Escape By D. I. Jolly (A Pirate Story – Part 3/8)
Tiny suddenly burst back through the door which slammed behind him.
“What’s the meaning of this?” yelled Jack.
Tiny looked up, scared.
“Mutiny sir! The men are too scared of the witch.”
Tiny suddenly blushed realised what he’d said in front of Isabella. But sanity quickly returned as the sound of crashing iron and wood filled the room, telling everyone that the door had been blocked. Thomas quickly helped Tiny back up.
“So what are they doing?”
Tiny’s eyes grew wide with fright but before he could speak, Isabella’s voice cut in small and scared.
“oh no.”
Then there was a crash, a bang and the unmistakable woofing of erupting flames.
“They’re burning down my ship!”
Exclaimed Jack and Thomas simultaneously.
Then they looked at each other, worried.
“Jack, what do we do?”
All eyes in the room quickly turned towards the man who was so seasick on his first day that he had to be put to bed. Jack stared back at them for a moment racking is mind for a solution.
“Windows, we can get out through the windows.”
He turned to Isabella.
“How far, roughly, are we from land?”
A nervous look spread across her face.
“Too far to swim, besides I umm… I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t swim.”
“But you take a boat out fishing everyday… Never mind, ok plan B.”
Jack once again looked into his mind, now with even more frantic desperation, then a light came on and an idea appeared.
“Tiny, Thomas, grab the heaviest thing you can find, we’re going through the floor. The food store should be right below us, we get down there then we storm the deck and take back our ship and put out these fire!”
Without question or second thought everyone in the room grabbed whatever they could and started beating at the floorboards until they began to break and a big enough hole was created. Tiny jumped down last after making sure everyone else had gotten down safely. From there they all ran back up on deck expecting to find some confrontation but instead, the deck was empty. The fire raged around them and in front of them was a tide of life rafts as the crew fled the burning ship.
“What do we do now?!”
Yelled Thomas, and once again attention turned to Jack who looked at their livelihood in flames around them.
“Grab something that we can use as oars and get onto Isabella’s boat. There is no way men this superstitious got on a witches boat!”
Tiny arrived behind them with a few long planks he had pulled from Jack’s bed and the four of them jumped down into the small boat still tied to the side of their ship. As soon as all were aboard they rowed furiously toward the island to get away from the blaze and as they got closer to land both Jack and Thomas took a moment to stare at their fortune in flame and wonder with a growing sense of fear and dread what they would do now.