You don’t intimidate me, I intimidate you. Yeah, it was childish and self-defeating, the last resort of weak minds. The sort of thing that should have been left in the high school locker room along with your dirty jock. But men never left it there. Cook knew they didn’t. Men were essentially weak, frightened creatures scurrying through life, seeing just about anything and everything as a challenge to what swung between their legs. Great stuff. You could see monkeys and lions practicing it on TV and men practicing it just about everywhere else.
And as Cook knew, the only men who practiced intimidation were those that were intimidated.
“Okay, Saks, you can quit staring me down now,” he said. “The playground is closed and I don’t play the big dick game.”
Fabrini burst out laughing and even Menhaus did.
“You might wanna watch it with that, Cook,” was all Saks could say. He had been cornered now, his infantile macho games dragged out into the open for all to see.
“Yeah, okay, Saks.” Cook smiled. “And Saks?”
Saks looked at him, never seemed to stop.
“Grow the fuck up already.”
Saks was boiling and Fabrini was laughing at him.
Poor old Saks, Cook thought, he never even realized that all his life, people were laughing behind his back.
“What’s that shit on your arm?” Menhaus asked.
Saks looked at him. Gave him the stare, too. “What the hell are you talking about, mama’s boy?”
But Cook was seeing it, too. All over his forearm… things like sores, great spreading red sores that did not look so much like abrasions or scrapes but like ulcers.
Saks pulled his sleeve down. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
“You better let me look at it, Saks. Doesn’t look good at all. Fabrini? Grab me the medical kit.”
But Saks said, “Keep away from me, Cook! All of you just fucking keep away from me! Be a cold day in hell I’d let a cock-monkey like you dress my wounds.”
“Then dress ‘em yourself.”
“Mind your own goddamn business.”
Cook folded his arms, shaking his head. “C’mon, Saks, you’re talking to the Big Cheese here. The health and well-being of all of you is part of the Big Cheese’s job.”
Saks recoiled a bit when Cook moved toward him and Cook stopped. Saks’s eyes had gone feral and simmering. He looked suddenly like he was capable of just about anything.
“If that shit’s catchy, Saks, you’re going over the fucking side,” Fabrini said.
And the thing was, even with the brief look at it Cook had had, those ulcerations did look catchy. There was something unpleasant and unnatural about them like skin tumors. Something morbid.
“You just try, Fagbrini.”
Saks shifted and they were all watching him, ringing him in now like wild dogs and he was feeling it, too, feeling cornered and threatened. A guy who liked to be the center of attention, but not prey. His hand inched towards the knife in his belt and Cook knew he’d cut anyone that got close.
Fabrini got a little closer. “What is that? Between your legs.. .”
Saks recovered now. “That’s my dick, and, no, I’m not putting it into your mouth.”
But it wasn’t his dick they were all looking at. There was a little greasy flannel sack that he had hidden under his leg. And now everyone saw it.
“Okay, Saks, what is it?” Cook put to him.
Saks grinned, knew they had him. He was caught in their snare with nowhere to run. He did two things real fast right then: he brought out his knife and picked up his little flannel-wrapped package that was about the size of a fist. “It’s mine and you fucks don’t get any.”
Cook said, “Saks-”
“Fuck you, too, Big Chief.”
He unwrapped it and it held something pale and fleshy marbled with pinkish-brown lines. Salt pork. They could smell its saltiness and meatiness in the air and everyone began to drool almost immediately. And Saks was loving it. He brought it up and licked it.
“Where’d you get that?” Menhaus said, slavering like a dog now.
“You cheap, selfish sonofabitch,” Fabrini said.
Crycek just blinked his eyes rapidly.
Cook shook his head. “He got that off the Cyclops.”
Everyone stopped salivating about then. To them, the idea of eating anything off that hoodoo ship was akin to stuffing your mouth with worms. They wanted meat and fat… but they weren’t ready to go that far.
Cook said, “Saks, Jesus Christ, don’t eat that stuff… you don’t know what kind of germs got into it. That shit is almost a hundred years old.”
Fabrini was looking sick, like maybe Saks was licking a piece of carrion.
Cook didn’t like this at all. The salt pork had an odd grayish cast to it.
Saks wouldn’t let them near it even if they wanted some. “It was in a sealed cask, you knothead, it’s just fine.”
“You mean you’ve been eating it?” Cook said.
“Sure, just like this.” Saks took a bite out of it and then another.
“Jesus, Saks! Don’t!” Cook cried out.
But he was powerless to stop him. Saks ate the entire wedge of salt pork and seemed to enjoy every bite. When he was finished, he licked his lips.
“How much, Saks… how much did you eat?”
But Saks just smiled.
“Let him poison himself,” Fabrini said. “Who gives a shit?”
Cook was watching him and thinking about those sores on his arm. Maybe there was no connection. Maybe it meant absolutely nothing and maybe it meant everything.
After that, nobody said a thing, but they were all thinking plenty.
The lifeboat drifted through that bunched, leafy weed and into the perpetual mist that floated over it in tarps and sheets. There were occasional sounds out there… splashings, but they never saw a thing. Not until they rammed into something.
“What the hell?” Fabrini said.
Crycek was in the bow. “It’s… shit, I think it’s a boat.”
Then everyone was up there, trying to pull the boat alongside. It was another lifeboat, a dead ringer for their own. Crycek tried to read the stenciled letters on her bow, but there were weeds everywhere. Somehow, some way, those profuse and winding weeds had climbed right up into the lifeboat, filled it like a window box. But they could still easily make out its general shape and bright orange fiberglass hull.
“How’d all those weeds get in there?” Fabrini wanted to know and you could hear something cracking just under his voice like ice.
Cook was up there, too, now.
He and Crycek were trying to bring the lifeboat around, but it was knotted and braided with creeping weed, just way too much of it and they were all painfully aware of that fact.
So much weed… had it grown in there? Cook pulled and the lifeboat would only move a few feet before it reached the end of its leash. The weeds were lush and bountiful and fibrous, tangled and snaking like the roots of an old banyan tree. You would have needed a chainsaw to free that lifeboat. As Cook and Crycek pulled, their own boat swung around until it was next to it lengthwise… or as close as those verdant weeds would allow.
Cook leaned over and Crycek did, too, while Fabrini and Menhaus held the lifeboat so it would not snap back from the elasticity of the weeds that held it.
Using their knifes, they began cutting through all those creepers and rootlets, tendrils that were thick as fingers and strong as cable. There was a dank heat coming off those weeds, heavy and steaming and sickening to smell. They were set with small, greasy leaves and damp fans, bulbous little floats and thorny stalks. Cook was certain more than once, that he felt them move in his hands… but it must have just been gravity. He took his knife… a knife he’d liberated from the Cyclops… and hacked and cut and sheared away green, glistening stems and hot-
