“And they keep coming,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes nothing for months and then, suddenly, three or four, five or six. In batches, they always come in batches. But as far as you go in the weed, you’ll find wreckage. Some of it very, very old.”
Chesbro had his head bowed over, praying silently.
Elizabeth Castle was watching him intently. “Is he a minister?” she asked.
But Cushing just shook his head. “No, he just has a deep and abiding faith,” Cushing said with all sincerity.
Good for you, George thought.
Anyone else might have said that Chesbro was a Jesus freak, a religious nut… but not Cushing. He wouldn’t go there and you couldn’t make him. That’s the kind of guy he was.
“You are very quiet, Mr. Pollard,” Elizabeth remarked.
He nodded. “I guess… I guess I don’t have much to say.”
“He’s okay,” Cushing told her. “He’s been through a lot.”
She and Cushing sat there discussing the specifics of this mad new world, the sort of things that lived there and all the people that must have perished there through the centuries, through the eons. It was real cheerful stuff. Elizabeth spoke of this place as something to be beaten down, something you had to fight at every turn, but nothing you could ever conquer. She was a stubborn, hard-headed woman by all accounts and maybe that’s how she had survived here – through ingenuity and rigid persistence. Maybe all the death she’d seen had made her cling to life all that much more tenaciously.
George thought she looked healthy. Her eyes were bright and her hair was lustrous, her teeth white and strong. But she was pale, her complexion like flawless porcelain. But that was probably due to the lack of sunshine. If people lived here generation by generation, breeding in this place, sooner or later they would have lost all skin pigment.
“All we’ve been holding out for,” Cushing said, “is a way out.”
“There is no way out,” Elizabeth said, her voice stern.
“Have you ever tried?” George put to her.
She gave him a hard, withering look and he felt himself sneak about two inches closer to death. But he didn’t give a shit if it offended her or not. He hated that smug certainty in her voice. Maybe she was satisfied with this place, but there was no way in hell he ever would be.
“Tried? No, I haven’t. Where would I begin?” She kept looking at him. “After a time, there’s only survival. That’s all you can think about.”
“How long have you been here?” Cushing said. “You said years, but-”
“What year did you sail to Bermuda?” George asked, getting right to it.
“What year? Well, I remember that very well. It was March, the second week of March, 1907.”
That landed like a brick and now everyone was staring at her, eyes wide and mouths hanging open.
“Jesus H. Christ,” George said. “1907? Oh my God…”
There was a sudden vulnerability to her, she looked lost and confused and she was certainly those things. She chewed her lip. “I. .. I’ve been here a long time, haven’t I?”
“I’m just not up to it,” Menhaus announced. “I just don’t have what it takes. I know that now. I played the game and did my best, but, Jesus, I just don’t have the stomach for this.”
Fabrini said, “C’mon now, you can’t give up.”
“Why can’t I?”
But Fabrini didn’t have a good answer for that. He figured Cook might have, but not him. It just wasn’t in him, all the right answers to the right questions. “Because you fucking can’t, that’s why.”
They were sitting on the deck of the fishing boat, an old side trawler out of Florida according to the paperwork in the wheelhouse, trying to figure out what it all meant. What it was all about now that Cook was gone and they were under Saks’s hand again. Something nobody particularly cared for. Saks was down in the captain’s cabin sleeping and Crycek was next door, not sleeping, but lost in one of his blue funks. When he got like that, he was pretty much unreachable. When he spoke, it was all doom and gloom and devils in the fog, prophecies.
“I don’t trust Saks,” Menhaus said. “We had a chance with Cook, I think we really had a chance… but now we’re screwed. Saks doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself.”
Some great revelation, that. “No, and he never did. That’s the kind of prick he is. But I say we just play it out, see what it’s worth. Saks wants to be Mr. Big Man? Okay, let him. Give him the ball and let him run with it.”
Menhaus nodded glumly, barely visible in the darkness. “But I think we had a chance with Cook. I think we really did have a chance.”
Fabrini didn’t like thinking about Cook. He’d come to trust Cook, to like Cook, and his death had not been an easy one and living with the memory of it was harder yet. “Saks has a plan,” Fabrini said.
“Does he?”
