Apocalyptic Visions Super Boxset (55 page)

With the bandana tied around his eyes, blocking his vision, all Dylan had to rely on was what he heard and felt. The pirate’s gibberish and the heavy clunk of crates and boots across the ship’s deck. The side of his face still felt tender from the hit, and the temperature of the air had dropped dramatically, letting him know the sun had long since sunk beneath the horizon. His shoulders felt tight, and his back was rigid. The restraints around his ankles and wrists were bound together, and his knees had gone numb from sitting on them for the past few hours.

The adrenaline had long run out of him, along with the mixture of grief, fear, and anger that went with it. All he could do was sit there while the image of Tank’s face plagued his thoughts until his mind was soaked with the blood that had poured out of his crewman. He’d only known the boy for a few weeks, but despite Mark’s flogging that he was worthless, Tank caught on quick.

When Dylan watched Tank from the wheelhouse, he would catch a smile creep up the side of his face when he was chumming bait or stowing a line. The boy loved the water. But when the images replayed in his mind, a hole would appear in Tank’s left cheek, and blood would spout from it and onto the deck, and his body was tossed overboard. His family and friends couldn’t even bury him.

Mark, Billy, and Dylan had remained silent during their imprisonment. None of them were willing to risk the beating or bullet they knew would come if they spoke. Even Mark’s mouth yielded after a round of thrashing from the pirates.

The dialogue between their captors suddenly turned heated. While they still spoke in their foreign tongue, Dylan knew something was wrong. The words reached a crescendo when a hand yanked off the blindfold. Dylan blinked repeatedly, his eyes adjusting to the moonlight. He looked to his left and saw that Mark and Billy were both still tied up and blindfolded. The pirate who had taken the blindfold off him dropped a map in front of him with scribbling all over it.

Dylan unfurled the map in his hands, and under moonlight he saw a circle around a small stretch of land just south of Boston on the coast. Dylan tossed the map back at the feet of the pirate. “I’m not taking you anywhere.” A right cross connected to Dylan’s face, and he stumbled from his knees to his side, bumping into Mark, who fell with him. The pirate fisted a clump of Dylan’s hair and yanked his head back, exposing his neck to the blade in his hand. Dylan felt the cold steel just below his Adam’s apple. “Go ahead. Do it.”

The head pirate looked at him and smiled. “Captain Dylan, it seems like you’re finally understanding what we’re trying to do.” He crouched down and met him at eye level. “It’s a place here.” The pirate pressed his forefinger into Dylan’s chest, hard, until it pulsed in and out with the beat of Dylan’s heart. “The mind makes us believe that it’s the one in control, but it’s the heart that fuels our desires, our fantasies, and our revenge.”

“Whatever you’re doing. Whatever you’re planning. I won’t have any part of it.”

“That’s because you lack the proper incentive.” The pirate smiled and pulled out a small square of faded paper, and when he flipped it around and placed it in front of Dylan for him to see the faces of his children, Dylan lunged for him but was too slow, and the side of a pistol smacked into the back of his head. “Our GPS is no longer functional. You will take us to the coordinates on the map, and if you don’t, then I will kill your children myself.”

The pirate dropped the picture, and it twirled in a spiral to the deck. Dylan retrieved it from a small puddle and wiped the photograph on his shirt, drying its worn and faded edges. He gently rubbed his thumb over their faces then tucked the picture safely into his pocket as the pirate who’d held the knife to his neck shoved him violently.

Dylan jumped to his feet and gave a forceful shove back. The pirate raised his pistol, but before it escalated any further, the head pirate spoke in their foreign tongue and then untied Mark and Billy’s restraints, taking their blindfolds off.

“You two all right?” Dylan asked.

“Yeah,” Mark answered. Billy simply nodded, eyeing the bloodstain on the deck where Tank had been shot. Dylan handed Mark the map as the three reboarded their ship, now heavy with four pirates and whatever else the pirates had stored below deck while they were tied up.

While Mark and Billy untied the ropes from the cleat connecting the two vessels, the pirates exchanged their pistols for AK-47s, and each of those barrels was aimed at one of them at all times. The lead pirate joined Dylan in the wheelhouse, and once the distressed vessel was behind them, both Billy and Mark were sent below deck with their guards.

“How long?” the pirate asked.

“We should get there before morning,” Dylan answered, although he was in no hurry.

“It needs to be before sunrise.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

“Then neither can I.” The tone was threatening, as it was meant to be. “Turn the lights off,” the pirate demanded.

“There’s a lot of traffic out here. If I can’t see anyone, and they can’t see me, that’ll do more harm than good.”

“No. Lights.”

Dylan flicked off the bow and stern lighting, sending the ship into darkness, with the exception of the moon and stars above. Even the cabin lights were off. “I can’t get us to the destination if I can’t see the map.”

The pirate turned on a flashlight and shone it over the nautical gear then flashed it off. “Just keep us on course.”

The hours that passed felt more like days. Above, clouds flashed lightning, and it danced across the sky. Dylan remembered the weather forecast from earlier. The projections had them missing the storm, but if an alert had come through while he was blindfolded, he would have missed it. A light rumble accompanied the flashes of hot light in the clouds, and Dylan heard the pirate shift uneasily behind him. For the first time in his nautical career, Dylan found himself wishing for rain.

Thunder boomed and lightning clashed the closer they moved toward the shoreline. The first few drops of rain splattered against the windshield, and the bow rose up the side of swells and then sped down the opposite slope. Waves crashed over the front of the boat as the wind picked up and howled. “You need to let my crew tie down the gear.” Dylan gripped the wheel hard as the rain thickened.

“No, they stay where they are,” the pirate answered, the resolution in his voice refusing to break.

Another bolt of lightning and crash of thunder sounded simultaneously as Dylan steered the boat into the wall of water careening toward them. The force of the wave sent fishing lines and weights crashing into the windows of the cabin, and with it the water from outside.

The rain whooshed through the broken panes of the cabin’s window and pelted Dylan’s face and the pirate, who finally turned to his men and yelled at them in his native tongue, then looked to Dylan. “If your crew tries anything, I will kill them.”

Dylan examined the dripping pistol in the pirate’s hand. He shouted through the window to Mark and Billy below. “Stow the lines and put out the anchors!” But before he could even finish his words, Mark was already barking at Billy to do just that. The two men hurried around the ship, doing their best to stay upright in the howling wind and rocking waves of the storm.

The engine of the boat whined and strained to follow Dylan’s commands, but the captain willed the boat forward, pushing it beyond its limits. Mark finally lowered the anchors on either side of the ship, giving the vessel some stability. The Wave Cutter charged through the storm, and Dylan fought to keep them on course.

The storm clouds had blocked out the moon and stars, and all Dylan could see in front of him was blackness with the lightning from above flashing, occasionally illuminating their path. “I need to turn the spotlight on.”

“No! No lights!”

“If I can’t see a swell coming, then we run the risk of capsizing! If you’re worried about getting caught, no one is going to stop us in this storm.” Dylan’s wet shirt clung to his chest with an icy grip, the rain soaking him through to the bone. The wind sent rain droplets speeding through the broken windows, which stung his exposed face and arms. The pirate finally nodded, and Dylan flicked the light switches and grabbed the spotlight attached to the roof of the wheelhouse, which he could operate with the handle that jutted down just above his head.

Dylan rotated the beam of light, bringing it onto the waves and rolling seas. He turned the wheel hard right, avoiding a swell that threatened to knock them sideways. “Hold on!” Gravity pulled them backward as the vessel pushed its way up the side of the wave. The boat creaked and strained and crawled to a stop as they reached the crest.

Dylan jammed the throttle down harder, giving the ship the needed boost to peak over the wave and slam onto the choppy waters below. He wiped the rain from his eyes, looking for any more rogues that threatened to take him out. A hand gripped his shoulder, and he ripped it off, only to find that it was Mark. “Captain! The gear’s tied down, but we lost a lot of line.”

“You and Billy get below and grab the life vests. I don’t know how much worse this storm is going to get or when it plans on stopping.”

Mark nodded and then carefully descended the ladder of the wheelhouse, almost falling into the ocean a few times before he made it to the deck. Dylan looked back at the pirate, drenched from head to toe but still gripping his pistol. Lightning flashed in the reflection of his eyes. He kept that scowl, watching Dylan’s every movement, the same granite expression that he’d had since they boarded his ship. In that moment, the finalization washed over Dylan: the pirate truly did not care whether he lived or died, so long as his mission was complete.

Dylan continued the push forward through the storm, the rain and waves peaking after an hour of battling. He felt his body sag from fatigue as the raging downpour turned into a light rain that pattered the windows and deck of his ship. The waves calmed, and the lightning and thunder that had done their best to crush them turned into nothing more than echoes in the distance. Water sloshed back and forth in the wheelhouse, and Mark and Billy used the bilge pump to help clear it out.

With the storm safely behind them, the pirate forced Dylan to turn the ship’s lights back off. “You’re good at what you do. My thanks.”

“Keep it.” The thought of it disgusted Dylan, but he didn’t do it for them. Billy and Mark were still alive, and he’d be damned if he let any more of his crew members die because of his decision making.

Dylan checked his watch, and the clock face read 5:00 a.m. They had less than ninety minutes before the sunrise. “When we make it to the shoreline, I won’t be able to take you all the way to land.”

“What?”

“The location you showed me.” Dylan jammed his finger into the soaking-wet map. “The waters are too shallow for my boat to make it all the way to shore.”

The pirate yelled through the open window, and after a few short commands, one of the men descended into the fish cellar and emerged with a radio. He extended the antenna and tuned the dial to whatever frequency his comrades on the other end were listening to. A few minutes later, he was in communication and then yelled something back up to their leader. “Keep course. We’ll have a boat come and meet you in the deeper waters.”

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Fatigue and the fact that everyone was soaked to the bone seemed to have leeched everyone’s remaining energy. But once the shoreline was in view, the pirates’ energies resurged, and Dylan became painfully aware of what would happen to them once the pirates had completed their mission.

“Slow,” the pirate said, holding the gun to the back of Dylan’s neck.

Dylan brought the ship to an idle and kept the lights off as instructed. Two of the pirates down on the deck kept a lookout for whatever dinghy was meeting them. If Dylan was going to get himself and his crew out of this alive, then he’d need to do it quickly. The nearest port was thirty minutes north. If he timed it right, he might be able to get both him and his crew there safely.

The pirates on the bow started shouting as they heard the light rumble of the outboard engine from the smaller vessel heading to meet them. They gave a quick flash of their lights, and Dylan was ordered to do the same. He cut the engines, and the ship coasted until the small sixteen-foot boat, captained by similar-looking men with rifles and pistols, pulled up on their port side.

They cast lines and tied them off on the cleats. Dylan was escorted down the steps and placed with Billy and Mark in the cabin. Both of them were still soggy from the storm. Billy looked like he was about to fall asleep, while Mark still had a fire stoked in him and looked as though he could set fire to any man he stared at for too long. “You two all right?”

Billy gave a sleepy nod, but Mark didn’t break his stare on the pirates. One man was left to guard them while the rest of the pirates moved whatever gear they stored below. Dylan heard the splash of the anchor and the thump of boots along the deck. The sounds continued for a while and then finally stopped as their leader shouted something down into the cabin for their captor to hear. He answered, and then the rumble of the smaller boat’s engine sounded. A few seconds later, a second guard came down to join his comrade, and both men took turns aiming their pistols over Dylan, Mark, and Billy’s heads.

With the rest of the pirates gone and two left to guard Dylan, Mark, and Billy, he realized that the small boat must not have had enough room to carry all of their gear. The pirates would need to make another trip.