Maybe it was sick, George got himself to thinking as he prodded its carcass with the oar, maybe that’s what it was about.
But then looking over at Soltz, he figured it out.
Or thought he did.
Soltz was either dying or close to it. Gosling said his cuts were severe, but not life-threatening… yet he was feverish and shaking, seemed to be in some sort of a coma. Like the guy had contracted some weird tropical disease or was full of infection. And maybe, just maybe, it was both. The bat-thing’s saliva had burned him, gotten into his cuts… and who knew what kind of parasites and germs it carried? Things deadly to human biology perhaps, alien things our immune system couldn’t hope to fight against. So, if that was true, maybe the same was true in reverse: the biology of that thing was killing Soltz, but maybe his biology had killed it off first.
He told Cushing this and Cushing liked it. “Makes sense, George. You’ve got a logical, scientific turn to your mind and you never even knew it.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but if he’s infected with something… we could all be in danger.”
“Does that worry you?” Gosling asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “And what are our alternatives?”
George knew what they were. “We don’t have any.”
And they didn’t. Living in a raft at close quarters pretty much ruled out the possibility of quarantine and there were no emergency rooms handy. Soltz was one of them. Infected or not, they had to care for him even if it meant getting sick themselves. They could not abandon him… if they did that, they were no better than, well, Saks for example.
“You’re right, we don’t have any. So?”
George just shrugged. “So I suppose there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Figured you’d say that.”
Good old Gosling. The supreme pragmatist. You could always count on him to see the practical side of just about anything.
Gosling had repaired the tears in the gunwale of the raft using the repair kit and had aired it back up using the hand-pump. They had taken some water, but not enough to be alarmed about. The inflated arches were pretty much toast, though. The creature’s barbed tail spines had literally shredded them and that was that.
George was starting to drift off when he realized that there was something in front of the raft. Another shadow, though this one was larger than the devil ray beast. Much larger. Whatever it was, it had to be easily twenty-feet across and seemed to be getting larger by the moment.
Maybe it was a submerged bank of weed, maybe something else.
He was about to draw Gosling’s attention to it when Soltz came out of his fugue, started babbling about the rusted chain on his bicycle in-between ragged breaths of air. Gosling went to him with Cushing at his side. Cushing mopped sweat from his brow and Gosling checked his vitals.
“How is he?” George asked, to which Gosling just shook his head.
And that pretty much said it all.
Soltz was fading and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it. Just sit there and twiddle their thumbs and watch him die. And the idea of that just about sucked the lot of them dry.
That shadow was closer now. Easily within ten feet of the raft. Whatever it was, either they were drifting toward it or it was drifting toward them. Take your pick.
“You see it?” George said, knowing Cushing had.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
Gosling had seen it, too, but was preoccupied with trying to make Soltz comfortable. Maybe he had, for Soltz had gone back to his dream-island again which was about all you could hope for under the circumstances. If he had to die, it would be better if he went in his sleep.
Even with the semi-brightening of the day and the use of a flashlight, you could only see maybe five or six inches down into the sea. Light would penetrate no farther. That shadow, George figured, was about that far down, maybe less. Just visible as a shape, but no more.
“I don’t like it,” Cushing said.
Gosling was watching it. “Row around it then.”
There’s a mad dog in your path, just walk around it.
He was being Mr. Realism again, of course, but it was obvious that he did not like that big dark mass being on a slow collision course with them either. But he could not come right out and say it. It was not his way. He was used to being in charge of men and that had not left him. Even in this godforsaken place. And when you were in charge, you didn’t admit to trouble very easily.
George was thinking: I don’t know what in the Christ you are, Mr. Shadow, but you’re giving me a real funny feeling in my belly and I don’t like it one fucking bit. Just go away now, go away. Leave us be. We don’t need another flying manta ray from Mars…
And wasn’t that a cheerful thought? That the dead bat-thing might have a big brother or a pissed-off father?
“Here,” Cushing said, putting an oar in his hands. “Let’s get away from it.”
