Blackbeard's Aliens

  Blackbeard's Aliens

  By

  Robert T. Jeschonek

  *****

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  *****

  Blackbeard's Aliens

  "Fire!" I have been called a Gentleman Pirate, and oft enough, the name suits. But on a day like this, Stede Bonnet is all pirate and no gentleman.

  No sooner has the order to fire left my lips than the port side guns of the Adventure blast out their loads in clouds of roiling black smoke. Five iron balls leap through the air, heading straight for their target--a huge silver disk hovering thirty feet above the water.

  Twin beams of red light flash out from the rim of the disk, burning two of the cannonballs into wisps of steam. But the other three make it through. They don't penetrate the hull of the silver disk as I had hoped, but they do make it rock in midair.

  Take that, you hellspawn. "Reload!" I shout, though I know the men have already done just that. We are united in perfect rhythm after all our many battles as part of this fearsome flotilla. Our leader, much as I despise him, has taught us that.

  Even now, not half a league away, I hear the guns of his personal flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, pound away at a larger target--another hovering object, this one triangular in shape. I don't have to look to know his banner yet flies from the mainmast, rippling in the Caribbean breeze.

  There is no other flag like it: a field of black, with a skeletal, horned demon raising a toast to Satan whilst piercing a heart with a spear. All this time, I thought it was merely a symbol of evil designed to strike fear in the hearts of seagoing foes. And, for me, a personal symbol of a man I loathed, a pirate who'd taken everything from me and pressed me into service in his infamous fleet.

  Little did I know it was a declaration of war on an unearthly enemy. Little did I dream, until recently, that Blackbeard had much more on his mind than wealth and power.

  "Fire!" This time, the booms of the cannon begin before I cry out the word. It's not insubordination; the men know we must press the attack hard and fast.

  But not one single ball connects with the target. This is because our one target has become many. The disk has split into twenty silver wedges, each leaping out of range of our guns.

  And then streaking toward us like arrows from a brace of archers.

  Raising the spyglass to my eye, I see spots of glowing light flare to life on the point of each wedge. The light is red, like the deadly beams that shot forth from the undivided disk a moment ago.

  Their purpose is clear to me.

  "Fight for your lives!" I pocket the spyglass and swing up my saber and pistol as I call out over the noise on deck. "Send 'em back to hell before they do the same to you!"

  *****

  It's hard to believe there was ever a time when I'd not heard of these creatures. But that time was three months ago, true enough.

  It was just then that Blackbeard's strange behavior began to arouse suspicions among his pirate captains, myself included. The way he started letting ships filled with goods from the West Indies pass without raiding them...the way he paced the decks at all hours, watching the inky darkness and muttering to himself...and then there were the treasure hunts.

  I confronted him about it one night on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of Northern Carolina, as we watched the men dig. We had marched inland some distance and stopped in the heart of a grove of cedar trees. It was there he had instructed the crew to sink the first spade and dig until they struck something solid.

  "Why are we pulling up all your old hoards?" I asked the question quietly under the rasp of sinking shovels and the grunting of the men. "New Providence, Nassau, Barbados, Oak Island--now here. Have you some grand scheme in mind?"

  Blackbeard turned his fierce countenance upon me. It's true what they say about his fearsome appearance. With those glittering dark eyes and pitch-black beard, he looks like something more than man, something divine in a hellish way. "You'll know soon enough, Stede." He was a full head taller than me and had to look down to see my face. "And then you'll wish you didn't."

  "Will you at least open this one?" It was stifling hot that night. I took off my broad-brimmed hat and wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my brown coat sleeve. "Or will you leave this chest padlocked in the hold of the Revenge like all the rest?"

  He smirked behind his thick, braided beard, his namesake. "The ship's name is the Queen Anne's Revenge," he said.

  I bristled, as he'd known I would. That ship had once been my own, christened Revenge, until he'd taken it from me. I despised him for it still, though I now served as captain of a smaller vessel in his fleet, the Adventure...waiting always for the day when I would regain what I had lost. Working for that day, too, always plotting and preparing. I was organizing a mutiny even then, taking advantage of Blackbeard's erratic behavior to sway key crewmen to my cause.

  "Can you at least give me a hint, Edward?" I kept my voice low so the men would not hear me call him by his given name, Edward Teach...or as close to a given name as he'd admit to. "What plan do you have in mind for all that treasure?"

  Blackbeard's broad face split in a pearly grin. "Who said anything about treasure?" He laughed and cuffed me on the side of my head.

  Just then, the men struck something. They were several feet down, up to their shoulders in the hole, when I heard the spades hit something solid.

  "We have it, sir," said one of the men. He hit it again. "I think it's a chest."

  "Bring it up, then." Blackbeard gestured impatiently. "And make it double-quick, lads."

  Suddenly, his head jerked up, and he looked around. His hands found the butts of two of the six pistols stuffed into the bandoliers he wore across his belly.

  "What is it?" I listened and looked, sensing nothing...and then I glimpsed a faint red light glowing among the cedars. It was steady, perhaps fifty yards distant--not flickering, not a torch, certainly.

  "We must have been followed." Blackbeard cocked the pistols. "You're about to get your answers, Stede."

  I drew my own pistol and saber. "Answers?"

  Blackbeard spit on the ground and raised the guns. "You won't like 'em." Then, he fired both weapons into the woods.

  As the brimstone smell of gunpowder filled the air, I heard a terrible shriek in the distance like the cry of a banshee. Suddenly, the red light flashed and divided, becoming three lights...and all three surged toward us.

  "Stand your ground!" Blackbeard dropped his first two guns and reached for another pair from his bandolier. "Go for their middle heads!"

  His words baffled me, but explanation came soon enough. The lights were fast upon us, and with them, strange creatures unlike any I'd ever seen.

  To say they were nightmarish would not do them justice. They were skeletal things of polished bone--roughly human in that they each had two arms, two legs, and a trunk...but the similarity ended there. For the bones were covered with jagged spurs and points.
And each creature had three heads like gleaming skulls: one atop the shoulders, with a crown of horns all around and sharp fangs in the jaws; one in the belly with a sharp beak; and one in the chest with a single glowing red eye and two mouths. Rays of crimson light shot out of those eyes, lancing right and left through the night.

  Demons. That was the only word I had for them.

  Chills leaped along my spine as they fell upon us. I heard the diggers scream, struck by the crimson rays, yet I did not flinch. I got off a shot at the demon nearest me, and my aim was true. The ball blasted dead on into the glowing red eye of the head in its chest. The thing went into a spasmodic dance, as if seized by St. Vitus, then spun screaming to the ground.

  Blackbeard shot one, as well, but it still managed to throw itself around his legs. The third demon pressed the advantage, wrapping him in its spiny grip.

  It was then I realized these things were more than mere skeletons. Their bones stretched and grew like vines, curling around Blackbeard as he grappled to free himself. Fresh spines and thorns arose and pierced his garments, anchoring themselves in his flesh.

  For an instant, I was gripped by an impulse to leave him to his fate. It was the end I had hoped for from the start, since he'd taken my ship and convinced my own crew to turn against me.

  And yet, I found myself running to his aid, hacking with my saber at the half-dead thing on the ground. Soon enough, it gave way.

  Blackbeard, meanwhile, strained within the other demon's embrace. It continued to stretch around him, bones knitting a barbed cage as its horned skull craned back out of the way of his fevered head butts.

  I slashed at its throat, taking the top head clean off--but the cage did not let go. The middle head was the vulnerable one, but it was pressed against Blackbeard, and I couldn't reach it.

  Then, suddenly, a blaze of red light flared between them. The demon howled and shuddered, and Blackbeard burst free of the skeletal trap, sending fragments of bone flying everywhere.

  But that was not the biggest surprise. I was far more stunned by what I saw before he pulled his tattered jacket closed to cover his exposed chest.

  For there, over his breastbone, was a second head.

  It was more like a face, not a fully formed skull as had jutted out of those demons. And it had two eyes, not just one--but those eyes both glowed with red light.

  I sucked in my breath and backed away from him. He glared at me as he wrapped the coat tighter around himself.

  "Into the pit with you." He gestured toward the hole the men had been digging.

  I kept backing away. Did he intend to kill me?

  Blackbeard rolled his eyes. "We're both going in. The beasties killed our diggers. We need to bring up the chest ourselves."

  He stormed toward the pit, but I hung back. After all I'd seen, did I dare trust him?

  "Get in the damn hole," he snapped. "Unless you want to stay out here alone and wait for more of those things."

  He had a point. Swallowing hard, I slid my saber into its scabbard and followed him down into the ground.

  *****

  After digging out the chest and hauling it to the beach, we rowed our skiff by moonlight toward the Queen Anne's Revenge and the Adventure.

  At first, Blackbeard just glowered at his end of the boat, saying nothing. But after a while, my own stare seemed to wear him down.

  "When I was a younger man," he said, "after sailing aboard a privateer's vessel in Queen Anne's War, I settled on an island in the Bahamas. It was called Shark Cay."

  I frowned. "I haven't heard of it."

  Blackbeard offered no comment. "I had a wife and two children there. Two splendid little boys." He pulled back on the oars, pushing the skiff forward. "I was happy."

  Happy? I tried to imagine it. I'd seen him furious, vengeful, bitter, distant, and brutal, but never happy.

  "Then, one night, they came." He bobbed his head toward Ocracoke, toward the demons. "They emerged from the heart of a raging storm, swirling with red, yellow, orange, blue, and black lightning. They swooped down out of a doorway in the sky in flying boats and landed on Shark Cay, which they laid waste to." Leaning forward, he met my gaze with eyes afire. "When they were done, I was the only living thing left on the island." His voice was like ice. "Perhaps this is why you have not heard of Shark Cay before."

  I rowed my own oars a few strokes before daring to speak. "And you?"

  Blackbeard sighed. "They took me with them. Back through the doorway." He gazed up at the stars. "They took me to the strangest place you can imagine. The skies were green, the sun was blue. Sounds were like smells, and tastes were like touches. There were beasties everywhere, some like the ones we just fought and some more terrifying still."

  "It sounds like Hell," I told him.

  "That's what I thought at first, but no. It was another world." He kept looking upward.

  I nodded silently. If not for the battle we'd just been through on Ocracoke, I would have thought him insane.

  "They...changed me. They thought I could be of use to them." He looked at me and sneered darkly. "They could not have been more wrong."

  "You escaped."

  Blackbeard smiled grimly. "They sent me back to do their dirty work, but I broke free. I've been waging war against them ever since, using the tools they gave me." He stopped rowing and patted his chest, where the second head glowed faintly under his coat. "I can feel them coming. I know what they want."

  "How is that possible?"

  "They think with one mind." He tapped his forehead with his finger. "I hear echoes and whispers enough to piece together their plans."

  I stopped rowing too, then. "Which are?"

  "The end of us all, Stede Bonnet." Blackbeard scowled. "Every man and woman on the face of the Earth."

  I sat silently for a long moment, watching him. His words sounded mad. I could not help but think that they were ample fuel for the mutiny I'd been organizing.

  Yet how could I dismiss them after what we'd been through? "Armageddon?" I said. "When? How?"

  "Very soon, Bonnet." Blackbeard closed his eyes. He'd woven fuses into his shaggy black hair, and the tips of them started to glow and burn as if someone had taken a match to them. "We won't have much time."

  "Time for what?" I asked. "What do we have to do?"

  His eyes shot open and the lit fuses flared. "Save the world, of course."

  *****

  We set sail the next morning for Hispaniola to rendezvous with the rest of our pirate fleet--eight ships strong, counting the Queen Anne's Revenge and the Adventure.

  The sun was shining bright, the wind gusting strong. We sailed in a southeasterly direction, making excellent speed over choppy sapphire seas.

  Salt spray misted over me as I paced the deck, watching the horizons through my spyglass. As I walked, the events of the night before replayed in my mind. In retrospect, they seemed like an opium dream, wholly unreal. Had any of it actually happened? Or was I the one who'd gone mad, not Edward?

  Just as I considered this possibility, I heard his familiar heavy footsteps clomping toward me. Turning, I saw him in glory restored--red velvet coat, black trousers and knee-high boots. Under the coat, as was his habit, he wore a white shirt with prominent ruffles from throat to waist. Already, his bandoliers were in place, plugged with six loaded pistols, and his cutlass was sheathed in the scabbard swinging at his left hip.

  "'Morning, Stede." He stomped up beside me and leaned his elbows on the port bulwark rail. "You're looking in the wrong place."

  "Am I now?" I tried sounding glib, but I was having trouble standing so close to him. Now that I knew what lay under his shirt, he seemed more fearsome than ever to me.

  Blackbeard raised a finger to the sky. "Our next attack will come from up there. Especially now, as we cruise the waters between Bermuda and Hispaniola."

  I looked up, shading my eyes against the sun. "And why is that?"

  "This is where their doorways open," said Blackbeard. "In this wedg
e of deep ocean where Mother Nature lets down her guard." He smacked his palm on the bulwark. "The walls are thin here, Stede."

  A chill shot along my spine. "Will they come for us, Edward? Are they on their way?"

  He shrugged his broad shoulders. "I feel nothing, but they surprise me sometimes. We'll keep the crew on round-the-clock watch for just such an occurrence." Narrowing his eyes, he clamped a hand on my upper arm. "Now come along. I have a task for you as well."

  *****

  He took me below decks, to a corner of the hold that was under watch by three armed guards. They were three of his most loyal men; I'd never dared approach them while recruiting for my mutiny.

  "Here we are." Blackbeard spread his arms before the five wooden chests stacked in front of us. "Finer treasures no man has ever beheld."

  I took off my hat and stood beside him. "What is this task you have for me?"

  Blackbeard reached for a ring of keys that hung on his right hip. He singled out one cast iron key and shook it in my face. "The most important thing you have ever done and will ever do in your life."

  Stomping forward, he inserted the key in the padlock on the topmost chest. He turned it, and I heard the lock snap open.

  "Would you say the winds can blow us in unforeseen directions, Stede?" he said as he unwound the chain from the chest. "That fate can lead us to places we never expected? Places we were destined to be?"

  I thought of the day he first boarded my ship--this ship, now his. "Of course."

  Blackbeard gazed at me with ferocious intensity from beneath his coal-black brows. "Then step forward, Stede."

  Sweat ran down my back and sides. Had Blackbeard heard of the mutiny? Had he brought me down here to put an end to me?