Alex Neptune, Pirate Hunter, page 2
“You did not know it,” said Zoey.
“I know it now and I think we should run away.”
Alex shook his head. “It can’t be pirates. That’s ridiculous.”
The ship turned its flank to face the town, more cannons being pushed into place along its deck. The skull-and-crossbones flag snapped in the wind.
“Reluctantly, I have to agree with Anil on this one,” said Zoey.
More trash balls were fired from the ship, splattering onto the cobbles and bursting against wooden-framed shopfronts. The washed-up girl observed the unfolding chaos for a moment before she grabbed Alex’s wrist and tried to drag him towards the sea-wall steps. She was taller than him, limbs long and rangy, surprisingly strong.
“I’m not running away!” he said, pulling his arm free. It was his job to protect Haven Bay, even if he wasn’t sure he could.
The girl scowled. “They know about your powers. They want to take you prisoner.”
Zoey and Anil stepped up alongside him, Loaf and the otters spreading out to form a barrier.
“They’ll have to get through us first,” said Zoey.
The cannon fire paused as the ship came close enough to lower skiffs – rowing boats cobbled together from assorted plastic and toy inflatables – into the water. People – pirates – crowded the benches. Dirt stained their faces and clung to matted braids of greasy hair. The pirates looked like they’d got dressed by rolling through a jumble sale. Threadbare tea towels had been fashioned into bandanas, furry leopard-print coats pulled over holey T-shirts and baggy waistcoats tied shut with lengths of rope, jeans torn off at the knee or with short legs revealing flashes of hairy ankle. One of them wore inflatable armbands.
Alex turned to the washed-up girl. Scruffy braids hung over her shoulders. A soggy, oversized jumper hung from her slight frame, patched with scraps of leather and multicoloured felt. Her shoes didn’t match.
“You’re one of them,” he said.
Her eyes widened into a desperate appeal. “You don’t understand—”
There was no time to try. The pirates were rowing hard for shore. Alex clicked his fingers and the otters shifted to guard her. When he splashed forwards into the water, the girl reached to hold him back but Zoey blocked her off.
The tide lapped around his legs, giving him the courage to face the approaching boats. Please help us, he thought, reaching out for the animals of the bay. His powers didn’t allow him to compel them, but his bond with the ocean meant they would respond to calls for aid – or so he hoped.
The invaders were already close to the beach when a dolphin leaped from the water and vaulted the nearest boat, knocking one of the pirates overboard. Crabs began swarming and nipping at hands and noses, making some of the pirates cry out and drop their oars. Alex cheered them on as relief flushed through him, beating back some of his fear.
Still, the boats kept coming, bringing the pirates closer. Sweat shone on their skin and gaps the size of caves gaped between their teeth.
“No eyepatches,” noted Anil. “That’s disappointing.”
The ship’s cannons resumed their bombardment, balls of rubbish whining overhead. Alex spread his hands in the water and tried to shut the noise from his mind. He curled his fingers and a rogue wave rose up to sideswipe the boats. A couple capsized, tipping their crew into the surf, but others managed to dig their oars into the water and stay upright.
“I knew it,” Alex croaked despairingly. “I’m not strong enough.”
Close to shore now, the pirates slung themselves over the side of the boats and waded towards the beach. Others who had fallen overboard emerged from the waves to join the landing.
A huge man led the crew ashore, thick beard beading with water as he smirked, muscles flexing under heavily tattooed skin. Alex expected to see crude inkings of swords and flintlock pistols, skulls and anchors. Instead, he was mesmerized by intricate depictions of trees, birds with wings spread wide, a solar system of planets. They were enough to make him miss the heavy net in the pirate’s hands until, eyes fixed firmly on Alex, he began swinging it above his head ready to throw.
“Loaf, charge!” Anil commanded.
The seal blundered past, honking furiously, and collided with the pirate hard enough to send them both sprawling.
“He actually listened to me!” Anil exclaimed.
The other pirates wielded what looked like old-fashioned cutlasses, shaped from lengths of scrap metal, hammered flat and sharpened to a deadly edge.
“I think it might be time to run the heck for our lives,” said Zoey.
They backed away from the surf. The washed-up girl goggled at the approaching pirates in horror.
“You promise you’re not one of them?” asked Alex.
She huffed in frustration. “I tried to warn you, didn’t I?”
While the otters scurried to pounce on the pirates who Loaf was knocking over like bowling pins, the four of them ran for the sea-wall steps. The mystery girl was unsteady on her feet, frequently having to catch herself on the rail before she fell over.
“Are you hurt?” asked Zoey.
The girl pushed herself upright again. “I’m not used to being on land.”
The sight that greeted them at the top of the steps made it clear any further questions would have to wait. Pandemonium had spread through the town. Trash balls continued to rain down, forcing tourists to cower in doorways or run screaming for higher ground. A few locals worked to shepherd them into shelter. The street was covered with fish bones and mouldering vegetables, rusty tin cans clattering along the cobbles and soiled nappies tumbling in the breeze. Only the seagulls were pleased about this disgusting turn of events, gathering in raucous swarms to pick at the rich selection of rubbish.
“It smells like a blocked drain,” shouted Zoey as they ran along the high street.
“Or stinky cheese left in a hot car,” added Anil.
Alex led them towards Neptune’s Bounty. Locking themselves inside the shop would be as safe as anywhere else. Maybe they could bring some of the stranded sightseers with them.
Screams further up the street brought the group to a halt. More boats must have landed because pirates were now marauding along the road, tipping over rubbish bins and flower tubs and hurling rocks through shop windows. One of the pirates spotted Alex and ran at him, mouth twisted in fury, cutlass raised above her head. At the last moment, the washed-up girl stepped into her path and the pirate faltered as if afraid, lowering her weapon.
The strange stand-off made Alex realize there was something unconvincing about some of the pirates. Many of them were scrawny, holding their cutlasses as if they weren’t sure which end to swing. Several trailed uncertainly behind the main mob, who seemed to be wreaking enough havoc for all of them.
More voices rose up behind Alex. He turned, expecting to find himself cornered by pirates on both sides. So he was surprised to see Mr Ballister, one of the local men, dressed in an old military outfit and marching towards the pirates with a boathook in his hands. Mrs Bilge wasn’t far behind, waving a frying pan, while Cannonball the dog waddled alongside her with a table leg clenched in his jaw. More locals followed, brandishing cricket bats, metal buckets and any other makeshift weapon they had been able to grab.
“Form up!” wheezed Mr Ballister. “Squad column, protect our main phalanx!”
Everybody ignored him and charged the pirates, lifting their voices in a bloodthirsty battle cry. The pirates immediately began to back away.
Another figure caught Alex’s eye – the mysterious man with the moustache lingered on the other side of the street, watching him from under the brim of a sun hat.
Hands seized Alex’s shoulders and hauled him back. It was Bridget, his sister, huge muscles easily steering him away from the battle. Mr Chatterjee and Mr Wu were there too, peeling away from the scrum to form a protective ring around their children.
“I’m going to guess this is totally your fault,” said Bridget, while Zoey and Anil were enveloped in hugs by their parents. The washed-up girl lingered awkwardly beside them.
“They came after me!” Alex protested.
When he looked again, the man with the moustache was nowhere to be seen.
“You are annoying enough to attack with a whole pirate ship.” Bridget waved behind them. Familiar chimes started up a jangling, off-kilter tune. An ice cream van edged around the rubbish littering the street and pulled up alongside them. Grandpa leaned out of the window, wiping sweat from his bald head.
“How about we let this lot handle the fightin’ and get you kids out of ’ere, eh?”
It all seemed to be over anyway. The pirates had picked the fight but now they were streaming away along the street and back to their boats without even trying to win it. Bridget ran off to join the counterattack, rolling her enormous shoulders threateningly.
Alex frowned at the pirates’ retreat. The locals, harrying them all the way, could be fearsome, but it still seemed too easy.
“Don’t mess with Haven Bay!” shouted Zoey as she climbed into the ice cream van.
Alex was almost the last inside. Only the washed-up girl remained on the road. He wanted to shut the door and leave her behind, sure she had played some role in the attack. But she was also their only chance of getting information about the pirates and their ship.
The girl gave Alex an imploring look that made up his mind. He held out a hand to help her in.
“You’d better come with us.”
From the top of the hill, they had a clear view of the aftermath. The pirates retreated to their ship without bothering to fight the locals, who harried them all the way back to the beach. Once its crew was safely aboard, the hodgepodge vessel wheeled around and floored its engine to speed out of the bay, quickly slipping into the cover of darkness, only visible in the clockwork flashes of the distant lighthouse.
“That’ll show ’em!” crowed Grandpa.
Alex shook his head. “Why come here and cause chaos if they were just going to run away at the first sign of trouble? They outnumbered us and had better weapons. If they really wanted to capture me, wouldn’t they have tried harder?”
“Maybe just be grateful you’ve not been taken prisoner by actual pirates?” suggested Zoey.
But Alex couldn’t shake an uneasy feeling in his belly. There was only one way they could get any answers.
“Who are you?” he demanded, rounding on the washed-up girl.
She had kept her distance from them, lingering close to the shelter of the ice cream van.
“My name is Meri,” she said. “I’m…sort of one of the pirates.”
In the light of the rising moon, Meri’s hair shone faintly green. Crystals of sea salt crusted her patchwork costume. The bridge of her nose was red and peeling with sunburn. She chewed nervously on a braid as she waited for a response.
“Are you with them or not?” asked Alex at the same moment as Anil exclaimed, “I can’t believe those were real pirates!”
“They’re not bad people!” Meri shrank back at the volume of her own voice. “At least, they didn’t used to be.”
Zoey raised an eyebrow into her fringe. “You might have noticed they just attacked our town and tried to kidnap our friend.”
Meri cowered further. On the beach she had been bold enough to try and drag Alex away. Now, faced with them all, she looked like she wanted the cliff to open up and swallow her whole. As his adrenaline ebbed, Alex felt himself soften towards her. She had come to warn him.
Grandpa cleared his throat loudly and climbed inside the van. He pressed a button and the ice cream machine whirred to life. In swift, practised motions he produced four soft-serve cones and handed them out to the group.
“Nothin’ calms yer down like ice cream.”
Zoey and Anil both wrapped their entire mouths around the ice cream and immediately screwed up their faces in synchronized brain freeze. Meri was much more delicate – she touched her tongue to the frozen treat and seemed surprised to find it was cold. When she finally took a lick, her face lit up with delight.
The cool sweetness of the ice cream helped Alex’s racing heart slow to normal. He realized they had parked up close to where the old aquarium had stood. Their rescue of the Water Dragon had destroyed half of the glass building and the rest had been knocked down shortly after. Now it was a building site while the foundations for a wind farm were laid.
Almost the whole town was visible from up here. The streets were a riot of activity, bustling with people guiding shaken tourists back to their accommodation or already beginning the clean-up.
Alex noticed that Meri was swaying slightly on the spot as she lapped at her ice cream. He remembered how she had tottered up the beach as if the ground was moving under her feet.
“Are you okay?”
A blush warmed Meri’s cheeks as if she was embarrassed to be caught enjoying something so much, though it didn’t stop her from finishing the ice cream in two more bites.
“I’ve never had it before,” she said in a small voice.
Anil’s mouth dropped open, leaving Zoey to speak for him. “You’ve never had ice cream?”
“There’s no way to keep it cold, back on…” Meri trailed off and gazed uncertainly between them.
Behind her, Grandpa filled another cone and pushed it into her hand. “Yer can tell us when you’re good and ready.”
The ice cream refill seemed to give her strength. “You remember when Haven Bay was all choked up with rubbish? That’s happening all over the world. More trash than you can imagine, being thrown away into the sea. Ocean currents pick it up and bring it all together into massive islands of floating litter. Dense and stinking, as far as the eye can see. Nobody to clean it up. Except for people like us.”
She sucked down a breath, as if she wasn’t used to talking this much and it was tiring her out. Everybody waited patiently for her to say more.
“I come from an environmental group dedicated to cleaning up that rubbish. Well, one patch of it. As much as we can,” Meri continued. “We live on a decommissioned oil rig about ten miles offshore. We’re not actually allowed to be there, so we hardly ever come to land in case we draw attention.”
“You don’t go to school?” asked Anil, slack-jawed with horror at the idea.
Meri shook her head. “I just learn what I can from experimenting with whatever I find in the water.”
“I think this is supposed to be a sad story, but I have to be honest,” said Zoey, “that sounds amazing.”
“Mostly we just work around the clock cleaning up rubbish,” Meri continued, a little defensively. “But it wasn’t enough. We never even made a dent.”
Alex remembered his feeling of hopelessness when Haven Bay was clogged with filth, how they had cleaned litter from the beach every morning just to see it covered again by the afternoon.
“Six weeks ago, a man washed up in one of our nets.” Meri looked between them ominously. “We fished him out and nursed him back to health. He stayed with us, told us he wanted to help. Instead, he manipulated people and convinced them to launch a mutiny against the leaders of our community. My parents.”
Anil gasped as if he was being told a particularly thrilling bedtime story.
“Are your parents okay?” asked Zoey.
“They’re prisoners on that ship.”
“This man…” Alex said, dread tugging at him like a rip tide. “Who is he?”
Meri fixed her eyes on him. “He calls himself Brineblood.”
They sank into stunned silence, faces turning pale as if they had seen a ghost – which apparently Meri had.
“Do you know him?” she asked.
“Know him? He’s only the most famous pirate in the history of Haven Bay!” said Anil. “Centuries ago, Brineblood was one of the people granted powers by the Water Dragon, but then he betrayed the dragon and stole its only egg so he could be even more powerful – totally not cool. The egg was lost when the dragon sought revenge and chomped a hole out of the town. Brineblood gave up his powers to escape the dragon and then spent ages trying to capture it, until the Water Dragon summoned a big storm to destroy his flagship – The Dragon’s Shadow – and then swallowed him whole.”
Anil gasped and leaned on his knees, apparently having told the entire story on a single breath.
“So…you do know him,” said Meri.
“It can’t be him,” said Alex. “He died centuries ago.”
Zoey made a sceptical noise and Alex rounded on her.
“It’s impossible!”
“So is commanding a crab army and being besties with a dragon, but you managed both of those,” said Zoey. “Maybe the ghost story is true. Maybe Brineblood’s corpse really did rise from the depths in search of a crew.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how dead did he look?” asked Anil.
Zoey nudged his shoulder. “He can’t have looked that dead if he convinced everybody to turn against her parents.”
Meri sighed. “Everybody on the rig has given up their whole lives to try and make a difference by cleaning up a small part of the ocean. But now it’s worse than when they started. Some people were already giving up hope. Then Brineblood – who seemed pretty alive, by the way – came along and told them they could help him gain enough power to clean up the entire ocean in one click of his fingers. All they had to do was find a treasure hidden away in the waters around Haven Bay, protected by magic.”
Anil’s eyes lit up at the mention of treasure. “A diamond? No, a mystical trident!”
Before she spoke again, Meri looked each of them in the eyes, as if willing them to believe what she was about to say. “The Water Dragon egg that was stolen centuries ago.”
“Now that’s impossible,” Alex said. “The egg was lost for good. My grandma spent centuries searching for it.”
“Maybe not.” Grandpa had emerged from the van to listen. “It’s true she looked, tryin’ to put right what Brineblood and his followers did to the dragon. It’s true she never found it. But…”
He trailed off and peered wistfully out to sea, the moon casting a wavering silver trail on the surface as if they could run along it in pursuit of the pirate ship.
