“I’m so thirsty,” Soltz kept saying. “I need water.”
“You’re okay. Just try to think of something else,” Cushing said, scanning the fog with his bright blue eyes, looking for something, anything out there. Anything that might give him even the thinnest ray of hope. Because, Jesus, this was bad.
Real bad.
Cushing wasn’t a pessimist by any stretch of the imagination, but there were limits to everything. Just the two of them, he was thinking, floating on that fucking hatch cover in that turgid, alien sea. What were their chances here? Death could come in so many different ways. And if it wasn’t from some of the wildlife – he’d heard enough sounds out there now to be convinced that there was some seriously nasty shit prowling around-then what? Dehydration? Starvation?
Damn, but it wasn’t looking real peachy right about then.
He hadn’t slept in… well, he wasn’t sure how long now. Since his berth in the ship. Every time his eyes started drifting shut, he snapped awake with the dread certainty that something was coming out of the fog, something was reaching out for him. Even when he was wide awake and alert, it was hard to shake that feeling.
He wondered if Soltz felt it, too. But he didn’t dare ask him.
The man had enough anxieties to deal with.
“No boats will come here,” Soltz sighed. “Not into this Sargasso Sea.”
“I told you that’s a myth. I was pulling your leg.”
“I think we both know better, don’t we?”
Cushing just shrugged. Okay, the kid gloves were off. No more trying to talk reason to the man… even if it was less like reason and more like out and out bullshit. Let Soltz believe they were lost in some alternate dimension, that they’d fallen through the back door of the Devil’s Triangle.
Why not? Because they probably had.
“What is that?” Soltz said excitedly. “Look! What is that? A shark? A whale?” Cushing looked and saw nothing. “Where?
“There!” Soltz said, jabbing his finger at the water.
Cushing saw a gigantic shadow pass beneath them. Soltz, trembling, his jaw sprung open like a trap, moved to the very center of the hatch cover. Cushing crept out to the edge, tried to get a look at their visitor. It was a huge fish, at least forty feet in length. Its body a dusky brownish green speckled with white dots and darker transverse bands. It could have been a whale… except that as it passed, Cushing saw that its head narrowed into an angular probocis that was lit up like a Christmas tree, seemed to twist in the water, corkscrewing.
Crazy, impossible fish.
It swam off, did not return.
“It’s just some kind of whale, I guess,” Cushing said, not sure if he was relieved or terrified by the idea of something that size. “Harmless, I think.”
“You think? Well, it didn’t look harmless to me.”
“It’s gone. Don’t worry about it.”
Soltz stared out through his thick glasses. “You know a lot about nature, don’t you? The sea and its animals, things like that. How is it an accountant knows about things like that?”
“I’m a frustrated naturalist,” Cushing admitted. “I read books on everything. Sea life happens to be one of those things I’ve studied.”
“With my eyes, reading is a chore. I get headaches. Did I ever tell you about my headaches?”
Cushing figured he was about to learn all about them.