The Last Pirate

      Well, it didn’t look great. Even through the intoxicated blur of whiskey and vodka and whatever other drink Stella had downed. She snapped her fingers remembering tequila. The snap ricocheted off the damp cave walls; a booming sound of a gun being shot. She shone her phone’s flashlight down the dark tunnel. A trickling of water down a wall, but other than, everything was as silent as a coffin six-feet under----and she was as utterly alone as the dead within. Thank God she’d borrowed Mason’s hoodie before she followed him into the hole in the cliff. And boy was she grateful that she chose the motorcycle boots over her heeled boots, the choice of which she’d debated over for fifteen minutes prior to the party. She regretted the black bodysuit though, fearing it might rip down her backside if she stretched or bent the wrong way.  Stella marveled at how the linebacker had been able to squeeze through the hole. Before she followed, she pulled his sweater tighter, trying to gather the nerve to crouch and duck inside. The headlights of the truck cast her shadow onto the mossy wall of rock. A horn and laughter from Mason’s friends blared a theme song to this moment. The moment of whether she went with Mason (the guy she’d had a crush on since move-in day freshmen year) or stayed behind and graduated college with a degree in cowardness. The whiskey, and vodka, and tequila gave her the gumption to go into the cave. She bumped into his broad back. His t-shirt was slick with cool sweat. He reached back and touched her knee, ensuring she was there. His flashlight reflected off the slick rock. The musty smell of stale water. Chills ran down her spine as they sojourned deeper into the cave. A maze of ups and downs, ducking and contorting. Finally, what seemed like hours but must have been only minutes, Mason announced, helping her down from the last ledge and into a double-dorm-sized cavern, that they had arrived.  The flashlight bounced off the stalactites and the stalagmites, all snarled and jagged formations of rock and minerals. She imagined she were in the mouth of a crocodile then.  “Are the others coming?” Stella glimpsed over her shoulder to point out that she was expecting them. Of course, she knew they weren’t going to come, and that Mason had brought her here to be alone.  Mason laid out a blanket he’d thrown over his shoulder when he’d gotten out of his truck. He sat down and pointed the flashlight up at her. The beam moved up and down her body. Stella shifted her weight from one foot to another.  “Are the ones growing from the top called stalactites or are they the stalagmites?” Stella looked around the dark cavern.  Mason grinned, biting his lip. “Why don’t you sit down little Miss Bookworm.”  He’d called her that since freshmen year, every time they were in the same class and assigned the same group project. Outside of the classroom, he didn’t bother saying hi. Until this year, something had changed. She had changed.  Stella had learned to blow dry her hair straight and put in contacts and lost the fifteen pounds she’d gained during Covid. And Mason had noticed, and he called her little Miss Bookworm outside of the classroom and had invited her to this Halloween party and now they were in a cave, alone.  Stella swallowed a stagnant mouthful of air, and in a flurry of legs and arms sat down crisscross beside him. She wished she’d been more graceful, not so blizzardy. Or sexier, maybe if she wasn’t so nervous, she’d slither onto his lap, straddling him. She’d slowly take the sweater off in the spotlight of his flashlight, and arch her back so her body could be displayed. Afterall, the catsuit left little to the imagination. She shouldn’t let it go to waste. Key word: shouldn’t.  He snorted and nudged her shoulder with his. “You’re not scared, are you?”  “No.” She concentrated on the dark ceiling, and the icicles of rock. They swayed back and forth. Probably because of the alcohol. What if one fell off and impaled them; forget impaled, it would squash them.  His breath heated her ear. She turned her face to him, and he kissed her.  The tequila was pungent on his breath, and his body quickly became forceful as he shoved her onto her back and attempted to take off his sweater off her.  Stella had a boyfriend in high school. She made out with a few guys during college. Sessions would get a little handsy, but she’d never had s*x, or oral for that matter. She’d wanted to, just never felt like the guy was right. And here in a cave drunk with Mason on top of her, shoving his hand up her shirt, squeezing her breast and thrusting his erection against her leg. Well, he for sure wasn’t the right guy.  It took three pushes against his chest for him to get off her. He panted as his eyes pawed over her with hunger. Stella stood, pulling his sweater down over her butt.  “What’s wrong?”  “I just think we should be getting back.”  “What, we barely---we haven’t.”  Stella folded her arms across her chest. “I mean, I’m drunk and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out of here if we wait much longer. You might have to carry me out.”  The last bit was a joke, but he jumped to his feet, grabbed her by the waist and nibbled on her earlobe. “That’s the point, Miss Bookworm.”  Stella took a step away from him. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Mason. Not here, at least. Not tonight.”  Her skin grew hot under the sweatshirt. She could feel her heart quickening. Still, she forced herself to hold his gaze, making sure he understood her boundaries.  His handsome face snarled. His thoughts played out within seconds through his expressions. Reactionary anger. An immediate idea. A calculation of some kind.  He growled and bent to gather the flashlight and the blanket. “Have fun finding your way out, bitch.”  Stella breathed a sigh of relief. And then panic set in. Mason had flicked off his flashlight once he had climbed the ledge, knowing she wouldn’t be able to follow him. A retaliation that wouldn’t get him jailtime.  Her hands shook as she retrieved her phone from the phone holder she’d belted around her waist. She flicked on the flashlight. But her heart pounded when she realized that in the cave there was no reception.  “Dammit.” She half-yelled, half-cried. Stella lifted herself onto the ledge and crawled for a minute until she came to a fork to turn left or right. It was gamble, she was drunk and had been impervious to the way in.  Well, it didn’t look great. She snapped her fingers remembering the word tequila. The sound of a gun far off, or was that the echoing of her snapping her fingers? She turned left, crawled for a few minutes, until she came to a cavity that allowed for her to crouch and walk. The trickling of water---her plan was to follow the sound of the water in hopes it might lead her to an above spring.  She knew that the cave they entered was the backside of a cliff which opened to sea caves. At worst she would fall into one of those sea caves and die. Second worse, she would wander the cave for days until she died of dehydration. Best case scenario, she’d find her way out tonight with some dignity in tack. Second best case scenario, Mason or one of his friend’s would come back for her once sober.  “Dammit.” She repeated. “How could I have lived such a cautious life and the first chance I take I get abandoned in a cave!”  Her voice echoed back to her. Once the vibrations dissipated, a strange thing happened, she heard a booming sound. Not the sound of a gun, or a car backfiring, but one closer to that of fireworks or cannons being fired in the movies.  She jumped at the first cannon. At the second, she began to run down the dark corridor in its direction. By the third cannon boom, she’d stopped just before a sharp right turn. A right turn that burst with torch light, and noise, and the rumbling of the sea.  Stella pressed her back to the wall, calmed her breathing, and inched closer to the corner. She peeked behind the rock and into a massive cavern which twinkled like a cathedral made of gold dust and diamonds. Torches lined the ledges of the cavern. The orange flames dazzling in the reflective mineral-plastered walls and ceiling. Smoke smudged her vision. The smell of sulfur, gun powder and brine wafted on the fresh smoke.  A voice then, through the smoke. A foreign accent, reverberating around the ginormous cavern and into her skeleton, “Girl!” A choir of men voices rose up just as the smoke cleared.  Stella rubbed her eyes for she could not believe what she saw. A three-mast ship---a schooner if she remembered correctly from a documentary she'd seen about ships---intact, beautiful, overwhelming in its presence. It settled in the green water as if it were sleeping, unaware of the men on her deck scrambling to port side to glimpse the intruder, the girl who was Stella.  The men, at least twenty of them, were dressed as pirates. They hollered at each other and at her. Someone called for the Captain.  Stella flattened herself against the rock wall. A tentacle of slime wrapped around her palm. She gulped. Clearly, she’d stumbled upon drug cartels; or as she considered the costumes, a historical organization interested in the preservation of ships. Then again, being a history major she knew all the historical societies and preservation groups along the Virginian Coast.  She prayed they were a rich group of gays from D.C. having a lavish Pirate Halloween party. But something in her gut told her she couldn’t be further from the truth.  A sharp point in her right side, under her third rib. Stella bit down on her bottom lip and looked over at a tall man dressed in authentic pirate garb. She smelled his black smile, the stench of garbage decomposing on a hot summer’s day. The whiskey or vodka or tequila, hell all of it, threatened to spew from her. Then she looked down at the very real sword he had digging into her side.  Stella put her hands up in surrender. “I won’t tell anyone what I saw. I swear to God.”  The man grabbed with thin, spindly fingers at her neck and at her breast as he manipulated her arm to twist behind her and her backside to dig into his stomach. “A real girl.” He shouted to the men in the ship. He sunk his nose into her dark hair and inhaled with such longing that she felt his nostalgia go through her. “She smells like vanilla.”  This was a man who hadn’t seen a girl or a woman in a long time. And if he hadn’t seen one in a long time. Then they hadn’t seen one in a long time. And Stella knew what her fate was to be, talked about on a murder podcast in three months when her body was discovered bloated and washed up on a beach a mile down shore. A cheer reared from the ship.  “Come on, lady. This way.”  Stella, with arm twisted behind her back and sword in her side, obeyed the man and descended a flight of rudimentary stairs to a small tender tethered to a five-foot dock made from what seemed to be a second dismantled tender.  The man rowed her to the ship. They drifted passed the main anchor. The chain groaned in the water beneath them. Stella’s stomach flipped. She wasn’t prone to thalassophobia, but in that moment she feared the deep, the dark, and what was lurking beneath. And thus, Stella cast her eyes up and caught the name of the ship engraved in gold on the port side: The Righteous.  She searched her brain for shipwrecks along the east coast of that name. Having read countless national geographics, watched hundreds of historical documentaries, and read twice the amount of history books, she thought somewhere in the depths of her mind was the name. For it rang a bell in her memory, or maybe it only sounded familiar because it proved relevant in her immediate present.  Then it came to her, a seedling of an idea. The tiniest thought creeping into the forefront of her mind even as the man busied himself with tying ropes to the loops on either end of the tender and giving a tug for them to be raised up. It was an impossibility, of course. She was drunk and afraid, but she asked anyway.  “What year do you think it is?”  The man blinked at her, and then chuckled. “The last we knew, it was the year of our Lord seventeen-hundred-and-twenty-two.”