Sargasso

by Russell C. Connor

  Lito only nodded.

  “Yo, what about those guys?” Carlos asked. “Was they really pirates, or maybe just wearin costumes or somethin?”

  “I’m pretty sure they were just as authentic as the ship,” Ray told him.

  “Dat’s two or t’ree hundred years.” Jericho gave a low whistle of amazement. “Dat’s a long time to just be sittin ‘round out here.”

  Amber saw Ray shoot an uncomfortable look at Lito. “Tell them about the flashlight.”

  Lito grimaced and looked up from his reloading. “The one from Eric’s story. I think we found it. Still turned on and running, like this guy from 1970 had just dropped it right before we strolled in.”

  “But it was more than that,” Ray added. “The ship was clean, no dust, and there was food in the galley that was still good. Screw the seventies, it was more like it’d only been a few days since those buccaneers were out plunderin.”

  Amber sank down onto the bench with Cherrywine as she considered this newest piece of the puzzle. “How? How is that possible?”

  Lito snapped the cylinder closed on his revolver. “I call a ban on anyone askin that question.”

  “Fuckin Bermuda Triangle,” Ray muttered. “Always hated those stories growin up.”

  “What now, Cap’n?” Jericho asked quietly.

  “We keep movin. Find a boat that has what you need, and do it fast.”

  “So we’re all finished treasure hunting?” Amber asked.

  Lito’s expression was halfway between a grimace and a grin.

  “Depends on the treasure, gringa

  .”

  1

  The pontoon raft had grown quiet. Ray and Jericho took up a position at the front with binoculars, scouting for other ships that might have a compatible fuel line. Lito stuck to the back, helping Carlos with rowing duties. The girls retreated into the cabin.

  They were completely enclosed by derelicts now; the ships stretched to the horizon in all directions, so densely packed they were almost a maze. Their course had become a meandering cruise through this minefield in whatever direction they could find an opening. With the wind picking up, it was a constant struggle to keep their distance from these other vessels.

  And they needed to keep their distance. It might be his imagination, but he could swear that pale faces were watching them from a few windows as they passed, faces that were gone whenever he looked back again. With all the lightning overhead now, tossing shadows, it was hard to tell. But he had to operate under the assumption that all of these ships held more monsters, more crew that had been transformed into those things.

  Lito glanced over at Carlos. He was quiet, bent into the oars. God, if this was getting to Lito so bad, he could only imagine what was going through the kid’s head.

  “I’m gonna get us outta this.”

  “Yeah, homey. Sure you are.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I dunno. Jorge and Rabid and Mondo thought you was Superman, and look where it got them.”

  That stung, but he didn’t let it show on his face. “You know, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talkin about. If you just dropped the attitude once in a while, life would probably go a lot easier for you.”

  “Yeah, well, you ain’t gotta put up with it much longer. I’m out at the next port.”

  Lito forced himself to count to five before answering. “I promised your mom I’d—”

  “Goddamn, would you shut up about my mom? I don’t want you talkin ‘bout my mom anymore, okay?”

  “Fine.” Lito pulled the oar from the water and tossed it on the deck next to the ingrate. “I gotta go check on the others. Keep us movin.”

  He made his way around the cabin, to the front of the boat, where Ray and Jericho stood scanning the night. “You seen anything worth tryin?”

  “Too old.” Jericho lowered the binoculars. A look passed between him and Ray that Lito couldn’t read. “All too old or not de right engine.”

  “I’ve seen several ships the same size as the Runner. Some of ‘em looked like they were in even better condition.”

  Ray said, “And any ship we try to scavenge could be crawlin with more of those things.”

  “Then we’ll just have to kill ‘em.”

  “We don’t have the ammo. Another clip for the AR, a handful of shotgun shells, and whatever rounds everybody’s got for their pistols.”

  “Then we’ll figure somethin else out.” Lito shrugged. “I know they’re disgusting, but those things ain’t invincible. They ain’t even all that smart. They go down just like a regular person.”

  “See, that’s another thing that’s botherin me. The thing that everyone’s thinkin but nobody’s sayin.” Ray pointed at the oily blue stain on the deck where Lito had killed the first of the mutants that attacked Amber. “They go down like regular people because, at some point, they were regular people. They didn’t all start out with blue blood and melted skin. Whether it’s a disease or too much fluoride in the water, somethin happened to make them this way. We should probably think long and hard about all that before we keep pokin around.”

  “And we’re obviously gettin closer to whatever’s broadcastin dat voice on de radio,” Jericho added.

  “Okay,” Lito said, “I get it, I’m with you. Just find us another ship that’s guaranteed to have what we need and we’ll get outta here.”

  That look passed between them once more, something hesitant.

  “What’s up?”

  Ray’s brow wrinkled. “We figured out what the big one is. The thing we spotted earlier from the houseboat.”

  “And?”

  “We’re pretty sure…it’s a cruise ship.”

  “Oh really? Carnival or Disney?”

  “I’m not jokin.”

  “No goddamned way.” Lito snatched the binoculars from Jericho and looked for himself. The enormous silhouette on the horizon—so much bigger than anything else they’d seen out here—was much clearer against the backdrop of lightning-filled clouds blowing in from the south, especially now that he knew what he was looking for. A lot of ships still lay between them, but he estimated they were probably closer to it than they were to the Steel Runner at this point. “That thing can’t be another derelict. If an entire cruise ship had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, don’t you think we’d know about it?”

  “So now it is the Bermuda Triangle, huh?”

  Lito rolled his eyes and said nothing.

  “Dere’s a smaller craft comin up on de left dat looks new,” Jericho said.“If it don’t have what we need, den dat cruise ship may be our last hope. Dey should have a fully stocked maintenance room, and even if de hoses are old, I can probably use dere equipment to rig somethin to get us by.”

  “Unless there’s more of those things on board,” Ray added.

  “One problem at a time.” Lito rubbed at his tired eyes. If things had gone according to plan, they would be most of the way back to port by now, and he’d be catching a nap on rich boy’s yacht. “Let’s check out this other boat.”

  2

  Amber fell asleep on the floor of the cabin with the radio scanner playing next to her head, like some gruesome lullaby. Because she’d been the one to save it from flying overboard, Lito had said she might as well keep up with it. Once she’d been left alone, she fought the urge to send out a mayday between broadcasts. She tried to tell herself it was because she didn’t like the idea of answering that growling monologue any more than the pirates did, but, if she were being honest, the real reason she didn’t call for help was because she didn’t want to betray Lito’s trust.

  Now, as she swam back to consciousness, with Cherrywine snoring loudly in one bunk, Justin moaning and thrashing in the other, and the skull of Mr. Watts grinning at her from a few feet away, the Voice of the Deep was even louder and clearer.

  The academic side of her wanted to find a way to get an audio sample, to take back to school. A person could spend years studying something like this;
it could be the modern day equivalent to cave drawings or the Phaistos disc, or even that Peruvian letter they’d discovered a few years back. Other linguists had made their entire careers from such finds. She realized she sounded like Lito, looking for treasure around every corner.

  Maybe you oughta worry less about how famous it’ll make you, and more about what it’s trying to tell you.

  She didn’t know. As she’d told Jericho, without some sort of Rosetta stone, she had no hope of translating this.

  Amber turned off the scanner and went to check on Justin. He was still asleep, but tossing back and forth. Heat rose from him like a stove burner. She thought again about Eric’s story, about the man who’d contracted a disease in the Bermuda Triangle so dangerous, the government had made him disappear when he returned home. It sounded so phony and paranoid…and yet, the part about the flashlight had been true, hadn’t it?

  From outside, she heard Lito ask, “Is it some kinda mini-sub?”

  “That’s not submersible.” Ray’s voice. “Look, it has natural buoyancy. This thing was designed to ride on the water, not under it.”

  She crept out of the cabin. The deck rocked a little more than she remembered beneath her feet; the ocean was getting turbulent. Lito, Ray and Jericho stood at the right side of the boat, gazing into the night with weapons held ready.

  Their boat was drifting up next to another strange craft. The vessel—about two-thirds the length of their pontoon raft but riding much lower in the water—gleamed in the flickers of lightning being thrown over their shoulders. It was all highly polished metal and shaped like a gigantic segmented bullet, with a blunt, tapered front end that rested just on top of the water. There was no place for any of the creatures to ambush them either; the exterior was free of outside decking and walkways, and only a single hatch on top for access to the interior. Its smooth surface was free of the rust and barnacles eating away at so many of the other derelicts, but it was marred by a few blackened scorch marks down one side and some extensive writing across its hull. If not for the huge metal propellers jutting from its rear, she wouldn’t even have thought of it as a watercraft.

  Ray let go of the shotgun barrel with one hand and pointed at the writing neatly stenciled along the upper curve of the hull. “Is that Japanese?”

  “Vietnamese,” she corrected. They turned to look at her as she walked over.

  “So you know Vietnamese?” Lito asked.

  “Again, I don’t need to. The Vietnamese written language is one of the few Asian derivatives that uses Greek-based alphabetic letters like that, as opposed to the logographic kanji symbols you find with Japanese and Chinese writing.”

  They stared at her. “You mean those weird stick things?” Ray asked.

  “Yes. Those ‘weird stick things.’”

  Lito gave her a sarcastic grin. “Okay, thanks, gringa. So it’s Vietnamese. But what is it? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s been t’rough hell and back.” Jericho leaned out over the water to get a better look. “Dese look like explosive impacts, but dey didn’t seem to’ve done a lotta damage. Gotta be one tough son-of-a-bitch.”

  Ray squatted. “And that looks like a projectile launch tube under the chin there. Maybe torpedoes.”

  “This is a war machine?” Lito looked incredulous as he tucked his pistol in the back of his waistband. He asked Jericho, “You think it would have your parts?”

  “No fucking idea, mon. For all I know, dis t’ing could run on nuclear fission.”

  “Only one way to find out. Hey Carlos, get us in next to it!”

  The raft maneuvered closer, until their pontoon rubbed against the strange craft’s hull with a squall of tortured metal. At the same time, the skies opened up as promised, dropping a slow but steady drizzle. Jericho insisted Lito take one of their radios this time, which he sealed in a double layer of plastic baggies and slipped into a cargo pockets of his shorts. He stepped off the boat onto the shiny surface, then climbed up the curved, segmented body toward the hatch at the apex.

  Before anyone could stop her—or before she could stop herself—Amber jumped from the edge of the raft to follow him.

  The craft’s metal body was slick beneath her tennis shoes from the rain. She stayed hunched low so the wind couldn’t get a grip on her, and used her hands to keep balanced until she reached the area that leveled off at the peak. Lito waited for her there.

  “What’re you doin?” he asked.

  “Hey, you’re the one that dragged us along for this ride. I’d rather be involved and know what’s going on instead of cowering inside.”

  Lito studied her, then closed both eyes and gave a few of those long inhales.

  “Why do you keep doing that?” she asked.

  He opened one eye. “A few cleansing breaths clears the mind so you can make more rational decisions.”

  “Riiiight. And what decision do you have to make?”

  Lito pulled his revolver and held it out to her, handle first. On the pontoon boat, someone gave a short, outraged grunt. “I need you to cover me while I try to get this hatch open. Can you do that?”

  Amber accepted the gun, tried to pull the hammer back like she’d seen in the movies, and ended up almost dropping the thing. “Piece of cake,” she muttered.

  “Just pull the trigger, Annie Oakley. You don’t have to cock it.”

  She pointed the weapon downward while he hauled at the metal wheel jutting from the hatch. After a long minute of straining and grunting, he gave up, walked past her back to the bow, and called up to the others on the pontoon, “No good, this thing is locked from the inside.”

  “Then just come back,” Ray told him. “We should’ve given this up a long time ago and gone back to the Steel Runner.”

  “Not yet. We go for the cruise ship.”

  “That is a stubborn, stupid idea, Lito.”

  “Duly noted. We’re goin anyway.”

  “What if the rest of us don’t want to?”

  “Then you’re gonna have to mutiny. The captain has spoken.”

  “I thought this was a democracy.”

  “Hey, we voted!”

  “Not for this.”

  Amber had turned her back on the hatch to listen to this exchange, but realized her mistake when she heard the metallic scrape of hinges. She spun around, ready to fire the revolver at the hideous monstrosity she knew must be coming at her, and instead found herself staring down the barrel of a long, thin rifle poking out of the half-open portal.

  3

  Their names were Due Trung and Tuan Pho.

  Both were young—their Asian features made it hard for Lito to guess their ages, but, judging by their skittish nature, he guessed even Carlos had a few months on them—and wearing sweat-stained military jumpsuits made of a shimmery brown material, the kind of getups fighter pilots wore in the cockpit.

  Only after convincing the duo they meant no harm were the soldiers willing to put down their rifles—heavily-modified AK-47’s—and introduce themselves. This part was so easy, Lito suspected they were relieved to have the company. They were obviously inexperienced soldiers, pressed into service at an early age. But they made Lito and Amber stand with their hands up on the outside of the craft while they waved a weird silver wand over them from the safety of the hatch. The device was connected to some sort of beeping PDA readout, and the two soldiers huddled over it intensely as they waited for results, the green backlight from the screen washing over their pale, round faces.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Amber asked quietly.

  “I have no idea,” Lito answered.

  Whatever the device told them, it seemed to satisfy. They let Lito bring Jericho onto their ship, where the process was repeated, then allowed all three of them to climb down the short ladder on the inside of the hatch.

  The interior of their craft was cramped and muggy, the ceiling barely big enough to stand up in, and smelled like a poorly ventilated locker room. The wal
ls looked like solid metal from the outside, but from within a narrow, transparent strip ran the length of each wall, seamlessly integrated into the design, which gave the crew a limited outside view. They had undoubtedly watched as the raft approached, and Lito and Amber climbed onto their ship.

  There were four crew seats around the interior, each in front of a complicated-looking control terminal full of screens and control panels lined with buttons and switches. All of these were powered-down and dark except for some soft-hued lighting around the edges, enough to see by. Lito spotted the crusty remains of MRE packaged dinner tins piled in one corner, the bane of the enlisted man. Due and Tuan sat nervously in two of the chairs, watching them.

  Lito leaned close enough to whisper in Jericho’s ear. “Take a look around, see if there’s anything we can use for the Runner.”

  The mechanic nodded and started to slip past a narrow bulkhead dividing the cockpit from the stern, where a tiny head the size of a closet with a metal toilet was visible, and other compartments further on. The soldier named Due stood up and shouted in Vietnamese while gesturing angrily. One hand went to the pistol holstered at his waist.

  “Hey, hey, cool it! No need for that!” Lito put his hands back in the air. He considered taking them by force, but decided it might be better to play this tactfully; after all, they needed all the allies they could get. Carefully, he reached over and used two fingers to pull the revolver he’d given Amber out of the waistband of her shorts, and set it on one of the consoles. “See, boys? Friendly. He just needs to take a piss. You got a can in this place, right?”

  There was no sign of comprehension on Due’s pinched face, but Tuan nodded after a second and gave a consenting wave. Jericho disappeared past the bulkhead, and Due plopped back down in his seat with a scowl.

  Lito turned to Amber. “Talk to these guys. See what you can find out.”

  “I told you, I don’t know Vietnamese.”

  “You know it a lot better than I do.” He glanced over her shoulder at the young soldiers. “These are the first two normal people we’ve come across. If they know anything about what’s goin on, or if they can tell us why they haven’t caught whatever those other people did, it would be helpful, don’t ya think?”