Read Dead Sea for Free Online Page B

That he often treated local workers like slave labor. On his last project, Saks had been accused of raping a village girl. He had also been accused of causing the deaths of three local men in a blasting accident. The story went that Saks had set the charges to clear a shelf of rock that was obstructing the road there were laying … but neglected to inform the workers.
    Saks was, in essence, a public relations nightmare.
    The sort of man who could give Fisk Technologies and its parent, Fisk International, a bad reputation. Still, Fisk used him. He was always the lowest bidder. But on this job, Cushing was put in place to watch him.
    Cushing didn’t like it.
    But he owed everything to Fisk.
    So he was going to watch and learn.
    Of course, if Saks learned about any of it and the rumors were true, Cushing was a dead man. Crocodiles and snakes would be the least of his worries.
    Laying there, he thought about death.
    Felt it reaching out for him …

12
    The ship was now thoroughly encased in the fog.
    Even the running lights only cut into its churning, drifting mass a few feet. Gosling stood there, watching it, feeling it, getting to know it. It didn’t look much like any fogbank he’d ever been through before. It was too yellow, too luminous. He’d never seen mist sparkle like that, almost as if there was electricity in it, some kind of surging, dormant power. And it was cold.
    Jesus, cold like a blast of air from a freezer or an icehouse.
    Abnormal.
    And it left an almost wet, slimy residue on the skin. And that wasn’t right. It was crazy fog, this stuff. And, deep down, he knew it was bad. He knew it was what had knocked out their radio, had made their compass go crazy, shutdown the GPS. The very idea of that compass not being able to find magnetic north, just spinning aimlessly, bothered him in ways that he couldn’t even begin to fathom.
    Lighting his pipe, he studied the fog more intently. It seemed not to be just blowing past them now, nudged by unseen winds, but actually
mushrooming
before the bow. Spiraling and twisting and sucking like some awful vortex that the ship was being inexorably drawn into.
    And the smell.
    What was that awful stink?
    A thick, organic smell of swamps. Rotting vegetation and hot, putrid decay. A high, wet stench that reminded him of tidal flats and putrefying things vomited onto beaches. It grew stronger and stronger until he had to lean against the pilothouse with dry heaves clawing up his throat.
    And then … worse.
    A pungent, cloying chemical odor of methane, ammonia, fetid gas. He went to his knees, gagging, his lungs rasping for something breathable. But it was no good. It was like trying to breathe through a mouthful of mildewed weeds. The air had gone too heavy or too thin. It was wet and dry, polluted with a loathsome stink, blighted and rank.
    Gosling’s head spun with crazy lights and a screaming white noise. His skull was echoing with something like the clatter of a thousand wings flapping and flapping until it felt like his head was going to burst.
    And then he was breathing again, gasping for breath. The stink, the bad air just a memory. He laid there by the pilothouse door until his head stopped pounding.
    He didn’t know what had just happened.
    But, mentally, he filed it under worst case scenario.

13
    “What the fuck is this?” Saks said when he made it out on deck a few minutes later. He took a moment or two to check out the fog, dismissed it, and grabbed Gosling by the shoulder, spinning him around. “You,” he said. “I’m talking to you, mister. What the fuck is this?”
    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