Coffin Island by Will Berkeley Page B

covered apocalypse. It was not a pleasure to meet you,
shark from the beginning of time. And I don’t want to ever see you
again. Stay out of my nightmares too. I’m just going to close my
eyes, scream in my sleep and pretend that you don’t exist. I have
never seen a shark of the apocalypse. I don’t know what you’re
talking about. That mind of yours is quite clever though. I will
grant you that. Dangerous and clever, that’s how I like my mind. We
should nip out for a cup of hot blood some time and chitchat art
and whatnot.
    There was a rope with some knots
hanging into the ocean. It was one of those little helpers that
were in such sparse abundance in this world that I immediately
seized it. I quickly climbed up the rope as the shark devoured the
mermaids. The mermaid would surely just whet the appetite of that
appalling beast. I didn’t want to watch it satiate that primordial
appetite. The thought of me in the belly of that beast was just too
horrible to contemplate. Apparently there is a nanosecond of
consciousness when you get your last thought before you’re own your
way to whatever afterlife that you believe in. I aimed to forestall
that final moment for a bit. What’s the hurry?
    I hauled myself on to the deck of
Doctor Fast with a shudder. I was wondering how a pirate could get
reassembled in a coffin after a shark attack of such magnitude. I
could only imagine what sort of primitive digestive track with rows
of retractable teeth was lurking within that horrible beast. The
colon surely had teeth. You must come to in your coffin as a
buffalo chip. Fortunately I was one of the chosen few who were
moving on to better things in this world than a predawn
gastrointestinal track with incisors all the way down the track. I
thanked my lucky stars for that as I watched the final mermaid bits
go down the hatch. You had to admire the thoroughness. Only a
werewolf attorney wouldn’t applaud that.
    Doctor Fast was a high performance
sailing craft. It wasn’t some leaky scow to transport human cargo
in shackles. Go fetch the rum and come back. Try not to catch
scurvy or die in the doldrums. Watch out for the pirates and those
hideous natives too. Don’t let the white people cheat you on the
black people too. Make them pay handsomely for those humans that we
have purchased. Welcome to the Caribbean. It’s not just some
foolish ride in Florida. I was doing way better than
that.
    Doctor Fast was an astonishing craft.
Somehow I felt like a bit of a slave to it though. Perhaps it had
something to do with the shackles on the deck. They had attached
themselves to me. They sort of hinted at the slavery
concept.
    There was something very brutal and
distressing percolating below the deck of Doctor Fast as well.
Something seemed to be screaming down there. I dismissed that noise
as so much lunacy. I was more preoccupied with my own situation.
How could I be a slave in this world? How could I be a trinket for
a better person to purchase?
    My ship was a slave ship. There was no
denying the concept. The shackles made it painfully clear. There
was also a little footnote on the back of the ship under the name,
Doctor Fast. It said slave ship under the title on the back. There
was that. It really upset me. What does witchcraft think that I’m
stupid? Putting a footnote on a slave ship was truly insulting.
Weren’t the shackles enough? Why taunt the slaves after you’ve
enslaved them? There was also the shouting below deck too. It was a
bit distressing. Witchcraft was doing the usual.
    Doctor Fast was going to take me to the
next school where I would sit on a block for a prospective buyer. I
wondered what sort of buyer witchcraft had for me out over the
horizon. Shall we take the journey to find out?
    However I was already contemplating my
revolt from whatever was out over the horizon. I figured that I
could strangle whatever creature had the audacity to try to
purchase me. What a hideous world that we live in. You can actually
buy