James Axler – Shadowfall

Everyone was tired from working waist-deep in the icy water, battling with the ropes of weed and the sodden wood that lay tangled together in the bay. After a snack from the supplies they’d brought from the redoubt, everyone lay in a rough circle around the fire, readying themselves for sleep.

Dean was first on watch.

RYAN WAS AWAKENED by a shake of the shoulder from Krysty. He sat up immediately, the SIG-Sauer miraculously cocked and ready in his fist.

“What?”

She kissed him on the mouth, sliding her warm tongue between his teeth. She kneeled, smiling at him, hair seeming to be ablaze in the glow of the fire, which everyone had kept burning brightly during their turns on watch.

“Nothing, lover. Just that it’s three in the morning. You’re on guard.” She lay down as he stood, tugging the collar of his coat around him against the chill night air. “Oh, and we’re nearly out of wood.”

“Doesn’t matter much.” He looked up at the great vault above them, trying to pierce the blanket of mist.

“Dawn can’t be too far away. Not worth hunting around for more wood. It’ll mostly be wet anyway.” He yawned. “See or hear anything?”

“Seals. Heard great whales moving a couple of times. Far off, but you know how sound carries at night. They were heading south. A pod of them, I think. Most amazingly mournful, moving sound. Thought I heard something moving in among that Sargasso Sea of weed in the cove, but I think it was probably just the waves, or a fish. Or something.”

“Something?” he whispered. “I’ll keep a triple careful lookout for that ‘something,’ lover.”

“Do that. Kiss before leaving.”

Ryan stooped down, brushing his lips against her cold cheek, straightening and walking past the glowing embers of the fire. He picked up some half-burned pieces of wood and lobbed them into the heart of the flames.

RYAN WALKED SLOWLY up and down for a few minutes, right at the limit of the water. The mass of weed jammed into the bay stopped the big ocean breakers, and the waves barely rippled onto the shingle. The mist had dropped visibility to less than a hundred yards. He peered out to where the mainland, if their guesses were correct, was waiting.

The raft, almost complete, lay like a tumbled cabin, odd-shaped spars and lengths of timber all bound together with the uncoiled orange rope.

Ryan looked at it, silhouetted against the dying fire, where a large balk of timber finally collapsed in on itself, sending a cascade of tiny sparks soaring skyward into the fog, like brilliant rubies.

In the stillness, he turned from the island and looked back across the cove. What had Krysty called it? A Sargasso Sea? Ryan had a vague feeling he’d heard the name before, perhaps in some old predark mag, a vast bed of weed that floated somewhere in the center of the Lantic Ocean, trapping even big, powerful ships in its clammy grasp and sentencing their helpless crews to a miserable death by starvation.

There was just enough light from a waning moon, filtering through the bank of swirling mist, for him to make out the strange writhing movement of the various chunks of flotsam and jetsam amid the clinging weeds, the sea beneath pushing and pulling below the surface.

Ryan stared more carefully into the gloom, trying to decide whether he’d possibly seen the “something” that Krysty thought she might have spotted. But the odd motion that had caught his eye wasn’t repeated.

He walked away, trying to move quietly to avoid disturbing his sleeping companions. He sat by the fire, his right hand resting on the butt of the SIG-Sauer in its holster. Somewhere above him was the redoubt, with the mat-trans unit, which set him to wondering about the strange rumors of Orientals suddenly appearing here and there in Deathlands.

His attention was suddenly distracted.

Chapter Ten

Part of the true horror of the moment was that Ryan realized he’d been sitting and looking at it for several seconds, perhaps for half a minute, before his brain finally accepted that the thing was realnot just a rippling in the water beneath the matted, tangled lengths of seaweed, not some freakish combination of the broken driftwood that was caught up in the carpet of weed.