After the Deluge
By Peter Golubock
“Shouldn’t we hoist the black flag?” asked the first mate.
They’d been shadowing the merchantman for more than an hour in the East Channel, edging closer by dribs and drabs, acting the part of a lowly water taxi ferrying tired servants from the island back to the main as the day came to a close.
The captain adjusted her eyepatch. “Not quite yet, I think,” she said. She didn’t speak loudly, but then again, she didn’t have to. The crew hung on her every word. Now she reached in her pocket for a stale crust of bread, offering it to the pigeon perched on her shoulder. It regarded the morsel for a moment, then cooed appreciatively and snatched the crust from the captain’s hand. “Whaddaya think, Bloombito?” said the captain to her bird. “Is it time?”
It wasn’t an easy question to answer, and Bloombito the pigeon would have been well advised to think before responding. Hoisting the Jolly Roger too soon would give the merchie time to run and sound the alarm. But every second they waited was another opportunity for a sharp pair of eyes aboard that fat merchie to sweep over the seemingly innocent water taxi a few points windward and to see the concealed gun ports and then to turn tail and run, screaming for help from the Navy as they fled.
The captain’s reverie was interrupted by the second mate’s arrival on the quarterdeck. “Avast, Cap’n,” he said, doffing his battered ball cap by way of greeting.
“Avast and ahoy, Roberto,” replied the skipper. “What’s the word?”
“The boys and girls are eager, Cap’n,” he said, tugging one of the plaits in his matted black beard for emphasis. “It’s been, what, near three weeks now since we caught that pleasure-yacht in the Central Lagoon?”
“And what’s the latest on the fuel situation?” It was this problem more than any other that had gnawed at the captain this past hour, as they’d crept up on their unwitting quarry.
“Clemenza says we’ve got ten minutes at full speed.”
The captain produced a spyglass from one of the innumerable pockets that adorned her battered blue pea coat, putting it to her remaining eye. It was dusk, and the wind was starting to pick up a bit from the southeast. The garbage-choked waters of the East Channel slapped the ship’s hull. The air smelled like mud and seagull shit. It was time.
She turned to the first mate, who’d been silent since being rebuffed not five minutes ago. Was it really just five minutes ago? thought the captain. It feels like a year. “Beat to quarters and hoist the black flag, Aki,” she said. “It’s time to start slitting throats.”
The First Mate smiled, which would have been kind of cute were her teeth not filed into points. “About time, Cap’n,” she said, and then she swept down the stairs from the quarterdeck. “Battle stations! Look hearty, you scurvy dogs!” she screamed to roars from the crew.
Not to be outdone, the second mate had been pulling down the yellow, white and black tricolor of the Water-Taxi and Limousine Commission. The ship had burst to life and was now a swarm of activity, as the pirate crew ran out the guns and the Jolly Roger crawled its way to the top of the flagpole.
From another pocket of the captain’s coat came an antique red and white megaphone, which she thumbed on and directed at her prey. “Ahoy, there, merchie!” she yelled at the ungainly, slate-grey ship—more a bathtub than a boat, thought the captain with a sneer—that was now only a couple hundred yards off her starboard bow. She lifted the megaphone to her lips again. “This is the Pizza Rat!” she said, and her crew pounded the gunwales with the butts of their guns and shrieked. “You’ve heard of us, and what we’ve done. Now heave to and prepare to be boarded, or we’ll have your guts for garters!”
A few months ago, after a merchantman had refused to strike the colors, leading the Pizza Rat on a lengthy chase and then resisting the boarding party tooth-and-nail to boot, Aki had actually tried to turn the offending captain’s guts into garters. It hadn’t worked out very well, and indeed, it was days like that one which made the captain wonder if perhaps she hadn’t gotten herself into the wrong line of work. She banished that stray thought from her mind as she grabbed the fire pole that went from the quarterdeck to the bridge and shinnied down.
Unlike the quarterdeck, the bridge was enclosed from the elements by a set of spectacularly grimy floor to ceiling windows. It was empty save for Fouad, the helmsman, a perpetually rumpled middle-aged man with curly greying hair and a walrus mustache. Fouad’s grandfather had driven taxis on land; his father had driven them on water. “Driving is in the blood,” is what Fouad himself said whenever he’d had one too many and was feeling ruminative. He turned and sketched a mock salute as the captain arrived on the bridge.
“Ready for action, Fouad?”
He snorted, sending the ends of his mustache skyward for a moment. “Action? What action?” He motioned at the merchie. “We’ve caught them with their pants down and ass hanging out.”
There were a few other ships in hailing distance and each and every one of which had bugged out the instant the Jolly Roger made its appearance. That left only the Pizza Rat’s prize, floundering pathetically in the water dead ahead. The captain didn’t even need her spyglass now. She was close enough to see the tub’s name—the O’Melveny, whatever the hell that was—and its crew, scurrying around like ants whose colony had just been smashed by a vengeful giant.
“They put about on the port tack when we raised the black flag,” said Fouad, “then changed their damn minds and went hard a-starboard. Now they’re caught up in stays, and not a motor to be seen.”
It was just then that the O’Melveny struck the colors. The captain smirked. “And we didn’t even need to fire a warning shot,” she said. “Oh, well. Suppose it’s about time everything went right for once.”
Fouad frowned. “Look over there, Cap’n,” he said, pointing starboard and astern. “One of the other ships is turning around.”
This did indeed call for the spyglass, which made an encore appearance. The captain frowned into the lens. One ship had, indeed, turned around, and was headed back directly towards the Pizza Rat and the merchie. It was going fast, too, a sleek little blue number with some contraption mounted on the bow.
The captain put down the spyglass, turned to Fouad, and said, “I don’t know what in hells they think they’re playing—”
She would have said “at” next, but then there was a loud explosion. Bloombito squawked, flew directly into the ceiling, and landed in a heap of feathers on the tiller. A massive gout of water shot into the air uncomfortably close to the starboard beam.
“It’s NYPN!” shouted Fouad, pointing at the advancing blue ship.
“Disengage, and do it now,” said the captain, fighting to keep a note of hysteria from creeping into her voice. “Set a course for LaGuardia Bay, and fire up the motor. Full speed ahead, Fouad.”
She didn’t even wait for him to confirm her orders before hauling herself hand over hand back up the fire pole to the quarterdeck. We’ve got to put in a set of stairs, the captain thought for the hundredth time, wondering as she did if it would be the last. The only greeting she received on the quarterdeck was a shell that shrieked overhead, clipping lines of rigging and barely missing the mizzenmast. The Pizza Rat was starting to pull away from the O’Melveny, whose captain was surely kissing the deck and thanking whatever set of gods she worshiped. The sun was a rapidly disappearing disc of orange in the west.
Aki ran onto the quarterdeck, gun in hand and eyes wild. “Why are we running?” she asked, gesturing with her rifle at the approaching police cutter. “We’re bigger than they are. We should stand and fight!”
A kettle of tension deep within the captain boiled over at that moment, and she took three quick strides across the deck, grabbing Aki’s gun with one hand, tossing it overboard, while holding onto her first mate’s throat very tightly with the other. Aki opened her mouth to speak, but the captain squeezed. A hoarse squawk was all that emerged.
“Shut the fuck up,” said the captain conversationally. “We’re pirates, you idiot, not soldiers. We slug it out with them, and we wind up with a boat full of holes and half the crew dead. And that’s if we’re lucky. Now where’s the profit in that, I ask you?”
Her grip loosened and Aki once more attempted to speak, only for the captain’s grip to tighten again just as suddenly, resulting in a slightly more truncated squawk. Bloombito cooed in response from his perch on the captain’s shoulder. “Again, shut the fuck up,” said the captain. “I wasn’t actually asking you.”
The Pizza Rat had turned away and accelerated south, giving them a chance to open fire on their pursuer. The ripping sound of machine-gun fire filled the air. Then there was a short sharp smashing sound, and the ship shuddered. The police cutter had scored a hit, punching a hole in the Pizza Rat’s hull just above the waterline amidships on the port side. A few scattered screams added their voices to the cawing of gulls overhead.
“Now go do your fucking job,” the captain snarled, “and be a good little girl, or I’ll cut off your fucking tongue and feed it to the fish.” She pushed Aki away towards the damaged area of the ship. The first mate stumbled, opened her mouth as if to say something, then thought better of it and ran.
“That was a bit dramatic, no?” Roberto had somehow managed to appear on the quarterdeck unnoticed. He was surprisingly good at sneaking around for a man who was the size of a small bear.
“What’s the damage?” asked the captain, waving towards the smoking hole amidships. Another shell sailed overhead, detonating harmlessly about fifty yards astern.
“We’ll live, for the moment.” The Pizza Rat’s guns continued to tear away, though from the looks of it they weren’t doing much.
“That’s comforting,” said the captain. “You always did have a way of putting me at ease, Roberto. It’s probably why you got the second mate gig.”
“We’ll live,” repeated Roberto, “for about six more minutes, after which we’ll run out of fuel, at which point they will proceed to run circles around us until we are dead.”
“That’s not so comforting.”
“They’ll also definitely have called for backup by now.” There was a crash and an unearthly screech as a shell smacked into the foremast, turning it into an assortment of bent metal shards. Four of the crew were pulped across the deck.
“You know, maybe you should just shut up.” The only thing they had going for them, the captain thought, was that night was rapidly approaching. Oh, and that they were leading the police into a trap. Couldn’t forget that.
The Pizza Rat’s gunners finally scored a hit of their own. There was a muffled blast. Smoke started pouring from the pursuer’s stern.
“That’ll slow them down a bit,” the captain said. “Now if we can just—”
“You know what I said about how they’ll have called for backup by now?”
“Didn’t I just tell you to shut up?”
“At your nine o’clock, amidships,” said Roberto, flinging an arm in the offending direction. “Another of the little buggers.”
“Hold the course!” shouted the captain to Roberto, and Fouad at the helm, and really to everyone. It was too late to do anything else at this point anyway, with only a few minutes of fuel left. Hopefully, a few minutes would be all they needed. Their original pursuer was lagging noticeably now. Dusk was changing to dark, and if they could shake this newest tail and get out of open water they’d be as good as invisible.
The Pizza Rat juddered through the choppy waters of LaGuardia Bay. A salvo of rockets shrieked overhead, as the second police cutter tried to gauge the range and sight in. The Rat’s gunners returned fire, but their broadside didn’t trouble the enemy. Fouad had opened the throttle as far as the old engine could go. It whined and retched as the ship skipped over the waves. Their pursuer matched the Pizza Rat’s acceleration with an almost contemptuous ease. It was edging closer and closer, though gunnery on both sides was hampered by the encroaching darkness.
A blast from their pursuer’s horn hailed the pirate ship, as the chase continued. “Now hear this,” blared a disembodied voice. “Attention unidentified criminal watercraft. You are hereby required to heave to at once, by express and lawful order of the New York Police Navy. Failure to comply may result in the use of lethal force against your vessel. Again, this . . .”
The recording continued, but the captain had heard enough. She sputtered in indignation. “Failure to comply may result in the use of lethal force! What the fuck have they been shooting at us for the past twenty minutes, party favors?”
Roberto sighed, shaking his head mournfully. “I swear,” he said, “their standards just keep on dropping. Give it a few years and they’ll be grunting at us.”
“We’re coming up on it, Captain!” shouted Fouad, from below. “Just a minute now!”
The smell of smoke and blood filled the air. It was all too familiar. “All right, Fouad,” the captain said. “Execute when ready. Let’s give these bastards a little gift from the Old City!”
A few seconds later the ship twitched a point to port, so imperceptibly that one could be forgiven for not noticing it, and then slid back to resume its previous course. All of a sudden, there was a terrible mangled screech, the sound of metal clashing on metal from behind them. Their pursuer had collided with some object beneath the waterline and run aground. It listed over on the starboard side, hull belly-up in surrender. LaGuardia Airport may have been long gone, but its air traffic control tower was not. Lurking beneath the waves, just inches beneath the surface, it waited to ensnare careless travelers. It was easy enough to avoid, of course. You just needed to know exactly where it was.
As the crew cheered and burst into song, the captain heard a cackle waft up from the helmsman below. “Fugheddaboutit!” shouted Fouad, triumphantly, as the Pizza Rat and its pirate crew slipped away into the murky nighttime streets of Jackson Heights.
It wasn’t a big surprise when New York sank beneath the waves. The surprise was that everyone stayed. Life went on much as it always had. There were a few minor alterations to people’s daily lives, of course; boats replaced cars, food carts became food canoes, and no one lived on the ground floor anymore. But there was no mass exodus from the five boroughs, no long snaking line of refugees wending its way deep into flyover country. New Yorkers stayed. They built up, and kept on building. Great swathes of Brooklyn were brownstones underwater as far as the second floor, with ramshackle additions welded onto roofs. Labyrinthine passages were strung between the skyscrapers of Manhattan, a spider web of streets hundreds of feet above the water. Most New Yorkers lived their entire lives without ever setting foot on land. The city sank, and rose again.
Everything about this new New York, an ungainly Venice on stilts, was outsized; both the virtues and flaws of the old New York were magnified in the newer version. Denizens of the Old City who battled rats, cockroaches and bedbugs would doubtless have been pleased that they shuffled off this mortal coil early enough to avoid the sharks, crocodiles, and poisonous jellyfish of the New City. Traffic choked the main water-streets and thoroughfares at all hours. Hapless crossing guards in rickety dinghies tweeted whistles and waved stop signs as every imaginable make and model of watercraft jostled for tiny scraps of space.
Inequality, that yawning chasm that separated the fortunate from everyone else, had grown by leaps and bounds, the two sides of the chasm moving farther away from each other. The rich lived in opulence on verdant islands dotted amid the waters of the city. The super-rich lived on dry land, a concept beyond the ken of ninety-nine percent of those who scratched and scraped and drifted through the streets. It should come as no surprise that some of those ninety-nine percent, the dispossessed and desperate, forsook the law and took to the waves with ill intent. Like the old stories of Robin Hood, the pirates of New York stole from the rich. They were rather less enthusiastic about giving to the poor, though.
The Floating Conclave was supposed to take place, by ancient and hoary tradition, on the first Thursday of every month. There was no explanation for this. In point of fact, the Floating Conclave took place whenever the most powerful pirate captains of the Five Boroughs had enough free time to sit down and do some day planning. It was thus a rare and momentous occasion.
Even so, there is one tonight, and we are invited. Let us go, then, to the old Statue of Liberty, the chosen site for this edition of the Conclave, convenient enough for all the great captains yet out-of-the-way enough to, hopefully, not catch the wandering eye of the New York Police Navy. The captains need not fear. The NYPN knows in vague and general terms about the Conclave. It may even know where it will meet. But the NYPN will do nothing due to the bitter certainty that it could arrest every pirate captain in New York and a day later there would be a brand new crop, possibly even more bloodthirsty than the current lot and definitely less predictable. Better the devil you know than the deep blue sea.
Enter Roberto Garcia-Rosenberg, second mate of the good ship Pizza Rat, a toasted everything bagel in one hand and his hole cards in the other. He is losing at poker and has been for some time now, but the bagel is delicious and a sweet young thing from the Hedge Funder’s Bane has been making cow eyes at him all night, so this particular Conclave is by no means a total loss.
“Are you going to fold, or what?” Copper Gourd asked. He was in a hurry because he was winning. Ride your luck while it lasts, he’d said not two minutes ago, waxed mustaches quivering with glee.
“Call,” said Roberto, tossing a pile of chips into the center of the table. His father had had a set of mustaches like that, back when he and Mom still owned the family artisanal pickle factory in Williamsburg.
“Fold,” said Madam Mercury. She turned to Roberto. “Heard you and the Rat got in a bit of a scrap the other evening.”
“That we did,” acknowledged Roberto with a nod, as The Mop raised the pot. “But the captain saw us through it.”
“You talk about her like she’s got a magic wand stuffed up her ass,” said Copper Gourd. He called The Mop’s raise.
“Who’s to say she doesn’t?” asked Roberto. He folded and stretched, taking in the view. Dozens of pirate ships were tied to the spikes of the old statue’s crown. There were a couple of lookouts perched on the torch, scanning the horizon for intruders. Salesmen and touts flitted to and fro on the periphery hawking their wares. The bold and desperate hoping to earn a place on a pirate crew circulated through the crowd, trying to catch a captain’s eye. They had quite a bit of competition.
The captain was talking to a spy. One thing that the rich of every era have had in abundance is employees. Invariably, some become disgruntled. Like any other pirate commander worth her salt, the captain maintained a network of informants throughout the city. They fed her morsels of information and were repaid with morsels of cash. While the information was generally idle gossip and stray rumors, every once in a while one of those morsels of information had a bit more meat on it.
“So, you’re saying it won’t have a guard escort?” The captain frowned dubiously and scratched her nose. This sounded a bit too good to be true, and after the debacle last time out, she was scrutinizing each and every gift horse with care.
“No guards,” said the contact with a definitive shake of her head, sending blonde curls flying every which way. “They said it would attract too much attention.”
“And the cargo is . . . fancy plates? What the fuck am I supposed to do with those?”
The contact flounced and stamped her feet. “You’re not listening! It’s china, it’s silver, it’s art, it’s everything! All going to their beach house in Vermont before the summer season starts. It’s worth, God, I can’t even imagine how much! And you’re just going to sit there?”
The captain didn’t actually doubt the contact. She’d worked for the House of Greenstone for a few years now. The contact always demurred when the subject of why she was so keen to sell out her employer came up, and the captain had never felt it wise to press the issue. The Pizza Rat had made more than one score thanks to information she’d provided, and the contact had made a fair bit of coin for her trouble. It had been a mutually profitable relationship. So why did the captain feel like she was being played?
“I didn’t say I’d just sit there,” said the captain, “though, frankly, I’m not sure what your problem with sitting there is. I find sitting to be quite an enjoyable activity.” She waved at the scenery surrounding the two of them, as they sipped tea at one of the tables that had been placed on the Statue of Liberty’s head.
The contact started to splutter and pout, then thought better of it. She smoothed her sea-green dress and took a deep breath. “I thought you’d be over the moon when you heard about this one,” she said. “I don’t get it. You need money, I definitely need money, and there’s a barge that’s begging to be robbed. What’s the issue?”
“A smash-and-grab job right smack in the middle of downtown is a tall fucking order, whether the boat is guarded or not.” The captain took a deep breath and played with her eyepatch. It’d start to fray at this rate, what with all the worrying away at it she’d been doing.
The contact tossed her arms in the air, then let them fall back onto the tea table. Saucers, spoons and teacups clinked and rattled. “It’s dangerous?” she asked. “So what? You’re pirates! Violent, amoral, adrenaline-crazed lunatics! Am I right?”
“You’re not wrong.”
Oh, to hell with it, the captain thought. In for a penny, in for a pound. She smoothed out her napkin and fed Bloombito an oyster cracker before focusing on the contact. “So, where did you say the best place to intercept the shipment was?”
The first order of business was to disguise the ship. That was easy enough. Hack off the figurehead and stow it in the hold, slap a new coat of paint on the old rust bucket, hide all the guns, make sure everything was spick and span, then call it a job well done. The second order of business was to disguise the crew, which somehow turned out to be more time-consuming. Most pirates tended to look as though the contents of a thrift shop had exploded all over them. Then there was the business of the false body parts several of the crew were sporting, which were entirely too noticeable. That led to the bold tonsorial and facial hair styling that was the fashion among pirates, and was most certainly not the fashion among contracted merchant seamen.
Even the captain herself was not immune. The eyepatch was gone for this mission, replaced by a glass eye and a pair of over-sized sunglasses. It didn’t feel right at all.
“The target is late.”
This from Aki, who had been subdued since her dressing-down on the Pizza Rat’s previous adventure. The ship slowly punted up Lexington Avenue, moving in time with the traffic, looking like nothing more than yet another tramp steamer hauling a load of who-knows-what to who-cares-where.
“Yes, it’s terribly unsporting of them. If they’re going to be late they should have the decency to call ahead and let us know, so we can get a coffee before robbing and murdering them.”
Roberto always did tend to get snappish when he was nervous. It was quite endearing. Sometimes the captain felt like a parent mediating between two siblings.
“We may not know where they are now, but we know where they’re going, right? Right?” asked the captain. Her reward was a pair of strained nods from her bickering underlings, which she took as a signal to continue. “They’ll take 58th out to open water, then make for Connecticut Bay. We’ll just keep loitering until they show up.”
It was a boiling hot midsummer day, which didn’t help anyone’s mood. Every now and then the faintest puff of a breeze blew in from the east. The air was so humid that you could almost cut it into slices and spread it on a piece of bread, thought the captain. It should have been lunchtime, but the crew watched and waited for their quarry to emerge.
And then, all of a sudden, it did. Aki claimed the honor of first eyes on the prize. “I think that’s it,” she said, pointing ahead. “Orange hull, two masts, double motors at the stern?” she asked, but it really wasn’t a question. The whole crew had memorized the vital details of the ship they were hunting.
Off went the sunglasses and out came the spyglass. The captain held it to her good eye, squinted, and then slammed it shut and started barking orders. “That’s it, all right,” she said, a note of excitement creeping into her voice. “Add sail, get the sculls working, and start the engines! We’ve got to cut them off before they get to open water or they’ll outrun us with those big motors for sure.”
The Pizza Rat started to pick up speed. It swerved into oncoming traffic for a beat, edged past a few slowpokes, then slid back into its lane just in time to avoid a collision.
“Turn east on 56th!” the captain shouted down to Fouad at the helm. It was narrower than 58th, but there wouldn’t be nearly as much crosstown traffic. They turned hard a-starboard on 56th Street, which thankfully was quiet. Only a few personal canoes and kayaks plied the quiet residential way. Their passage was rudely interrupted by the Pizza Rat, which roared down the street, leaving a trail of whitecaps in its wake.
“Left on 2nd Avenue!” roared the captain, caught up in the thrill of the hunt. “Clear for action!”
Second Avenue was much busier, and the traffic was heavy. They were still about two-thirds of a block shy of 58th when the captain saw the target starting to negotiate the intersection ahead. She wasn’t the only one to notice. A muffled groan was audible from bow to stern.
“They’re going to get away,” warned Roberto.
“Not if we blow our cover,” said Aki. “How about it, Captain?”
She pretended to consider the situation for a moment, though of course she’d already decided what to do. The Pizza Rat would have had to announce its presence soon enough anyway. It was time to start the dance.
“Raise the Jolly Roger,” she said, “and run out the guns. Fire a warning burst at those sluggards ahead of us. That should speed them along a bit.”
The staccato rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire punctured the drone of motors and horns. Chaos reigned in the street, as the traffic struggled to process the situation. Some boats fled to port, others to starboard. Still others opened their throttles in an attempt to flee. The result was total gridlock.
“Keep firing!” said the captain. “They’ll move out of our way, or we’ll move them to their graves!”
The pirates plowed through the wreckage of the morning traffic, guns firing as they approached the cargo barge. It had gotten stuck in a knot of ships trying to escape the scene, all tangled into a crazy quilt of desperation at the corner of 2nd and 58th. Horns and screams sounded in a crashing wail as the Pizza Rat bore down.
The captain was an island of calm in the storm. She thumbed on her megaphone and said to the crew, “All hands, prepare for boarding. We’ll only have about five or ten minutes before the cops show, so don’t play around. Find the valuables, take them, and get the hell out. If anyone looks at you funny, kill the bastard, but be quick about it. You’re on the clock.”
They’d slowed down now as they approached the target and there was a hiss-whistle of grappling hooks, lashing out and binding the two ships together. There were a few crewmen scuttling around on the deck of the barge, milling about in confused circles like lemmings that couldn’t find a cliff to leap off. So few, thought the captain. Why not more? Where’s their crew?
The pirate crew started to jump from the Pizza Rat to their prey now, guns and axes held aloft, singing dreadful sea shanties as they leaped. They plunged onto the deck, swiftly clearing it of resistance. The demolition crew was preparing to blast the hatches open and roust the leftovers from their hiding places when someone started screaming. This was not an uncommon happening on board the Pizza Rat, and the captain didn’t really pay it any mind until it dawned on her that it was the lookout in the topmast who was screaming. Then there was a smash and a bang, and all of a sudden she was lying on the deck.
The captain levered herself up with one hand to a sitting position and wiped the blood off her face. Three undercover Police Navy gunboats, which had been hidden away somewhere in the traffic, were raking the Rat’s stern with controlled bursts of machine-gun fire. On the barge, supposedly as helpless as a beached whale, the hatches had burst open and a full platoon of action troopers had flooded forth onto the deck. The boarding party was being quickly and efficiently slaughtered.
It was a trap. The contact had sold them out. She’d been played.
She took a deep breath, opened her mouth to issue the orders that would set everything right, and then stopped short. The bridge was on fire now. Thick clouds of smoke were pouring from the engine room as the gunboats continued to tear at the Pizza Rat, hungry predators satiating themselves on wounded prey. The troopers were mopping things up on the barge. There was only the Captain and what was left of Roberto on the quarterdeck.
It was already over. Everything ends so fast.
All of a sudden, she remembered the beginning, back when she wasn’t the captain, with a brace of pistols, an eyepatch, a pigeon on her shoulder, and a ship at her command. In the beginning she had been Teresa, or Ms. Cheng, to her supervisor at the fulfillment center to which she’d been subcontracted. They all dreamed of running away and joining a pirate crew, all the young drones processing orders and taking gigs, but Teresa was the only one who’d actually done it.
She’d signed on to the Credit-Default Swap, a sturdy barque that sailed out of Red Hook Cove, and old Captain Queenie had taken a shine to her. She was a great grey slab of a woman with a nose that looked like it’d been carved out of granite. Teresa hadn’t been with the Swap long before they made a big score running down a merchie crammed to the gills with product in Jamaica Bay. That night they made anchor in the bay and celebrated. It was almost dawn, when the sky shifts from black to grey, and everyone was passed out round the embers of the bonfire except for Teresa, still savoring every moment of this strange new world she had fallen in to. Then Old Queenie had appeared, as if from nowhere. She looked at Teresa and said, “This life is short and sharp and beautiful. Enjoy it while you can.”
The captain pulled herself up. Everything stank of blood. She fitted two pistols carefully into her hands. The troopers were starting to come over to the Rat now, wiping up the last scattered pockets of resistance. She couldn’t help but wondering, in a little corner of her mind, here at the end, how they’d remember the ship and her. Would they tell stories about the fights she’d won, the treasures she’d stolen, the lovers she’d had, or the escapes she’d made? Would they even sing songs? The captain thought about it, just for a moment.
Then, with a shout, she launched herself into the fray.