Tim Curran - Dead Sea

Gosling just shook his head, watching the fog get thicker and their chances get thinner.

George Ryan had been sleeping when the madness hit. As had Cushing and Soltz. They came awake at roughly the same time, gagging and coughing and finding it impossible to draw so much as a breath. They heard the men stampeding in the corridors outside, but decided not to join them.

In fact, it really wasn’t even a choice.

Soltz passed out before he made it to the porthole. George made it there and Cushing just barely did. Within the span of a few minutes it had all passed and they were left lying on the floor, leaning up against bulkheads, their throats raw and dry as desert sand.

They never heard the screaming.

Never even knew what hell had been let loose on the decks above. Everything they would learn, they would learn later and in varying detail from the others. For now, it was just enough for them to be able to breathe.

“What happened?” Soltz asked them.

“A very interesting question,” Cushing said, coughing.

George ignored the sarcasm of that. “We better get topside and see what this is.” Soltz said, “Are we sinking?”

He was staring up into the rafters of the cabin, at the lifejackets and survival suits hanging up there.

“No, we’re not sinking.”

Cushing was staring out the porthole by this time. “Look at that fog,” he said. “You ever see anything like it?”

Gosling had one last pipe before he went to the captain.

He stood out on the hurricane deck, staring out over the bow, feeling the wind in his face and watching tendrils of mist snake over the forward decks. There wasn’t much of a stink to the fog anymore. Any that he noticed, that was. Just sort of a vague dank, dark smell about it. And he had to concentrate to really notice it. They’d been in the fog for upwards of three hours now. Nothing had changed. The radio was still picking up only dead air and the compass, though not spinning frantically now, was moving in a lazy, jittery circle, counterclockwise, as if it could not detect magnetic north. The gyrocompass was caught in a perpetual lazy roll. The RDF was dead and the SatNav was equally lifeless. It was like being in a vacuum.

Nothing was working right.

Nothing was as it should have been.

Gosling kept telling himself it was the fog, freak weather patterns, atmospheric disturbances, sunspots. Nothing seemed to fit, though. He’d been in plenty of heavy fogs, but none of them like this.

“Shit,” he said to himself. “Sonofabitch.”

He went to the captain’s cabin and knocked gently on the door before entering. Things weren’t terribly rigid or strict aboard the Mara Corday, but the captain was still the ship’s master and deserved respect.

Captain Morse was seated at his desk, his fingers drumming nervously. Morse was a heavy man, a curious combination of fat and muscle. He was clean-shaven and slicked his hair straight back from his brow. Gosling had never seen him smile.

And he was not smiling now. “Well?” he said.

“No dice, Sir,” Gosling told him. “Stokes is gone. If those idiots would have told me we had a man overboard… well, piss on it. Stokes is gone. In this fog, well, we couldn’t see a damn thing. It’s worse when you get water-level, Captain… thicker, smellier… I couldn’t even see the boys in my own damn boat, let alone anything floating out there.”

Morse’s deadpan face did not change. “Tell me about it.”

“Nothing to tell.” Gosling sat down and pulled his watch cap off, smoothing down his hair. “Well, nothing worth mentioning. Some of the boys were getting a little spooked down there.”

Morse raised an eyebrow. It arched like the back of an inchworm. “Let’s have it.”

So Gosling told him… what there was to tell. How the fog was thick and membranous below on the sea which was flatter than a sheet of glass. How they couldn’t see a damn thing, how they lost sight of the Mara Corday almost instantly.

“What was spooking them?”

Gosling said he didn’t know exactly what it was. Everyone was wound up tighter than trampoline springs, so it probably made things worse than they might have been. The only way the two boats kept in contact was with the bullhorn and searchlights. “We kept hearing sounds out there, Skipper. I don’t know… splashing sounds, things moving in the water. Big things. Maybe a pod of whales moving by, I don’t know exactly. In that fog, well it got under the mens’ skins and I didn’t blame ‘em either. I didn’t care much for it myself.”

He was leaving out things and Morse knew it, but he didn’t press. Gosling wasn’t about to tell the ship’s master that a deckhand named Crycek in the other boat started screaming, saying he saw something with a long neck and eyes watching him from the fog. That one of his men claimed he heard Stokes calling out there… except that it sounded like maybe his mouth was full of mud and kelp. Gosling had heard it, too, but he couldn’t say how it was a human voice. It was something, something bad, he just wasn’t sure what.

“Anything else?”

Gosling shrugged. “Like I said, sea is flat as glass. Not so much as a ripple. Patches of seaweed floating around, rotten-smelling stuff. Given the calm and the weed, could be we’re farther into the Sargasso than we should be.”

Morse just nodded. “Could be a lot of things, I guess. What have you got for me, Mister?” he asked. “What happened to Stokes?”

Gosling didn’t have any real answers there, either. Marx, the chief engineer, had a couple deckhands go into the aft starboard ballast tank with the first assistant engineer, Hupp. There was only four feet of water in there, but the intake was clogged. It turned out it was clogged with weeds. Hupp cleaned it out and about that time, Stokes started screaming, fighting his way to the hatch.

“I don’t know, Skipper, there was blood all over the damn place. Around the hatch, on the deck, bulkheads, going up the companionway. Christ if I know what happened. Maybe he got claustrophobic and… well, nothing really explains it, but…”

“But what?”

Gosling just shook his head. “Lot of people heard what he was screaming about. That there was something in him or biting him, something like that. I suppose we could have sucked just about anything into the tank.”

Morse didn’t doubt that. The size of those ballast tanks, a shark could’ve been at home in there. Or a whale. Not that those things could get in through the intake. But smaller fish did quite frequently. Mollusks, shrimp, mussels, you name it.

“Something that bit him,” Morse said. “Chewed into him. Hmm. Is that tank sealed?”

“Yes, sir, it’s secured, all right.”

They talked about the fog, their predicament. The chances things might clear out there.

“I wish there was something I could tell you, but this is all beyond me.” Gosling sighed. “I’ve been sailing a long time, Captain. We both have. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not in the books or out of it.”

Morse’s face did not change. “Tell me something, Paul. Anything.”

“Okay. Radio’s working, but all we’re picking up is static. RDF is also working but, again, it’s not picking up a goddamn thing. SatNav seems operational, but it, too, is locking in on zilch” He shook his head. “It’s all pretty crazy. Satellite could be messed-up. I’ve seen it happen before, but we should get something. It’s almost like it’s not even up there anymore.”

Which was crazy. He didn’t need to tell Morse how GPS worked. That the GPS was a satellite-based navigation system provided by a network of no less than twenty-four satellites in separate orbital paths. Sure, one might go out and maybe even two or three… but all twenty-four?