Skulls & Crossbones

by Andi Marquette

  I threw the weapon into the churning water. Hopefully, in my anger, I had taught Abdi a lesson. But, I realised, that was not me thinking—those were the cold, cruel thoughts of Mother Jamila.

  I had idolised the Pirate Queen ever since she had rescued me from the mud and blood of the Didessa river. She had been everything that I needed to be: strong, powerful, wealthy, and above all unafraid. But I learned that her strength came from her ability to instill fear in others, and her power from the same fear. Her wealth came from her power. And, I learned long ago, she was unafraid because she had suffered in every way that a woman might suffer, and survived. She understood the cruel nature of the world, which had made her country one of the poorest in the world, and had taken from her what little she'd had. A world that had made her weak, but that had also given her the opportunity to rebuild herself, become powerful in a way that only the warlords of Somalia are powerful. She was, it occurred to me, a dreadful woman. I did not want to be like her. I did not want to be halfway between a woman and a man, the source of lust or fear. I only wanted to be. I turned to lean back against the railing, as Mother Jamila had done earlier that day, and could see the tail end of the monsoon against the white horizon. The freighter's cranes and metal containers were stark and straight-edged against the sky. I turned to the north. I no longer needed a scope to see the American warship. It was immense, its sharp prow slicing through the spume frothed up by the giant's passage through the warm waters. It was close enough for me to make out its inactive searchlights, steel masts, and radar dishes. A blast from its cannon would put a hole right through our freighter. It would have taken no effort on their part to sink us, but of course they had the hostages to think about.

  It made me shiver, despite the humidity. I felt exposed and horribly vulnerable, like a fox pursued through open fields. I had the bolt-hole of the lower decks, but I did not want to push past the wounded Abdi, whose fury would no doubt be catching up with him. Thinking of consulting with Mother Jamila suddenly made me feel sick in my stomach. Something to do with what I had said to Abdi: And now you are just a thief, like Mother Jamila and me.

  I did not want to follow in Mother Jamila's footsteps. Those prints were left in clotted blood. No matter how much respect and strength Mother Jamila had, no matter how much gold, I did not want to be anything like her or Abdi, anything at all like the others of the crew.

  The heavy door inside opened with a wheel. I turned and turned it, finally

  breaking the seal, and slipped back into the darkness one last time, with the roar of the hulking warship following behind me.

  Abdi was not where I had left him, but his blood was still on the floor. Ever the fool, Abdi had never fully adjusted to the life of a pirate. He was still a militiaman at heart, and until that day, hadn't realised how stupid it was to bring a knife to a gun fight.

  Gedhi and Muhammed were standing at the junction of two narrow corridors, adjoined by the larger crew quarters and the mess, where the hostages were being held.

  "Where were you?" asked Ghedi hurriedly, his rifle weighing down both his hands. He smelled of qaat. "Mother Jamila is—"

  "I have just spoken with her," I said. "She said that we are going to fire upon the American vessel."

  "What?"

  I held up my hands. "Wait, wait—she said that we were to order the hostages onto the deck first." I hoped that my exaggerated gestures did not betray me as a liar. Ghedi is an astute man, and Muhammed an old hand at observation. "To use them as cover?" he asked dubiously.

  I nodded, pressing my lips together. The less I said, the better. I was not used to being untruthful.

  "Then we must do it quickly," said Ghedi. He was, no doubt, still enamoured with Mother Jamila after their most recent time together, as the men always were. He was still under her spell and thought her infallible as I once did.

  Ghedi went to shout at the hostages. Muhammed stepped closer to me, a shadow, and put his hand on my shoulder. Muhammed has the darkest skin I have ever seen, almost as black as oil, like Mother Jamila's.

  He said, "I have spoken with Abdi. Amina, what are you doing?"

  "I am following orders," I said, and hoped that this would be enough.

  Muhammed looked at me with narrowed eyes. His face was set and hard and there is barely a centimetre of fat on his entire body. Powerful as he was, Muhammed was only a pirate. A thief. A good man to me, perhaps, but not a respectful man. I realised that I had never respected him, or any of them, save for Mother Jamila. "Do what you must," he told me finally, and let me go.

  I unslung my rifle and began to herd the hostages onto the open deck. The others had joined us and were doing the same. Mother Jamila was elsewhere. I wondered where she could be. If she turned up now, then I would be put on the spot, and I would likely be killed—I imagined that Abdi would volunteer for this.

  Abdi looked at me out of the corner of his eye as he waved his pistol at

  the captive crew. They filed out sedately, like cattle. I hoped that what I was doing was right, and prayed to God that He would carry them through this unhurt.

  Soon, everybody was out on deck, opening their collars to the muggy heat. The crew and I moved to step out last. I stopped dead when sudden colour rippled through the spray thrown off by the waves—the red line of a laser sight.

  So the warship had come close enough for the use of long-range rifles. A sniper's line of sight cut between us and our cover. I could see the thin beam quivering in front of me, first visible and then not, and finally almost solid as a fresh crest of spray jolted up against the side of the freighter.

  "D'ey are here," I heard Ghedi say. "Get Mudda Jamila. Use d'e radio."

  I heard the click of the safety being disabled on his weapon. The noise echoed behind me as Abdi and the others did the same. I could only stare at the trembling horizontal beam of light in front of me, and I held up my hands and stepped out of the safety of the doorway. "Amina, what are you doing?" Ghedi shouted.

  "Let her go," Abdi yelled. "Let the Americans put a bullet in her head."

  The beam disappeared from my view as I stepped into it. I imagined that I could feel the burning red spot of light on my temple, denoting the path of the bullet that would kill me. But I did not stop, nor did I kneel.

  I spun on my toes and grabbed the point of Ghedi's rifle. With both hands squeezed tight around the barrel, I yanked with all my strength. It caught him off guard, and he stumbled forward. I used his own momentum to pull him deep into the crowd of hostages, who were now shouting to each other in alarm like a flock of disturbed birds.

  With Ghedi exposed, I ducked and zig-zagged through the throng and back toward the hatch. I leapt up in front of Muhammed and saw the surprise in his eyes. The muscles tensed in his chest, showing beneath his shirt. I did not grab him. I would give him his chance, and let him make his own choice.

  Abdi understood my plan. He tried to push Muhammed aside to give him room for his pistol, which he carried poorly, the hunk of metal weighing unevenly on his narrow wrist. I did not grab it like I had Ghedi's rifle—I knew that Abdi would just let go—but instead I used both my hands to slam his fist into the metal wall of the corridor. He dropped the pistol as I expected, but I had not anticipated his machete, which I thought I had thrown into the sea. Evidently, he kept two.

  I screamed as the heatless metal dropped heavily against my shoulder. I felt my collar bone break inside me and the pain as Abdi wriggled the blade free of the cleft it had made in my body. My whole right arm went limp, like a dead fish on the end of a line.

  Muhammed tried to stop him, but the narrow corridor was too tight for his huge body. Anyway, I did not think that he really wanted to stop Abdi, who ducked under Muhammed's arm and came at me with the machete. He swung his arm upward, like a man waving smoke under a bee's nest to put them to sleep. The machete caught me under the ribs with the force of a hammer, and tore up my body and through the meat of my breast. "Stop, Abdi," Muhammed was yelling. I barely hea
rd him through the screaming in my head—or was I screaming aloud? "We must kill her."

  "Stop."

  With blood pouring from my shoulder and breast, I staggered back through the doorway. My legs felt weak and detached from my body. I was surprised that I could still stand. Something frozen and painful sat in my belly, and I felt suddenly very cold. My vision greyed, and I was grabbed from behind—by Ghedi, I realised later—and pulled onto my back. I saw twin beams of red light dancing against the sky above me as I fell. Gunshots rang out and there was screaming.

  After I was pulled over, a darkness flooded behind my eyes like octopus ink. I was still conscious, or else the noises around me penetrated my dreams, because I could hear Ghedi shouting wordlessly at the warship, losing his English. He fired his gun at them, and then a different weapon was fired, and Ghedi stopped screaming. That is all I remember.

  The owners of the freighter, of course, got their boat back. They never had to make a claim, and General Average never had to be involved. One of my interrogators told me that the general was not a person, but some ancient maritime law that protects the victims of crimes at sea. The Navy and maritime companies were very secretive about it, though, and I have come to accept it as something mysterious but benevolent, helping people like the poor Chinese captain.

  The warship had been authorised to use deadly force. They fired upon us under Resolution 1838, a new piece of legislation that allowed military force to suppress acts of piracy in the Somali region. I had never heard of it—none of us had—and if only the message had been spread, perhaps there would be fewer opportunists off the coast of Africa, taking easy pickings without risk. I read in a newspaper the next day that all of the hostages were released, but none of Mother Jamila's crew escaped. Ghedi, Abdi, Ekevu, and Sefu were shot by snipers and killed. I was glad to hear that Muhammed surrendered and was not killed. Like me, he went to jail, though they were not as lenient with Muhammed as they were with me. Thambo and Nathaniel also lived. Nobody discussed Mother Jamila herself. She was never mentioned in any of the newspapers, though on the television, a news reporter said that our crew had been led by an infamous Pirate Queen similar to Cheng Chui Ping, the Chinese snakehead who smuggled human cargo in and out of China until the turn of the millennium. They never said if Mother Jamila had been caught or killed.

  I like to think that she had sensed my betrayal and took her leave of the freighter, leaping into the Indian Ocean without her boots. She would have chosen not to swim back to the Horn of Africa, but out to sea, where all there was were waves and seabirds, circling and cawing in the sky. If she did, my rational mind tells me that she would have died and sunk to the seabed miles below the surface.

  But I do not feel as though she has died. I feel that she lives still.

  The After

  Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin

  Hutchins and I came upon the house at sunset. Red clapboard, brilliant in the fiery light, it sat downslope in a pasture hard with ice. Only the loose blacktop and torn-up dirt by the side of the road indicated that anyone had been there recently.

  The truck, I thought, the truck that had roared by us not ten minutes earlier. The frozen ground hid much of its impact on the earth, but the damage to the edges of the decaying road surface was fresh. I guessed the truck had been parked close to the house and then driven up the slope before growling past us.

  Other than the small group of flagellants we had hidden from, the occupants of the truck were the only people we had seen all day. There had been nothing to scramble behind or under, no bush or tree, no rock or knoll. We had instead shuffled as far as we could into the bare field, away from the noise of the approaching engine, but the large, grimy vehicle was around the bend in no time.

  We should have dropped to the ground the moment we'd heard it. Pretending to be dead had worked before. But our wintry joints and brains weren't responding quickly, and we'd stood like prey stiffened with fear as the truck slowed down and someone on the passenger side of the cab leaned out the window to look at us.

  The dusky face and big, dark Afro with a streak of white on the side could have belonged to either a man or a woman, but something told me the person was female. With a hand extended out the window, she'd given a signal to someone in the open-bed back, and I'd noticed suddenly the two long-barreled guns sticking out through wooden slats that had been mounted to increase the height of the sides. The barrels withdrew. The person in the cab continued staring at us until we were out of sight.

  Now, I eyed the house and said to Hutchins, "What do you think?" The approaching night promised snow.

  "I think they're gone," he said. "We have to take our chances."

  We left the road and headed warily toward the simple structure.

  "Where do you suppose they got the truck?" I said. "Or the gas?"

  Hutchins shrugged. He spoke even less than I did.

  The house was farther away than it appeared, and by the time we arrived, the shadows had already pooled around it on three sides. Descending, we had seen no one on the front porch, now dark and uncertain. I could hardly feel the soles of my feet despite two layers of socks inside the thick work boots, and I lagged behind Hutchins, who by now understood that my slowness was due neither to fear nor reluctance. He waited for me to catch up.

  The month was at full moon. If it were not for the advancing clouds, we would have that to our advantage inside the house. Last night, we had spent the night in a barn, where the smell of animals was still strong and comforting. Hutchins and I always tried to take turns keeping watch, but we usually fell asleep from the day's walking and then woke up around dawn, surprised at the silence, as if we were not used to it by now.

  Removing the hatchet from his belt, Hutchins glanced at me. I had already taken the steel rod from its makeshift scabbard on the side of my rucksack and held it ready, its icy metal sticking to my skin through the holes in my gloves. I nodded. We went up the wooden porch stairs, our footsteps impossibly loud.

  I peered into the darkness on either side of the screen door, then followed Hutchins into a large room with a staircase straight ahead. With no flashlight or candles, we waited for our eyes to adjust. The curtains had been torn from the windows. Some hung in shreds from narrow rods that I considered taking because their ends could be sharpened.

  Together, we searched the room on the right, not speaking, not needing to. Most of the furniture was gone, but two chairs with broken cane seats and a sofa without cushions had been pushed against the walls. The baseball cap jammed onto my head did nothing to protect my ears from the winter that sent its breath through the broken windows.

  More than anything, I wanted a cup of hot tea. Plain hot tea, steaming, unsweetened. I craved it the way I could no longer crave anything else, as if it represented everything that had been forfeited. Hutchins and I got along well, though I didn't particularly like him. He had a penchant for teary reminiscences of a world we might never see again, but I trusted him. The yen for hot tea, constant now and growing, was my link to his unwillingness to forget.

  He was built large, much bigger than me. Next to him, I looked like a boy instead of a man only slightly younger. In addition to a hatchet, he carried a crowbar and a partially serrated fixed-blade knife. I, too, carried a knife, something I had found in a kitchen we'd stayed in, but it rarely left my rucksack because I couldn't depend on my hands to have enough sensation to grip it so that it wouldn't be turned against me. Like my feet, they had fallen to this strange neuropathy since the cold set in. That Hutchins and I were among the living was miracle and nightmare enough. He showed no symptoms, and the numbness was my only one.

  The house smelled bad, almost fetid. Hutchins approached the doorway to the next room and stopped.

  "Something died in here," he said quietly.

  It was the living I feared, though we'd had to use the crowbar only twice. I thought of the woman with the big Afro and wondered if she would have spared us had we surprised her and her friends in the house.
I doubted it. "Keep going."

  The second room was a small kitchen. If the rest of the house was clear, we would come back and search the cabinets for matches and food, unlikely as we were to find any.

  The back door by the battered porcelain sink was nailed shut with two-by-fours. Someone had succeeded in prying one of them loose, but the others held strong. Probably nothing could come in the back way while we were here.

  In the third room, the remnants of a dining table were splintered across a large area rug. The last slivers of light from the departing sun needled onto the floor through the cracked French windows.

  "What's that?" I said.

  A long, bundled shape lay a few feet from the table. Its filth evident even in the dying light, the indeterminate humanoid form was wrapped in rags and slightly curled, as if it had attempted a fetal position but the tattered layers had interfered. "Poke it," Hutchins said.

  With the steel rod I gently prodded the middle of the form, then, more firmly, the right end.

  "Frozen," I said.

  "Give me that." Hutchins took the rod and slammed it down on what was either the feet or the head.

  "Jesus, Hutch!" I backed up a step. I had taken the pipe from steel fencing that was new and uncorroded. Used the right way, it could kill a person. That's why I carried it. But it disturbed me that it was Hutchins who had whacked a dead or near-dead body with it—he, who still wept openly about his wife and baby.

  "Just making sure," he said. He handed back the rod. We looked at the thing on the floor, and I felt something vile rise inside me. No face was visible, no hands, no limbs. I had thought I was becoming used to this sort of sight, and that Hutchins was hardening, too. Now, we glanced at each other and I could feel his reluctance.