Cook, feeling a raw heat in his belly, turned around and sure enough Saks was giving him the eye, that cocky grin on his face.
“What the hell are you looking at?”
That grin, growing, knowing it was on to something here. “What’s the matter, Cook? You seem a little touchy? Something eating you?”
“What could be eating me, Saks?”
“I don’t know, but something is. Playing the big boss man too much for you?”
Cook felt his lower lip tremble. “It’s too much for anyone, isn’t it?”
“Poor Cook. He just bit off more than he could chew.” That grin was so big now it was like a knife cut in Saks’s face. “Some guys just aren’t up to it, Cook. Some guys just don’t have it. And you, my friend, you don’t have it.”
“Well, maybe not, Saks, but who else is there?”
Saks shrugged. “Let me think. How about you, Fabrini? You ready to take charge here?”
Fabrini just looked from him to Cook dumbly, an almost bovine emptiness in his eyes. “No … no, I don’t want no part of it.”
Saks shrugged again. “Well, there’s always Menhaus. He’s a true pillar of fucking strength. And Crycek? Sure, maybe a crazy situation needs a crazy leader.”
Crycek ignored him.
Cook tried to control his breathing, felt like he was about to start hyperventilating. “Which leaves
who?
You, Saks? You?” Cook started laughing. “Saks, no offense, but putting you in charge is like putting a child molester in charge of a little boy’s school.”
“Fuck you mean by that?”
“I mean, you’re a goddamn zero. I mean you don’t have the guts for the job. Yeah, I’ve been watching you, Saks, and when the shit gets deep, you’re the first to run. All you care about is your own skin. You can play tough all you want, you can run those fucking intimidation games of yours until the cows come home, but it won’t change the fact … you’re weak. Inside, you’re soft and gutless and spineless and-”
“You shut your goddamn mouth!” Saks cried out, his voice echoing out through the fog.
Ah, now who was pushing whose buttons?
“Take it easy, Saks,” Cook said, feeling calm now. “We all know it, we all know you aren’t fit to run a fucking hot dog stand. But you know what? It always amazes me how gutless, stupid fucks like you always end up in charge. Just blows me away. But, you know what they say, shit always floats to the top.”
Well, there it was.
Saks’s invitation to take up his knife, lunge and cut. And he’d probably make a good show of it before Cook put a bullet in him.
Saks just sat there, eyes narrowed and filled with hate. But that’s all he really did. He sat there and stewed and made with the hard eyes. All bluster and blow, no thunder to go with it.
Fabrini chuckled. “Boy, you pegged old Saksy, Cook. You sure as hell did. Anybody smell something? I think Saks just shit his pants.”
Saks had his knife out then.
Maybe he could take it from Cook, but not Fabrini. No way. Not ever. He brought that knife out and his eyes went black and Fabrini brought his out and here it came, all those boiling black poisons were finally being lanced and Menhaus and Crycek weren’t about to get in the way and, the thing was, neither was Cook.
Not this time.
He had murder on his mind. As they said, it only took one rotten apple to ruin the bunch and Saks was rotten, all right. Just dirty and dark and seething to his core like something that needed to be cut out before it infected the whole body. So Cook was not going to intervene, he was going to let Fabrini kill him and if he didn’t, Cook was going to. Because he couldn’t go on day after day in this nightmare world with that asshole picking at everyone.
“Go ahead, Fabrini,” Cook said, his voice low and even. “Kill that useless fucking prick. You’ve got my blessing.”
That made Fabrini smile.
Something like doubt crossed Saks’s face. See, this wasn’t how it worked. Cook was the voice of reason and he was supposed to stop this, get in the middle of them, cool heads prevailing and all that. But Cook wanted it to happen. Really
wanted
it and that was the last thing old tough guy Saks expected. He was no stranger to violence. He did not back down easily … particularly when the odds were in his favor. He had been in knife fights before, but what he wasn’t liking was that Fabrini was young and strong and muscular. Had been pushed too far now and was beyond all the societal taboos ingrained in him that had stopped him before. He was capable of murder now and Saks knew it.
Fabrini was on his feet, the lifeboat rocking.
Saks stood up, knowing it was coming now.
“Bring it on, you faggot,” he said.
And Fabrini started to move, down low and stalking, knowing he had physical advantages here. Maybe Saks was experienced at this sort of thing, but he was pushing sixty, going to fat, and his glory days on the docks and construction gangs were far behind him now.
“What’s that?” Menhaus said. “Over there … what the hell is that?”
Saks did not look, but the others did. Fabrini included.
There was something there. Something that looked pretty much like a large patch of weed that had broken loose and was drifting … drifting right toward the lifeboat.
“Weeds,” Cook said. “Weeds.”
But even as the words fell from his lips, he wasn’t so sure. Weeds? No, this did not look like a harmless patch of weeds, in fact, Cook was thinking it looked like … well, it looked like a head of hair just beneath the surface. That was crazy bullshit, but that’s what he thought momentarily. Like the gargantuan head of a woman, her hair fanning out in every direction. If it was just weeds, then it was
different
weeds. For these were not the average creepers and stalks, leafy branches like kelp that made up the weed banks. No these hairs or tendrils or whatever in the Christ they were, were fine, were wire-thin and as that patch got closer to the boat, Cook was thinking that they looked much like waterlogged pasta, thin and reedy and pale.
“Put those blades away,” Menhaus suddenly said.
He was soft and friendly, your favorite uncle or brother-in-law. A good neighbor or a guy to drink beers with or cookout in the backyard, bowl with … but he had no real balls and they all knew it. So when he barked out an order in that I’m-taking-absolutely-no-shit tone of voice, it was uncharacteristic and everyone listened.
Now Saks was watching that submerged shape moving at the lifeboat, too, and there was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind: it was not accidental, that thing was moving at them on purpose.
“Get ready for the shit,” Saks said.
Sure, and that’s exactly what everyone was doing … except, they did not know exactly how to get ready for this. At sea, in a normal body of water, you saw a shark or a jellyfish or sea snake moving in your direction, your mind had some ready ideas because it knew what these things were and what they were capable of. There were certain evasive maneuvers you could attempt. But what about this …
thing?
How could you prepare for something that looked like nothing you’d ever seen?
Cook was watching it.
It was circling around the boat and seemed to be moving in the general direction of the bow now, where he was. It was brushing aside clumps of weeds and there was no doubt it was a solid object. But looking at it, you wouldn’t have thought so. It had come up out of the water maybe two or three inches now, just enough so that it broke the surface of that algae-scummed sea. What Cook was seeing was an irregular, somewhat oval hump that seemed to be made of those wiry strands of material. They were yellow and green in color, incredibly thick and profuse and tangled like discolored angel’s hair. They radiated out from that shaggy hump in twisting filaments that were snarled and matted in places, others free flowing and incredibly long.
“What is it, Cook?” Menhaus said. “What does it want?”
And Cook was thinking that what it wanted would not be a good thing … for this thing inspired a shivering primal disgust in him like seeing a spider under a microscope, a bulbous body covered with fine hairs. Something so alien and abhorrent it could not truly be alive. He watched the thing, seeing that it had no eyes … just those wire-thin projections cast about in the water from that hump. As he looked upon it, those cilia-like hairs seeming to twitch and writhe in the water, he saw his own death. It came on him suddenly and with complete conviction, this thing was death. It was
his
death, the same death that had been dogging him for thirty-eight years. It was here now and it was ready.
Cook saw this and knew it to be true and the knowledge of that was like a razor scraped across his brain. It was painful and destructive and emptying. He had an odd, almost hallucinogenic sense that something inside him wanted very badly to rip through his skin and escape. He couldn’t seem to breathe and he could feel his heartbeat slowing, as if preparing for the inevitable.
“I don’t like this, Cook,” Saks was saying. “Shoot that fucker …”
And they were all telling him to and he figured they were right, but then he also knew that this new and mystical certainty which had bloomed in him like a death-orchid was simply beyond them. It was not their time.
“Cook …” Fabrini began.
The thing began to rise up before the bow … and, Jesus, what was it? It came up out of that stinking, vile sea, dripping water and slime and clots of decomposing matter, plumes of steam rising from it. It came up ten or twelve feet, viscid and alive and utterly impossible.
Menhaus gasped.
It had a nebulous, abstract sort of shape, something made of bumps and mounds all threaded with those tendrils of hair, matted and knotted and sweeping and moving. It was a flowing thing and a braided thing, a diaphanous spider clustered in hairballs and filigree. A snaking expanse of living cobwebs that were in constant, creeping motion. That hump they’d first seen rode atop the mass like a head, but it had no face, no anything … just a net of that webby hair hiding something black and glistening beyond. And it had two limbs or maybe three … boneless things that were not tentacles or the appendages of a crab, but just long and scaly sticks that shuddered and dripped ooze.
In a high, panicked voice, Saks said: “What … what are you going to do about it, Big Chief?”
Good question.
Cook looked upon it and it was hideous, an abomination, something that could not possibly be alive … but was. Very much alive. A creeping, evil mesh of fibers and hairs and dirty gray lace. Strands and plaits of those growths were extended out in a random pattern like limbs, but they were not limbs. Just free-flowing and wavering hairs, others bunched into great masses and knotted strands, all interconnected by long fleshy cords.
Cook started shooting.
He emptied the gun into it and then it took him. That is to say those long and scaly limbs knocked him into its central mass. But it had no mouth as such, nothing to rend him with. He fell against it and they all heard him scream, scream with the guttural and blank and inhuman sound of an animal being tortured to death.
Menhaus was pounding on his seat, screeching and shouting and crying, his mind flying apart in his head.
And Fabrini, he was just in shock.
Cook … Jesus. All those hairs and cilia were blanketing him, webbing and caressing and sliding over him, knotting him up and he was thrashing, tearing at those growths, coming out with handfuls of them that sounded like bunches of grass pulled from muddy soil. All those webs inherited him, coveted him, flowing up his nostrils and down his throat and in through his eyes, crawling and undulating things like the dendrites and synapses of nerve cells. They were growing
into
him like roots, into him and out of him.
They all saw it.
About the time his screaming stopped because his throat was filled with a bail of those slithering cobwebs, tiny hairs began to sprout from his face and throat and hands and arms. They burst forth like rootlets on time-lapse photographs, wiry and fibrous, just millions of them erupting from Cook until there was no longer any Cook … just a hairy, twitching thing with the general shape of a man that was being absorbed into the thing’s rustling mass.
The others sat there because there wasn’t a goddamn thing they could do about it. Fabrini stood up once, brandishing an oar and took maybe one step before Saks told him to sit the hell down, he knew what was good for him.
It happened very fast.
One moment Cook was there and the next … he was part of the thing.
Menhaus was whimpering and Fabrini was making a strangled gagging sound in his throat and Crycek refused to look upon it. And Saks? He was scared shitless and wanted to put a gun in his mouth and blow his brains out through the top of his head. But as terrible and offensive as this all was, that scheming mind of his took it all for what it really was: opportunity.
So, he reached down inside himself, found his voice quivering in darkness, and pulled it up his throat and past his lips. “Okay,” he said in a squeaking voice. “Okay … just sit still and do not fucking move.”
It was an easy order to follow; nobody had a problem with it.
The thing was still there, a huge and breathing network of webbing and tissue and floss, all those fibroid and ropy sinews shuddering and wriggling like long stringy worms. It looked almost pregnant with the mounded form of Cook tangled in it. Its limbs, those branching scaly sticks, were busy there, pulling nets of hair over him, tucking him away, a cocooned fly. And the really horrible thing was, Cook was still moving. Shuddering and jerking in there, trying to die and having a hard time of it apparently.
The men in the lifeboat knew what was happening to him.
They knew he was not being eaten exactly or drained of blood or de-boned … although, essentially, all these things were happening, just not in the way they understood them. For Cook was being absorbed and digested by those hairs, dissolved and assimilated into the general mass of that nightmare. The creature was the sort of thing you whacked with a broom and swept into a dustbin, except in this place, it did the whacking.
It was moving now, lilting slowly from side to side like it was drunk. Saks saw this and figured it probably wasn’t a good thing. For if the beast was full, it would have just sank back into the sea.