All The Rum Ye Could Want...
A delicious ending to our Bugtime Story...
Yarr! ‘Tis be time to wrap up last week’s Bugtime Story with the ending ye scallywags voted fer!
The Captain chewed his mustache thoughtfully for a few moments as he decided. Trick had never been a superstitious man, but he had always been a hard one…
“Throw ‘em both overboard!” he shouted.
There was a grumble of dissent from the men until Trick fired from his flintlock again, silencing them. Tibalt and Jones were grabbed by rough hands and forced toward the plank. Neither man said a word, even as their bare feet shuffled out over the thrashing sea.
“Captain, please,” Wiley hissed, “think about this, ‘tis only rum!”
“ONLY RUM?!” Captain Trick bellowed.
He grabbed Wiley by the collar and tossed him into Tibalt and Jones. All three men tumbled overboard into the water below. Trick turned on his crew, waving his cutlass at the men furiously. He knew that he risked mutiny at that moment, and he needed to keep control lest he be thrown overboard himself.
“Pickle, ye be me first mate now,” he said, pointing the blade at the older man. “The rest of ye get back to work! We be down three men—though that means more booty for the lot of ye!”
The men grumbled but did as they were told. The extra workload would be more of a sore spot than three dead sailors, but the captain knew that the promise of a larger portion of riches would do the trick, even if he never intended to actually share them. He deserved recompense for the rum, after all. As the ship continued on toward their destination, the flailing shapes of Wiley, Tibalt, and Jones receded from view.
That night, Trick slept restlessly in his cabin, tossing and turning in a cold sweat. His dreams were dark: each involved the dead men, pulling him down to the bottom of the sea, smiling at him with rictus grins. He tried to reason with them, to beg forgiveness, but it didn’t make a difference; the men had been innocent, and Trick needed to be punished.
The creaking of the cabin door jolted the captain awake. He reached for his pistol, but in his delirium, he simply knocked it to the floor with a soft clatter.
“Who goes there?” he called out with a dry throat.
“It just be your first mate, Captain,” a strange voice replied.
Trick swallowed as he waited for his eyes to adjust. The silhouette in the doorway suddenly split into two men, outlined by the full moon reflecting on the sea behind them. The pair shambled into the cabin, no longer speaking. Each footfall on the wood sounded wet, like the sound of a fish dropped from its net onto the deck.
“Pickle?” Trick asked, but he knew that wasn’t the first mate who had spoken.
Finally, Trick could see the swollen, waterlogged faces of Wiley and Jones. The men looked haggard and bloated, with chunks of flesh missing from their lips. The captain tried to jump to his feet, but they held him fast. Their hands were cold and moist and impossibly strong.
“’Twas just Tibalt, Captain,” Jones said. “I didn’t steal nothing.”
A glint of moonlight showed a bottle had appeared in Wiley’s hand. The first mate shoved the neck of it into Trick’s mouth, shattering his teeth. The taste of rum mingled with blood rushed over his tongue and down his throat. He tried to swallow, but the rum never stopped flowing, even as the captain began to choke.
“All the rum ye could ever want,” Wiley said.
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That’s it! No more pirate talk from me!
Bugs and Kisses,
Kris and the Bad Bug Crew
It had to end that way or the Capt. would make them all pay for his alcohol problem.