Captain Marks awoke the following evening from a terrible
dream. It was six hundred years prior,
he was at sea, a cabin boy on his first sailing vessel. His parents, like himself almost a lifetime
later, had been taken by servants of the Nine as food. By the time he had been taken, he had been
captain of his own ship for twenty years.
That had made him valuable. His
parents hadn’t been so lucky. He could
see over and over again in his mind the unspeakable horror that they must have
endured, being bled out. Being passed
around as food at a Council feast. The
groping hands. The constant and
repetitive bites. At the neck, wrists,
upper thighs where the veins ran down the legs. Their screams the symphony that had entertained the masses
assembled at the gathering. Much like
his own experience had been. But he had
been lucky, where his parents had not.
His father was a simple cobbler.
His mother, a barren housewife who couldn’t have children after her
first pregnancy. Captain Marks climbed
from his hammock as the last of these images faded from his now conscious
mind. He looked around his sparse
cabin, the few things that he had kept as mementos throughout history adorned
the walls. An oil portrait of the
infamous pirate Black Beard, whom he had contracted to do certain jobs for the
Council. His old cutlass from the days
when such weapons were a sailor’s means of survival on the high seas. A small glass display case with several
Spanish pieces of eight, all in mint condition, all from his personal treasury
from years past. He stepped into his
boots, black, and made from well oiled heavy leather and began to lace
them. Captain Marks pulled on a heavy
wool sweater on his way to the bridge, where he knew that it couldn’t have been
more than a few brief moments past sunset.
He reached for the knob and pushed open the door. As he stepped through and onto the bridge,
he noticed there was no one there.
Before Captain Marks had managed to pull the door closed behind him, he
heard a whooshing sound from off to his right.
He wheeled towards the sound, in time to see his First Mate, the man who
piloted the ship during the daylight hours, swinging a large wrench at his
face. Captain Marks raised his hands to
ward off the blow as he tried to drop to the ground, but to no avail. The wrench caught him full on in the arms
and he could feel the bones breaking as it struck. The wrench pushed his ruined arms into his nose, breaking it as
well, and sending him to the floor where he lay, dazed. He tried to clear the fog from his head, but
before he could get his battered body back under his control, he felt something
slam through his chest. Captain Marks
tried to cry out, but he could draw no air to scream. The last thing he saw as his eyes fluttered open was the wrench
coming down towards his already smashed face.
Stephan awoke to a thud on the deck almost directly above
him. It was a hard thud, like someone
falling. There was next to no roll to
the ship as it cut through the water on it’s third and final day before it
reached the Atlantic. He noticed that
Kate was sleeping contentedly on her side, she still had him pinned between her
and the wall like she had during the days before. She was snoring softly, and Stephan watched the rise and fall of
her chest as she breathed. His
sensitive ears caught what sounded to him like a struggle of some sort on the
deck above. After the first thud, there
was a second, louder, one that reverberated across the ceiling, like something
had been used to strike the floor. Ever
so gently, he slid the blankets off of him, and wiggled out from behind
Kate. She stirred slightly as he
crawled over top of her and off the bed.
He dressed quickly, pulling on only the pair of jeans that he had worn
the night before. The gun he now kept
in the top of his duffel in the closet, still loaded, but he hadn’t thought
that he would have a need to carry it until they arrived at their
destination. He went to the closet and
fetched it, stuffing it into the front of his jeans then slipping the baldric
that held his sword off the hook on the back of the door. Too many years of being an outlaw had led
him to believe that you don’t take chances, especially when it’s you that could
end up paying the price for being lax.
As he dropped the baldric over his head and adjusted how the blade
rested on his back, Kate stirred.
Stephan looked in her direction, and seeing her eyes open, he motioned
her to be silent. She nodded, choosing
to slip from under the covers and fetch her shirt from the floor, where he had
tossed it the night before. Stephan
couldn’t help but think of the feel of her naked skin beneath his fingertips as
he watched her dress, trying to listen for anything on the deck above. She really was going to be the death of him
yet; he just couldn’t keep his thoughts on what was important if she was
around.