Dead Sea

Maybe Gosling’s death had shut something down in him and maybe it had opened something else up. George was never able to figure exactly how he felt about any of it. He’d liked Gosling, trusted Gosling, had faith that Gosling would somehow, in the end, get their asses out of there. And now that he was gone? What was left? Sadness? Hopelessness? Maybe even something as crazy and improper as betrayal? Because it was there, all right, that insane sense that by dying, Gosling had abandoned them all. Abandoned them to Cushing’s theories and George’s own indecision, to Pollard’s weird sensitivity and Chesbro’s blind faith. That what they had now, was all they’d ever have… dead ships and crawling weed and stinking mists and fear. Yes, fear. Fear that every decision they made was wrong, that every turn they took was the wrong one, every road leading back into itself, a maze, a hopeless fucking maze. Without Gosling there, without his guiding hand and no-nonsense practicality, they were screwed. Literally.

For Gosling had been important.

Gosling had been necessary.

He was the heat and boiling steam and hot wetness in a pan and, without him, they were just the residue clinging to the lid. Yes, Gosling had been their motion and energy and drive. He kept them going. He kept them sane and together and hopeful. Gosling was the can-do guy, the quit-feeling-sorry-for-your-pussy-ass guy. Get your ass in high gear, boy, or swear to God, I’ll kick it there. That was Gosling.

Without him?

Residue.

Just residue clinging to the lid of the pan called the Dead Sea. And who was going to scrape that residue off? Who was going to be the one now to kick this little group of theirs in the ass and get it moving? That was the question and George didn’t seem to have any good ideas. In his mind, he could see them unraveling day by day until none of them gave a shit and they became like Elizabeth Castle… just beaten and squashed and accepting.

And George thought: Is that what you want? Is that what you really want to become?

And it wasn’t.

Gosling was gone, but they had to carry on in his spirit. He would have respected nothing less and nothing less was acceptable. George was thinking about the things Marx and Gosling had been talking about: finding a boat. Something with an engine, something that could plow them out of the weed and back out into the sea itself. Because George had been thinking that very thing himself all along. With a child’s simple logic he knew that if you came in through a door, then you had to go back the same way. And maybe it took quantum theory and Einsteinian physics for a certain Mr. Greenberg to arrive at this deduction, but George knew it intuitively.

16

The screaming came in the night.

Except, of course, it was not night really. George had been laying in his bunk, napping, and he had come awake to screaming. His cabin was dim and he stumbled out into the corridor, more than a little confused, his head full of fuzz.

Screaming.

Who in the Christ was screaming?

George made it up to deck shortly after Pollard, both dazed and shocked and they didn’t know what. Didn’t know what in the hell they were going to be staring in the face this time, only that it would not be good. Could not possibly be good.

“What the hell’s going on?” George heard himself say.

Pollard mumbled something incomprehensible and George was right behind him, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps as they scrambled along those salt-whitened decks, trying to locate the screaming.

“There,” Pollard said dumbly. “Oh, there… there… ”

It was Chesbro.

He was out into the weed about thirty feet maybe from the Mystic, in a run of oily, slopping water, stumbling about in the raft as it sank around him, seeming to deflate before their eyes. But it wasn’t deflating, it was… it was coming apart. It was fraying and shredding and collapsing. That dirty water around it was spraying up in gouts and boiling in foam.

“Christ, we gotta do something,” Pollard was saying.

And George knew they had to, too, but what? They had no boat to get to him and what in the fuck was he doing out there anyhow? But George could pretty much put that together. The dumb sonofabitch was trying to escape. He’d been in a weird, introspective mood ever since the squid attacked them on the C-130 and now he had simply lost his mind and was trying to escape.

George could see quite clearly now what was happening and it made something in his belly take a sickening, empty roll. The raft was getting hit by things… luminous things, like the fish he and Gosling had been hit by. Except these were smaller, fist-sized creatures darting and diving about with such speed you could not get a good look at them. Just shining, glowing little things, perhaps hundreds of them going after the raft, hitting it like sharks in a feeding frenzy, teeth tearing and ripping and biting.

He’s a dead man, George found himself thinking.