Keith Laumer - A Plague of Demons

After twenty minutes, my vision began to blur; I was feeling the strain in my arms, and the first stifling sensations of oxygen starvation. I angled upward, broke the surface, and saw the low silhouette of a half-submerged vessel a quarter of a mile away across rippled ink-and-silver water, streaked with the winking reflections of her deck lights.

I trod water, looking around; a bell-buoy clanged a hundred yards away. Farther off, a small boat buzzed toward shore from a ship in the distance. There was a smell of sea-things, salt, a metallic odor of ship’s engines, a vagrant reek of oil. There was no sign of pursuit from the shore.

I swam on toward the ship, came up on her from the starboard quarter, and made out the words EXCALIBUR—New Hartford in raised letters across her stern. There was a deck-house beyond a low guard rail, a retractable antenna array perched atop it with crimson and white lights sparkling at the peak.

Farther forward, small deck cranes poised over an open hatch like ungainly herons waiting for a minnow. I caught a faint sound of raucous music, a momentarily raised voice. The odor of petroleum was strong here, and there was a glistening scum on the water. She was a tanker, loaded and ready to sail, to judge from the waterline, a foot above her anachronistic plimsoll.

I pulled myself up on the corroding hull-plates, inched my way to the rail, crossed to the deck-house. The door opened into warmth, light, the odors of beer, tobacco smoke, unlaundered humans. I took a great, grateful lungful; this was familiar, reassuring—the odor of my kind of animal.

Steep stairs led down. I followed them, came into a narrow corridor with a three-inch glare-strip along the center line of the low ceiling. There were doors set at ten-foot intervals along the smooth, buff-colored walls. Voices muttered at the far end of the corridor. I stepped to the nearest door, listened with my hearing keened, then turned the handle and stepped inside.

It was an eight-by-ten cell papered with photo-murals of Central Park, chipped and grease-stained at hand level. There was a table, a metal locker, a hooked rug on the floor, a tidy bunk, a single-tube lamp clamped to the wall above it beside a hand-painted plaster plaque representing a haloed saint with a dazed expression.

Footsteps were coming along the corridor. I turned to the door as it opened, and nearly collided with a vast, tall man in a soiled undershirt bulging with biceps, blue trousers worn low to ease a paunch that looked slight against his massive bulk.

He stared down at me, frowning; he had curly, uncut hair, large, dull-brown eyes, a loose mouth. There was a deeply depressed scar the size of an egg on the side of his forehead above his left eye. He raised a hand, pointed a thick finger at me.

“Hey!” he said, in a startlingly mellow tenor. He blinked past me at the room. “This here is my flop.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I guess I kind of stumbled into the wrong place.” I started past him. He moved slightly, blocking the door.

“How come you’re in my flop?” he demanded. He didn’t sound mad—just mildly curious.

“I was looking for the Mate,” I said. “He must be down the hall, eh?”

“Heck, no; the Mate got a fancy place aft.” He was looking me over now. “How come you’re all wet?”

“I fell in the water,” I said. “Look, how are you fixed for crew aboard this ship?”

The giant reached up, rasped at his scalp with a fingernail like a banjo pick.

“You want to sign on?”

“Right. Now—”

“Who you want to see, you want to see Carboni. Oh, boy…” the loose mouth curved in a vast grin. “He’ll be surprised, all right. Nobody don’t want to sign on aboard the ’Scabbler .”

“Well, I do. Where do I find him?”

The grin dropped. “Huh?”

“Where can I find Mr. Carboni—so I can sign on, you know?”

The grin was back. He nodded vigorously. “He’s prob’ly down in the ward room. He’s prob’ly pretty drunk.”

“Maybe you could show me the way.”

He looked blank for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. Hey.” He was frowning again, looking at my shoulder. “You got a cut on ya. You got a couple cuts. You been in a fight?”

“Nothing serious. How about Mr. Carboni?”

The finger was aimed at me like a revolver. “That’s how come you want to sign on the ’Scabbler . I betcha you croaked some guy, and the cops is after ya.”

“Not as far as I know, big boy. Now—”

“My name ain’t Big Boy; it’s Joel.”

“Okay, Joel. Let’s go see the man, all right?”

“Come on.” He moved out of the doorway, started off along the corridor, watching to be sure I was following.

“Carboni, he drinks a couple of bottles and he gets drunk. I tried that, but it don’t work. One time I drank two bottles of booze but all it done, it made me like burp.”

“When does the ship sail?”

“Huh? I dunno.”

“What’s your destination?”

“What’s that?”

“Where’s the ship going?”

“Huh?”

“Skip it, Joel. Just take me to your leader.”

After a five-minute walk along crisscrossing passageways, we ducked our heads, stepped into a long, narrow room where three men sat at an oilcloth-covered table decorated with a capless ketchup bottle and a mustard pot with a wooden stick. There were four empty liquor bottles on the table, and another, nearly full one.

The drinker on the opposite side of the table looked up as we came in. He was a thick-necked fellow with a bald head, heavy features, bushy eyebrows, a blotchy complexion. He sat slumped with both arms on the table encircling his glass. One of his eyes looked at the ceiling with a mild expression; the other fixed itself on me. A frown made a crease between the eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” His voice was a husky whisper; someone had hit him in the windpipe once, but it hadn’t improved his manners.

I stepped up past Joel. “I want to sign on for the cruise.”

He swallowed a healthy slug of what was in the glass, glanced at his companions, who were hitching around to get a look at me.

“He says it’s a cruise,” he rasped. “He wants to sign on, he says.” The eye went to Joel. “Where’d you pick this bird up?”

Joel said, “Huh?”

“Where’d you come from, punk?” The eye was back on me again. “How’d you get aboard?”

“The name’s Jones,” I said. “I swam. What about that job?”

“A job, he says.” The eye ran over me. “You’re a seaman, eh?”

“I can learn.”

“He can learn, he says.”

“Not many guys want to sign on this tub, do they, Carboni?” Joel asked brightly.

“Shut up,” Carboni growled without looking at him. “You got blood on your face,” he said to me.

I put a hand up, felt a gash across my jaw.

“I don’t like this mug’s looks,” one of the drinking buddies said, in a voice like fingernails on a blackboard. He was a long-faced, lanky, big-handed fellow in grimy whites. He had a large nose, coarse skin, long, discolored teeth with receding gums.

“A chain-climber. I got a good mind to throw him to hell off back in the drink where he come from. He looks like some kind of cop to me.”

“Do I get the job or not?” I said, looking at Carboni.

“I’m talking to you, mug,” the long man said. “I ast you if you’re a cop.”

“Who runs this show?” I said, still watching Carboni. “You or this talking horse?” I jerked a thumb at the second man. He made an explosive noise, started up from the bench.

“Sit down, Pogey,” Carboni snarled. The lanky man sank back, talking to himself.