Pirates of the Caribbean — A Marketplace Tale, Part 9
Pirates of the Carribean is fanfiction based on Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series, a fictional world in which there is a large and secret market for consensual slaves who serve their owners under contract. Laura recently released “No Safewords,” a fan anthology of tales by different writers set in the Marketplace world.
In Part 8, Bette makes a raid on the boat where the captives are being held. She manages to rescue the hostages — but something goes terribly wrong. In this part, she ends up with a starring role in her own personal episode of Shark Week.
I land in an inflatable blaze orange lifeboat, completely round, and through sheer luck I manage not to puncture it with the tip of the spear still projecting through my chest.
I can hear the Cape Ann II’s outboard motor start, and I see the tip of its mast float by the silhouette of the big mangrove island, its form black against the starry night sky.
I start to shake uncontrollably. I’m going into shock. I put my head down as low as I can get it in the boat and put my feet up on the gunwales, to try to keep my blood in my head.
*********
When I wake up the sun is beating down on me. My mouth is dry. I gingerly move my head to scan the horizon. I’ve drifted out to sea. I see land — but it’s far, and between me and it I see a white, patchy shore break.
The reef.
Maybe I’m on part of the reef? I feel something bumping my ass through the thin, flexible rubber of the raft. But it feels smooth, not the way I’d expect a reef to feel.
I lie back and feel it again. Slowly, I feel my way around the spear. I can’t reach where it comes through in the back. There’s something slick underneath me but I can’t tell if it’s blood or water or sweat.
Suddenly I feel violently nauseous.
Oh my god.
I hate barfing. Hate, hate, hate it. I will do anything to avoid it. I don’t want to do it even if I know I’ll feel ten times better once I do.
The thought of barfing, though, isn’t quite as bad as the thought of trying to move so I can toss my cookies over the gunwale — instead of…
The thought of being in the inflatable raft with my own vomit heaves my stomach and gives me the urgency to lift myself up and get up and over the gunwale.
I must be bumping on the reef again, as I feel something under my knee. I hang over the gunwale, heaving, even after there’s nothing left to come up. I notice there’s blood in the vomit. Shit. Internal bleeding.
It happens so fast — something that’s all teeth comes up through the slick of blood and barf.
FUCKING SHARK!!! I scream in panic, scrambling to the far side of the raft and then back to the middle as it threatens to capsize.
******
I stay on my knees in the raft, as close to its center as I can get, for the rest of the day. The sun is so hot, and I’m so thirsty and it’s so tempting to lie down in the raft.
Sometimes I think there’s just one, sliding back and forth in the water.
Sometimes I think there’s more than one.
Mostly I feel so angry. I know if I survive this I’ll be angry at myself, but right now? I hate El Camaricaño with a seething passion. I wanna rip the guy’s balls off with my bare hands. Sure — he doesn’t kill or disfigure women, but he doesn’t object to dropping them outside the reef where the hungry sharks feed — the same place he drops off all his other victims. I’d kill him with my bare hands without even stopping to take the spear out of my chest first. I think about my wife, and my baby, and how I’ll spend the last breath in my body making sure that evil bastard doesn’t steal them from me.
I start to paddle.
Carefully.
I look at the water, then, stick my hand in, paddle once, draw it out quickly. As the sun sets the tide is helping me, drawing me toward the dozens of tiny islands sheltering the bay from the sea.
I do this again and again, checking each time for sharks before I put my good hand in the water.
*******
I know what you’re thinking. “So, Bette, you’ve got a spear sticking through your chest. How come you’re not dead?”
Siddown, kiddies. Im’a tell you a story about Iraq.
The big thing with insurgents in-country was burying explosive devices under the roads.
Now, last time I checked, about 6,000 of our guys have died in Iraq and Afghanistan so far. It’s a drop in the bucket, really, to something like Vietnam, where US casualties were almost ten times that in a shorter war.
It’s a good news/bad news story, you see — and it’s ’cause of people like me — badass motherfuckers known as field medics.
I don’t know if we were getting blown up or shot at less than we did in other wars — but we weren’t dying in the field anywhere near as often. Battlefield medicine and body armor has gotten so good that you practically gotta pulp a guy to actually kill him. If you don’t take his head off, I can probably get him alive to a field hospital. And if I can get him alive to a field hospital, the crew there will drop him into a gleaming vat of technology that would give the Bionic Man a robotic hard-on, and they can get him on a C-30 to Rammstein Air Base in Germany, and they ship him off to Walter Reed and pretty soon he’s back home pounding the Bud and telling big fat lies about all the pussy he got back in the day…
You get the picture.
Thing is, we don’t always send ‘em home with all their parts. 6,000 casualties, right?
18,000 amputees.
Read that again, sister. Eight. Teen. Thousand. Amputees.
There are gonna be a whole lotta wedding and graduation and anniversary pictures in the next few decades where Uncle Mike or Daddy Luis is missing an arm or a leg.
Let’s not even get into the traumatic brain injury.
Anyway, this isn’t a story about a guy missing parts: it’s about a guy with extra parts.
It doesn’t matter what road we went down or what time of day it was or what vehicle we were in.
It’s all the same: Drive, bump, boom.
One minute I’m in the bus and the next minute I’m on my back in the sand 25 feet from the road and I can’t hear a fucking thing. I wait a minute: one of the insurgents’ favorite tricks is to blow up your shit and then blow up a second bomb while you’re rushing in to rescue the survivors.
By the time I start to hear the guys screaming I figure, if it isn’t safe to go in, then fuck it, I die and that’s the way it plays.
If there was a second IED it didn’t go off. I imagine quality control at IED Industries was for fucking shit and workplace safety was pretty bad too, but there is such a thing as good enough to blow up government work.
I start pulling guys out, tying off this, getting other guys to drag guys out of the roadway.
Choppers start showing up. Then I look in the bus.
Fucking driver has a piece of the bus through his chest.
Goddamn it all to hell. I call up for the SawzAll.
Truth in advertising: It really does fucking saw it all, no shit. I cut off the ends of the metal — honest, I have no fucking clue what part of the bus it was — to unconnect him from the vehicle.
Guess what? Guy’s alive and has twins. Working as a middle school science teacher, plays basketball on the weekends.
The thing about having something poking through some important body part — or even one that’s just near an important artery is this: DON’T FUCKING TRY TO TAKE IT OUT.
I mean, that was my whole job back to the copter, trying to get the guy not to grab the fucking thing sticking through his chest and pull the fucker out, I don’t blame him, it’s goddamn unnatural, amirite? I had to call an MP over to cuff the guy’s hands behind his back so I could get a line started.
So. I have this thing through my chest, but I can feel that I’m not losing blood — not to the outside, anyway. I’m probably losing some inside, but as long as I don’t try to pull this fucker out, I might live.
If the sharks don’t get me.
********
Go to Part 10 and read the conclusion!
The statistics about veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not invented — they are real. As far back as 2004, articles in prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine were talking about how advances in battlefield medicine were saving more lives — but sending servicemembers home with far more serious injuries. If you’re interested in learning more, please visit The Wounded Warrior Project, where returning service member and their allies help vets live their lives to the fullest.
Lily Lloyd is the author of Discipline: Adding Rules and Discipline to Your Kinky Relationship, a book about making kinky relationships work.
