The Tragedy of Captain Carver

The crew of the Antoinette serenaded the Atlantic with melancholic tunes of want and weariness.

We told secrets to ourselves before

Our good world up and died.

Now we wander shore to shore

And don’t even know why.

Captain Carver stood sentinel at the windows of the bridge, staring out at the lantern-lit deck. Technicolor cargo crates were stacked like building blocks across the length of the ship. Hammocks were strung up at all heights in the alleyways between them, creating a calculated web of ropes and nets.

Behind her, Carver’s first mate and navigator were engaged in drunken discourse.

“I’m telling you, Marie Antoinette didn’t actually say ‘let them eat cake!’” Midas explained, his speech slurry.

Lacy Mae growled and kicked her feet up onto the sonar.

“Puh-lease, why would they say she said it if she didn’t actually say it?”

“Because history is written by whoever tells the best story,” Carver chimed in, her voice flat.

“Always gotta make it serious. Have some fun! Be joyous! It’s your birthday!” Lacy Mae covered her right eye with one hand and stomped to a messy beat. “Yar, har fiddle dee doo, happy birthday, yee haw, blah blah!”

“Don’t listen to her.” Midas said. “Today’s your day. Be as stalwart and douchey as you like.”

Carver chuckled and put her arms around him. They stared into each others’ eyes—the windows to the old world, as sailors sometimes called them.

“Blegh, barf,” Lacy Mae exclaimed. “I’ll grab your gift while you two eyefuck.”

She stomped off the bridge through the open door. Carver scoffed, and sat beside Midas. They leaned into each other. Echoes of shanties seeped through cracks in the walls.

We’re starvin’.

We’re dyin’!

But you won’t

See us cryin’!

“They’re getting good,” Midas remarked.

“They’ll sing about me one day,” she whispered.

“They already sing about you.”

Carver laughed disheartedly.

“Lotta swears in those songs.”

He laughed, too.

“They’re sailors.”

They smiled at each other, and closed the space between their mouths. He wrapped his arm around her pristine white jacket and held her as close as physically possible.

“Alright, ‘nuff neckin’,” Lacy Mae’s voice cut through the air, dividing them. She stood in the doorway with a domed silver platter in one hand, and a knife in the other. She skipped over and slid the items onto the table, knocking over the pirate ship board game piece they’d been using to mark their location on the map.

“Careful,” Carver demanded as she reset the piece. The map got bluer everyday, she thought. Every time they traveled, they discovered new quadrants of land that were flooded completely, and they’d have to paint over those areas on the table. She figured they’d soon be passing over what used to be New York City.

“Went shopping in the cold crates for this,” Lacy Mae joked.

Carver was not amused.

“You took this from our cargo? Do you know what the Trade Administrators will do if they—”

Lacy Mae interrupted her.

“Always on about the Trade Administrators, you are. I checked the inventory. It’s overstock. They’ll never know!”

Carver rose from her seat.

“And what if the crew had seen? What if someone just wandering through on a night’s stroll happened to see what was in those crates?”

Lacy Mae did not back down.

“Maybe if you told them what's in the crates from the beginning, that wouldn’t be an issue!”

“Enough!” Midas shouted over them. “What’s done is done. Might as well enjoy it.”

Carver stepped away from Lacy Mae and sat back down.

“Exactly. Have your cake, and eat it too,” Lacy Mae quipped. She reached for the reflective dome, but was tripped up as the ship lurched in the water with a guttural roar. The knife slid across the table and nearly struck Midas, but Carver caught it just in time.

Driven by muscle memory, they scrambled to the control panels. Carver watched as a fortress of crates on the deck toppled, spilling its edges overboard with sailors caught underneath.

“Somebody tell me what the hell just happened!” Carver commanded.

Lacy Mae pointed to the dozens of red glowing orbs blinking on the sonar.

Carver’s voice crackled over the ship's loudspeakers.

“We’re under attack! Defensive positions!”

She grabbed a rifle, and a flare gun from the gun locker. Her bridge-mates followed suit. The three of them dashed down the stairs and out onto the main deck. Through the narrow corridors between crates, frenzied sailors were storming to their posts.

A harpoon tore into sight just ahead of Carver and pierced the crate beside her, taking a sailor’s head clean off and spritzing her jacket with blood. The wire attached to it pulled taut, causing the crate to shift and screech.

“Run!” Carver shouted, and frantically turned around as the metal box was sucked into the void. The vacuum in its stead was filled by another crate that crashed down at an angle, becoming a ramp for more to slide off into the abyss. The horde scrambled to outrun the avalanche of steel steamrolling into darkness.

The three of them broke off down an alleyway still relatively untouched by the chaos, and navigated up through ropes and nets until they reached the top of the crates. Carver raised the flare gun to eye level and took a shot into the darkness. As the beacon flew through the night, it cast a crimson glow on the armada of ships surrounding them. They were smaller, more agile frigates, armed at every edge and reeling in cargo crates with blistering haste.

Carver was ready to fight, and die, and go down with her ship, but Midas felt otherwise. He removed her jacket, raised it high, and waved it back and forth through the windless air.

“We surrender! We surrender!” He hollered ceaselessly.

Carver shouted at him. “Midas, stop! What are you doing?! We have to fight back!”

Lacy Mae grappled her and pulled her down to the cold steel.

“Stop this—both of you, stop!”

“Can’t write history if you’re dead, cap’n,” Lacy Mae grumbled as she wrestled with Carver.

“We do not surrender! We do not!”

But the words were pointless, because the onslaught had already ceased. An iron voice filled the air completely.

“Jettison all your topside cargo. You have until sunrise.”

Midas collapsed. Lacy Mae released Carver, who scrambled to her feet and stood over the two of them. She ripped her jacket from him and put it back on.

“We do not surrender... ever!”

Midas looked up at her, his eyes still full of love.

“We just did.”

She shook her head disappointedly, and made her way back down to the deck. They followed her.

“We’ve bought ourselves time!” She hollered to the surrounding crewmates. “We will mount a counterattack, and…” Her voice trailed off, as she honed in on a faint and faltering melody amidst the swarm of people.

Now... we wander shore... to... shore...

And don’t... even know...

In the crowd, a few sailors were tending to a young man leaning against a wall, whose arm was dangling by vascular threads from his shredded torso. He stared up at Carver shakily, and finished the verse on a dissonant note.

...why..?

Another voice rang out from the crowd.

“Show us what we’re dyin’ for!”

Before Carver had the chance to refuse, a band of crewmates had already taken to opening up the crate in front of them. Once the doors were ajar, the crowd fell quiet. The dying man’s eyes widened, as if he was witnessing God inside the big metal box. No more words came—just faint laughter, then silence, then uproar.

Suddenly, everything was fuzzy and dark. Carver was shoved against a wall hard, which sent her head spinning around itself. Midas struck the crewmate who pushed her, and then guns were drawn. Lanterns were going off all over the ship. Shots were fired.

Carver and Midas navigated the maze between crates, trying to find their way back to the bridge. Screams barreled through the narrows.

“Kill Carver!”

“Kill the Captain!”

“Death!”

Down a long strait stood Lacy Mae, holding open a door and waving her hand in the air. Midas and Carver filed in ahead of her, but before they could thank her, their ears were pierced by the sound of metal striking metal. Lacy Mae’s body thrust back into the door and sank to the ground, propping it open. The right side of her face was a crater.

Midas and Carver sprinted up the stairs as the sound of many stomping boots boomed underneath them like thunder. When they reached the bridge, they sealed the door behind them not a moment too soon. The mob on the other side hollered sounds more akin to beast than human.

“Okay… okay,” Carver said to herself as she approached the control deck.

“First, we take the raiders. Their ships are small. We can ram them, and—”

“Carver, it’s over. We surrendered.”

“No, you surrendered!” She turned and shouted at him, her eyes meeting not his, but the eye of his gun.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

“Stopping you from making this any worse.”

“If we don’t deliver what’s left of this cargo, the Trade Admins will have my head!”

“Well, they’ll have to wait in line,” Midas said coldly. The roars behind the door did not yield.

“You’ll give up everything we had?” she asked.

He let a contrived guffaw slip. “Me?! You’re the one willing to let me and everyone on this ship die for...” He removed the dome from the platter on the table, revealing the fresh and full chocolate cake beneath it. “For this! Crates full of fucking desserts!”

Midas’ breath quavered as Carver approached him slowly, making her way around the table as he berated her.

“But it… it’s not the cargo, is it? It’s the… accolades. You wanna be a legend, as if any of that fucking matters now!”

Sweat and tears coated his face.

“As if any of it will matter when you’re dead!? When the world is dead, and everyone is gone because everything is just fucking water!”

She stared into his eyes and lowered his gun with a gentle hand. He couldn't bring himself to look at her, so he looked at the table instead. The pirate piece was on its side again, so he set it back upright. The knife was gone, too—digging into his flesh as soon as he’d noticed its absence. In return, he pressed his gun against Carver’s stomach and unleashed a muffled opera of bullets. Their eyes met one final time before he fell to the ground and she fell into the chair, still with a firm grip on the knife.

The cake looked delicious, Carver thought. Its thick icing was as dark as the night, and its cherries were a perfect match for the guts she was pouring out onto the table. With the last iota of strength her terminating body could muster, she cut herself a hearty slice. The blood on the blade soaked into the spongy chocolate with each chop, but before she could enjoy her piece, everything was dark.

When the crew had finally breached the bridge, the sun was rising over a barren deck, and not a raider in sight. Remnants of skyscrapers passed by just beneath the water’s surface.

Carver’s head was buried face-first in the cake. The pirate piece sailed aimlessly across the scarlet sea that she had spilled onto the table. They dumped her body overboard and sailed on.

In years to come, they indeed sang of Captain Carver, though not how she had hoped.

Captain carver took a bite

Too big to stomach on that night.

Now, she sleeps ten thousand leagues

Below this cursed sea.