.
And the smell.
What was that awful stink?
A thick, organic smell of swamps. Rotting vegetation and hot, putrid decay. A high, wet stench that reminded him of tidal flats and putrefying things vomited onto beaches. It grew stronger and stronger until he had to lean against the pilothouse with dry heaves clawing up his throat.
And then… worse.
A pungent, cloying chemical odor of methane, ammonia, fetid gas. He went to his knees, gagging, his lungs rasping for something breathable. But it was no good. It was like trying to breathe through a mouthful of mildewed weeds. The air had gone too heavy or too thin. It was wet and dry, polluted with a loathsome stink, blighted and rank.
Gosling’s head spun with crazy lights and a screaming white noise. His skull was echoing with something like the clatter of a thousand wings flapping and flapping until it felt like his head was going to burst.
And then he was breathing again, gasping for breath. The stink, the bad air just a memory. He laid there by the pilothouse door until his head stopped pounding.
He didn’t know what had just happened.
But, mentally, he filed it under worst case scenario.
13
“What the fuck is this?” Saks said when he made it out on deck a few minutes later. He took a moment or two to check out the fog, dismissed it, and grabbed Gosling by the shoulder, spinning him around. “You,” he said. “I’m talking to you, mister. What the fuck is this?”
Gosling knocked his hand aside. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Something went shit with the ventilation system below decks for chrissake. I got guys down there passing out and puking their fucking guts out!”
“It’s this fog,” Gosling said and then, as if realizing how silly that sounded, said, “I’ll check it out.”
“Damn right you will.”
After he left, Saks stood there looking into that boiling fog and wondering what kind of dumbfuck, inbred morons could’ve navigated them into a mess like this. Goddamn stuff was so thick they wouldn’t see a ship until it was three feet away. And it was everywhere. A solid, misting mass of yellow-white fog like nothing he’d ever seen before in his life. It looked so thick you could scoop some up with your fist and put it in a jar. But that wasn’t the worse part. The worst part was that it looked blank. Neutral. Nothing. Like they were stuck in the middle of nothing, lost in the static on a TV screen. Even the ship didn’t seem to be moving, yet he could feel the engines, hear the bow cutting the drink.
What kind of brownwater, butthole sailors are these?
More people were pouring out on deck now. The ship’s crew in addition to Saks’s own. They were all looking a little green. Some were being helped along by their mates. One of the engine room swabbies collapsed and started heaving onto the deck. They were all a real mess. A suffocating, acrid smell came from the open hatches.
“Saks,” Fabrini said, wiping his hands on his jeans like something greasy was all over them. “What is it? What happened?”
“I don’t know. Ventilation system went to hell maybe. Fumes from the engines backed-up. Something.”
One of the sailors shook his head. “Ain’t no way, mister. Nothing in those turbines smells like that.”
Another sailor wiped his yellow face with a rag. “He’s right.”
“Okay, Einstein,” Saks said, “then what the hell was it?”
Nobody said anything.
“This isn’t right,” Menhaus said, shivering. “It isn’t just the engines here, and you all know it. Take a whiff. That fog smells… smells like something dead. There’s something wrong with it.”
“Who asked you?” Saks snapped.
It was at this particular moment that someone started screaming.
Everyone promptly shut up.
All the arguments and grumbling skidded to an echoing halt. The screaming was coming from aft, on the deck. Somewhere out in that maze of equipment and containers lashed to the spar deck. But in the fog. .. it was really hard to say exactly where. Everyone turned and made ready to go, to investigate… made ready and that was about it. Because everyone just stood there, faces pale, lips locked tight. No one moved. They all wanted to know what the hell was going on, but nobody wanted to be the first to charge through that fog and see. Maybe it was the sheer quality of that scream which was more than just a scream but the shriek of somebody being slowly roasted over a hot bed of coals. It was loud and shrill like nothing they’d ever heard before.
It was the sound of someone who’d just lost their mind.
“Jesus,” Saks said. “We better-”
The screaming broke down into painful, sharp squeals and the guy who was doing it appeared suddenly out of the murk. One of the deckhands. He was soaking wet, wearing rubber chest waders which had fallen down to his hips now. The front of his denim apron was red and glistening and he clawed frantically at it. His face was hooked into an awful, gray, twisted mask and everyone got out of his way.
“Get it offa me get it offa me get it offa me!” he howled, thrashing away across the decks, leaving a trail of blood. “OH JESUS JESUS JESUUUUS IT’S IN ME IT’S YAAAHHHHH…”
