“It’s funny static… never heard nothing quite like it before. Those sounds in there, buzzing sounds now and again. You listen to it long enough you get the feeling…”
“That it’s listening back?”
But if Gosling thought that, he would not say and maybe it was his silence that was the very worst thing of all.
He feels it, too, George found himself thinking, he feels something out there, something listening, something cold and predatory
… and maybe amused.
But George knew he had to get off that track. For it was the road to dementia and once you started down it, you’d never come back. It was strictly a one-way street.
Gosling shut the radio off. “Nothing out there,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
George figured if the both of them kept telling themselves that, given time, they might even believe it.
He stared off into the fog like maybe he was waiting for it to show its teeth. “You don’t have much hope for us, do you?”
Gosling shrugged. “I don’t put much in things like hope or faith or luck. I used to hope for things, wish for things for all the good it did. Experience taught me otherwise. You make your own luck, I guess. I’m not saying luck doesn’t exist. I’m sure it does. But not for me and probably not for you. Some people have it, most people don’t.”
George uttered a short laugh. “You can say that again.”
They sat in silence, wishing they had something to smoke or something hard to drink. Anything. Humans loved their chemical dependencies and they never meant so much as they did in survival situations.
“Listen,” Gosling said.
“I don’t hear…” George began and then he did.
It was subtle, but it was there: a sort of tapping sound. And it was coming from under the raft. It wasn’t a big sound like before when the raft had actually been lifted from the sea. This was nothing like that, this was more investigatory, probing, curious. George heard it down there, thinking with a chill that it sounded very much like fingertips scraping over the rubber. It started getting louder, bumping and squeaking, thudding.
“Jesus-”
“Shut up,” Gosling warned him.
It ran up and down the bottom of the raft, creaking and bumping and scratching. Then it just touched now and again.
When it hadn’t happened again for maybe five minutes, George said, “What do you suppose that was?”
But Gosling just shook his head. “I don’t know… I just hope it stays gone.”
Saks was watching the boys play, thinking that he had nobody to blame but himself. That he had hired this crew of mama’s boys, dick-suckers, and all around morons.
The fog had brightened now and the boys were all excited that the sun was coming up, would burn off that fog and deliver the lot of them into never-neverland. They knew better. They all knew better. The fog was filled with a sort of illumination, sure, but to Saks it didn’t look like sunshine at all, but more of a silvery moonlight that the fog tinted yellow. It was not a clean sort of light, but dirty like sunlight tinted through a yellow window pane.
What it came down to, he knew, was that it was all wrong.
Sure, it was brighter now. You could see people’s faces, make out things just fine, but it was not what you’d call a sunny day. It surely was not normal.
After they’d reached the lifeboat and everybody had a bite to eat and some water, everybody chatted away and then one by one they’d fallen asleep… not realizing until that moment how tired they were. Saks himself had gone out hard, not waking for nearly five hours.
But he felt better now. On top of his game.
And his brain was firing on all cylinders again. For what he was thinking about as those idiots fooled with the fishing gear from the survival canisters, was not how they were going to stay alive, but how he was going to stay alive. How he was going to take control of this little party of stooges and make them work to his adavantage.
Saks was a natural at things like that.
Menhaus was rigging a lure with the sixty-pound test line. Since they didn’t have any bait… any bait that could be spared, that was… Menhaus decided to use his watch since it had seized up now anyway.
“It’s worth a try,” he said. “I saw it in that movie.”
Fabrini grunted. “Sounds fucking goofy to me.”
“So let me do it. I don’t need your help.”
Menhaus was talking about something he’d seen in the film Lifeboat. The survivors of a shipwreck used a belt and a shiny bracelet as a fishing lure to try and catch fish. But they didn’t have any real tackle, Menhaus pointed out, and that gave him a distinct advantage.
“I gotta see this,” Fabrini said.
“Let’s go fishing then,” Cook said, happy that they finally had something to do other than watch Saks.
Saks was wondering exactly what they thought they were going to catch in that soup.
Crycek was up in the bow, had Hupp’s head cradled in his lap as before. He watched the entire thing with glazed eyes. Maybe he was there and maybe he was somewhere else entirely.
