“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.
The farther they got into the graveyard, the thicker the stuff was
… and the more ships were captured in it. Some riding on top of it and some on their sides sinking into it… or somewhere in-between. They passed overturned hulls crusted with sea shells and the mastless wreck of a racing yacht and once, they saw something like the prow of a Viking dragonboat jutting up, but it was so blanketed in that engulfing sea grass that it could have been just about anything.
The closer they got to the mysterious object, the more certain they were it was no boat, no ship. They came around the side of a fishing trawler, its high derricks and winches rising above them in the fog like Medieval gallows, and then they got a good look at it.
“It’s a plane,” Cushing said. “A goddamn plane.”
And it was. It was a dusky green in color, easily over a hundred feet in length, just laying there in a great reef of weeds like a toy plane in a bed of peat moss. It had high-mounted wings with turboprops and an upswept finned tail section. The weeds had not begun to grow over it yet.
“That’s a Hercules,” Marx said. “A C-130. Transport plane… Army and Navy use ‘em, all the services do. The old workhorse of the military.”
“What’s it doing here?” George said.
But they just ignored him, awed by this huge bird that had fallen from the sky and died in the seaweed sea. It was a stupid question anyway and he knew it. It got there the same way everything else did. .. it was pulled in. They had only seen two other planes so far. One was a little Piper Cub immersed in trailing weeds and the other was just the wing of some unknown craft rising from the waterlogged vegetation like the dorsal of a shark, slicked green with mildew.
“Hasn’t been here too long by the looks of it,” Cushing said. He shook his head. “Makes you wonder how many ships and planes the military loses in this damned place.”
“Yeah, and how many they really admit to,” Marx said.
George could imagine what it must have been like for that big, proud plane. Getting sucked into this place, instruments gone haywire, the crew going out of their minds circling in the grim fog until they had to ditch. He wondered what had become of them… or what had gotten to them.
As they got in closer, they could see that the cargo bay doors in the massive tail were open, the aft loading ramp down, pressed into the weed. And maybe they were all thinking the same thing: a fresh transport plane beat the shit out of an old freighter any day.
They rowed in as close as they could get, which was about thirty or forty feet. At which point the weeds became so thick the lifeboat was stopped dead. They all climbed into the raft, cutting the lifeboat free and tying it off with a length of nylon line which George fed out loop by loop as they pushed the raft in closer to the boarding ramp. When they got there, Marx hopped out, securing the raft with the line from its sea anchor. Gosling helped George tie off the line to the lifeboat and they went inside.
It was dark in there.
Gosling broke out the two flashlights they had and everyone went in. It smelled damp and musty inside, but it was great to be walking again. To feel a firm surface beneath their feet. The interior of the C-130 was immense. You could have packed a hundred men comfortably in the cargo bay. There was a row of a dozen pallets to one side, each stacked up to a height of eight feet, and, to the other side, two Hum-V reconnaissance vehicles with more pallets in front of them. All of which were secured with trusses and stanchions to the floor. There was a walkway in between.
“Now, if we just had some land to go for a spin,” George said.
“I wonder where all this stuff was going,” Cushing said.
“Middle East or Europe, probably,” Gosling said.
Marx climbed up atop one of the Hummers, played his flashlight along a heavy gun mounted on top. “This would be a fifty-caliber machine gun, boys. If we just had some ammo for it, we could cut anything in half out there with it.”
Up front of the vehicles, there was an open space with web seats on either wall. There was some loose gear stored there in green nylon canvas bags. Gosling checked them out one after the other. “Medical gear,” he said. “We can use this stuff… antibiotics, pressure bandages, disinfectants. Must have been some medics on board…”
They found a few battery-powered lanterns and used them, conserving their flashlights. Marx and Gosling kept checking everything out.
“I don’t see any survival rafts here, First,” Marx said. “My guess is these boys ditched and headed off across the weed.”
They moved forward up to the cockpit and it was empty, save for a lot of avionics and navigational systems which were beyond them. Many of the screens were still lit which meant the batteries still had a charge. Marx turned on the VHF and scanned the channels, picking up nothing but that breathing, listening static. He turned it off before they heard something worse.
George and Cushing stepped down to the passenger door just behind the cockpit. It was open, too, weeds and water having insinuated themselves there now. It was getting dim out in the seaweed sea, the fog hanging in a ghostly membrane, flowing and covering, shimmering like burning marsh gas, will-o’-the-wisp. Great patches of it drifted over the weeds and assorted wreckage.
But maybe ten feet out in the weeds was what they were looking at.
Snagged in green mats of the stuff were the remains of three bodies, possibly a fourth. You couldn’t see much of them, just slats of white bone showing through greasy emerald and yellow-green ropes and flaps of creeping weed. Though the others were face-down, sinking in the growth, one of the skulls was grinning up at them, tendrils of pinkish slime oozing from its eye sockets and seaweed on the crown dangling like hair. Down there, in that misty growth, that skeleton looked like it wanted to get at them.
“Oh, boy,” George said. “That must be the crew… or some of them…”
A fat brown worm slid from the skull’s nasal cavity and sought the weed.
“They’re just dead. They can’t hurt you,” Gosling said, leading the both of them away.
But George was thinking that it had already hurt him, seeing those men stripped to bone like that had hurt him in ways he could not begin to catalog. But that was the reality of this place: one wound on top of another. One heartbreak and nightmare after another. You could expect no more here in this feral dimension.
Like gravity, it sucked.