Tim Curran - Dead Sea

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-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…”

“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.