We ventured over to the stretch of beach closest to the wreckage. There was also a sandy path leading upwards, to a cliff directly overlooking the ship. Lilian and Belkross offered to take the trek up there, see if they could climb down the cliff face and onto what looked to be the ship’s hole-ridden deck. Nakoda and Paco looked after them, and then at each other, and then the halfling pointed at Paco’s lizard, “Can it swim?”
“Of course Turtle can swim,” Paco scoffed, absentmindedly rubbing sleepily at his eyes. He fell back onto Turtle’s shell, sat legs crossed. The lizard waddled lazily into the water and began paddling over to the Jenivere. using its odd tail to propel itself forward.
Show off, I thought mildly.
As Nakoda climbed up into my saddle, he said, “Okay, I know you don’t like swimming, buddy, but we can’t let them show us up-Whoa!”
I jumped into the water. He wasn’t wrong. I hated swimming. But just because I didn’t like it, didn’t mean I couldn’t. Small fish brushed through my legs as I swam, but better them than the ghostly hands I’d seen that morning. I passed by Paco’s lizard within minutes, but the effort left me breathing hard. I also wasn’t used to all of the salt in the water. It burned my eyes, blurring my vision as the ship gradually came closer into view. Its bow had smashed into the side of the cliff, with several other jagged rocks piercing its side. It was now positioned crookedly, almost as if it were seconds away from falling onto its side. The main sail had broken off. Its beam now lay over the railing, with the upper half in the water. I slowed down as we approached, eyeing the broken sail.
Seemingly having the same idea, Paco and Turtle swam past us. Despite the slippery wood, the lizard managed to climb onto the sail’s beam and began trudging upwards at an angle, using it as a bridge up to the ship proper.
“Worth a shot?” Nakoda asked me.
I snorted once and swam to the beam. It was harder for me than it had been for Turtle to get proper footing. My hooves slipped and slid as I tried to climb up. To make it easier for me, Nakoda carefully slid off my saddle and began climbing up the beam on his own. By then both Paco and Turtle were on the ship, neither giving us even a passing glance back to see if we were okay.
“You got this, Don,” Nakoda called back reassuringly. He was just a few feet shy from what was left of the railing. “Just keep calm, one foot in front of-”
Crack!
I was suddenly falling, the sound of breaking wood echoing through my ears. I landed back in the water with big, loud splash. I couldn’t stop the panicked hee-haw from bursting from my mouth as I flailed my feet back and forth to keep myself from going under.
“Donkiote!”
Nakoda’s voice pierced through the panic. At least enough for me to get my body back under control. Breathing hard, I looked up and spotted my brother hanging off the hull. He’d drawn his lance and stabbed it into the hull’s side to keep himself from falling into the water with me. He removed one hand from its grip to wave down at me. “You hurt?”
Just my pride, I thought. Now that the shock was wearing off, it didn’t feel like I’d hurt anything in the fall. So I snorted twice.
“Okay then!” Nakoda placed his hand back on the grip and then used both to swing himself straight up, yanking the lance out of the hull as he did so. He landed on the railing, wobbled slightly, but managed to find his footing. “Whoo! Made i-!”
He slipped off. I didn’t see it, but I’m pretty sure he crashed face first across the ship’s deck.
“…I’m okay!” he eventually called out, pained. After a moment, he came back into view, a line of blood trickling out of his left nostril. “Sorry, buddy, but I’m gonna follow Paco. See if we can help anybody still in the ship. He seems like he’s an okay guy. I promise to come back but,” he hesitated and then said, “but if it takes a while, go find Miss Lilian and Belkross. You understand?”
I didn’t want to, but in the end all I could do was snort once. Now that the beam was broken, there didn’t seem to be any other way for me to get onto the ship. So I had no choice but to just stay there, swimming in place.
Nakoda nodded and disappeared.
“Be careful,” I murmured, “brother-”
Nakoda’s face popped back into view.
“Almost forgot,” he said, pointing at me. “I love you, bro.”
He then disappeared into the Jenivere’s corpse for real.
I love you, too, I thought. And then, He is so going to die.
#
Nakoda didn’t die, but according to him, this is what happened up on the ship:
So, there was blood. A lot of blood. No bodies, though. Paco and his lizard were following the trail of blood smeared across the deck. Or, uh, at least the lizard was. Paco was lying across its shell, falling asleep. I hurried over, tugged on his sleeve. He cracked an eye open. “Oh, it’s you,” he mumbled. “You go on ahead. You got this.”
“Thank you?” I was about to say, but a thumping sound made me flinch back. At first I thought it was you, Don, thumping against the ship. But then it kept on going, again and again. It was coming from inside the ship. Directly below us.
“You hear that?” I began to ask Paco, but he cut me off.
“Well, we’ve seen everything we came to see here,” he said, patting his lizard’s side. “Come on, Turtle. Let’s go.”
“But,” I said, stepping in front of them, “what if that’s someone who needs help? Come on! Let’s do this! You and me!”
Paco reached out, placed a hand on my shoulder. “Trust me. There’s no one,” he said, as the thumping continued. “Absolutely no one.”
I shrugged off his hand. “But what if you’re wrong, and there is somebody,” I said. “And if there’s nobody, then I help nobody. And it hurts nobody.” It was my turn to put a hand on his shoulder. “Accomplishing nothing hurts no one. Doing nothing when somebody needs you hurts everybody.”
“No,” Paco said dryly. “It just hurts the person who needs help.”
“Exactly!”
“What, no-”
“We’re on the same page!’
“We’re definitely not-”
“LET’S GO!”
With Paco now completely convinced and on my side, we followed the trail of blood. I took the lead, with him watching my back, rifle out. It led through the door leading towards the kitchen. Sure enough, the thumping kept getting louder as we walked through the slanted hallway. The walls and ceiling were coated in sea salt, and there were a few dead fish and seaweed. It was suuuuuuuper spooky. But I definitely wasn’t scared at all, Don. Not one bit.
The kitchen was a mess. The crash had thrown everything onto the floor and left the drawers and cabinets open.
So Paco got off Turtle and started stealing stuff.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Salvaging,” he said, stuffing vials and dried foods into his coat and bag. “Might as well. Nobody else is here.”
“We don’t know that yet!” I told him.
“Then hurry up and help me grab this stuff! The quicker we do it, the quicker we can get to helping nobody from nothing, or whatever.”
I didn’t like it, but I began scooping stuff off the floor, too. There were a few healing potions, so maybe the crew was using the kitchen as a makeshift infirmary? Definitely could’ve used some of this stuff while I was puking my guts out!
And then I found the food locker, and a body fell on top of me.
I definitely did not scream. It took me a second to recognize him, but it was the cook. I got out from under him and checked him out. There were two bloody holes in him, with black veins spreading out from them. “Looks like a snake did this,” I told Paco. “Big snake. Looks like we’re dealing with a big snake. Or a vampire.”
“Fun,” he said, keeping his gun aimed at the corpse’s face.
The thumping was getting louder, more urgent. And there was another sound beneath it. Wood cracking.
As men (and a Turtle) on a mission, we hurried out of the kitchen, towards the sound. We rounded the corner and immediately spotted our enemy. It wasn’t a big snake, as I’d guessed, but another of those lobster-scorpion-monster-things! This one was twice as big as the others, Don! Red instead of pink, with a stinger nearly as long as I am tall! It was slamming its claws against the door at the end of the hallway. By then the door was super close to being cracked in half. The blood trail led through the door. Whoever the blood belonged to was hiding behind it, seconds away from being lobster food!
So, I took a deep breath, held my lance tight like Dad taught me, and charged.
But Paco beat me to it. The shot from his rifle boomed through the hallway and I swear I saw the bullet fly by face! And then SPLAT! The bullet went through the lobster-scorpion’s butt, through its stomach, and out its head, making it explode. The walls and floor and ceiling and I got completely splattered in blood and guts.
“…Thank you?” I said, turning back towards Paco. It was hard to see through the layer of blood covering my face, but I think he was smiling. Not a drop of blood had hit either him or Turtle.
“My work here is done,” he said, hopping back onto Turtle and steering the lizard around. “I’ma go take a nap outside. Scream if you need me.” He paused and then added, “Try not to need me.”
“Um, okay,” I said, watching them go. I then walked over to the door, through the lobster corpse. And then I knocked. “Hello?”
“…Who’s there,” a pained voice groaned.
“Me!” I answered. “What’s your name?”
“…A-Alton…Did you…did you slay the beast?”
“Not me. A friend did. But I helped! And we’re here to save you! If you come with us my best friend Don is waiting outside. He’s a donkey. Mostly. We can give you a ride to the beach, where we cooked more crabs too eat, if you want some…Yeah.”
The door opened and Alton limped out. He was holding his stomach. His shirt and pants were covered in blood. His blood. And there was a hole by his left shoulder, with black veins spreading up across his neck and the left half of his face. “The captain,” he wheezed. “Have you seen…the captain?”
And then he fell on top of me.
Good thing he’s a skinny guy. Made it easier to carry him back to you, Don. All in all, everything turned out okay, don’t you think?
Don? You okay, buddy? Your left eye’s twitching a bit…
#
He leaves with a nose bleed…
And comes back drenched in gore.
(Insert internal screaming here)
Nakoda and Paco tied a rope around Alton’s waist and carefully lowered the unconscious man onto me. Turtle plopped back into the water with a loud splash. So as to not get his guns wet, Paco used the rope attached to Alton to slide down onto me, and then jump over onto Turtle’s back. Nakoda cut the rope and jumped into the water. “I’ll follow after you, Don,” he said, the sea water having washed off some of the blood. He nodded to Alton. “He doesn’t look so good. Take care of him.”
I snorted once and started swimming back towards the shore, letting Paco and Turtle take the lead this time. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Lilian and Belkross walking back across the beach to reunite with us . It seemed that neither had tried to risk climbing down the cliff face to get onto the ship. Neither of them seemed particularly fazed by Nakoda’s bloody appearance. We returned to the “camp” where Paco had cooked the crabs we’d killed, and Nakoda took out a bed roll from my saddle for Alton to sleep on.
“No one else?” Lilian asked, kneeling next to the man.
“Just a dead cook,” Paco said, munching on leftover crab. “Though that doesn’t mean none of the other crew members washed up somewhere else on the island-Wait, no, what are you doing?!”
He was speaking to Nakoda. The halfling had been about tip the contents of a small vial into Alton’s chapped mouth. “Don’t waste it!” Paco snapped.
“What is it?” Lilian asked.
“Potion, I think,” Nakoda answered. He unhooked one of the pouches on his waist and handed it over to her. She took it and very carefully began to set out the vials across a small section of the bed roll. They were labelled with a jagged scrawl that I couldn’t read, but apparently she could.
Meanwhile, Paco snapped again, “Those things are valuable-”
“And meant to help people,” Nakoda shot back, still holding the vial to Alton’s lips. He glanced over at Lilan, Belkross, and me. “Right?.”
“These healing potions are more for wounds, to accelerate the healing process,” Lilian said, edging closer to Alton. She carefully tipped his head to the side so as to get a better look at the black veins spreading across his face. “He’s been poisoned. So the potions won’t do any good.”
“Oh,” Nakoda said. He then reached over and tugged up Alton’s bloody shirt, revealing a gaping wound in the man’s stomach. The edges had begun to crust over with dried blood. The only reason it wasn’t bleeding worse was because Alton no longer had that much blood to bleed. “How about this?”
Lilian shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead.”
While Paco looked on disapprovingly, Nakoda fed Alton the potion. Just like Direwolf’s wounds back in the cave, the gash in Alton’s stomach began to heal over, with the muscle stitching itself together. There was still a layer of skin missing, but at least the bleeding had stopped. Yet, just as Lilian had said, the veins of poison remained. Even so, Alton’s eyes twitched and then opened slightly. “…K-Kovack…”
“No, I’m Nakoda,” said Nakoda.
“…Na…koda…?”
“Move over a bit,” Lilian said. Nakoda did so. She positioned herself over the first mate’s chest. “knife,” she said, holding out her hand. Belkross handed her one. She used it to cut open Alton’s shirt. Some kind of barbed stinger was lodged in Alton’s shoulder. It was clearly the source of the poison. “I’m going cut this out,” she told Alton. “And I’m going to ask for something very important in return.”
“…Er…al…right,” he muttered weakly.
“Tell me your sins.”
Nakoda and Paco frowned at that, looked at each other, and then shrugged. Alton licked his lips and then chuckled, sounding delirious, “…My s-sins? I…I guess a lot of sea f-folk are a bit greedy…Or m-maybe sloth, because I-I wasn’t fast enough to stop Captain Kovack from…from-Aah!”
Lilian had managed to cut out the stinger. Blackened blood seeped from the wound and across Alton’s chest. His body shuddered, his eyes grew wide, and then he slumped back, going still.
“Looks like we’ve got emergency rations after all,” Paco chuckled, to which Lilian rolled her eyes.
She checked Alton’s pulse. “He’s alive, just unconscious.” She handed Belkross his knife back and stood up. “Whether he stays that way is up to him.” She sighed. “Yes, Nakoda?”
Nakoda had raised his hand. “So what now?”
Lilian touched her chin thoughtfully. “You didn’t find any on the ship, so we need to find a source of water. This is an island, so there could be coconuts. But finding water-water is our highest priority at the moment.” She looked to Belkross and then both turned towards the waiting jungle.
“Wouldn’t it be smarter to stay along the beach?” Nakoda asked.
“Do you want to die of dehydration?” Lilian asked back.
“Plus, sand fleas aren’t fun,” Paco chimed in.
“We need to find water,” Lilian pressed. “Once we’ve found water we can decide what to do from there.”
0 Comments