IV. Return of the Pillaging Dead Part I

“I don’t like this, Captain…” D’anna whimpered. She didn’t sound like she was about to cry but was certainly heading down that path. Her voice cracked as her vocal chords tensed from the dread, anxiety tightening its grip around her throat. She could hardly focus on her duty of tightening knots, forgetting a crucial step of a Clove Hitch and watching as the entire thing unraveled. Out of pity Majel silently took over for her, which wasn’t the best idea in retrospect, since it allowed D’anna to fully focus on her sense of impending doom. Behind Cain, the elf started to loop around the poop deck the way a stressed-out animal circles inside its tiny cage.

“What if the zombies eat me when you’re not around? Or… o-or what if they turn me into one of them, and now I’m a zombie for the rest of my life? Who’d take care of the cows back on the farm?!”

“Afterlife,” Majel corrected her as she adjusted the sails. “You’d be stuck as a zombie for the rest of your afterlife. You’re technically semi-dead in that scenario.”

D’anna whimpered. Majel turned her attention back to the knots, realizing that she probably should’ve just kept that to herself.

“Ye don’t gotta worry about any bites, D’anna, since I’ll be responsible for turnin’ em all in the first place.” He looked into the distance and smiled devilishly. “They’ll be at me every beck ‘n’ call… the puppets to me master!”

“Master?” Majel asked.

“Master of puppets,” Cain explained. “Someone who’s pull—”

“No, I know the term, Cain. But how are you going to control these kinds of zombies?”

“Whaddya mean ‘these kinds’ of zombies?” 

Majel gestured to the Beheaded Navyman’s cage with her thumb. “Sawyer, this head is a walks-around-and-eats-people kind of zombie. This isn’t the magical-does-your-bidding zombie you’re thinking of.”

Cain took a second to process that, then slapped the wheel and threw his hands up in the air in defeat. 

“Well it’s too late to turn back now, the sea fort is nigh! We be stickin’ to the plan, anyway, since there be a chance ye don’t know the hell what yer talkin’ about.”

There was a bit of a pause before he added, “I really would’ve liked it if ya’d let me know that before we sailed all this godsdamn way…” 

“Me?! You were the one who told D’anna and I this shoddy scheme while we were still hungover!”

“And whose fault be that?” The skeleton shot back in a mocking tone.

“Yours! We were a day into shore leave before you canceled it halfway through!”

Cain scowled. “Adjust the sails, we oughta start slowin’ down now…” he muttered.  

Majel huffed, storming to the side of the ship to adjust the rigging. Although she won that scuffle, it didn’t feel like she did.

D’anna hunched next to Majel. “How do you know so much about zombies?” she asked.

“The Naval Academy requires that you take a supernatural studies course,” Majel explained. “Unfortunately, I didn’t learn how to rid yourself of skeletons…”

The Festering Wound docked at a sea fort, which gave the appearance of a regular fort that had successfully blasted away all the surrounding land. Sea forts looked like castles, but were a lot more horizontal and a lot less colorful. (Well, in a sense. They had plenty of different shades of color, like Smoke Gray, Anchor Gray, Ash Gray, and Fossil Gray.)

And like castles, they were up-the-wazoo with guards, guards who immediately noticed the Festering Wound and began to fire. Cannonballs flew from the top towers of the fort and slammed into the nearby waters with a mighty splash! 

“Pirate scum!” an officer yelled from the fort. “May you soon bask in eternal flame!”

“May you bask in this flame, ye colonizin’ colon!” Cain yelled out. “FIRE!”

D’anna started to load the cannons while the more experienced Majel aimed and fired. The ship continued to rotate around the fort, weakening all sides with their hurling balls of iron. Majel knew that the most important targets were wherever the opposing fire was coming from, taking note of any spots that were less-than-adequately armed. Holes busted through the stone bricks, gradually making the fort look more and more like the moon’s surface.

Being a moving target gave the crew an advantage, but the fort was still able to nick the Wound with the occasional cannonball. Whenever a gaping hole threatened to sink the ship, Majel had to man the guns solo while D’anna scurried below decks to patch it up. On her right thigh, attached to her belt, was a pouch that Cain required every member of the crew (including himself) to wear. Half of it was filled with small, spherical bullets, and the other half was filled with nails in which to board up the ship. The elf grabbed one, as well as one of the many hammers purposely scattered around the lower deck, and started to repair.

“Sawyer! What direction is the next wall facing?” Majel called out.

Cain looked to the compass he’d tied to the helm. “That’d be the south!” he answered. 

“The south wall is flat and not as armed as the others!” Majel reported.

“Aye! The Wound will dock there so we can board! Get the explosives ready!”

The skeleton spun the helm like a roulette and quickly began to adjust the ship’s sails. Once the ship started to turn in the right direction, he stopped it with his boot and began to lower the anchor. Meanwhile, Majel slipped below deck. 

“We’re gonna board in a minute, grab a weapon,” she instructed D'anna, fetching three black, spherical bombs from a barrel. The cat pounced up the stairs to the top deck, grabbed the still-smoking linstock which had been used to ignite the cannons, and propped the gangplank against the ship’s railing. 

“All set, Captain!” she yelled to Cain. 

“Give ‘em hell!” Cain yelled. 

With a kick of the board, Majel connected the Festering Wound to the fort. She ran around the south wall to the western one and placed the bombs, lighting them with the linstock. Once the sparks started to fly from their dwindling wicks, she hauled ass to the other side. 

BOOM!

A volcano-like flash of bright, warm light shot out, followed by a dark brown cloud of smoke. Chunks of bricks shot out at speeds exceeding that of cannonfire. Flaming boards of wood were (mostly) extinguished as they landed into the sea. Several very-burnt officers jumped into the water to make their appointment with Davy Jones. Ash and embers floated through the air like snowfall, being carried along by the sea’s breeze.

“Stay here and guard the ship, elf!” Cain yelled to D’anna as he quickly grabbed the cage and took out the head. It started gnawing at the captain’s bony hands to no avail.

“Just hold on and I can get ya some dinner,” Cain assured it as he ran to meet Majel at the fort’s newest entrance. As he got close, she cocked her pistol and nodded. With the head in one hand and a cutlass in the other, the skeleton charged inside. A fight quickly broke out between him and three guards that had been drawn to the explosion. He caught one by surprise, slashing him open and kicking him into a wall.

Another took a swing at Cain, but a bullet to the hand made her drop her rapier. Majel had taken cover behind the wall, shooting at the guards from a comfortable distance. She didn’t need to aim carefully, as Cain wasn’t the most… complete of a target. 

The skeleton grabbed the hair of another guard and pierced a cutlass through their chest. However, whenever he tried to dislodge his sword, it seemed to be stuck between two ribs. He tried to jerk it loose as the other guard ran up to him screaming. With no more time left, he gave up and, being the only weapon he had left, tossed the head at her.

She instinctively blocked it with her arms, but that just gave the Beheaded Navyman more surface to work with. It latched onto her, clenching down until its rotten teeth met her forearm’s bones. Suddenly, her muscles felt like they were boiling. She dropped to the ground and started to heave like a cat. Her eyes rolled back into her sockets. A mixture of vomit, bile, and blood seeped out from between her lips before evolving into a geyser-like spray. 

“Holy shit!” Cain yelled, backing away from her. 

Majel quickly darted her eyes away, trying not to have the last remnants of shore leave return to her mouth.

While the guard was… distracted, Cain was able to free his very-stained cutlass out of one of the guards. He wiped it off on his pant leg and sheathed it. Then, he raised the head to meet him at eye-level.

“Bet that felt good, didn’t it?” the skeleton smiled as he walked out of the fort. 

“Graaahhh…” the Beheaded Navyman groaned without emotion. Its chin was now dripping with red as it chewed on a strip of ripped skin like tobacco.  

“Can’t say I feel too bad for those bastards…” Majel said as they hurried back to the Wound. She made sure to stick to the right, as Cain was carrying the head in his left hand.

“Take another man’s freedom, I take yer life,” Cain said flatly. While the Horatio Empire was the biggest pain in his ass, the Kodos Konfederation was a close second on his shitlist. As far as he was concerned, the sooner all of their bases were nothing but rubble, the better.

Back on the Festering Wound, the head was returned to its cage and safely secured in Cain’s quarters. D’anna noticed that it was a lot more covered in blood than it had been before.

Once he locked the door for safe keeping, Cain turned to address his meager crew. “A zombie is now in tha makin’, courtesy of yers truly!”

He leaned against the ship’s railing and looked back at the fort. “All we gotta do now is just wait. After a bit ‘o time’s passed, we’ll check to see if tha curse worked. If the zombie heeds my command, we’ll infect tha entire fort and finally have a crew proper! If not, then we’ll just seize every cent this ruddy pile of bricks has left instead. Yes, D’anna?” 

The elf lowered her hand. “If it doesn’t work and we just rob the fort, can the profits go to hiring an actual crew?” 

Cain crossed his arms and looked to the side, shrugging. “I guess…” 

Cain peered through back into the fort. The puddle was still there, but the zombie was nowhere to be seen. More concerningly, the other two guards were gone, too. 

“Uh oh…”  he muttered. He almost took another step inside, but thought, Ah, what tha hell, I might as well…

He clenched his jaw and cleared his mind. His brain felt like it started to contract as he telepathically called out to his undead crewmates.

Come to yer captain… he thought with all the concentration he could muster, shamble on back down here to yer captain… 

He waited a couple seconds. 

He waited a few more. 

Nothing. 

“Dammit!” Cain grumbled before he made a break to the Festering Wound, waving his sword in the air to draw D’anna and Majel’s attention.

“D’anna! Majel! We be fallin’ back to the other plan! Buckle yer boots and get yer guns!”

“You couldn’t control the zombies?” asked D’anna.

“No, I couldn’t!” 

“Phew!” the elf sighed as she wiped her brow.

“...but we gotta be quick about plunderin’ the place! I don’t know where they went…”

“You don’t know where they went?” Majel asked, grabbing the skeleton’s shirt. “YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE THEY WENT?”