Dead Sea

What? he asked himself. What is it that bothers you about it so much? What you might be hearing could be just dead noise, atmospheric interference… or maybe the Coast Guard searching you out. Isn’t that a good thing?

He just wasn’t sure.

For nothing was reading right here, from the fog to this soupy becalmed sea, and part of him was certain that if there was an intelligence behind that buzzing, then it was not benevolent in nature.

That was crazy, paranoid thinking, but there was something about the fog that encouraged such wild leaps of irrationality. The buzzing pulses or pings or whatever they were only occurred moments after Cook sent out a voice signal. Maybe that meant absolutely nothing… but what if somebody out there was locking onto those signals and was seeking them out?

This is the very thing that unnerved Cook, the very thing he dared not even admit to himself. Because he couldn’t get one central idea out of his mind: whatever came out of the fog would not be a good thing.

Crycek had heard those sounds when he used the VHF, too. And when he did, he pulled the plug from his ear, said, “Fucking weird… that sound, you hear it? A buzzing. Like there’s some locust out there wanting to talk.”

And that’s exactly what Cook had thought, what had gotten under his skin and stayed there: it did sound like a locust. Like some loathsome insect was trying to make contact.

Of course, if there was someone or something trying to find them, then all it would have to do is follow the emergency radio beacons the boat sent on auto.

You gotta stop it, Cook was telling himself, and you gotta stop it right now.

And he knew he had to. He was not nervous or high-strung by nature and that’s why him feeling this way, thinking these dark things, was even more disturbing.

But he had to keep his head, because he had the feeling that Crycek was right on the edge. And one little push is all it would take.

Cook kept wondering about the others. Had any of the ship’s crew made it? Had any of the construction crew? He found it hard to believe that even the sea could take Saks. It was silly to think of a man like that simply drowning. Maybe a bullet or a knife, but nothing so prosaic as drowning.

And the others?

Well, yes, he could picture the sea taking them.

But not Saks.

Saks was too much like Cook’s father, the belligerent, opinionated sonofabitch who’d beaten his mother to death. Cook had watched it go on for years. Every Friday night his father finished his shift at the mill, sauced himself up on Jack Daniels, and came home walking ten-feet tall and bulletproof, just looking for a fight. And men like that, they always found one sooner or later. And if they couldn’t find one, they created one.

Whether it was genetics or environment, Cook only knew that his father was trash. Asshole is as asshole does.

It was just not Cook’s mother who took it, but Cook himself. Anybody who got in the way. Then the old man lost his job, decided drinking was a vocation, and the beatings became daily. In time, they became extremely vicious. His mother was in and out of the hospital. Broken ribs. Broken jaw. Sprained wrist. A punctured lung. Bruised kidney. And she always covered for the bastard. But she couldn’t cover for him when he threw her down the stairs in a drunken rage and her neck snapped like a twig.

Cook had come home from school and discovered his father weeping over her body, drunk and ugly.

“She fell, goddammit,” he snapped. “And that’s all you gotta know, you little bastard.”

Cook could still remember the sense of acceptance he’d felt. The sense of calm knowing the worst had finally happened. He’d set his books down, went into the den and got the shotgun. He remembered grinning as he chambered a shell. Grinning as he pumped it into his father’s chest.

Self-defense, they’d said.

They were wrong.

It wasn’t self-defense, but it wasn’t murder either; it was eradication, extermination. Much as you eradicated a weed that threatened your garden or exterminated termites that infested your home. Some things had to be done for the good of all.

Yes, Saks was his father reincarnated.

Cook didn’t doubt this.

And if the two of them washed up on a desert island or they were the only ones in a lifeboat, Cook knew what would happen. As soon as Saks closed his eyes, he would kill the bastard.

And smile as he did so.

5

“You ever been shipwrecked before?”

“Once,” Gosling said, “off the coast of Labrador.”

“How long?”

“Six hours before I got picked up. I was a mate on an ore freighter. She was improperly loaded, they said. Ore shifted, snapped her in half. Lost twenty men. I was one of the lucky ones. I floated on a piece of planking until I saw a channel buoy. I made my way to it, waited there. A Coast Guard ship picked me up.”