feeling vines.
“These things… they’re moving,” Crycek said, pulling his hands away.
Fabrini said something, but Cook wasn’t listening. Yes, they were moving, but very slowly, sluggishly. They were actually pulsing like newborn things, hot and vibrant, unpleasantly fleshy to the touch.
Cook found a bloated tuber that just struck him as wrong. It was pink like a vein, throbbing beneath his fingers and it disgusted him. Plants could not feel like this. They could not be like this. He slashed his knife against it and a dark, inky fluid sprayed against the back of his hand.
Fabrini swallowed something thick in his throat. “It looks like. ..”
“Blood,” Cook said. “It’s… I think it’s blood…”
Maybe it was the others’ unwillingness to help him hack through those pulsing vines and tentacles of green and pink growth and maybe it was just his instinctive hatred for them, but Cook began to slash and cut his way deeper into the mass and soon wished he hadn’t.
There was a body under the weeds.
The body of a man, probably a crewmember from the Mara Corday.. . but it was really hard to tell. He was lying in the bottom of the boat in about two inches of slopping black water, noosed in garlands of pulsing weed. His face was sharp and bony, sallow and lifeless, his body terribly wrinkled and shrunken. And he was breathing. Shallowly, but breathing all the same.
“He’s alive,” Cook said.
But the others wanted no part of this. There was something diabolic and utterly macabre about a man entwined in all those stalks and tubers and pink tentacles. Cook started pulling the weeds away from him… and recoiled as a single distended and oily run of weed came away from the man’s throat with a popping sound like suction cups pulled from vinyl. There were oval sucker marks on his neck. Yes, the weeds had encircled him, tucked him down deep in their own vegetable profusion and-
“They’re… they’re sucking his blood,” Menhaus said in a high voice, just absolutely filled with an irrational horror at the idea of it. “Those fucking weeds… they’re sucking his blood away… ”
And there was no arguing against it.
For that’s what those weeds were doing. The pulsing pink tendrils had suckers on their undersides like little rubbery mouths. They felt like viscid arteries in Cook’s hands. The man beneath them was slowly being leeched, he was being bled white drop by drop by drop.
Cook looked down at his hands and they were red with blood.
Something like a dry, rasping scream came from his mouth. He fell back into the lifeboat and the other one pulled back into the mist and they all distinctly heard the sounds coming from it. Busy, stealthy sounds. Rustlings and slitherings as if the lifeboat were filled with serpents. But it wasn’t serpents, it was something far worse.
Cook hung over the gunnel, washing the blood off his hands manicly.
“Unclean,” Crycek said in a hurting voice. “Oh, so terrible and unclean…”
4
“That ain’t no boat,” Marx was saying, squinting through the thickening mist. “Not sure what the hell it is.”
Thing was, nobody was sure. Just another vague gray shape licked by tongues of fog, murky and indistinct. Large, like a ship, but splayed out and low in the weed. Gosling’s idea was, with night apparently coming on, to find a ship they could rest on. Not the haunted skeleton of some old fungus-shrouded sailing vessel, but something more recent. A bulk carrier or container ship, something he was intimately familiar with. Something that would have fresh water in her tanks and possibly real food in the pantry. But whatever they were seeing at the edge of the fog, it had everyone’s curiosity up.
“Maybe we don’t want to know what it is,” Pollard said.
That got a quick affirmative from Chesbro, who was only interested in finding shelter and food, nothing more.
“Oh, shut your mouth,” Marx said.
So, they rowed deeper into the ship’s graveyard and the mist settled over them like a canopy, obscuring everything and making all those old dead hulks look incorporeal and ethereal. They rowed around shattered bows and masts dripping with weed and belts of fungus. The seaweed was so very thick they could barely move through some of it. Huge banks of it rose above the water and even that which was at the waterline or just submerged, was tangled and ropy, ensnarling oars and the bow of the lifeboat. The raft took it easier, sliding over the stuff except where it grew in great islands of steaming vegetation.
The farther they got into the graveyard, the thicker the stuff was
… and the more ships were captured in it. Some riding on top of it and some on their sides sinking into it… or somewhere in-between. They passed overturned hulls crusted with sea shells and the mastless wreck of a racing yacht and once, they saw something like the prow of a Viking dragonboat jutting up, but it was so blanketed in that engulfing sea grass that it could have been just about anything.
The closer they got to the mysterious object, the more certain they were it was no boat, no ship. They came around the side of a fishing trawler, its high derricks and winches rising above them in the fog like Medieval gallows, and then they got a good look at it.
“It’s a plane,” Cushing said. “A goddamn plane.”
And it was. It was a dusky green in color, easily over a hundred feet in length, just laying there in a great reef of weeds like a toy plane in a bed of peat moss. It had high-mounted wings with turboprops and an upswept finned tail section. The weeds had not begun to grow over it yet.
“That’s a Hercules,” Marx said. “A C-130. Transport plane… Army and Navy use ‘em, all the services do. The old workhorse of the military.”
“What’s it doing here?” George said.
But they just ignored him, awed by this huge bird that had fallen from the sky and died in the seaweed sea. It was a stupid question anyway and he knew it. It got there the same way everything else did. .. it was pulled in. They had only seen two other planes so far. One was a little Piper Cub immersed in trailing weeds and the other was just the wing of some unknown craft rising from the waterlogged vegetation like the dorsal of a shark, slicked green with mildew.
“Hasn’t been here too long by the looks of it,” Cushing said. He shook his head. “Makes you wonder how many ships and planes the military loses in this damned place.”
“Yeah, and how many they really admit to,” Marx said.
George could imagine what it must have been like for that big, proud plane. Getting sucked into this place, instruments gone haywire, the crew going out of their minds circling in the grim fog until they had to ditch. He wondered what had become of them… or what had gotten to them.
As they got in closer, they could see that the cargo bay doors in the massive tail were open, the aft loading ramp down, pressed into the weed. And maybe they were all thinking the same thing: a fresh transport plane beat the shit out of an old freighter any day.
They rowed in as close as they could get, which was about thirty or forty feet. At which point the weeds became so thick the lifeboat was stopped dead. They all climbed into the raft, cutting the lifeboat free and tying it off with a length of nylon line which George fed out loop by loop as they pushed the raft in closer to the boarding ramp. When they got there, Marx hopped out, securing the raft with the line from its sea anchor. Gosling helped George tie off the line to the lifeboat and they went inside.
It was dark in there.
Gosling broke out the two flashlights they had and everyone went in. It smelled damp and musty inside, but it was great to be walking again. To feel a firm surface beneath their feet. The interior of the C-130 was immense. You could have packed a hundred men comfortably in the cargo bay. There was a row of a dozen pallets to one side, each stacked up to a height of eight feet, and, to the other side, two Hum-V reconnaissance vehicles with more pallets in front of them. All of which were secured with trusses and stanchions to the floor. There was a walkway in between.
