The Ghoul Archipelago

1. JIM-3

“Found it,” Jim said, finally producing the pistol and pressing it into the wide-eyed child’s hands, “Here. Take it. Take. Even trade.”

Jim was sure he was speaking Curienese pidgin, but the child still looked absolutely nonplussed. Jim all but tossed him over the side of the boat before the child ran off, his eyes alternating between the oversized peashooter in his tiny palm and the path before him.

“Jim!”

It was more a moan than a word. Jim had to look to the steering wheel. He simply had to. The key was still there. It would be the easiest thing in the world to leave the clownish white man behind. The boat was riddled with bullet holes already, and it wasn’t as though theirs had been the first excursion to this village.

He had to look at the wheel, even had to wait for a cartridge to pass through one side of the boat and leave an exit wound in the other.

“Jim?”

Sadder. Quieter, that time. Jim took a deep breath, held it. He stood full up. For the first time, he spotted the attackers. A dhow crept up the river, silhouetted by the rising sun, which, not incidentally, provided it with excellent cover from being viewed from shore. The dhow was spattered with the bright magenta tincture so common to Patusan and the other Curiens.

“Pink sails,” Jim whispered.

A tiny little wisp of a man, shorter even than Jim at maybe a meter and a third, stood with one foot on the prow of the boat, grinning widely and shouting in Curienese at his men. Jim’s eyes locked with the short man’s for a moment, but by the time the little man could point at Jim and order his men to open fire, Jim had jumped back to shore, putting the riverboat between him and the pirates. It was thin cover, only slightly better than the cardboard boxes Marlow was hiding behind, but at least it obscured their view of him.

“We have to go, Captain Charles,” Jim said, kneeling down and throwing the wounded man’s arms over his neck like a sash.

“The boat,” Marlow whispered, his breath hot and rusty on Jim’s face.

Jim simply shook his head. Marlow sagged visibly, though Jim couldn’t be sure whether it was the thought of losing his boat, losing his life, or being yet another captain who had to report failure back to Bergeron. Bergeron had summarily dismissed every sailor who had failed to make the delivery to the fishing village from his service. There had been at least six, and the denizens of the fishing village had chased each one off.

“I don’t suppose you think we could grab the collars before we go?” Marlow asked wistfully.

Jim didn’t even bother to glance over the wall of cardboard at the box which had tipped over. He knew a few of the metal collars still poked out of the mud, gleaming in the first rays of morning, and, not incidentally, presenting a magnificent target to the cherry-colored pirates. Some of the muddy collars might be recovered; the ones which had tipped into the drink were already ruined. In any case, they wouldn’t be able to take any with them. All the boxes would become part of the pirate chieftain’s prize.

Jim knitted Marlow’s fingers together so that they resembled a praying man’s. He didn’t particularly care for this method of transport, but he refused to drop his only form of protection, the bat, in order to execute a more graceful fireman’s carry. He took off into the wood line, dragging Marlow behind him with the man’s arms wrapped firmly around his neck. Jim had never felt so much like a plow horse.

“We’re leaving a fortune behind on that beach,” Marlow mused, about as close directly into Jim’s ear as anyone but a lover had ever spoken, “Bergeron will have our guts for garters, not a doubt in my mind.”

A bullet pulverized the mud just behind Marlow’s wounded leg, jarring it and causing him to wince.

“Shall I leave you with it, then, Captain Charles?”

Marlow didn’t really have to shake his head, but he did anyway. The trek wasn’t as difficult as Jim had feared. For one thing, the villagers, finally rallied by their town mother, had taken to the riverbank to fight the pirates, which took some of the heat off the escaping interlopers. For another thing, Marlow’s legs weren’t completely useless, and he continually scissored his good leg to keep Jim moving forward.

Even so, they were scarcely a kilometer into the brush before Jim had to stop for a breather.

“You’re stronger than you look, Jim,” Marlow said. “You really ought to leave me.”

Jim said nothing.

“Would we ever make it all the way back to Allang like this?”

“No,” Jim replied.

“We might wait out the battle and then reclaim our boat,” Marlow said, “if it’s still there. If not, we shall have to beg the villagers for help, I should think.”

Jim pretended he was still too busy catching his breath to respond.

They both heard it at the same time. A sudden crack, sharp like gunfire, but distinctly different.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if that will be your boogey man, then, Jim,” Marlow said, trying to chuckle, but he had lost too much blood to do so adequately.

The pugot, if indeed that’s what it was, was rustling in the underbrush, as though it were caught on a wad of tanglevine. Jim’s thoughts unconsciously flashed back to the fat woman with the stick impaled through her eye.

“I’ll go flush it out,” Jim said, gently unlocking Marlow’s bloodless fingers from one another and setting his diminishing body up against a tree trunk.

“I say, Jim,” Marlow called after him as he stalked up to the pugot in the underbrush, “why did you trade away the gun? You could have simply shot it.”

Jim considered asking whether Marlow wanted to give away their position, but from the way he was shouting, Jim already knew the answer. Instead, he put his finger to his lips. Thankfully, silence fell. Jim swung the bat underhand through the scrub where the creature had been rustling. Jim spotted a flash of red fur as the animal darted away into the jungle. So it had been a vixen after all.

“Jim!”

Suddenly, Jim felt a great weight slam home over his head, clocking him in the crown. That wasn’t the worst of it, though, because he was suffocating before he really knew what was going on. He dropped the bat to scrabble at his face, but found his way blocked by hard glass.

“What’s the matter, don’t like your new helmet, you little s**t?” someone whispered behind him in Curienese.

Jim scrabbled at the glass jar, and began trying to pull it off his face. He dropped to his knees, all the lost air sucking the fight out of him. He could scarcely think, as panic made his heart flutter, but he had enough of his wits about him to recall that some muggers in Manila had used plastic bags to knock their marks unconscious. He had never heard of using a glass jar before, but the Curiens were a world unto themselves when it came to crime and all else.

A sense of calm took him as he realized that he was breathing his last. The world seemed all in slow motion. He glanced over to where he had left Marlow. The man was gone, though a trail of blood led off into the jungle. He turned in the other direction. His heart was beating loud in his head, slowing.

A man stumbled through his field of vision, as black cigarette burns speckled his whole field of view. The man had a beard tucked into his belt. Jim had once mistaken him for the town elder. All of his entrails crept out through his beard and trailed behind him on the ground. Yet he walked on. The town elder, or whatever he really was, was shuffling like the victim of a terrible stroke. One pirate stood before the man, goading him forward like a matador. As the matador distracted the disemboweled old man, another pirate snuck up from behind, jammed a glass jar down over his head, and tightened the mouth of the jar around its neck with a metal sealing bolt. This was the first time Jim realized what, precisely, was suffocating him.

He tried one last time to take a deep breath, even attempting to break the air seal around his neck with his fingers. It was no use. The metal was just too tight, although he took a couple of good chunks out of his neck with his fingernails. All he got was a lungful of spent air from the inside of the jar. He’d be dead in just an instant, he knew.

The bat wavered before him on the ground. His hand seemed to emerge from nowhere to pick it up. It swung well wide of the jar over his head the first time. Before the bat, seemingly of its own volition, swung again, another apparition stepped into his field of view. It was the child this time, the one who had taken Marlow’s gun, a gun which it still clutched in its otherwise dead, rigorous fingers.

The child had a jar over its head as well. Its body was riddled with bullets. Its mouth was wide open, and it was more or less giving the inside of its jar a lengthy, saliva-free Roman kiss. The boy was obviously dead, but still walking.

“Pugot,” Jim mouthed breathlessly.

He didn’t really feel the bat as it was plucked out of his fingers, but that was more a function of the loss of sensation in his digits than anything else.

“Hey,” someone said behind him in Curien pidgin, “this one’s not dead.”

Something slammed into the side of Jim’s head and he thought he felt the glass shatter before he passed out.