by Cole Alpaugh
To Butter, the booming voice of Jesus provided a thread of hope from her lost life. Her village elders had spoken of a man named Jesus, recounting stories from the flying soldier. Jesus was the son of a great god and possessed his own magical powers to heal, although this man smelled an awful lot like the toilet pit after a heavy rain. Butter recalled the thick book written about him that her mother guarded. It was the fattest of them all, which meant it was the most important. But it would have washed away in the big wave, as lost and dead as her injured animals and everything else that had been her life.
Butter was overwhelmed by all the sad thoughts. She gave in to the darkness, the heat, and the cold. She had no fight left, no will to think, or even to live. And all the pain and mourning thankfully lifted, leaving her completely hollow. She slept, dreamless, for a week.
Chapter 12
The fifteen-meter Julius Caesar had been working as a small commercial fishing boat until it was hijacked by two drunken small-time Fijian crooks. The keys had been left in the ignition, so it was just a matter of untying a few knots, throwing her into reverse. A new scourge of the South Pacific was born.
Ratu and Jope were now valiant pirates, hard at work lugging their spoils, having recently pillaged the JetPoint Supacentre—one of Fiji’s largest supermarkets—after a cleaning lady had grabbed a smoke and left the loading dock door ajar. This bit of fortune occurred when they’d cut through a back alley after selling two bags of crank for gas money for the boat. They had lingered behind the Supacentre when Jope noticed one of the rooms in the cat house didn’t have a curtain pulled all the way down. Some cash, a quick glimpse of naked boobies, and they were all but invited inside a closed store filled with every imaginable item.
Luck seemed to be popping up everywhere for the twenty year old bandits. Forgotten keys and unlocked doors every which way they turned.
In near pitch dark, Ratu and Jope piled their ill-gotten gains onto the deck of the moored Julius Caesar, an eerie glow emanating from the tiny dials of some three hundred Timex Indiglo watches. An orange tint reflected from the dozens of bags of shanghaied Cheetos, sustenance for their upcoming high-seas enterprise. They had moved the fully equipped charter fishing boat to a public dock on the shadier side of town, making sure not to leave the keys in it while continuing their crime spree.
What better next step than to parley their fortune on the wide-open eastern waters, out where the luxury yachts floated exposed and unprotected. It had been Ratu’s idea, copycatted from recent newspaper stories warning high-end yacht owners of a rash of strong-armed robberies by moonlight raiding parties.
“Read the middle part again,” begged Jope, a young man who—while suffering through his early childhood years being beaten by his father and selling five dollar bags of dope to backpacking tourists—had never picked up the art of reading.
“Okay, Jope, lemme see,” Ratu said as he crouched over the wrinkled newspaper article on the bare wood floor of their shithole, one-room efficiency. “ ‘The pirates came aboard as we slept and I woke to a heavy blade pressed across my throat by a large black male. I’ve never been so frightened in my life,’ fifty-seven year old Stuart Bendellman, a retired venture capitalist now living in New Caledonia, told police.”
“Yeah, man!” cheered Jope. “Adventure communist gotta be some dumbass white guy, don’t ya think, Ratu? I bet he never wanna see another brother long as he lives! You think the heavy blade was a sword? I bet it was a big sword with a curve in it. The pirate coulda gone chop, chop, and that white guy woulda been hamburger. I’m hungry.”
“And there’s lots more big yachts out there, Jope,” Ratu said to his best friend. “All of them sitting ducks, beggin’ to be plucked.”
“Read it again, Ratu!” Jope was so excited that he peed himself a little as he reached into his cut off jeans for another small bag of crank. It was tough to get ahead in the world when you snorted most of your product. “Read the middle part again.”
Out at the dock on their heisted boat, Ratu battened down the watches and stowed the Cheetos, then climbed up to the pilot house to start the engine. Jope was in the seat to his right. They headed due north before realizing the navigational map was upside down.
“Easier if we had one of them maps that says ‘you are here,’ with a big red arrow.” Jope was holding the map sideways, trying to make sense of the legend. “Look, it says we’re like ten centimeters from where you wanna go. We could take my dick, just walk on it like it was a gangplank!”
“You doin’ too much crank. Fuckin’ up your head.”
“I couldn’t find the Cheetos.” Jope turned the map over, examining the blank side closely.
“What are you looking for?”
“Maybe it’s a treasure map.”
“It’s just a regular map.” Ratu steered the pirate ship away from the Suva city lights, avoiding other boat traffic.
“I won a gift certificate for CDs on a Cap’n Crunch treasure map. I took the box to the store, but they said it was real old, no good anymore.”
“That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It’s okay, I don’t got a CD player, anyway. But then the store manager says ‘Hey, I know you. You was in here shoplifting two days ago.’ I said, ‘No way, man, it was a guy looked just like me.’ Big dude starts coming around the counter, saying ‘You stay right there,’ just like he said two days ago.”
“Did you get anything good?”
“Couple of CDs, but I don’t got a CD player.”
It was a three-hour, teeth-rattling trek over choppy seas to Makutu, then another sixty kilometers southeast to where luxury yachts were often seen adrift at night, following their long days of pure sailing in the wide-open waters. Paths bisected by lowly fishing vessels, the multi-million dollar jewels tacked slowly, artfully, then came about in tight, impatient arcs, sails gorging with the weight of the wind as they began to run full-out, slicing the sea with abandon.
The pirates approached an enormous main-topsail schooner, its elegant eastern pine and red oak hull gleaming in starlight. The newbie buccaneers snuck up as stealthily as they could, despite the diesel engine that blatted from cheap fuel and the lack of any recent tuning.
“Now! Kill it now!” Ratu called up to his partner and turned back to the closing ship.
Jope killed the engine, let momentum carry the Julius Caesar the final quiet meters, as Ratu leaned out over the bow railing and absorbed the impact of the exquisite hull with both hands.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jope hissed, practically diving feet first down the ladder from the pilot house.
By boarding the sleepy yacht so brazenly, with no plan and no idea of how many armed bodyguards the wealthy owner might have in his employ, the pair was riding their recent luck. As they jumped over the side railing and onto the shadowy foredeck, the pirates brandished the matching track and field starter pistols they’d snatched from the JetPoint Supacentre sporting goods aisle. Both, dressed in old denim cut-offs, were shirtless and bare-footed, moving quickly for cover behind the large, double capstan, the drum-like machine used to wind in ropes. Their black skin helped them blend into the dark horizon beyond.
“Everybody’s sound asleep,” Ratu guessed, as they huddled at eye level in the wheelhouse of the tethered Julius Caesar.
“How many you think?”
“Could be none or could be forty, who knows? We just gotta take charge, tell them we’ll shoot anyone right between the eyes if they don’t do what we say.”
“My gun ain’t real.” Jope turned the realistic looking pistol over in his hands. “I think it only shoots caps. Did you bring any caps? Mine got all wet.”
“We don’t need real guns. We don’t want nobody getting shot.”
“If they have guns, we’ll get shot.”
“Nah, no real guns on a big boat like this. These are rich white people. They maybe got a spear gun with their scuba gear, and a couple of flare guns.”
“I seen a guy who got shot with a flare g
un.” Jope nearly dropped the gun; his fingers seemed to have taken on a jittery life of their own. The drugs had left him a paranoid, nervous wreck. Committing his first act of piracy on the open sea had pushed him right to the edge. “It was worse than a real gun, Ratu. He caught fire. I don’t ever wanna catch fire like that.”
“Stop worrying about everything. This is a piece of cake.”
“His woman ran off with a big, fat bastard from Labasa,” Jope continued, the pair still hunkering behind the double capstan. “Got drunk down at Timi’s place and pulled the damn thing out of his pants. Was waving it around, saying he gonna kill that fucker who stole his woman. Went off by accident, ricocheted off the bar and hit him in the guts.”
“Oh, yeah, I heard about that.”
“Place burned right to the ground.” Jope shook his head. “Poor guy looked like a burned up marshmallow.”
“Okay, so no problem.” Ratu gently patted his friend on the back. “Listen, you see a flare gun, you leave it alone, okay?”
“Spear gun no good, too. I once heard about this guy …”
“Look, there aren’t any guns on this boat, okay?” Ratu tried to calm his shaking partner. The longer they waited, the greater the risk of someone wandering up on deck for some night air. “These rich white people have butlers and nannies, not guards. They got maybe one or two babysitters taking turns making sure no birds start building a nest anywhere. Nothin’ to worry about.”
“You promise, Ratu?”
“C’mon, Jope, we gotta find the companionway down to the quarters.” Ratu rose to his feet, his starter pistol again held out in the lead. “It’s time for us to get rich, Jope. No guns to worry about. Follow me and stick real close.”
The Fijian pirates’ run of good luck was about to be seriously tested. The fore hatch clicked open three meters ahead, its well-lubricated hinges perfectly silent. One of the two highly-trained babysitters on board was lifting it from beneath with the top of his head. Both of the man’s hands were busy steadying the AK-47 that took aim squarely in the middle of the first pirate’s chest.
The babysitter squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 13
Dicky Miller’s mood had swung a hundred-eighty degrees since opening his mail at lunchtime. The article he’d submitted to Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a prestigious monthly scientific journal, had once again been rejected, this time with a brief handwritten note saying: “Please stop submitting this. Thanks!”
Miller’s article claimed something fishy was going on inside Earth’s moon. The amateur astronomer’s article broke the news that the shadowy Whipple crater, the second closest crater to the moon’s North Pole, was actually a 15.7 kilometer hatchway to a hollow storage area. Miller’s paranoid schizophrenia—medicated only by an occasional Bayer Aspirin—had fueled the belief that Pakistani leaders were in cahoots with an alien race of cosmic collectors. The aliens were hoarding items from Earth, and the Pakistani government was the enabler, allowing the remote mountains of the Hunza Valley to be used as a staging area for stealthy raids on Earth’s treasures. Missing were entire Japanese skyscrapers, natural monuments from North Africa, and whole herds of Australian beef cattle. In his article Miller conceded he’d only just begun to tap the depth of the conspiracy, but he had thousands of slightly blurred photographs taken with his Meade LX90 telescope showing the comings and goings from the lunar portal.
Miller didn’t help his chances for publication by writing the twenty-seven thousand word article backwards, aided by his bathroom mirror, entirely in red pencil (aliens have a hard time seeing the color red), lest it be intercepted and fall into the wrong hands.
Miller was standing over his telescope’s tripod in the backyard of his one bedroom rental home in Borroloola, Australia, a remote fishing village in the Northern Territory. His mood of bleak rejection had shifted to elation when one of the other phenomena he’d been observing came zooming across the night sky in all its infinite glory. He watched the first flares of what he had christened in a letter to The Astronomical Society of the Pacific as the Camel Meteor Shower.
Miller had named the event for the Camelopardalis, or Giraffe constellation, whose nearest star, GJ 445, is seventeen and a half light years from Earth, off at the far edge of the Milky Way. As a middle school student he’d learned that meteoroids burning up in Earth’s atmosphere don’t really come from distant constellations but are named for the general direction from which they initially appeared. It would take our fastest rocket ship about a quarter-million years to reach GJ 445, so nobody would be heading there any time soon, Miller’s sixth grade science teacher had long ago explained.
Dicky Miller had plotted a small comet’s trajectory, calculated to the very minute when Earth would intersect its debris field. And the Camel Meteor Shower was right on time, precisely as forecast. Everything had unfolded perfectly for Miller for what may have been the first time in his life. Except that three weeks earlier he’d forgotten to mail the letter documenting his prediction. The stamped envelope meticulously documenting his astronomic event sat under the sugar bowl in his sparse kitchen. It would remain undiscovered for days or maybe weeks—until he ran out of sweetener and took the bowl for a refill.
* * * *
Across the South Pacific, stories would be passed down through generations about how the night sky had gone brighter than any mid-summer day, forever blinding those islanders unlucky enough to be looking up when one particularly speedy piece of meteor ignited in Earth’s atmosphere.
On the small coral island of Tarluga-Ben, a woman gave birth at the very instant the kilometers-long meteor trail was at its brightest. The duteous native islanders deemed the baby their future king, a special-delivery from the Celestial Gods to be waited on hand and foot. Up until his thirteenth birthday, the revered King-in-Waiting was given any of the other island children’s toys he showed so much as a fleeting interest in, was never criticized or corrected, and was bathed in constant praise. A week shy of coronation, and with a National Geographic reporter and photographer recently arrived, the horribly spoiled, mollycoddled adolescent brat set fire to the community toilets during a petulant fit over the temperature of his coconut milk. The stinking destruction occasioned a meeting of the elders, who reassessed the true meaning of the supernatural flash in the sky. “It was the sun which had fallen from the sky, and the little bastard’s birth was mere coincidence,” proclaimed the oldest. No one bothered to point out that the sun had seemed just fine that next morning, and every day of the subsequent thirteen years. The prospect of a sixty or seventy year reign under the evil little reprobate who hadn’t thought twice about torching the village johns trumped astral superstition, hands down.
* * * *
On the deck of the shadow-filled luxury schooner, the pirates’ luck held out, despite their being tremendously outgunned. Their cap gun starter pistols would only really be considered weapons if they were tossed with exceptional force, and even then only if they hit someone in the eye. On the other hand, the schooner’s armed babysitters’ AK-47 rounds traveled at a much deadlier sixty-seven hundred meters per second. The three meters separating them would have taken almost no time at all, and the damage would have been significant and permanent—the pirate’s chest being much softer than the bullet about to be fired.
But eighty kilometers above the open ocean something smaller than the AK-47 bullet, traveling a hundred times faster, was about to cause a major hullabaloo all over the South Pacific. There were thousands of pieces of space dust in this debris field, but one burned hundreds of times brighter than all the rest. This speck of dust was roughly the size of a dragon fruit seed, but with a meteorite, it wasn’t size that mattered, it was speed.
The tiny rock that hurtled through the vacuum of space at seventy kilometers per second, making for an incredibly bright display as it burned in the friction of Earth’s atmosphere, was a complete surprise to the luxury schooner’s heavily armed babysitters, who knew no
thing about astronomy and couldn’t care less.
The pirates’ good fortune held, for the brilliant flash of the meteor simultaneously burned the retinas of both armed schooner babysitters, the second one having assumed the flank position, also leveling an AK-47 at the first pirate. Whether their blindness was permanent or temporary quickly became immaterial, because both highly trained killing machines stumbled overboard and sank from the weight of their bullet proof vests.
“What just happened?” Ratu said. He thought he might have seen a pair of ninjas jump overboard without resurfacing. Rich white folk were indeed strange creatures.
“I think something blew up in the sky.” Jope searched the stars above. It had all happened behind their backs, causing the schooner deck to be filled momentarily with frightening, disconcerting shadows. “Maybe a UFO?”
“No, I mean what just jumped off the boat?”
“I didn’t see nothing.”
“C’mon.” Ratu waved the starter pistol and Jope followed. “Hoist the Jolly Roger. Time to do some serious pillaging, Matey!”
“What’s a Jolly Roger?” Carefully stepping over a coil of furling line, Jope let Ratu lead him into the darkness.
“You’re a shitty pirate,” Ratu said to his friend, without any real malice, as the pair climbed down the nearest hatch and into the belly of the deserted yacht.
Chapter 14
The fifteen-meter Julius Caesar was loosely moored to the swanky, forty-two meter schooner and doing one helluva job on its expensive hull. Each swell caused rough kisses, nicks and dents that would be an absolute bear for the owners to have buffed out.