Apocalyptic pirates 4, p.8
Apocalyptic Pirates 4, page 8
It made a very satisfying splash.
“Now that’s what I like to hear,” Letty said with a determined nod of her head. “Here, Dia, can you grab hold of this one’s neck?”
Dia bent down to take hold of the baby’s long spiny neck.
“Oh,” she said softly, and without another word, she crumpled to the ground.
Chapter 6
“Dia.” I barely realized that her name had left my mouth.
I was only vaguely aware of my body moving, but somehow I was kneeling by her side and staring down into her pale face.
All the breath seemed to have frozen in my body.
A terrible, hollow emptiness filled me.
Then Dia’s eyelashes fluttered.
Relief flooded through me and overturned every horrible thought that had passed through my mind in the past millisecond. My heart was hammering, and my limbs felt loose and weak with adrenaline.
“Dia.” The aftermath of shock was still rushing through me, but my body remembered how to be capable. There was a long gash on Dia’s bicep, and I clasped my hands tightly over the wound to try and stem the blood flow.
“Oh, Dia,” Ally gasped. Her face went white when she saw the wound on Dia’s arm.
“Jeez,” Dia said weakly. “Who died?”
“You almost did, you idiot,” Letty scolded her in a trembling voice.
“I’m fine,” Dia mumbled and tried to sit up, but winced and sucked in her breath quickly when she put weight on her wounded arm.
Shannon dropped down on her knees by Dia’s side and stared intently at the Latina woman’s injury.
“How do you feel?” Shannon asked her with an urgent edge in her voice.
“Honestly?” Dia tried again to sit up, and with Shannon and I helping her, she managed to get into an upright position. “I feel stupid.”
“Good,” Letty scolded and dabbed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. “You near enough gave me a heart attack.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Dia protested. “That little fucker just took me by surprise, and–”
“Why didn’t you immediately tell us it had injured you?” Ally demanded in what I could only describe as a severely worked-up mom tone.
Dia scowled a bit. “It’s not that big of a deal, I guess I just bent down too quickly.”
“We’re just glad you’re in one piece,” I told her, and I was glad that the thundering, relieved beat of my heart didn’t come through and show in my voice.
“That looks like it’ll need stitches,” Valerie observed.
She and Ray had been standing at a little distance and allowing us to have space, but now she stepped forward and peered closely at Dia’s arm.
“Can you do that?” Shannon asked.
“Sure.” Valerie nodded. “I’ve stitched up more wounds than I can count.”
“Stitches?” Some of the color was coming back into Dia’s cheeks, and the attack clearly hadn’t dented her spirits in the slightest as she flashed Valerie a cheeky grin. “Can’t I just put a Band-Aid on it and call it a day?”
“You can if you want to bleed out and die,” Valerie told her. “Do you want to bleed out and die?”
“No,” Dia admitted, and Ally raised a very huffy eyebrow.
“Then you need stitches.” Valerie clucked her tongue in exasperation. “All the grief you young folk gave me about a couple of bruises, and now you won’t even take your own advice.”
“Alright.” Dia rolled her eyes in a show of carelessness, but she accepted Shannon’s hand to help her get on her feet, and she didn’t complain when Letty and Ally stepped in to help her, either.
“I’ll go look for what we have in the bag,” Shannon said. “Valerie, would you mind helping me? My brother is a doctor, so I have a little bit of know-how about things like this, but you’ll probably know better what’s best to use here.”
“Of course.” Valerie nodded.
The two of them headed below deck, and Ray followed them to help.
That just left the problem of how to tidy up, and I was honestly grateful for the work. None of the women on my crew had been injured like this before, and I was admittedly more worked up about it than I wanted to admit.
Knowing it wasn’t severe, and that Dia would be properly tended to, definitely helped me relax, but something about shucking dead dragons into the depths of the ocean really soothed my nerves at the moment.
Psycho little shitheads.
I hoisted the bodies of the baby dragons over the side of the boat, but the mother dragon was another story.
I hadn’t been this close to such a huge dead dragon before, and as I stepped close to the corpse and stared up at it, it struck me just what a ferocious predator this creature was.
Its scales were gleaming turquoise, and the claws on its front feet must have been six inches long. Its curved back claws were even longer. Its fangs were stained orange where they forced their way out of its black gums, and it reminded me of seeing primeval weapons made of animal bones in Sammy’s history books. Just one of these dragon’s fangs would make a scarily effective weapon.
I took out my phone and hit the record button on the camera. I walked around the body and tried to capture as much as possible of the huge dimensions of the dragon’s body. I wasn’t about to add narration this time, though, in case of any more jokes about unboxings or “likes and subscribes”.
Dia was leaning on Ally and Letty now, and the three of them came close to gaze at the fallen predator. Ally had killed the engine so the yacht was now bobbing quietly up and down in the water, and in the silence without the engine grumbling or a sail flapping, the sight of the enormous beast lying so still on the deck was pretty damn eerie.
“It’s quite spectacular, isn’t it?” Ally said in an awestruck voice.
“Spectacularly ugly,” Dia grumbled, and she kicked the dragon’s huge limp foot.
“Be careful,” Letty warned her.
“Hey, this thing’s baby just opened a slice in my arm,” Dia retorted. “I think I’m allowed to be a little mad about it.”
She leaned over and pressed her hand against the dragon’s neck so the long wound in its throat was exposed.
“Don’t,” Letty protested. The Southern woman’s face flushed dark red when we all looked at her in bemusement. “I ain’t sayin’ I feel sorry for it or nothin’.”
“Well, good,” I said with a raised eyebrow as I finished filming and put my phone back in my pocket.
“It’s just…” Letty shrugged and looked down at the deck. “It makes you think, don’t it? This must be what our ancestors felt like. They would have taken down woolly mammoths and saber-tooth cats with just the weapons they had. And then they would have stood like we’re doing right now and looked at what they’d done.”
“I think I know what you mean.” Ally nodded slowly. “It makes you feel like we’re going backwards, in a way. Who could have predicted that the human race would have gone back to slaying giant predators? We’re supposed to have left all that behind.”
“Yeah,” Letty confirmed. “You know, there was this colleague of mine, Terri, and she was real set on the idea of going back to nature, connecting with our roots, all that kind of stuff.”
“Like, crystals and shit?” Dia asked with raised eyebrows.
“No.” Letty shook her head. “More like dopamine fasts, and recycling, and growing her own herbs.”
“What the hell is a dopamine fast?” I queried.
“It’s like a digital detox,” Letty explained. “You stop going on your phone or watching TV or listening to music. It’s supposed to help your concentration and give you more time to go out and take walks in nature.”
“Huh.” I considered the idea for a moment. “I suppose that makes sense.”
“Sounds like some hippy bullshit to me,” Dia muttered, and she sounded so much like a grumpy old man that the rest of us looked at each other and chuckled.
“Anyway,” Letty continued. “Terri was always going on about how we’d lost touch of our real selves and we needed to repair our relationship with the planet.”
“So, what?” I looked at the enormous carcass sprawled on the deck in front of us. “Killing dragons is going to heal the earth?”
“No.” Letty screwed up her face in concentration. “I don’t really know what I’m saying. This just reminded me of all that. Us standing around and looking at the giant body of a dangerous animal we just killed.”
“It is like something primal, though.” Ally ran a hand through her red waves and looked down at the dragon’s body.
As I looked at her standing there with her beautiful hair blowing in the wind off the gulf, and with her rifle hanging over her shoulder, I thought I began to get an idea of what she meant.
In another life, Ally would never have been caught dead standing over an animal carcass. She would never have been found with a hair out of place, her nails unpolished, and everything just so. But when it came down to it, all those things that marked her for a civilized and wealthy woman didn’t matter at all. This next chapter of Ally’s life was both a progression of taking the next step forward, and a regression of reverting back to one of the first types of woman that ever existed.
It made me feel odd to consider that all of those thoughts and images were tied up in the carcass before us. Killing dragons was a part of life now. Was it possible that we would ever forget that? What would life look like in a few years from now? What things would have become normal and accepted?
On the surface, it seemed like humans had managed to forget that we’d once had to kill like this for survival. But maybe we actually hadn’t forgotten. Maybe it was a shared memory we all had that was just tucked away in our DNA, and it just took the apocalypse to scratch away the surface and reveal what had been lying dormant all along.
I shook my head. If I was going to start thinking about the nature of the universe and humanity, I’d better have a stiff drink in my hand while doing it. Besides, there were more important things to think about right now.
“We need to figure out a way to get this old girl off the boat.” I gave the dragon’s body an experimental push. It barely rocked under my hand. “I don’t want to think about how much this thing weighs.”
“One ton?” Ally hazarded a guess. “And that’s a conservative estimate. When I used to go horseback riding–”
“Oh, of course you used to go horseback riding,” Letty teased her.
“When I used to go horseback riding,” Ally continued sternly. “There were Shire horses at the stables where I rode. I reckon they weren’t too much smaller than this thing, and they usually weighed that much.”
“Why were you discussing how much the horses weighed?” Dia asked in puzzlement.
“It’s a rich people thing,” Letty told her in a stage whisper. “They do all kinds of strange things like that.”
“They were show horses!” Ally protested with her cheeks turning pink. “Things like height and weight are very important factors in showing a horse.”
“Oh, riiiiight,” Dia drawled. “You should have said they were show horses, then I’d have immediately known that height and weight were very important factors.”
I grinned as Ally crossed her arms in a huff and muttered something about how she didn’t realize knowing information about horses was a crime.
Ray and Valerie and Shannon came back on deck.
“Alright, Dia,” Shannon said. “Are you ready to get stitched up like a rag doll?”
“I guess.” Dia pulled a face.
“Now, just hold on a minute.” Valerie took a step closer to the dragon’s corpse and pointed a wrinkled finger down at the deck. “What in the heck is that?”
We all looked to see where she was pointing.
There had been plenty of dragon blood shed during the fight, and with the mother dragon as full of bullet holes as she was, she was now lying in a pretty big puddle of her own blood as her body carried on dripping it out of all the wounds she’d sustained.
That by itself wasn’t anything remarkable.
What was remarkable was that Dia’s blood had dripped from the gash in her arm and fallen onto the deck. And where Dia’s blood had met the dragon’s blood, there was now something very weird happening.
“What the hell?” I breathed.
The blood was beginning to bubble.
The furthest edges of the blood spill were stagnant and already starting to dry, but the parts that were closest to our feet– and presumably where Dia’s blood had dropped down– were fizzing and spitting with some kind of activity that I had never seen before.
“Oh, my god,” Letty gasped.
“The fuck.” Dia’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “That’s my blood, right?”
“Right.” I bent down to get a better look at the scene. “It must have dropped down from the cut in your arm.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Ray’s voice was a wondrous whisper, and he knelt down beside me to get closer.
“Don’t get too close,” Valerie warned. “Don’t you go touching it now, Ray, we don’t know what it might do.”
“Yeah.” Ally was worrying her lower lip between her teeth. “They said the dragons were radioactive, didn’t they? What if their blood is nuclear?”
That definitely made me pause.
I scrambled to my feet and helped Ray stand up again.
“Don’t suppose you have such a thing as a Geiger counter on this boat, do you?” Ray asked.
“Unfortunately, no,” I admitted.
“But we’ve been exposed to dragon blood for a long time now,” Shannon pointed out. “Surely we would have seen some weird side effects if it was dangerous? Not to be gross but… raise your hand if you haven’t had dragon blood splattered all over you sometime in the last few weeks.”
Everyone awkwardly kept their hands at their sides.
“That just ain’t normal,” Letty murmured and shook her head.
“What about the atomic bomb?” Ally worried. “I’m sure I read about the effects of that lasting for years after the initial blast.”
“I think that’s a bit different,” I told her. “I mean, obviously no one can know that for sure. But an atomic bomb is extreme.”
“A side effect of its design is that it spreads high levels of radiation over a significant area,” Ray added. “If these here dragons had the power of a nuclear bomb inside them, I reckon we’d have noticed it by now.”
“Think of all the times they’ve drowned or their blood had fallen into the water,” I said. “But we’ve seen no dead fish or any other dead sea life floating around.”
“And more importantly,” Shannon added. “The scientists confirmed that the dragons were barely even radioactive at all after a short time outside of their meteor egg thingies. If they had nuclear blood, they’d have found out and told absolutely everyone by now.”
“Yeah, that’s true,” Ally agreed. “Okay. That makes me feel a bit better.”
“I had a cousin who needed radiation treatment for his cancer,” Valerie mused. “Not all radiation is deadly. And this could be a new kind of radiation if the dragons came from outer space or another planet.”
“Even bananas are radioactive,” Shannon put in.
“Excuse me.” Ally’s light-green eyes widened in disbelief. “Bananas are what now?”
“They’re radioactive,” Shannon informed her with a grin. “Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I did not,” Ally declared. “That’s going to make me look at smoothies very differently.”
“I remember Sammy telling me that,” I said with a grin. “It blew her mind when she found out, and she was going around telling everyone about it as her fact of the day. I think it’s to do with the potassium levels in a banana, or something like that. It’s not harmful, though, you’d need to eat about a million bananas for it to be dangerous.”
“Reckon you’d die from eating that many bananas sooner than you’d die from the radiation,” Valerie chuckled.
Dia knelt down to look at the puddle of blood on the deck. The fizzing had died down by now, and there were only a few ruby-colored bubbles floating on the surface of the liquid to show that anything weird had happened.
In one quick motion, Dia dipped her free hand in the blood and poured a cupped palmful of it over the open slice in her arm.
Everyone lurched forward at once.
“Dia!” I grabbed at her hand but it was too late.
“It’s just like bananas, right?” Dia flashed me a daredevil grin.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded. “We’ve got no idea how dangerous this stuff is!”
“Seriously!” Letty grabbed hold of Dia’s bloody hand and hauled her to her feet. “You’re like an actual three-year-old.”
“That was mighty risky, chicky,” Valerie told Dia with her brow crinkled into an anxious frown.
“How do you feel?” I pushed. “Does your arm feel weird? Does it hurt?”
“Well, yeah,” Dia deadpanned. “It’s got a huge slice in it.”
“Does it hurt worse now than it did before?” I spelled out.
“Not really.” She shrugged. “It tingles a bit.”
“You must tell us right away if you feel any nausea,” Valerie directed. “Or if you start getting any kind of fever.”
“Come on,” Shannon said with a glare that didn’t allow room for any arguments. “You’re getting cleaned and stitched up right now.”
“We have no idea what could happen,” Ally scolded as they led Dia away to get her arm tended to.
“Guess we’ll find out!” the Latina woman chirped, and Letty sighed as she followed after them to straighten up the mess in the kitchen and lounge.
Ray and I were left standing by the dragon as I raked a frazzled hand through my hair.
Dia’s lack of concern was both infuriating and endearing. I supposed that Dia wouldn’t be Dia if she wasn’t making the people around her tear their hair out every once in a while, but still.
I’d be fucking gray by the time we got to Hawaii if these women kept this kind of shit up.
Ray slowly shook his head.
“You’ve got yourself an interesting crew here,” he said with a chuckle.
