Gosling knocked his hand aside. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? Something went shit with the ventilation system below decks for chrissake. I got guys down there passing out and puking their fucking guts out!”
“It’s this fog,” Gosling said and then, as if realizing how silly that sounded, said, “I’ll check it out.”
“Damn right you will.”
After he left, Saks stood there looking into that boiling fog and wondering what kind of dumbfuck, inbred morons could’ve navigated them into a mess like this. Goddamn stuff was so thick they wouldn’t see a ship until it was three feet away. And it was everywhere. A solid, misting mass of yellow-white fog like nothing he’d ever seen before in his life. It looked so thick you could scoop some up with your fist and put it in a jar. But that wasn’t the worse part. The worst part was that it looked blank. Neutral. Nothing. Like they were stuck in the middle of nothing, lost in the static on a TV screen. Even the ship didn’t seem to be moving, yet he could feel the engines, hear the bow cutting the drink.
What kind of brownwater, butthole sailors are these?
More people were pouring out on deck now. The ship’s crew in addition to Saks’s own. They were all looking a little green. Some were being helped along by their mates. One of the engine room swabbies collapsed and started heaving onto the deck. They were all a real mess. A suffocating, acrid smell came from the open hatches.
“Saks,” Fabrini said, wiping his hands on his jeans like something greasy was all over them. “What is it? What happened?”
“I don’t know. Ventilation system went to hell maybe. Fumes from the engines backed-up. Something.”
One of the sailors shook his head. “Ain’t no way, mister. Nothing in those turbines smells like that.”
Another sailor wiped his yellow face with a rag. “He’s right.”
“Okay, Einstein,” Saks said, “then what the hell was it?”
Nobody said anything.
“This isn’t right,” Menhaus said, shivering. “It isn’t just the engines here, and you all know it. Take a whiff. That fog smells… smells like something dead. There’s something wrong with it.”
“Who asked you?” Saks snapped.
It was at this particular moment that someone started screaming.
Everyone promptly shut up.
All the arguments and grumbling skidded to an echoing halt. The screaming was coming from aft, on the deck. Somewhere out in that maze of equipment and containers lashed to the spar deck. But in the fog… it was really hard to say exactly where. Everyone turned and made ready to go, to investigate… made ready and that was about it. Because everyone just stood there, faces pale, lips locked tight. No one moved. They all wanted to know what the hell was going on, but nobody wanted to be the first to charge through that fog and see. Maybe it was the sheer quality of that scream which was more than just a scream but the shriek of somebody being slowly roasted over a hot bed of coals. It was loud and shrill like nothing they’d ever heard before.
It was the sound of someone who’d just lost their mind.
“Jesus,” Saks said. “We better-”
The screaming broke down into painful, sharp squeals and the guy who was doing it appeared suddenly out of the murk. One of the deckhands. He was soaking wet, wearing rubber chest waders which had fallen down to his hips now. The front of his denim apron was red and glistening and he clawed frantically at it. His face was hooked into an awful, gray, twisted mask and everyone got out of his way.
“Get it offa me get it offa me get it offa me!” he howled, thrashing away across the decks, leaving a trail of blood. “OH JESUS JESUS JESUUUUS IT’S IN ME IT’S YAAAHHHHH…”
Before anyone could move, he ran to the railing. They saw him as a dim form convulsing in the fog. And then he threw himself over into the sea.
“Sonofabitch!” Saks said, breaking the spell. “Man overboard! Man fucking overboard!”
But no one came.
And everybody just stood there, not knowing what in the hell to do. To a man, nobody even moved an inch toward that spot where he’d gone over. Yes, they’d all been watching him, wanting to help him, but the screams, the blood, the very nightmarish absurdity of the whole situation had kept them from doing anything. They just watched. For it almost appeared as if he’d been pulled over the railing, rather than jumped of his own accord. And the splashing they heard… huge, echoing splashes… it didn’t seem like a man could make that kind of noise. It sounded more like somebody had dropped a car into the drink.
There was complete silence for a moment or two.
It was like everything was suspended, locked down tight and motionless. You could hear the water, something that might have been a distant drone of wind, the faint thrum of the engines, but nothing more.
“Man overboard,” one of the sailors said very quietly. “Man overboard. There’s a man overboard.”
But no one seemed concerned.
Reality had taken a beating in the last few minutes and it was still reeling, still trying to find its proper footing and the men with it.
“He’s gone,” Saks said. “Even if we turned this crate around, we’d never find him. Not in this.”
“Oh dear God,” Menhaus said. “That man.”
One of the sailors ran off and a few seconds later an alarm began to sound. It was high and whining like an air raid siren. The sort of thing that went right up your spine, filled your head, made you want to grind your teeth and squint your eyes.
Despite the racket, everyone started talking at once. Talking almost in low tones like they didn’t want the others to hear what they were saying.
Fabrini had his own way of dealing with the unreal, the frightening. He got angry. “This is bullshit,” he said, walking around in a loose circle. “This is fucking bullshit. We’ve gotta turn back. You hear me? We gotta turn back. I ain’t gonna die like that.”
“Like what?” Saks said.
“Yeah,” Menhaus said. “We don’t even know what happened.”
Fabrini realized they were all staring at him. His swarthy skin had an almost moonish pallor to it now. “You heard that guy for chrissake! All of you heard him! You heard what the fuck he was saying! Get it off me, get it off me! He was bleeding like somebody stuck a knife in him! Something got him, right? Something must’ve bit him!”
Saks rolled his eyes. “For the love of Christ, Fabrini, the guy was nuts. He probably slit his own fucking wrists or something.”
No one argued with that hypothesis. It was neat and tight and safe. It made sense. You could fit it into a box, close the lid, and be sure it wouldn’t get back out again. And it was much better than the alternative and nobody even wanted to consider that. At least not openly. Not yet.
Saks looked around carefully. He didn’t like any of this. He’d seen situations like this in the war. Times when the shit hit the fan from every which direction and the tension was so high you could feel it pulsing from man to man in an unbroken circuit. And when things got that stressed out, men cracked. Men started thinking crazy shit and somebody didn’t throw water on it and quick, they started doing crazy shit. And particularly when you had some nut like Fabrini running around feeding their fears, saying the crazy, dangerous things that were on everyone’s minds. And when that happened… mass hysteria soon set in and people got hurt.
Already he could see everyone pairing off in twos and threes, getting paranoid, not trusting their neighbors. Trench mentality. Jesus H. Christ. Saks didn’t need that shit. There was a job needed to be done in French Guiana and he needed these boneheads to do it. A lot of money was riding on the contract and Saks wasn’t about to let somebody screw him out of that. After it was done? Then he didn’t care, they could de-nut each other with potato peelers, they wanted to. But not now.