Hell Rig by J. E. Gurley Read Free Book Online

read and the voice said nothing of him, but he would watch him just the same. His eyes were as dark as shadows and Waters trembled when the eyes came to rest on him. The cold of them burned like venom.
    Avoiding the deeper shadows, Waters stalked the platform like a shadow himself, reliving that terrible afternoon when his life had become unglued. Soft sobs came from him as he mumbled quietly to himself, remembering.
    First, working alone on the saltwater injection manifold, miles from the main rig, windy, cold, rain soaked as Hurricane Katrina bore down. Then, the frantic radio call from rig boss Trey Dixon claiming the Digger Man had gone mad, killing, murdering, burning. He remembered the cold horror as he listened to Digger Man kill Dixon and the sepulcher voice that wasn’t Digger Man’s warning, “You’re safe now, Waters, but don’t come back or you’re mine.”
    He knew he had to go back to the rig, if only to act as a witness to their deaths. Smoke, black and gritty, swept low by the gale, wrapped the landing dock, heaving like a wounded beast in its death throes as he tied up his boat. The bodies seemed unreal, Halloween props placed haphazardly about the rig for maximum shock value. The crew shack was a mound of molten steel smoldering on the deck, its grisly contents invisible but present in the stench that hung over the rig in spite of the wind. Invisible hands had drawn him toward the crane, to Digger Man’s crucified, eyeless corpse hanging in Messiah-like penitence.
    The voice in his head had not been Digger Man’s, had not been human. It called to him in symbols and visions so horrible he swooned. He felt his mind slipping away and ran blindly for the boat, for escape, remembering nothing more until he awoke strapped to the hospital bed. Now, he was back and the horrors were just beginning again.
    Chapter Five
    Lisa Love read the faded labels on the tumbled pile of drums in the warehouse by flashlight and checked them off on-by-one on her clipboard. There were oil solvents, lubricants, surfactants, biocides and corrosion inhibitors. Most of the drums were intact. A few, tossed by the wind, had small pinhole leaks. These she temporarily sealed with leaded tape. A few blue plastic drums of acid had leaked and etched their outlines on the concrete. They would have to be loaded into special 55-gallon plastic drums sealed for later removal. She found no extra drums of diesel fuel, which they needed badly.
    Three drums were unmarked, their labels washed away by the rain, but by sloshing them around she suspected they were different grades of motor oil or hydraulic fluid. She would have to run down the serial numbers on the inventory sheet to identify them, a long and laborious process, and she was too tired to continue. It had been a long, exhausting day. Her head and back ached and her eyes itched behind her safety glasses. She wanted to rub them, but her heavy rubber gloves prevented that small luxury. The drums were safe for now, providing no one tossed a cigarette butt onto them. Half of them contained flammable materials.
    A sound, like the scuffing of heavy boots on concrete startled her. She turned and shined her flashlight around the room, seeking the source of the sound. The shadows moved slowly away from the beam of light, like a viscous liquid, but revealed nothing. As the beam swept by one particular spot, the shadows coalesced into a face with no eyes. Startled, she reversed the light, but when her flashlight returned to that exact spot, the face was gone, reabsorbed into the shadows.
    “Who’s there?” she asked in a shaky voice. There was no reply. Behind her, a dark tendril oozed from the shadows, becoming a hand and lightly caressing her hair. She jerked around but saw nothing. She shook her hair to remove an invisible insect before recalling that she had she had not seen a single insect, bird, rat or spider since their arrival on the rig. That in itself was an oddity on an oil rig.
    She