Chapter 5

  Behind Door Number One

  Snap paced the cell she had been so unceremoniously tossed into, huffing and puffing, thwacking her thagomizer against the forcefield, demanding to be fed. “I'm starving in here!”

  “We fed you two minutes ago,” Wilhelmina said tersely.

  “Yeah! And that was two minutes ago! This is now!” She unhinged her jaw, letting it dangle wide open, and pointed down her throat. “Eat eat! Consume consume! Inhale inhale! I demand calories!”

  “I say we load you in the cannon,” Wilhelmina growled, “and fire you into the horizon!”

  “I say feed me!”

  “I say cannon!”

  “FEED ME!”

  “CANNON!”

  “Wait!” A pirate-babe burst in, craning her neck, straining her ears. “What ho!”

  “Who you callin' 'ho'?” Snap retorted.

  “No! That sound! It's music!” she proclaimed. “Enchanting music! Evocative music!”

  “Evocative,” Snap echoed in a near-whisper.

  “Peaceful music! The kind of music you could take home to meet your parents!”

  Snap squinted at the intruder. “Who are you?”

  “Who? Me? I'm the coxswain.” Snap snorted, her cheeks blurting out, looking ready to erupt into fits of laughter. “Oh, ha, ha, yeah, yeah, I've heard 'em all! It's a real position on a ship! Jerk wad.”

  The sound of bells jingling tickled their ears, and Snap pressed her hands and nose against the invisible forcefield, then got the wild idea of pressing her boobs against the invisible forcefield, which made her chuckle for no real good reason beyond she knew it looked silly. Down the corridor, around the bend, paraded a troupe of hooded individuals, evoking stately Gregorian monks in somber repose, their eerie, ethereal chants reverberating through the metal tube.

  “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart,” they sang, wandering into the brig, “but the very next day you gave it away.”

  Wilhelmina scratched her head. “Who are these bozos? Who let them on the ship?”

  “No one 'let's' us anywhere, ma'am,” the head monk said, head bowed low, face enshrouded by his cloak. “We simply barge in unannounced, unwelcome and unloved!” Gripping the edge of his hood, he yanked it back, revealing his starkly desirable visage.

  Far from desirable, that nose alone was big enough to sink a battleship, let alone a flying submarine, and good grief, good luck looking into his eyes, pick one first, the lopsided nature making anyone who stared too long get a headache. “I am Zeke Zasperate! And we are – THE EXASPERATEDS!”

  “Okay, so they were formerly Asperateds,” Wilhelmina murmured. “What the heck is an 'Asperated'?”

  Snap banged her head as the lights lowered and the fog machine kicked in. “What the heck is happening!” Wilhelmina screamed as they kicked their habits and blasted them right off their feet with the combined powers of their bass guitars, cracking a hole right in the side of The Naughty Lass.

  “Mom! Dad!” Snap squealed as the forcefield flickered out of existence. Her joy turned to indifference quickly, shoulders slumping, ears flopping lifelessly. “Uncia.”

  “Nice to see you too, sis,” Uncia snorted, the silver-furred kitten tightening up her guitar strings for another round of mayhem and music, rhythm and ruin. “My one wish is that one day, you'll come save me with the enthusiasm I saved you.”

  “Mom and Dad made you do it.”

  “WHAT I AM MADE FOR? TO SUFFER?”

  “Knock it off you two,” Zeke snorted. “This is our big family reunion moment after being separated for approximately,” he glanced at his watch, “seventeen minutes.”

  “Snap Xoxana Zasperate,” Acinony said, hooking her rhythm guitar over her shoulder, a nice counterweight to her pregnant tummy. “Where's Jessica?”

  “How should I know? Am I my Jessica's keeper?”

  Acinony smacked her upside the head. “Try again.”

  “She's down in the generator room, using her legs for something cooler than delivering pizza,” Snap answered grumpily. “But I say we leave her, go on with our own lives and celebrate us, the living.” Now both her parents slapped her upside the head. “OW! I'm joking! I know it's hard to tell sometimes we're always so serious and solemn around here, but in this case I was joking!”

  “Here, in case you think we forgot you,” Zeke said, tossing her four drumsticks, one for each reptilian paw.

  Her eyes lit up, a maniacal grin splitting her face from ear-fin to ear-fin. “YOU LIKE ME! YOU REALLY REALLY LIKE ME!” She started banging on everything and everyone, walls, floor, pirate-babes, no rhythm or talent but dang did she make up for it with moxy and enthusiasm. “Just wubba-dubba-dubba call me Wingo Starr, a.k.a. Starr-Lord of the Liverpool Starrs! WOO! So, we gonna go wescue Jessica, or gonna do kick Steely Dan's pasty white butt?”

  “Wescue, uh, rescue Jessica,” Acinony said, arming her guitar, cranking the dial all the way to 11. “After all she's been through, she's in dire need of medical treatment, and sadly I don't think her parents' small business insurance plan can cover the bills. We're going to need to loot the looters.”

  “Cooters! I mean, coolers! I mean, cool! But what about Steely Dan McCool?”

  “You don't worry about Steely Dan McCool. She'll be dealt with in due time.”

  “You're gonna ground me and forbid me to ever try and stop her, aren't you?”

  “That's a distinct possibility, yes.”

  “I in that case I DEFY YOU-”

  “Shut up, Snap,” Zeke muttered.

  She discreetly acquiesced. “Yes, sir.”

  Down below, like, way down below – no, further – FURTHER – FURTHER STILL – the McCools exited the elevator shaft. “That was quite the plummet,” Chicago said, glancing around the high-ceilinged vault they emerged into. “How far anyone care to wager?”

  “I calculated a drop of at least 2 kilometers,” Floyd said, hovering over everyone, taking in the almost cyclopean majesty of the chamber they found themselves in.

  Chicago looked paler than usual for being a 117 year old vampire. “Seems rather unwise, does it not, digging a vault that deep on an island with an active volcano? Surprised we're not all boiling alive down here.”

  “The climate controls installed must be beyond next level,” Floyd explained. He turned to Steely. “Looking like your lead was correct. There's no way they'd dig this deep in such a dangerous locale unless they wanted to hide something REALLY important.”

  “I love being right,” she cooed.

  A golden vault door several hundred meters tall and about half as wide occupied the entire far end of the chamber, dozens of huge columns propping up the ceiling, extending deep below even further into the earth if that were possible. “Who built all this?” Chicago asked. “What an engineering marvel!”

  “Quit with the ga-ga eyes,” Steely growled. “We need to get this doggie door off its hinges. Pinky!”

  The fuchsia behemoth cracked her knuckles and winding up, swung her fist into the monumental door, resulting in a loud clang that reverberated through the chamber, as clear as a bell. Pinky stepped away, shaking her fist. “Door hurt Pinky!”

  “She's not up to the challenge,” Floyd said, zipping into her face. “You're not up to the challenge!” She grabbed him, wrapping him in the palm of one hand, only his big head popping out of the top, and put the squeeze on him. “Uh, of course, you maybe just need the proper motivation? Urk!”

  “Me pop your head like pimple,” Pinky laughed, squeezing his skull between her thumb and forefinger. “Floyd go 'squish'.”

  “STEEEEEELEEEEE!” he shrieked, his feet dangling out of the bottom of her fist, kicking about uselessly.

  “Pinky, eh, wait a minute,” Steely Dan mused.

  “WHADDAYA MEAN 'WAIT A MINUTE'?” he screamed, Pinky's fingers throbbing around his veiny skull. “No wait! No wait! Speak now!”

  “Eh, see, you annoy the hell outta me,” she explained. “But...you are also the smartest guy on The Naughty Lass.”

  “Yes! Yes! Very smart!” Floyd sobbed. “Will be less annoying too!”

  Steely turned to Chicago. “What's your diagnosis, doctor?”

  “Dammit, Steely, I'm not a doctor, I'm a first mate, and my diagnosis is – why is the door behaving that way?”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “Weird diagnosis – OH! You you you, you really mean it!”

  The door glowed with an ethereal, otherworldly light, a celestial sensation that sent pings and dings bouncing around the chamber, sending chills up their spines.

  “It's happening!” Steely Dan shrieked, jumping for joy. She bent over, rotating her hips, shaking her booty. “We can do it to it! We can do it to it! Woot woot! We can do it! Yes! Yes! Show me the power! SHOW! ME! THE! POWER! I can take it! All of it! Just smack me in the face with a salmon or a trout, I'm exulting in my glory!”

  The door didn't so much open as it simply...ceased. To exist. In a valid manner. Within the current space/time continuum. As a three-dimensional object. Or even as an abstract thought. The McCools stood, or in Floyd's case hovered, there, staring into the yawning abyss, a black inky void into whence no living soul dared venture.

  Steely turned to her siblings and grinned. “I'm gonna dare to venture into there.”

  “Yeesh, Steely, could you go three seconds without wishing extermination upon yourself and others?” Chicago griped. “Namely, me?”

  “You know, Chico,” she sneered, getting all up in his personal space, so close she could see her alabaster reflection in his shiny skin, “you have real, how shall I put this?”

  “Knack?” Floyd suggested.

  “Nah, something more vulgar,” Steely grumbled. “Let's go with 'knack'. A real knack for making me want to get violent and moody and-”

  “OOH! OOH!” Pinky bellowed, jabbing her meaty finger at the doorway, shimmering green glow emanating from deep within. “Real life ghosties!”

  They emerged, one after the other, single file, forming a straight line before presenting themselves to the astonished youths. One by one, in all their paranormal glory, a murderer's row of seven of the most bloodthirsty cutthroats to ever pillage a village or plunder a blunder. Or loot a coot. Or rob a Bob. Or...yeah, let's not deviate from our presently scheduled program.

  “Behold!” Steely squealed, most undignified for such a paragon of the pirate hierarchy. “The seven greatest pirates lords of all time! The cream of the crop!”

  “Wouldn't the 'catch of the day' be a better metaphor,” Chicago said, “seeing how it's nautical and not agricultural-” She smacked him. “Ow. Shutting up.”

  A tall dark captain with an ostentatious hat, his facial hair spreading out in thick ebony waves across his chest, woven with braids and adorned with beads and ribbons. Steely Dan gestured broadly, a theatrical flourish to her every syllable, every punctuation mark. “Behold! Edward Teach, Blackbeard, king of the pirates!”

  The eerie green amorphous blob took new shape, a crusty old sea cook, his right leg gone, the victim of some nameless cannonball, leaning on his crutch, an apt metaphor for his attitude as well. “Long John Silver, the meanest sea dog the world has ever seen!”

  A fiery redheaded woman in ragged shirt and heavy leather boots swung her cutlass. “Anne Bonny, the first true queen of the pirates!”

  Floyd curled his lip in disgust. “A girl pirate? Wow, that's original.”

  A fancy foppish fellow with a pencil-thin mustaches, elegant red velvet coat, and most important of all, a cruel steel hook where his right hand should be, stepped forth, a weary expression on his face. “The slayer of children, the enemy of fun, the scourge of Never-Ever Land, Captain James Tiberius Hook!”

  “Oh, what a world, what a world,” he groaned, sighing with demonstrable despair.

  If rugged masculinity could be defined as a red direwolf with a flair for blue coats and extra panache, it would be the next pirate warlord summoned from the depths of the underworld. “From the shores of Albuquerque to the halls of Cape Suzette,” Steely Dan declared, “it is the king of the Air Pirates, Don Karnage!”

  “Here to regale you with tales of my epic spinning!” he declared, sounding a bit like, but not quite, Ricky Ricardo.

  “Funny,” Chicago said, “if there was going to be a Disney pirate, I'd have fancied one not so obscure. One with a more...sun-stroked vibe, to put it mildly?”

  “Less chance of being sued this way,” Steely Dan explained.

  “Ah, but 'less chance' does not equal out to 'zero chance'.”

  The sixth spectral figure of the plundering past appeared, dressed in a not the stereotypical nautical gear of a Caribbean swashbuckler with flintlocks and cutlasses, but an expensive suit and tie, gold cuff links, the pinnacle of Wall Street decadence. “A wolf in the sheets, both bed and spread, ladies and gentlemen – and Floyd.”

  “Hey!”

  “Leonardo DiCaprio! I mean, Jordan Belfort!”

  “Wait a second!” he yelled. “I'm not even dead yet!”

  “Tut tut,” Steely Dan chided, wagging her finger. “No more freebies!”

  He hung his head and whimpered. “Yes, evil mistress.”

  “And last, and also certainly least,” Steely chuckled, swaggering up to the really scrawny black guy in a ratty t-shirt and in dire need of a good dentist. “The man, the myth, the meme – the 'I'm The Captain Now' guy!”

  “Excuse me!” he intoned in a thick Somali accent. “I have a name, and it is-”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Steely barked, gesturing rudely. “I didn't ask for no damn life story. YEESH.”

  “So, you dare summon us from the depths of Davy Jones's Locker,” Blackbeard sneered, stroking his elegant whiskers. “There can be but one reason and one reason only.”

  “You read my mind,” Steely Dan quipped. “Here to sell ya on time-share condos in Florida.”

  “And what would ghost pirates need time-share condos for?”

  “That was a joke. Please laugh.”

  No one laughed, and they were right to do so.

  “Okay, okay!” Steely growled. “I have sought you out at great expense and frustration to summon you from your watery graves-”

  “I'm not dead,” Belfort whimpered.

  “To reveal to me the location...of the mythic treasure that your seven acquired via means most duplicitous. I refer to the legend of the Seven Seize.”

  “You know,” Belfort said, “you'd have a greater return on investment if you took your assets and created a diverse portfolio rather than sinking it all into buried treasure.”

  “Yanno,” Steely said, “keep talking, I will make you a real ghost.” Belfort hastily backed off.

  “Hey, you both worked with Tom Hanks,” Floyd said to Belfort and I'm The Captain Now guy. “Is he really as nice as he seems in real life, or is he an absolutely monster to deal with?”

  They stared at him in disbelief, partly because of the inanity of the question, but mostly because he was an eight-year old boy with a distended head, floating around like a mystic swami. “I'm not Leonardo DiCaprio!”

  “And I'm not whoever played me in that damn movie! And my real name is-”

  “We don't care about your real name!” Steely Dan screamed. “You're the 'I'm The Captain Now' guy and that's that! Over! Finito! DEAL WITH IT!”

  “If it bein' the location of the Seven Seize ye be a-seekin',” Blackbeard drawled.

  “I love that old-timey pirate talk,” Pinky giggled, bouncing and clapping her hands, shaking the whole damn building in the process.

  “Then ya best be seekin' from within,” Blackbeard concluded, giving the big pink behemoth a strange look.

  “If it's the 'friends I met along the way', joke's on you,” Steely retorted. “I ain't got any friends. Only well-wishers and admirers.”

  “Nay, it be as real as your wildest dreams,” Blackbeard assured her. “Real an' spectacular!”

  “I dunno, my dreams can get pretty wild. Heh, remember that one dream I told ya about-”

  “Oh no, please,” Chicago groaned, “Steely not in front of the warlords.”

  “Right right. Must focus! Double down! Where is it? Show me the money, I mean power, I mean, show me on the doll where they touched you! Hummina hummina hummina.”

  “Aye, she's a bit of a strange one,” Blackbeard noted.

  Chicago inhaled deeply. “She has her peculiarities, yes.”

  The heavy thud echoed above them. Floyd winced. “Whatever that was had to be frickin' enormous to penetrate the layers of earth and armor between us and the surface!”

  “Either really big,” Steely mused, whipping her chain-sword out of nowhere. “Or really strong! Chicago, escort our guests back to The Naughty Lass. Pinky and me'll handle this.”

  “Very well,” Chicago sighed, gesturing at the ghosts. “You heard her esteemed Goth workaholic. Up, up you go.”

  “And how, praytell,” Blackbeard chuckled, “would ye be obtaining our acquiescence when we being not so inclined to obey? We are pirates after all, an' captains as well. We don't takin' orders.”

  Chicago rolled his eyes and gestured towards Floyd, who floated in, a big mean grin on his face. “I think of EVERYTHING,” he informed them, reaching under his cape to pull out a small cube with a rich history of intricate patterns on it all of them dulled and diluted with crayon rubbings. Holding it towards Blackbeard, a solitary beam of pure white light shot from its center, holding the pirate ghost in its clutches before vacuuming him into the inner chambers of this unusual mechanism. Before the remaining six ghosts could react, he had them all snatched up, allocated to the unusual innerspace of the device, each one taking up several gigabytes of spiritual memory.

  “Impressive,” Chicago compliment his younger brother. “Almost like a trap from 'Ghostbusters'!”

  “I got the idea from Pokeballs in 'Pokemon',” Floyd replied grumpily.

  “But 'Ghostbusters' did it first.”

  “But it's small and handheld.”

  “But it comes in a rectangular form like a trap.”

  “It's based on 'Pokemon'!”

  “I don't like 'Pokemon'!”

  “Up yours!” They started smacking each other, Floyd zipping around him, a biplane pecking away at a skyscraper-climbing gorilla.

  Steely clobbered them both with the flat of her blade, laying them out flat. “Get back topside, ya scurvy dogs!”

  “When did you ever use the term 'scurvy dog' in your life?” Chicago groaned, rubbing his head.

  “I dunno, something about being inundated with all this history has me feeling all...quirky on the inside,” she giggled, shaking her booty.

  “Boys,” Pinky grunted. “Pathetic.”

  “Yeah, well,” Steely said, revving her blade to maximum as she and Pinky took the front line near the elevator shaft. “That's why we leave the heavy lifting to us girls. Am I right, or am I right?”

  Piercing whistling like a bomb hurtling out of the sky tickled their ears, and they flexed, preparing for the worst, expecting even worse. It landed with a stupendous CLANG, pointy horns impaled into the floor, the pointy horns as befitting an authentic Viking helmet. There, perfectly shoved into said helmet, a tall ginger girl in a tie-dyed bikini that deftly defied the alarming tug of gravity, upturned, upended, and upside-down, her legs rotating around and ariound as if peddling an invisible bicycle, her whole freckled frame quivering like a tuning fork. With a grunt, she rolled over and stood up, picked up her helmet, yanking it out of the floor, dusted it off, and popped it back on her ginger head. Rooting around the mess, she procured a baseball bat – 'Betsy Ross' carved in the side and wrapped in barb wire. Coughing fitfully, she stood up, dusted herself off and smirked at the sisters.

  Pinky glowered down at her big sister. “Friend of yours?”

  “No, but I'd love to get to know her better. In bed or on the battlefield, whichever comes first, a-cha-cha cha-cha, meow.”

  “Hello, Steely Dan. I'm Hippie Matchstick, daughter of Thor.”

  The alabaster captain blinked at her groggily, as if unable to process the sequence of events that had so abruptly transpired in the brief span of time she witnessed it happen. “That really narrows it down. Thor Heyerdahl? The Kon-Tiki dude?”

  “More like Thor the god of thunder.”

  “Heh, yeah sure you are. Hippie?” Steely grimaced. “Is it cause you dress like a hippie?” She screwed up her face, looking ready to vomit. “Smell like one too.”

  “Nah, that's a coincidence. I'm really named for my grandmother Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. Hippie's the diminutive.”

  “Ah, well, interesting. Not really. Me? I was named for a fifty-foot long steam-powered dildo, which ought to give you some clue as to the direction my parents wanted me to take in life. Anyway, avast! Or whatever the word is, I generally just skip formalities and cut to the big fight scene.”

  Hippie twirled her bat and smiled. “On that, we can find common ground.”