by J. B. Hawker
Inching along behind Bunny and Marki, Max felt the time go agonizingly slow. The distance stretching out between them and the door never seemed to shrink.
In this virtual time warp, his mind seemed to split, with one part vigilantly tracking their surroundings and the other reviewing his entire life. Looked at from this perspective, his life seemed to hold more regrets than accomplishments. Max was proud of being a successful man. He had risen to the top of his profession, had a series of attractive wives and all the toys that money could buy. However, scuttling across the deck in front of him, right now, were the living embodiments of his failures as a husband and father: the real measure of a man.
If they got off this ship alive, that was going to change. Max vowed to do what he could to make amends to his daughter and to be the husband Bunny deserved. He silently cried out to God in remorse, begging for the chance to make amends.
At that moment, Marki’s hand slipped as she crawled and she bumped against a stack of deck chairs, sending them slithering and crashing to the deck.
There was a shout and shots rang out.
“Run for the door, but keep down!” Max shouted.
Behind him Strother and Virginia were already crouched over running for their lives.
A quick glance showed Max that Franz was not following suit. Instead, the older man was moving swiftly toward the pirates, brandishing the knife and screaming at them in German.
Warren shouted at him to get down and shot a spray of bullets at the pirates to give Franz cover.
Franz turned to Warren shouting “Go! Now! I go to Analise! You escape!”
As he shouted, he ran full bore into the closest pirate, stabbing him in the chest before dropping in a hail of bullets.
Not wanting to waste the brave man’s sacrifice, Warren and the others did as they were told, running as quickly as possible to the stairway door.
Shots rang out and bullets ripped into the bulkhead close to the fleeing prisoners, but all managed to get through the door before Warren slammed and bolted it.
“Find cover, fast! They will soon get through this door or come around. We have to hide. Get to the lower decks,” he directed.
Just reaching the third deck down, Sammy and Celine heard what sounded like gunfire. Panting, Celine clung to Samantha’s arm.
“Can’t we stop here and find a safe place, Sammy? I’m exhausted.”
“Didn’t you hear those shots? The pirates must have seen the others. They will be after us.”
“If they are coming after us, we need to hide right now!”
The two opened a few doors and soon realized these were the crew quarters.
Sammy opened one of the middle cabins, calculating it would be furthest from either entrance to that level. Once in the room she spied an adjoining bathroom, shared by the cabin next door. Considering two locked doors to be better than one, she went through and latched it.
“Celine, lock that door and come here. We’ll hide in this bathroom; I guess it’s as good a spot as any. At least we’ll have water if we need to be here awhile.”
After securing the inner doors, the two women tried to make themselves as comfortable as possible in the cramped space.
“I never liked playing Hide-and-Seek, even as a little girl,” Celine whimpered. “I hated the suspense and fear of being caught. I almost always ended up wetting my pants.”
“I guess we’re in the right place, then,” Sammy drawled, attempting a smile.
When the shots rang out behind them, Floyd halted the group’s downward momentum and turned to Marco.
“Give me that pistol, son, and I’ll go up and help hold the pirates off.”
Marco began to hand over the gun when Tricia interrupted.
“You can’t hold off a bunch of automatic rifles with that pea shooter, Floydie. You’d only give them another target. Come on, we’ve got to hide. They’ll be through the door and on us!”
Heeding her advice, they resumed clattering down the metal stairs until reaching what appeared to be the storage area of the ship.
“Hey, guys! Look in here,” she opened a door wider and gestured at the stacks of cardboard cartons.
“This must be where they keep the dry goods. The box labels say they have canned fruits and vegetables inside,” her husband commented.
“Hey Marco, you ever build with blocks? What say we build us a nifty fort out of these boxes of tin cans? If we set ourselves up opposite this door we can take potshots at anyone coming in.”
The others caught Tricia’s enthusiasm for her plan and started shifting cartons around to make a thick wall across from the doorway.
“I figure we need to make it about three cartons deep to stop their bullets, or at least slow them down. Make it high as you can reach, but leave a hole for Floyd to shoot through. He doesn’t need much room. I call him ‘dead-eye, Floyd,’ when we go huntin’. He’s been shooting squirrels out of trees since he was knee high.”
The group worked tirelessly, with very little chatter, and soon had a small safe-room within the stacks of grocery cartons.
Tricia surveyed the results from the doorway.
“That about does it, you guys. From here, you can’t see our hidey-hole, at all. Good work.”
Marco was reading labels on the cartons.
“All this good food and we’ve been eating garbage. I wish I wasn’t so scared then I could eat some of these canned beans.”
“How would you open the can, kid? If we had one of the knives, instead of this pistol, we could open a can or two. As it is, they’ll just be good for throwing at the pirates, if we run out of ammo.”
“Ah, what kind of damage could you do with a can of peaches, Tricia?” her husband asked.
“Shall I show you by chucking one at your pointy head?” she countered.
“You have been very brave,” Marcella breathed. “I could not have been able to think of what to do, I’m so scared. You are saving us.”
“Hells bells. Just doing what I can to help is all,” Tricia blushed and closed the storeroom door.
The little group hunkered down in their impromptu fort to await discovery or rescue.
Chapter Twenty
Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked, from the rebellion of the workers of iniquity ─ Psalm 64:2
The pirates pounded on the stairway door then shot out the lock while their leader screamed his rage and abuse.
Max hurried his family further into the bowels of the ship. They soon overtook Strother and Virginia, who were happy to join them on the descent.
Moving so quickly down the steps, Bunny felt as though she were floating. She was on one level and, only a moment later, she was much further down. She’d been feeling disoriented since they dashed into the stairwell with bullets flying around their heads, but she smiled a greeting to Virginia and her husband, relieved they had made it, too.
Warren kept urging them all to go faster until suddenly the stairs ended. They had reached the lowest deck.
“We want to find the engine room. There should be places to hide there and we might even find some tools we can use as weapons.”
“Good idea,” Max agreed.
With one hand around Bunny’s arm and the other holding Marki by the hand, he continued to drive them forward, but now at a slightly slower pace.
As the group approached the door at the far end of a corridor in the stern of the ship, the strong stench of death and decay wafted out to greet them.
“We can’t go in there! It stinks!” Marki protested.
“That stink is going to help protect us. If the pirates get down here, they won’t want to stick around too long looking for us. They might even think that smell would keep us from hiding here. We need every advantage we can get,” Warren responded.
Inside the engine room the source of the miasma became obvious. The pirates had killed the engine room crew in their initial attack on the ship and left the men where they fell, rather than taking them up the stairs
to dispose of the bodies.
Marki gagged, covering her mouth and averting her eyes from the corpses as she followed Max across the room to where the others waited beside another door.
This was the entrance to a machine room with a large workshop area.
As Warren predicted, there were many nooks and crannies to hide them here.
Strother and Virginia quickly slipped behind a large crate that leaned up against the inner hull of the ship with just enough room for the two of them to squeeze into.
Max looked around until his eyes rested on the shadowy space behind a large turbine-like machine. There were boxes nearby he could use to block the entrance once they were safely tucked into this dark recess.
“This way, Marki, you go in first. Crawl as far back as you can.”
Once his daughter was settled, Max turned to help Bunny, but she had not followed them. He saw her still standing in the open area in the middle of the room. She seemed to be looking at something in her hand.
“Bunny, come on!” he urged, impatiently.
Bunny extended her hand toward Max and slid gracefully to the floor, emitting a small sigh.
“Bunny!”
When Max knelt beside her in the dimness, he could see something dark on her palm. He touched it and recoiled at the sticky wetness.
Max examined her hand more closely, but there was no wound. Where was the blood coming from? He ran his hand up her arm. There was more blood on her shoulder, but pulling back her shirt he could not see any injury.
“Bunny! Wake up, Sweetie,” he pleaded, holding her face gently.
His fingers encountered more sticky blood on the side of her face. Brushing her hair back, Max finally saw the gash in her hairline above her right eye.
She must have been struck by a ricochet as they entered the stairwell for the bullet to have entered from the front.
Her blood was oozing now, rather than flowing, but Max still needed to bind the wound.
He tore a couple of strips off his old work shirt Bunny was wearing and wrapped the makeshift bandage gently around her head.
“What’s going on?” Warren asked, leaning over Max.
“She’s been shot. We’ve got to get her to a doctor, or the sick bay…we’ve got to do something!”
“There’s nothing we can do. If we leave this room, we risk running into the pirates. They would kill us all, in that case.”
“But…”
“No. It doesn’t look like she’s bleeding badly. The best thing we can do is keep her safe until we are rescued. Here, I’ll help you move her into your hiding spot.”
Virginia watched from across the room, her eyes filling with tears.
“It’s just not fair!” she whispered. “I really liked her.”
“Now, now, Ginny. She was a believer, we’ll see her again. Perhaps sooner than we’d like,” her husband whispered back.
Shimbir left two of his men to guard the remaining passengers, all herded into the gated swimming pool area, and started down the stairs following the last half-dozen of his crew, his blood pounding in his ears like war drums.
“Find them and shoot them all!” he screeched, running down the steps.
He set one man searching the first level they reached and urged the others on down the next flight of steps.
On the second landing, he stopped to think, deciding only one man was sufficient here, as well.
The next deck down, he left two of the men, one going to the far end of the corridor to search the cabins on each side, while the other man searched from their end.
This appeared to be the crew’s quarters and the small cabins would be quickly searched. Many of the doors were locked, but those should succumb to a few hard kicks. This proved to be the case, as Shimbir and his companion could hear one door collapsing while they descended to the deck below.
In their refuge in the crew members’ tiny shared bathroom, Sammy and Celine began to hear the shouts and bangs as the searching pirates approached them from either side.
“S-s-sammy!” Celine hissed. “I’m so scared. They’re coming! What can we do?”
Samantha looked around frantically, trying to come up with some sort of plan of action. When her eyes lit upon the medicine cabinet, she stood up and looked inside.
“We’re in luck, CeCe! Hairspray and spray deodorant.”
She was feeling in her trousers pockets as she spoke and pulled out a disposable lighter.
“Yes! We’re in business!”
“Oh, Sammy, why do you have that old lighter? You promised to quit smoking when we got married,” Celine pouted.
“Forget about that. We have hope, now. If any pirate sticks his nose through one of those doors, he’s going to get his eyebrows singed off for his troubles, and I’ll stick him with this while he’s crying about it,” she exclaimed while brandishing Bunny’s knife.
Shimbir and the other pirate were on a deck below. Here there were storerooms, rather than the regular array of cabins, so Shimbir and his man were searching these larger rooms together. With so much equipment and so many boxes of supplies to look behind, it was taking a long time. Shimbir’s frustrations were mounting every second that passed without finding the escapees.
“You finish the rest of these rooms,” he ordered his man. “I’m going to the lower deck. The frightened mice are probably all down there, anyway. You clear this deck, quickly, then follow me down.”
While Shimbir headed down to the lower deck, two of his minions were converging on Sammy and Celine.
One pirate rattled the handle of the cabin across the corridor and walked inside, while the other attempted to open one of the rooms sharing the bathroom where the women cowered. Finding this one locked, the pirate began kicking it in.
A series of strong kicks brought the door crashing into the room.
Celine clutched at Sammy convulsively. Sammy held her fingers to her lips to keep her quiet, then handed one of the spray cans to Celine, positioning her in front of the far door and planting her own feet firmly before the entry she expected the pirate to come through first. She held her lighter tightly in one hand and the spray can in the other. The knife was thrust into the waistband of her trousers, poking her as an uncomfortable reminder of its presence.
Just when she thought she might pass out from terrified apprehension, the door handle was shaken, first lightly, then with more aggression. Sammy edged further back, so as not to be hit by the door if the pirate somehow forced it into the tiny room. She bumped against Celine and almost cried out.
After vigorous shaking and pounding failed to open the door the pirate shot the locking mechanism and the door pulled open.
The moment the door swung aside, Sammy flicked the lighter and began spraying hairspray toward the intruder’s face. The spray can became an instant blowtorch engulfing the pirate’s face and head in flames.
He pulled back and ran, howling, into the hallway.
“Get ready. There are more of them. We heard them coming from both sides, remember,” Sammy cautioned Celine.
The injured pirate’s teammate took one look at the burned man and rushed into the cabin with rifle ready.
The women had backed into the other cabin, shutting the bathroom door behind them, so the pirate found only an empty room.
He quickly kicked the door open. As he appeared, Sammy repeated her blowtorch technique from behind the door. The pirate’s hair burst into flame and he dropped his gun to try to beat the fire out.
Celine stepped forward and quickly thrust Bunny’s knife into his stomach. Unable to pull the blade back out, she left it protruding from the man, now lying on the floor, writhing in pain, while the two women quickly ran to the door to see if there were other pirates waiting outside the room.
Seeing no one in the corridor, and not knowing what else to do, the women ran up the stairs to their own cabin and locked the door, collapsing on the bed in relief, shock and exhaustion.
Fortunately, although they didn’t
know it, this deck had already been searched by the pirates, so they were in no immediate danger.
“Sammy….what if they come here, too? We should have taken that man’s gun when he dropped it.”
“Hush, now. Just you climb into bed and pull the covers over your head. I’ll keep watch. We’ve got lots of your hairspray in our bathroom and I’ve still got my trusty butane lighter. I’ll keep you safe, Little One,” she reassured her partner, adding, “I just wish we still had that knife,” under her breath as Celine obediently fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter Twenty-One
Take counsel, execute judgment; Make your shadow like the night in the middle of the day; Hide the outcasts, Do not betray him who escapes. ─ Isaiah 16:3
On the storage deck, the lone pirate’s search was bringing him nearer to the room with the canned-food fortress.
The occupants of that makeshift fort had been listening to him coming ever closer for an excruciatingly long time. They were struggling to keep silent. No one wanted to risk giving away their position.
Floyd Winston, holding the pistol, squatted behind a gap in the cartons with a clear view of the doorway. Anyone coming through that door was in for an unpleasant surprise. Being an experienced hunter, Floyd would identify his prey before pulling the trigger, in the off chance it was a rescuer and not one of their pursuers opening the door.
While the search continued below, the brigand who received the first blast from Samantha’s spray can staggered up the stairs to the open deck, where he collapsed and died.
The two guards on the deck were dismayed to see what had happened to their shipmate, but the prisoners on deck were heartened by this evidence that the escapees were fighting back against their captors.
When Warren’s band broke free, there had been grumbling among a few of the other captives who felt they had been abandoned and should have been included in the escape plan, somehow. These were heartened to see the plan might not have been simply to escape and hide, but to try to take back the ship and rescue them all.
A few of those enclosed in the pool area began to consider their current numerical advantage against the two armed guards and to wonder if they might utilize it to increase their chances of survival.