Z-Burbia: A Zombie Novel (31 page)

3.  MARTIGAN

The pirates brandished AK-47s, mostly.  A few had dropped some serious cash for Uzis, and one, probably a swabbie at best, waved a baseball bat with perpendicular nails hammered into it.  The four-and-a-half foot tall boss pirate sta
rted shouting first.  Then his voice was almost immediately drowned out by a chorus of randomized phonemes, morphemes, and floating tones as his underlings joined in.

“It’s just that I barely remember her, Skip,” the boat’s chief mate, the one the crew called Salt, shouted down to his boss.

Captain Henk “Howling Mad” Martigan nodded wanly, not daring to say a word in reply for fear that lifting his head to speak would throw off his balance and send him tumbling to the deck. 

Martigan was as thin as a railway spike.  He was neither as tall as his third mate, Kurtz, nor as thickly muscled as his chief engineer, Mo, but his men always knew when he was present, and, so far, his mouth hadn’t gotten him lynched yet.  Charisma, his mother had told him.  Luck, he called it, or when he was feeling more verbose, “the curlicue whimsy of fate.”

Aside from a compulsive need to keep his face baby smooth, Martigan had a very laid back look to him.  When plying the South Seas as he was now, he donned little more than mirrored sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and thick lambskin boots.  (He had long ago learned the folly of wearing thongs or sneakers while shipboard.)  His only concession to rank was a hat which had once belonged to a U-boat captain.  It had been his father’s sole war trophy.

Martigan clenched his arms tightly around the pole leading up to the crow’s nest, embracing it far tighter than he had ever hugged his mother or any of his ex-wives.  Of course, if he had gripped one of them so tightly, he might have strangled her.  He wouldn’t have objected to that outcome for at least three of his exes.

“The hell of it is,” Salt continued, ignoring the menacing of the pirates and the discomfort of his boss in equal measure, “I always wore a rubber.  Always.  Well, not a rubber.  I mean, we called them rubbers.  They were sheepskin, though.”

If he had a stronger stomach for heights, Martigan would’ve said, “That’s your problem right there.” 

“I mean, he doesn’t even look like me,” Salt ruminated, raising his voice to be heard over the rising shouting of the fast-approaching pirate dhow, “do you think he looks like me, Skip?”

Martigan pressed his nose to the ladder, clenched his eyes shut, and yelled as loud as he could in what he knew was no doubt still coming out quite weakly, “He’s half white, Wilson.”

Salt was nodding, probably.  Reluctantly, Martigan opened his eyes again.  He found that, having spoken finally, his stomach was a little more settled.  Clutching twice as tightly with his left hand, he slowly, ever so slowly, just a bit too slowly, moved his right hand to his chest and lifted the spyglass to his eye.  Someone had splashed a ridiculous color of paint on the pirate dhow.

“Hot pink,” Martigan muttered, slipping into his native Afrikaans in his discomfort, “what were they thinking?”

“What’d you say, Skip?”

Martigan lost his grip, fumbled to keep the spyglass from falling, then, thinking better of it, just let it drop so he could throw both arms around the pole.  The spyglass was dangling from a shoelace around his neck for a reason.  He had already dropped it on the deck a hundred times on this voyage and given it a hairline crack, which bothered him to no end. 

Breathing shallowly, he craned his neck upwards to glance at his chief mate ten feet above him in the crow’s nest.

Switching to English, he responded, “I said they don’t have much class, Mr. Salt!”

Salt chuckled like a horny jackal.

“They’re pirates, Skip,” Salt said, “why would they?”

“Would you paint a boat neon pink like that?” Martigan asked, gesturing at the pirate dhow, and then quickly regretting it as he scrambled for purchase on the ladder and, catching it, hugged the mast close.

Salt actually took the time to turn and take a look at the half-assed paint job on the enemy vessel.  He looked it up and down, back and forth, and then nodded in approval, or maybe disapproval.

“I’d say it’s more of a magenta, Skip.”

His heart fluttering in his chest, and his arms losing blood as he clutched the mast a little bit too tightly, Martigan took a deep breath.  Martigan hated being in the crow’s nest, but he also hated shouting over the wind from the deck to make himself heard to the lookout, and so he found himself in this ridiculous position halfway up the ladder, listening to his heart hammer in his ears.

“Verdomp, you’re an asshole, Salty!”

This time, Salt giggled for twice as long.

“The hell of it is,” the chief mate said when he was done; “I can’t be the only white guy who ever made port in Port-Au-Prince.  (Heh.  Port in Port-au-Prince.  That sounds funny.)  I just can’t be.  I mean, how does she know that I’m the father?”

“Maybe you’re the only white guy she ever fucked,” Martigan wanted to say, but didn’t.  He just let Salt go on talking.  It’s not like there were more important things to do, like handle a pirate attack.

“He doesn’t even look like me,” Salt ruminated. “Do you think he looks like me, Skip?”

Martigan moaned, and not just because this was the hundredth time they’d had this conversation, and not just because he was stuck like laundry dangling from the line halfway up the mizzenmast.

“For the love of God, Wilson,” Martigan said, “I told you I didn’t have to take him on.  You said it was okay.  ‘Okay,’ those were your exact words.  Now, I’m getting down from here before I die.”

“Okay,” Salt said.

Martigan braced himself to clamber back down with eyes clenched shut.

“Skip?”

Martigan glanced back up.

“There’s a bad storm brewing,” Salt said.

Shaking his head and swallowing his fear of heights, Martigan clambered up into the crow’s nest alongside his chief mate, despite the tight fit.  Martigan patted his old friend on the shoulder tentatively.

“We’ll take care of them, Salty,” Martigan said. “We’ll come out all right.”

“Oh, yeah,” Salt said, “well, that’s true, too, about the pirates.  But look.”

Salt pointed off into the distance.  The horizon slowly blended from a light blue on white hue into a horrifying ball of raven-colored clouds.  Lightning strikes were visible in the distance.

“It never rains, but it pours,” Martigan muttered, cradling his forehead in his palm. “We’re going to capsize in that.”

“If we do, they do, too,” Salt said with a shrug, “So maybe God’s on our side after all.  You know, I promised his mum I would meet him.”

“Yeah, well…”

Whatever Martigan was going to say next was interrupted by a single gunshot.  One of the bastards on the other boat must have turned his AK to semi.

“Bastard!” Martigan said, clutching at his ear, “That went right by my head.”

“Hmm,” Salt murmured, examining his boss’s ear, “you’re probably lucky, Skip.  I doubt it was supposed to miss.”

Salt chuckled interminably.  Martigan kept touching his ear and pulling his hand away to check, but there was definitely no blood, no matter how many times he looked.

“Yeah, well, how’s your Tagalog?”

Salt considered the question.

“Pretty good,” he said after a moment, “but they ain’t talking Filipino-talk.”

“Malay?”

“Probably,” he said. “We’re not far from the Curiens.  They’re probably either Malays or Bugis.”

Another shot went overhead, this time followed by a flurry of little baby shots, all fired off in near-unison.

Martigan was already on the ladder sliding down before he said, “You be okay up here?”

“I’ll duck,” Salt said.

“Keep me abreast,” Martigan said.

As always, Salt giggled before repeating, “Breast.”

Martigan slid down the ladder, rather than going hand-over-hand.  He wanted to get back down from the dizzying height of the crow’s nest as fast as he possibly could.  He pulled his knees up towards his chest and took the impact in a crouch.  Springing up, Martigan cursed vilely in Afrikaans, and tried to shake the splinters from his hands.

He was dismayed to see how many of his boys were still scrambling around the deck of the Rey Gould.  She was a seaworthy boat.  That was about the most Martigan could say for her.  He had been on freighters, cutters, even a destroyer back in his Navy days.  The Rey was easily in the bottom seven of all the boats he had ever been on, but damn it, it was his boat.

Reaching out with one hand, Martigan snagged his second mate, the one they called Pepper, and pulled him in.

“I thought Kurtz was getting everyone below deck.”

Pepper shrugged, at least as annoyed as Martigan was.

“He’s supposed to be.”

“Help him out,” Martigan said, clapping his hands in time with an invisible drum in his head, “I’m not kidding around.  Get everyone into Hold 3.”

Pepper nodded and scrambled off, waving his arms and yelling, “Get below decks!  Get below decks!”

The second mate’s urgency seemed to work like a charm.  The sailors of the Rey were already scrambling like a pack of agitated ants to get off the deck.  Clearing his throat, Martigan walked towards the bridge.  He was running his hands over his cheeks and under his nose, irritated that he hadn’t shaved as closely this morning as he preferred.  It was a tic and he knew it.  Sometimes he shaved in the afternoon, just to avoid that five o’clock shadow.  Probably wouldn’t get the chance today.

Against the flow of sailors surging toward the third hold, Martigan was scarcely surprised to see a great bull of a man passing through the throng, going in the wrong direction, with a wrench the size of a femur bone slung over his shoulder like a caveman.

“Mo!” Martigan shouted, “What the hell are you doing?  I thought I ordered everyone below decks.”

“Enver said the wheel is still pulling to the right,” Hannibal Mo said slowly, his voice dripping with Missouri molasses, “or signed it anyway.”

Mo was dependable, slow, and steady, but sometimes he really made a vice out of deliberateness.

“Are you still doing that?” Martigan asked, “Damn, you’re slow, Mo.  You fix my boat like old people fuck.”

“Well, I guess you never tried to castrate a bull, Skip,” Mo replied. “Got to be faster than hell to do that and get away whole.”

Martigan chuckled at his chief engineer.  Mo was about the same height as Martigan, but twice as thick around the middle and shoulders like a rugby champion.  Sometimes Martigan wondered how he made his way around the engine room.

Mo ran one of his permanently oil-stained hands through his red shock of hair.  The man’s usually stony face betrayed a dark mood now.  He habitually wore an oiler’s coveralls.  Martigan had rarely seen him in anything else, even on special occasions.  In Mo’s current mood, though, his day uniform reminded Martigan of nothing so much as a set of prison grays. 

“Listen, Skip,” Mo said, lowering his monkey wrench to the ground and holding it like a golf club, “it’s time to come clean.  We need to talk about the…”

Mo gestured incommunicatively with his head towards the pirates.  Martigan put a finger to his mouth and whirled on his chief engineer.  He glanced around to make sure that none of the crewmen were listening.  Even though he didn’t see any on the deck, he hustled Mo into the bridge for privacy. 

“Beat it,” Martigan said to the mute helmsman, Enver.

Enver, who had been stuck at the wheel as his comrades beat feet, seemed more than happy to oblige.

When they were alone, Martigan took the wheel and nervously glanced at the pirate vessel.  They seemed to have halted their attack for now, as the two vessels had drifted far enough apart that their bullets were now useless.  That situation wouldn’t last long under any circumstances, and certainly not if the dhow corrected course.

“What’ve you heard?” Martigan whispered.

Mo wasn’t having all of the glancing around and acting on the sly business.  He was straight and to the point.

“I know you’re smuggling.” 

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because I’ve lifted anchor with you before, Skip.”

“Never as captain,” Martigan said.

“That’s true,” Mo admitted, “I might be slow, but I’m not dumb.”

Without taking his hands off the wheel, Martigan turned to look Mo full in the face.  The engineer was a farm boy, and slow as molasses, but stupid he was not.  Behind those baby blues, the man had a mind like a steel trap.  (A slow-closing steel trap, but still.)

“You signed on with me, Mo,” Martigan said, “if you’re having reservations now…”

Mo held up his hand.

“It ain’t like that, Skip,” he said, “Not at all.  I know I’m here to keep the engine running and not to care what we’re carrying.  But if we do happen to be carrying something that mightn’t help us out of this current pinch, now is the time to cop to it.”

Martigan scowled and glanced at the floor.

“We’re not,” he said.