They moved fast.
Nobody asked questions, they just did what Cook told them, knowing there was a good goddamn reason for him wanting them off the Cyclops. They worked as a team and it was good for them, it was reviving and necessary. Crycek pitched in wholeheartedly, just glad to be leaving that ghost ship and its attendant nightmares behind. They packed up blankets and survival gear, filled three lanterns with kerosene and took the candles.
Then they made the corridor and Saks told them to stop.
“Listen,” he said. “Listen… ”
And they all heard it, heard her coming for them. Heard that creeping, skittering sound of her moving along the corridor and maybe not on the deck, but over the walls or ceilings, but definitely coming now. She was singing that unearthly dirge and maybe singing their names and counting their bones and drooling for their blood.
“Go the other way,” Cook told them.
He kept the flashlight pointed down the corridor as Saks led the others off to the other companionway. Cook did not see her. He ran after the others just as she would have rounded the bend. He ran along, slopping through the fungi and he was the last one up the companionway ladder that echoed with frantic footsteps. His mind reached out for that door, for freedom, long before he physically found it and he was certain, dead certain, that at the last moment she would drag him back into the darkness, take hold of him and suck him dry of juices.
“C’mon, Cook!” Fabrini cried.
He got a hand hooked around the hatch frame and she was right behind him, hissing and breathing and clawing, coming on with a mind-numbing stench of mucus-licked cobwebs and dried carapaces. And then, just then, something looped around his ankle, then his knee, the bend of his left arm. Silk. A living, coiling, snaking silk roping over him and her breath was on him smelling of violated caskets as she tried to web him, pull him down.
Somebody screamed.
Cook brought the Browning back and squeezed-off three shots.
And broke free.
He did not really see what he hit. Just a chitinous-fleshed blur that was oily and leggy and what might have been a chewing black mouth dripping brown sap.
And then he was out, pitched face-first on the deck.
From the mouth of the companionway came a screeching, squealing roar.
“Close that fucking door!” he heard himself shout.
And then Fabrini and Saks threw everything they had into it and Cook heard it slam into something, something pulpy and moist like rotting fruit and then the door was shut, the latch secured.
And on the other side, she was scratching and grinding and rasping with all those needle-tipped legs.
They ran.
They made it to the boarding ladder and went down one by one while Cook stood there with the gun in his fist. When it was his turn, he looked one last time and saw a flurry of limbs come bursting out of the mouth of a ventilator shaft. He did not wait to see what they were connected to.
When he made the lifeboat, Saks didn’t bother untying the nylon rope, he sawed through it with his knife and planted a foot against the derelict and kicked off with everything he had. The lifeboat drifted out into the weeds. By then there were oars in hands and everyone was paddling madly, pushing the boat out towards the channel through that clotted weed.
“Row!” Saks was crying out. “For the love of God, row!”
And then the bow of the lifeboat cut through the weeds and into the channel and they were well out of her range. But they’d looked back, looked back just once as they pulled away from the ship. And she was waiting there, up at the top of the boarding ladder. Her face was a white blur like an out-of-focus photograph. But you could see her eyes and they were like yellow dying stars sinking into black godless nebula. Those eyes hated. They raged. But mostly, they hungered.
Cook saw her and so did the others.
But what he was really looking at were her hands above, hooked over the railing. They were not hands. They were discolored thorny claws.
Then the mist took her.
Took the Cyclops and buried it in a shroud of coveting fog.
“What… Jesus Christ… what was that?” Menhaus said.
But Cook would not say. Would never say. “Row,” he said. “Just keep rowing and don’t stop.”