Clay Hale

Clay sat on a pier of Finney Docks watching the sunset spill oranges and violet across the blue sea, the water a murky mirror of the sky above. He leaned against the wooden piling, ignoring the bite of barnacles against his back, unfocused dark eyes staring past the dark forest of ship masts bobbing in the harbor, silhouetted against the evening’s roseate glow. The bustle of the docks had subsided with the waning hours. Docking cranes and fishnets lay idle while dockworkers and sailors murmured and smoked on the pier. Dockside bars were lanterns of light and laughter in the darkening evening, but Clay just kept his eyes on the horizon. 

Watch that old fire as it flickers and dies

That once blessed the household and lit up our lives

It shone for the friends and the clinking of glasses

I'll tend to the flame, you can worship the ashes….

The voices of Robin, Yates, Darley, and Sattin mingled with a practiced resonant harmony. The sailors mended nets, whittled, and gutted fish long after others had quit the pier. Sea Shanties flowed from their lips and memories, the crewmen having practiced together since a childhood of listening to their parents sing these same verses, a line of legacy that threaded the lives of hard-working people together across generations. 

Heave with a will boys and heave long and strong

Away Rio!

Sing the good chorus for 'tis a good song

And we're bound for the Rio Grande, and it's

Away Rio! Away Rio!

Sing fare thee well, my pretty young girl, and

We're bound for the Rio Grande…

The sailors noticed the fifth fellow that’d stayed with them, but Clay just listened and made no trouble. Robin had raised his eyebrows to his crewmates between shanties and gestured with a filet knife in silent inquiry if this stony faced lad was sober or ‘all there’. Sattin rolled her eyes and quietly implied that this one poked around in shipwrecks looking for some of the …strange sights…that seasoned hands knew it was trouble to ever talk about openly. The Hunter, whose mutant senses made the whispers as audible as if the conspiring crewmates were talking directly at him, just smirked and contentedly watched the sun sink beyond the waterline. 

Yew that is old, in churchyard mould, he breedeth a mighty bow

Alder for shoes do wise men choose, and Beech for cups also

But when you have killed

And your bowl it is filled, and your shoes are clean outworn

Back you must speed for all that you need to Oak, and Ash, and Thorn

Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs

All on a midsummer's morn

Surely we'll sing of no little thing

In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn…

Fog rolled in after the last gasp of evening had faded, as if it were a living thing that the sun had kept chained. Sheets of thick vapor snuck over the pier and slithering amongst the ships at anchor. Clay stirred for the first time in his vigil, as the Slayer had been patiently tracking the approach of something unseen that’d shown itself at last. He stood and started doing stretches against the piling without any self-consciousness as sea shanties defied the fog. 

There once was a ship that put to sea

The name of the ship was the Billy of Tea

The winds blew up, her bow dipped down

Oh blow, my bully boys, blow 

Soon may the Wellerman come

To bring us sugar and tea and rum

One day, when the tonguing is done

We'll take our leave and go…

The song ceased as Clay interrupted after so long in companionable silence. The Slayer told the sailors, for their sake, that they needed to get inside right now and keep their doors locked.  The four sailors looked at each uncertainly before Clay slapped down money for drinks on a barrel beside the crewmates. His advice was heeded immediately. 

“I once knew an emperor, and this was almost two thousand years ago, who was obsessed with the idea of mapping out all the land that he ruled.” Bobbi heaved a sigh at the memory, sniffing at the recycled air within her houseboat. She leaned back on her makeshift hammock, a gift from one of her boys, the descendants of her once great pirate crew that now shares the struggle of mundane fishing with her, all because they knew the true value of the seas. None of them envied their peers, for they had none. “He had recreated his entire empire on an island he spent a great deal of gold, and lives, constructing… Would you believe that this was all in a lake in his imperial estates?”

Bobbi received no answer, which she had expected but could not be troubled to come to terms with, so she scoffed at the silence instead. “On this island of his, each molehill was turned into a mountain, each river a smaller rivulet. It takes him half an hour just to walk around the perimeter of this island.” She smirked as she looked up at the ceiling, eyes squinting at the artificial light that served as a beacon not only against the darkness of each cold night but also against her loneliness. In her head, she likened it to the pale light before dawn, when a hundred men would wade and swim out to carefully repair any damage wrought by the weather or the wild fowl. “Such futile attempts… But futility doth maketh purpose.”

In the silence that surrounded her and the prized katana on display, to which she was speaking, she had almost fallen asleep, her eyes heavy with the baggage of a long life lived to the fullest, only to be shackled by the loss of her soul. For any huxian, that would mean their last tail, or even just the first, but for Baozhai? Her soul was her ship, the Jade Wind, that which the Lost Fleet had taken from her, ripped from her very hands, along with the few unfortunate crewmates that had followed her to their doom. “So dramatic…” She murmured in her daze, until something woke her up, stirred her upright. “Hmm? Is that…? No, it can’t be…”

As if on a spell, Bobbi bolted from her respite and into the arms of a familiar fog, loathing rising from within her as did sparks of electricity from her own body, what remains of her huxian nature, eager to claim justice and vengeance for what had been taken, what had been lost. “Well, well, well… If it isn’t the assholes who owe me a ship… I’ve seen this movie before. You better not have a monkey with you. There’s no one here named Jack.” With a sprint and a lunge, Bobbi fearlessly jumped into the fray. For any huxian, conflict was something to avoid, but for Baozhai? She has already lost all her tails, plus her ship: She has nothing left to lose.

Clay let his sixth sense take over, each of the rising corpses registering as a blot of undeath on his awareness, a cold toxicity that called to him through the roiling fog. Thick vapor drowned docks, turning tall pilings and ship masts into lone islands in a sea of blue-white. Firearms would’ve been a liability with this much obscuration and civilian presence. So, the Slayer drew a machete from a sheath and plunged into the haunted fog. 

Corpses scaled piers and the sides with a fervor born of starvation. Sea life flourished in undead bodies that swelled with drowned bloating. Corals climbed up some of the bodies like lichen, blooming with vivid colors against cadaverous flesh. Eels and crabs gnawed in the constantly regenerating chest cavities of a few of the zombies, while barnacles and mussels had turned some of the walking dead into mollusk encrusted statues. Kelp and seaweed trailed from many undead like ragged capes. A wet misma of briny rot filled the air as Zombies emerged from from the water, like noxious gas bubbling the surface of a mire. 

Clay jumped from the pier, landing into the prow of a harboring vessel. A heaving swing severed the head of a corpse clawing its way up the anchor chain, sending the decapitated remains tumbling back into foggy depths. “Hello everyone.” Clay said to the crew of the vessel he’d just boarded from above, “might want to find some cover.”

If Mrs. Gao was here right now, Bobbi had no doubts she would rethink her business ventures. Finney Docks was, on paper, a great place for renting houseboats, especially if you have too many and none of which you’re actually interested in. The old woman’s late husband was the one with all the zest when it came to houseboats that it almost seemed an obsession. When he passed away, Mrs. Gao could not find it in her to dispose of them all, whether by sinking or selling them. So here we are.

“Here we fucking are indeed.” Bobbi scowled as she swiftly sliced the head off of a misguided zombie that tried to come near her, using only a cutlass that had been one of her favorite weapons. Back in the good old days, which was of course decades ago, perhaps even a century or two, the huxian, who intentionally lost her tails to pursue a life of adventure and some would say villainy, became a master of the cutlass. Considering she could actually shock a private’s privates off, it should have been more of an accessory, but there was something about the weapon, how it felt in her hands, how graceful she was with it, that it became her more favored tool to get things done. “What perfect timing… Just when the boys are passed-out drunk.” 

Two more charged at her, all looking like terrible extras from the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Or was it the third? Come to think of it, Davy Squidward Jones appeared in more than two movies, right? These thoughts filled Bobbi’s head as she gracefully stepped back, made three swings at the first charger that sent it back down into the sea, and basically did the same routine with the other. All she needed now was a pistol and a hat. Maybe a strange gait, almost drunken when in fact still sober. From the corner of her eyes, she saw someone, or was it something, fly aboard another ship, one that she herself was not familiar with. Did someone illegally park their boat again? She didn’t have much time to linger on the mysterious boats and its mysterious occupants, especially that strange man who hopefully didn’t fly down from the skies, as three more of the undersea-mutated corpses began to crowd her. “What is it that they like to say? Dead men tell no tales? Seems very fitting against someone with no tails.”

“Hello ma’am.” Boots slammed on the deck as a sodden figure covered in black ichor hefted his way up and over the railing. Clay dropped to his stomach as a dead man wearing the tattered beige of a World War Royal Navy jacket swung a rusted pipe into the railing the Hunter once occupied. A deceased woman in the blue fleet uniform and ushanka of the USSR used the opening to tackle Clay, the fleet pilot’s rotten jaws opening to dribble seawater and dark spittle on the Slayer’s face as she bore down on him.

“Nice…uh cutlass where'd .,.ugh..you get it,” Clay gagged as he tucked his knees up to his chest and slammed his feet into the chest of the Zombie trying to mail him, sending the dead Soviet pilot careening into one of corpses assaulting Bobbi.

“Ma’am?” Bobbi timed a step back, allowing the dead Soviet pilot to crash into one of her attackers. The forceful momentum sent them both back into the water, first colliding against the hard hull of another nearby ship. The huxian scowled as she spun around to her left, gracefully evading one of the remaining two brainless husks of decaying flesh as it tried to attack her, before swiftly kicking it towards the other, sending both of them back into the water as well. 

“How dare you? I don’t look a day over…” She almost slipped but immediately caught herself. Revealing how old she truly was would surprise the human, though she wasn’t sure if he was indeed just a normal human. His abilities and calm demeanor towards the attacking dead would suggest otherwise, but Bobbi has learned from the lessons of her past and maintained that revealing the truth about her would only lead to more problems than it was worth. “...twenty five.”

The dreary atmosphere in combination with her mood almost made her explain plainly the origins of her most favored weapon. But then she remembered something that the boys always loved to retort, and that made her smirk. Let me just… Before that, however, Bobbi spotted another disgusting ship stealer making its way towards her, so in one fluid motion, she charged towards it with a dropkick from out of nowhere, forcing it back into the fog, whatever was inside it, and then performing a kip-up without much effort. When she turned to him with that same smirk, she was already back to her feet. “...yo momma.”

Stillness had settled over the deck as the unliving things lay in piles of bisected bodies and severed limbs. Clay’s shoulders rose and fell with exerted respiration, gory machete held at the ready as he reached out his Slayer sense to more oily pulses of undeath. But the only pinpricks at the edge of his consciousness were far at sea. The last remaining signal of undeath was falling away down away from him after the definitely twenty-something captain of the vessel did a drop-kick that sent it over the side. 

Ok, fine, that was a cool move. Game must acknowledge game.