Maybe they were expecting a sea monster.
Maybe they were expecting something worse. Truth was, in that goddamn place, they wouldn’t have been truly surprised to see Santa and his reindeer come winging out of the mist with the Easter Bunny bringing up the back door. Got so you were willing to believe anything in that place. It was easier that way.
But what they got was another lifeboat from the Mara Corday.
“Hey, you bums over there!” a voice called. “You got any damn beer?”
“Yeah,” Cushing said, “we got a keg we just tapped.”
“Don’t forget to tell ‘em about the strippers,” Gosling said.
They rowed over to the lifeboat and saw that Marx, the chief engineer, from the ship was on board. He had two deckhands with him, Pollard and Chesbro, both kids that hadn’t yet seen twenty-five. When introductions were made, George saw that while Marx – biker-bearded and bald, tough as lizardhide – seemed okay with all of it, the two deckhands were not. Pollard looked shellshocked, like he’d just crawled from the trenches. His eyes were glazed and staring, looking into the mist at something no one else could see. And Chesbro… he kept saying how it was all God’s will.
George liked that.
He wasn’t big on religion, but he didn’t have a problem with faith, figured it could be a good thing if you were leading it and it wasn’t leading you. Problem was, you said something was God’s will, it was just another way of throwing up your hands and giving up. And looking at Chesbro, you could see he’d definitely given up. He was a thin kid with sparse red hair and freckles, like Richie Cunningham with dead gray eyes, despair clinging to him like lichen to a rock.
It was almost heartbreaking looking at these two.
So young and so… empty.
Not that George himself was exactly full. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was these days. It was hard to be sure. Sometimes he was filled with a nagging hope and at other times, bleak with pessimism wondering what in Christ they were going to do when the food and water ran out. When he thought about it, he could not be honestly sure how long they had been in the fog now. A few days probably… no more than three or four, but, dammit, sometimes it seemed like it must have been a week or a month or a year. And when he tried to remember life before the Dead Sea, life back in the real world… he had trouble. It all seemed blurry and indistinct like a photo of a flying saucer or bigfoot. Purposely out of focus. Like trying to recall a dream clearly half way through the day. Seemed that maybe he’d never been anywhere else but here and the rest of it was just something he’d dreamed about.
And Christ, he knew that sort of thinking was trouble.
But he thought it all the same.
He kept thinking: I got a wife and a kid out there somewhere, light years from this place probably. Somehow, some way I got to see them again. I just have to. I can’t die in this hellhole, I just can’t. The idea of them spending their life with some half-baked idea that I was lost at sea is unthinkable. I gotta get out of here… if only for them and not for myself.
Marx was talking about the supplies in the lifeboat and how if they pooled everything they had, they could survive well over a month. “By then, First,” he said to Gosling, “we had better come up with something.”
“God will grant us what’s needed if he wants us to survive,” Chesbro said.
“Oh, shut the hell up with that,” Marx said, a big man with tattooed arms, looked like he’d could hurt somebody bad, he got the notion to.
George was thinking that was something Chesbro might want to remember.
Gosling seemed to forget about George and Cushing right away, was just happy to be reunited with his old shipmate… and drinking partner, if the stories they were swapping were even half-true.
Cushing climbed over into the lifeboat, tried talking with Pollard, tried drawing him out of his shell.
George just sat there, taking it all in. New blood. It was exciting and somehow depressing at the same time.
“Can’t say exactly where this shitter is,” Marx said, “south of the goddamn Twilight Zone and north of the Devil’s Triangle. You go figure. But, way I’m seeing it, if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. Gotta be a back door around here somewhere.”
“You wanna be careful of that,” Pollard said, not looking at any of them.
They all stared at him. He had been silent for days, Marx said, and him speaking was big news, like Ghandi busting a move.
“Careful of what?” Gosling said.
“That back door,” Pollard said. “Never know where it might lead.”
And that was it. Pollard’s jewel of the day. He would speak no more of it and even Marx bullying him brought no results.
“Just leave him alone,” Chesbro said. “He’s scared. He’s been through a lot.”
“No shit?” Marx said. “Has he really? Well, I haven’t. I just been sitting here pulling my meat and hoping Jesus would see us through this pigfuck. I haven’t been trying to hold you goddamn pussies together for the past three days with spit and hope and snot, now have I? Trying to keep you alive when things came out of the sea with empty bellies and big shitting teeth. Guess again, Chesbro, we’ve all been through a lot. Each and every one of us. But you don’t see me shutting down, do you? Or the First here? Not even Mr. Cushing or Mr. Ryan. No sir. They’re all ready to slap ass and slide dick. They got their peckers out and are just looking for some sweet hole to fill. You know what that is? That’s called being a man.”
Chesbro, true to form, was mumbling prayers under his voice. He looked up at Marx. “I put my faith in God,” he said. “Whatever happens here, will be His will. I don’t care how tough you are or how tough you think you are, Chief, there’s things here a lot tougher than you.”
“Sure as shit there are, dumbass. I’m just saying that we got to buck up and take it. We all wanna get out of here, don’t we? Well, if we’re dead, that ain’t gonna happen… now is it?” He looked over at Pollard, shook his head, looked like maybe he wanted to clop him upside the head. “Case in fucking point, Chesbro. Goddamn Pollard here. You want us all to drop to his level? Sit there with that hang-dog, where-is-my-fucking-mommy look about us? I mean, hell and ice, look at him. Looks like he got cornholed by a striped ape with a bowling pin for a pecker, got his shit packed so tight he don’t know whether to squat and push or call the Roto-Rooter man. You want us all to sink to that?”
But Chesbro was praying again, looking close to tears.
“It’s been a tough business from square one,” Gosling said. He was looking on Pollard with a sort of compassion and that much was obvious. “It’s been tough on everyone.”
“Sure,” Marx said. “People handle it different ways, I suspect. But, way I see it, we got a hell of a plot to hoe, we don’t stick together and toughen up, we might as well drop our pants and jump in that slop, let the first thing that swims by make a sandwich out of our bare asses.”
“Amen to that,” Cushing said.
George wasn’t sure what to make of Marx. He was a tough bastard, to be sure, not exactly sympathetic, but something told him the chief engineer was okay. Down deep, he was a good guy… you got past the salty language.
Marx maybe read his mind, because he looked over at George, smiled, stroked his mustache which was flecked with silver. “Don’t mind me, boys, I just go off sometimes. I’m not so bad as I sound. But we got to toughen our asses up. That’s how I see it. Every man for himself doesn’t wash dirty shorts here. We gotta stay tight and stay hard. Am I right, First?”
“As rain,” Gosling said. “As always.”
Cushing cleared his throat. “But Pollard’s right, you know.”
“How’s that?” Marx asked.
“In saying we should be real careful of that back door. In this place, we should be careful of every door.” He had everyone’s attention now and that was what he’d wanted. “Way I see it, we slipped through some kind of door into this place, some kind of warp, if you will. Vortex. Time/space distortion. Wormhole. Call it what you want. If there’s a doorway into our world there just might be doorways into others. We had best be careful we don’t walk through the wrong one.”
That gave everyone something to chew over in their minds.
“I mean, some of the things we’ve seen here… some of the local wildlife… who can say if it’s even native to this place? It might have been pulled in from other places. Maybe.”
George thought that made sense. Most of it was probably native, but some of it could have been as alien as they were. Possibly. Just a theory, but it held some water when you thought about it. And George had been thinking about such things. “I like it, Cushing,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe all those crazy stories of sea monsters sailors reported, maybe they were things that got vomited out of this place and into ours.”
“Sure,” Marx said, “why in the Christ not? I shipped with a boilermaker out of Baton Rouge when I was first a deckhand. Claimed he saw something off of the Ivory Coast like out of one of them prehistoric movies, long neck and all, Loch Ness monster-type. Said it was pea-green and had teeth like knives. Dove before they could get a good picture of it. Maybe that shitter swam out of here.”
“Sounds like a plesiosaur,” Cushing said.
“Sounds fine to me,” Marx said. “Fucking sea monster, all right. You seem to know your science, son. You a scientist or some shit?”
“No. I just like the stuff, natural history and all that. A hobby, I guess.”
George knew he was being modest. Cushing was a trove of information. And as George well knew most hobbyists knew more about their chosen obssessions than did most experts. When something was your blood and soul, rather than your bread and butter, you lived it. You drank it and breathed it and slept it. He figured Cushing was like that.
“Well, we can sure use your head,” Marx said. “When we find that way out, we’ll let you pick door number one or two or three.”
George thought that you just had to admire Marx’s energy level. He was always up, always ready to tango. To a guy like him, pessimism was unthinkable. Not among his natural rhythms. If you were to ask him, George figured, Marx would have said that pessimists weren’t nothing but sissies with philosophy and good diction.
Gosling said, “Let’s rope the raft to your lifeboat and do some rowing. I have a feeling these channels through the weed here, by accident or purpose, lead somewhere. And I want to know where that is.”
“And there’s a drift here,” Marx said. “And it’s pulling us in that general direction. Sooner or later we’re going there, might as well row our nuts off and get a look at it before it gets a look at us.”
Chesbro looked like he was going to say something, but shut his mouth.
Which George figured was probably a good thing.
Marx explained to them that anyone else that got spit into this place would drift in the same direction, chances were. So that if there were other survivors they would be up ahead. “And who knows? If this is the same place that’s been sucking ships and planes out of the Triangle and the Sargasso since god-knows-when, they’re probably up there, too. Jesus, we could find a good boat… I could get my hands on some engines and fuel… shit, I’d either push us back home or make one hell of a stab at it.”
And that, George realized, was about as close as you were going to come to a reason to live in this place.
It was too much to hope for… but it was better than drifting and brooding. He had a funny feeling they were poised at the edge of revelation. He just hoped it didn’t have big teeth and an empty belly.