Hidden Island Chapter 29, part 3 of 3

Hidden Island
Chapter 29, part 3 of 3

"You're going to be mad at me later for that, and that's alright," Jack said. Her hand still rested lightly on Bella's cheek, their eyes locked together.

"Right now, I need you to focus. You're safe. I'm here. Quinn is here. We are not going to let anyone hurt you. You've stitched me up before. This isn't any different. We need your help.

You can do this."

"A... alright," Bella said, nodding and visibly collecting her wits as Jack's words sunk in.

Jack took Bella's hand and gently tugged her toward the bed. Doctor Kalfou was beginning to wrap a splint around the broken arm she'd just set.

"Take over," she said to Jack. Jack gave Bella an assuring nod and took the roll of bandages from the doctor. "Can you suture, you?" the doctor asked Bella.

"Y-yes," Bella said, taking a quick, centering breath.

The doctor pointed to a wooden box on the Captain's bedside table. "Your kit, there," she said, then pointed to the man with the tourniquet on his leg.

"Your patient, here. Once he's closed up, let Jack know. Will bandage him, she." As she spoke, she made a gesture to Quinn, who rolled over the unconscious man on the bed, revealing two vicious puncture wounds. Quinn tore the man's shirt down the back with one sharp, steady pull. Bella blanched at the sight of the gushing wounds; then, another gunshot rang out, causing Bella to flinch. Her breath came faster and shallower.

"No." Doctor Kalfou said calmly to Bella. Quinn began cleaning the wounds with a wet cloth.

Bella stared at the scars. "Stay with me," Friday said to Bella, her tone causing Bella to look up and meet the doctor's eyes. "Breathe. Focus." She pointed again to the crewman's leg.

"Sew."

"Hell," Will muttered.

He was on the lower deck, up toward the prow, right in the middle of the crew berth. The water was up to his shins. The lantern in his hand illuminated a sizeable crack in the timbers. It looked like the first time the Kestrel had been rammed; the other ship's keel had hit the Kestrel's prow and cracked the hull wide open.

The hole was right at the waterline, which was lucky. The water wasn't gushing, but every wave pushed more in. It didn't help that the Kestrel's bowsprit was currently speared into the other ship, adding its weight to the Kestrel's, shoving her nose down deeper into the water.

This wouldn't sink them quickly, but it meant they weren't seaworthy. Will turned and was just about to turn to report back to the Captain when he caught strange movement in the shadows of the lanternlight. He did a double take, aiming the lantern back at the hole in the hull.

A reddish tentacle rose from below and wrapped through the hole, grabbing the splintered timbers. Its end had what looked like a deformed hand. Another joined it. Then another. Then, a fully formed hand. A woman's face rose next, bug-eyed and slack-jawed. She locked eyes with him and screamed.

"Help!"

Will stared in horror momentarily, thankful that the crack didn't look wide enough for the... thing to fit through. Then she hurled. A long red rope erupted from her mouth. Will jumped back, getting a brief but up-close view of the white stinger on the end of the tendril as it reached its entire length, with Will just barely out of reach.

Her barbed tongue retracted quickly, and she relaunched it, straining for the extra foot she needed to reach him. Will backed up even more, shaking his head as he moved.

"Help!" She screamed again.

"Oh, no, thank you," he said to her. "I'll just stay back here."

With inhuman strength, she broke one of the cracked timbers free, widening the rend in the hull. Then she snapped off another and started to shove her corpse-white body through the gap. She was ruined, clothing snagged and ripped. Shards of wood pierced her hands and scraped her body, but she didn't seem to notice.

"You've got to be kidding me," Will complained. He drew his sword.

The thing fell through the crack into the ship's hold, landing in a pile of tentacles. She was a corpse-white naked woman from the pelvis up, a monstrous octopus made of raw meat from the hips down. She writhed and righted herself, her octopus tentacles squeezing together, sealing along nearly invisible seams to form rubbery but functional legs. What he'd mistaken for misshapen fingers at the end of the tentacles had been toes. She stood up, looking passably human.

"Heeeeeelp!" she shrieked.

Will was speechless. He shook his head again, entirely at a loss for words. The thing spewed its stinger at him again. He flicked his wrist and leaned to the side, deflecting the tendril with his sword. He took a breath, shrugging off the disbelief and horror and focusing on the reality of survival. There was only one thing to do.

As the creature retracted its stinger tongue, Will sloshed forward. The water made his progress slower than he would have liked, but the monster wasn't quick or creative. Her full-body heave that preceded the stinger attack gave Will plenty of notice about what was happening next.

Another flick of the wrist and a sidestep sent the stinger over his shoulder. Then she lunged and swung at him with her fingers outstretched like claws. He stepped back as she lunged and calmly put his sword through her chest.

She didn't even blink. Will's eyes widened in surprise as she dragged herself up the blade with a surge that overbalanced him. The water dragged at his feet and tipped him back, and her lunge became a fall. He lost the lantern as he fell. It hit the water with a splash but didn't extinguish. The light took on a muted, rippling tone as her hands gripped his clothing and yanked herself closer. She collapsed into a mess of tentacles that wrapped around his legs, holding him close and tight. He shoved with all his strength, adding his other hand to the hilt of his sword, trying to use it to push her off of him, but she was stronger than he was. Her mouth opened wide, her body heaving again. He jerked his head to the side just in time to avoid the stinger. It splashed into the water and hit the deck hard enough that he could feel the reverberations beneath him. It retracted quickly, and she dragged her face closer to his, reaching for a terrible, lethal kiss.

He twisted his sword and wrenched it to the side, using it as a handle to drag her around. She was stronger than he was, but he was heavier by nearly double. That mattered. The tongue flew past his head again as he rolled them both onto their sides. Letting go of his sword, he grabbed her tongue-tendril to keep it from retracting. It was coated in something slick and slid through his hand until the bulbous base of the stinger caught his grip and yanked his fist to her mouth. She bit down hard. He yelled in pain but didn't let go. One of her arms snaked around behind his neck and dragged their faces closer together, trying to push his face into the stinger caught in his fist. He turned his hand to aim the stinger away as she dragged their heads together. Their foreheads touched, and his lips were pressed against the back of his hand. He could feel the hilt of his sword being pushed painfully into his sternum. He gagged as one of her leg tentacles slithered up his chest, leading with a pair of toes on half a foot. It quickly wound around his neck.

The water finally seeped into the lantern, enough to snuff out the fire. Everything went black.

Beneath the water, his other hand fumbled at his waist, trying to feel past the rest of the writhing tentacles blindly. Finding the hilt of his parrying dagger, he yanked it free of its sheath and slammed it sideways through her neck. She jerked back, dragging his arm with her. He still refused to let go of the stinger, so she bit down on his hand again. A lightning crack lit up the berth through the crack in the hull, letting him see her twisted face for just a moment as she heaved, relaunching her tongue. In desperation, he pulled on the hilt of his dagger, forcing her neck to turn just before she launched that terrible spine into his face. The hand holding the stinger flew into the water with the force of the retching, nearly causing him to let go, but he managed to keep his grip. He returned his fist to her face again, driving her stinger into her eye.

Her whole body flailed and thrashed, constricting and contorting, shrieking one last plea before convulsing and going still.

He rolled her the rest of the way off of him and shakily stood up, taking ragged breaths as he frantically pulled tentacles free of his legs. He fumbled in the dark, pulling his weapons free of her body, and stepped back. Another lightning flash lit up the berth. Silhouetted in the cracked hull were more tentacles.

"Help," a ragged voice called.

"No," he said flatly, coughing as he recovered from strangulation.

He sloshed out of the room and shut the door behind him, quickly sheathing his weapons.

Then he retrieved a hammer and a handful of nails from where they hung against the mast.

He turned back to the door. "No, I don't think so."

"Coleman! Hooks! We need to shove off!" Danica bellowed. Her husband turned his head and shouted an "Aye!" in reply before ordering the men near him to the side of the ship.

"You four, with me!" Danica called several nearby swabs who were still getting their bearings now that they had some light. They quickly fell in line with her.

Mounted on the railings near all the small boats were gaff hooks. Usually, they are used for snagging nets or debris from the water or pushing off if the ship finds itself grounded. They were long, twice as tall as a man, with blunted metal points and sharpened hooks at the end. The crew swapped their swords, clubs, and knives for makeshift spears and waited for orders.

Danica retrieved her hook and pointed it overboard. "Find the reef, dig in, and be ready to heave!"

While the North tried to free the ship, the battle raged on the foredeck.

The Kestrel's crew were all non-disabled men and women, used to the rough and tumble life of sailors and veterans of many a dockside brawl, but they weren't hardened fighters. They were armed with the tools of their trade: belaying pins, knives, hooks, and hatchets. A few had personal weapons, but most didn't. None of them had armor. They weren't a crew of soldiers; even the most capable were still only used to fighting other people.

The foes they faced that night looked human but were anything but. They seemed to have difficulty keeping their balance, constantly lurching and falling over. More than one tumbled off the Kestrel's deck into the angry ocean. Their clumsiness was the only thing that kept the Kestrel from being quickly overrun. It was their one disadvantage. They seemed to feel no pain. They were intense and relentless. They had scorpion's tails in place of tongues. Worst of all, though, were their faces. They were bulging, bloodshot eyes. Contorted expressions like they'd been trapped in terror and agony. Their voices were raw and strained from screaming.

They only called one thing, even amid the chaotic violence, in between vomiting up those terrible spined tongues.

Help.

A dozen different languages, a cacophony of calls for aid. Left with no targets near them, they would occasionally default to waving their arms back and forth over their heads like marooned sailors.

Nearly a dozen dead and dying crew members lay strewn across the deck. Their foes weren't fast, but it was all over for them if they managed to get ahold of someone. Their inhuman strength made them nearly impossible to get free from. They would strangle, bite, and sting with those terrible tongues until their prey was done for.

The crew of the Kestrel was terrified. They would have broken and run already, save for the presence of one man, right in the thick of it all, anchoring the crew to the fight.

Mister Reeve was reveling in the violence. The small handful of crew members he'd brought seemed nearly as bloodthirsty. They created an effective blockade on the deck and gave the rest of the crew something to rally to. Reeve was single-handedly holding off four of the wretched pale invaders. Reeve swung his wooden hook in broad chops, striking with the curved back edge to drag the serrations across pale flesh. Their inhuman foes shed blood like men, and Reeve had already painted the deck with it. It wasn't enough to quickly wash it away even in the storm's rain.

Through it all, Reeve grinned. He didn't laugh, or brag, or shout orders. He just smiled, his sharp, filed teeth matching the serrations on his hook.

A spined tongue embedded itself just below his ribs, and he grabbed it in a meaty fist. Quickly winding it around his wrist, he pulled it out of his body and gave it a sharp yank, dragging the pale invader into his reach. Then he brought his big wooden hook down where his foe's shoulder and neck met.

Bones broke, and shark's tooth serrations tore flesh. The blow would likely have killed an ordinary man, but the pale thing didn't cry out. It crumpled and stood again, reaching for Reeve's neck with its good arm. Reeve grabbed the staggered monster by the throat to keep it out of reach and chopped again, this time into the thing's knee. The leg folded like it was boneless, bending unnaturally instead of breaking. That was the moment that broke Reeve's smile. He looked at the thing in his grip with a mixture of confusion and disgust, and then he swung it like a rag doll, crashing it into one of its fellows.

It flailed and flopped, its leg split strangely from the force of the blow. Reeve had hit it laterally, but the wound he saw looked like it was running vertically up the entire length of its leg. "What the hell?" Reeve muttered, swatting away another incoming tongue-stinger. The thing with the damaged leg tried to stand, but the wound gave way. As Reeve watched, its injured leg peeled open. Its barefoot is separated into three sections and split along the shin, the knee, and the thigh to the hip. It lay there writhing on the ground, its leg now looking like three tentacles made of freshly butchered meat. One of the tentacles dangled by a thread of viscera. The other two sections tried to seal themselves together and push off the deck so it could stand, but without the third tentacle to form an entire leg, it didn't have the structural integrity to support its body. It collapsed twice before realizing it wouldn't be standing again. It looked down at itself for a moment, then its other leg split like the first one had. It fell, its pelvis sitting on the deck surrounded by writhing tentacles that had once been legs. It began to use them to drag itself across the deck slowly. It moved like an octopus, a rolling mass of boneless arms gathering and pulling. It uttered a ragged scream for help, then launched its barbed tongue in Reeve's direction again. Reeve stepped to the side with a speed that belied his bulk. As the tongue reached its entire length, another rifle crack rang out. The left side of its head exploded. It collapsed in a pile of still-writhing tentacles; its long tongue stretched across the deck.

Reeve looked over his shoulder and gave Mister Lynch a nod, then turned back to the butchery around him. He began to lay about him again, aiming lower now.

"Aim for the legs or the head!" He roared to the crew. His grin returned.

The Kestrel lurched sharply backward, sending the crew sprawling again. Many of the combatants toward the prow found themselves tossed to the ground amid the scrambling horrors. In the hold, Will fell into the door he was nailing shut. "What the?" He bit off a curse.

What was shoving them? That was too jerky of a motion to be the ocean, and the black ship was already stuck on them. How were they being pushed?

He brought his hammer down twice, driving a third nail between the door and the frame.

Something scraped on the door from the other side.

Hopefully, the nails will hold, or at least they will buy some time. He turned and ran. Morant's small contingent of explorers was on the other side of the hold. All six were decked out in leather armor with thick curved blades on their hips. They were guarding the door to Morant's room with steely-eyed intensity.

"Are you serious!" he yelled at them. "Get up on deck!" His throat hurt where he'd been strangled, but he was too angry to heed the pain.

"Not our orders," one of them said.

"If this ship gets taken, they won't take prisoners to ransom! Those are Grindylows!" Will growled.

He could see the men's faces look surprised and fearful. " Are you sure?" another of them asked.

"Yeah," Will nodded. "So come fight, or we all die."

"Not. Our. Orders," the one who'd spoken earlier reiterated.

"I don't have time for this," Will said. "If you don't get up there, you won't like how this unfolds, no matter who wins."

He left the men in the dark and returned up the steps as quickly as possible. He'd taken three steps when the ship lurched again, this time forward.

He descended the staircase, drove his shin into a step, then tumbled back into the hold. He winced and pushed himself back to his feet, using the walls of the narrow hall to steady himself. "How," he muttered to himself.

Ten seconds later, he was up on deck, limping with the pain in his shin but walking it off as quickly as possible.

"What hit us?" he called up to the helm.

"No idea," the captain yelled back. "Danica, report!"

"Nothing to report, Captain!" Danica called back. "I don't see anything!"

"Does that ship have oars?" Will called to the first mate. He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

"Not that I can see," Danica answered.

A theory was starting to form in Will's mind, and he disliked it. "We're breached, Captain!" he called up to the helm as he rushed up the second set of stairs. "Right at the waterline. Every wave pushes more water into the hold. We have more of those things down there, too,"

Captain Vex bit off a curse. "Any good news?"

"I nailed the door to the crew quarters shut. No idea how long it will hold. If it bursts, those things will be down there with Morant's porters.

Turns out they all have armor and swords," Will said, his voice dripping with bitter sarcasm.

"And they aren't up here?' Belita demanded.

"Not their orders, apparently," Will sneered.

Captain Vex's eyes went steely and grim. There would be a reckoning later, but first, they had to survive. "We have to get free. That's priority one."

"No argument here," Will agreed.

"Riggers! Repel boarders!" Belita yelled. "Swabs, man, the hooks!"

"Repel boarders!" they heard Lace echo from above.

"I have an idea," Will said. "Call it a failsafe."

"What?" Belita asked.

"I'm... going to try to blast us free," Will said tentatively, waiting for the outrage or refusal from the captain.

She eyed him for a moment. "Ye have explosives?"

"Jack does," Will said.

Captain Vex nodded. "Last resort. Make it happen."

Will gave her a nod and ran back down the stairs.



To be continued