Cook found a bloated tuber that just struck him as wrong. It was pink like a vein, throbbing beneath his fingers and it disgusted him. Plants could not
feel
like this. They could not be like this. He slashed his knife against it and a dark, inky fluid sprayed against the back of his hand.
Fabrini swallowed something thick in his throat. “It looks like …”
“Blood,” Cook said. “It’s … I think it’s blood …”
Maybe it was the others’ unwillingness to help him hack through those pulsing vines and tentacles of green and pink growth and maybe it was just his instinctive hatred for them, but Cook began to slash and cut his way deeper into the mass and soon wished he hadn’t.
There was a body under the weeds.
The body of a man, probably a crewmember from the
Mara Corday …
but it was really hard to tell. He was lying in the bottom of the boat in about two inches of slopping black water, noosed in garlands of pulsing weed. His face was sharp and bony, sallow and lifeless, his body terribly wrinkled and shrunken. And he was breathing. Shallowly, but breathing all the same.
“He’s alive,” Cook said.
But the others wanted no part of this. There was something diabolic and utterly macabre about a man entwined in all those stalks and tubers and pink tentacles. Cook started pulling the weeds away from him … and recoiled as a single distended and oily run of weed came away from the man’s throat with a popping sound like suction cups pulled from vinyl. There were oval sucker marks on his neck. Yes, the weeds had encircled him, tucked him down deep in their own vegetable profusion and-
“They’re … they’re sucking his blood,” Menhaus said in a high voice, just absolutely filled with an irrational horror at the idea of it. “Those fucking weeds …
they’re sucking his blood away … ”
And there was no arguing against it.
For that’s what those weeds were doing. The pulsing pink tendrils had suckers on their undersides like little rubbery mouths. They felt like viscid arteries in Cook’s hands. The man beneath them was slowly being leeched, he was being bled white drop by drop by drop.
Cook looked down at his hands and they were red with blood.
Something like a dry, rasping scream came from his mouth. He fell back into the lifeboat and the other one pulled back into the mist and they all distinctly heard the sounds coming from it. Busy, stealthy sounds. Rustlings and slitherings as if the lifeboat were filled with serpents. But it wasn’t serpents, it was something far worse.
Cook hung over the gunnel, washing the blood off his hands manicly.
“Unclean,” Crycek said in a hurting voice. “Oh, so terrible and unclean …”
“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.
Cook thought:
Look at them, just sitting and waiting, hoping. They all have something to return to. Lives. Things they want and need to take up again. All except me. I was alone in the old world and I’m alone in the new one. And they know it, they all goddamn well know it. They talk about girlfriends and wives, sisters and brothers and children. Me? I say nothing. They want to get back. And look at their eyes, will ya? They all doubt that I’m the man that can get them there.
Cook could feel it all draining out of him now. All the poison, all the doubts and uncertainties and anxieties. It came out of every pore and nearly drowned him, left him gulping for air up in the bow. He sat there, staring off into the mist and the weeds, not wanting any of them to see the weakness on his face. He was wrung out and just plain out of answers. All of this had gone on too long and these men were going to die and it would be his fault, all his fault, because he didn’t have a goddamn clue as to what to do next.
No, he couldn’t let Saks see it on his face.
Because Saks
would
see it. And if he saw it, he would recognize it. Because guys like Saks are predators and they can smell fear and personal anguish same way a mad dog can smell panic on you. And once that happens, forget it, it’s only a matter of waiting for those teeth and that frothy, hot breath. And that’s exactly how Saks was: he smelled it on you, he tasted it on you, he sensed it on you, he’d sink his teeth in and never let go. You had any flaws or frailties and Saks got hold of them, he’d exploit the shit right out of them. He’d rub it all in your face until you either killed him or just simply broke down and he won.
And if he won … look out.
Cook wasn’t exactly sure when it had started coming apart for him. Maybe it had been coming on for a long time and maybe what they’d found in the other lifeboat had just kicked it into high gear. Because he was having trouble with that, having trouble with what he’d seen.
Blood. Those weeds had been full of blood. They’d been milking the poor bastard lying in the bottom. He was unconscious and beyond pain, but what if he was paralyzed or something? What if he had known what was happening, but could do nothing to prevent it? Was just too weak? Jesus, how long could the mind string itself together when parasitic weeds were sucking the blood out of you?
And I left him there,
Cook thought, just angry and guilty and full of wild, self-defeating things he could not name.
I left that poor bastard there … to be drained to a husk …
What kind of death was that? By the look of the guy, he’d probably already lost too much blood. Even if they cut him loose, he would never wake up. Cook tried to tell himself that, but it did not make him feel better. Because the least he could have done was to have killed the guy. Put a bullet in his head or drawn a knife across his throat …
something.
But he hadn’t.
He hadn’t done a damn thing.
When he’d sliced through those damn weeds … and they’d bled, squirted hot blood over his hands … well, it had just been too much. And when he’d pulled those little suckers off the guy’s throat, that’s when things had snapped for him. The grim and shocking realization that those plants fed on blood, were designed by nature to leech things … it was just too much.
Even now, he could still feel the greasy flesh of those plants, the blood on his hands.
Saks was watching him.
Cook did not turn, did not have to. He could feel that hungry gaze on him, those probing eyes. Oh, yes, he could feel them just fine. Searching for a sign of weakness, something to take advantage of, to use and abuse.