Sole Survivarrrgh
by
Michael D. Britton
* * * *
Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books
You just can’t make this stuff up.
My first big interview since I got hired at Channel 8 – one that would surely hit the national feeds – an exclusive chance to sit down and talk with the sole survivor of National Airways Flight 440 – and the guy turns out to be, well, a pirate.
I’m not talking about crooked geeks who rip off your intellectual property. And I’m not talking about those guys off the coast of Somalia, brandishing AK-47s and taking cruise ships hostage.
I’m talking about a full-fledged, rum-swilling, “yo-ho me hearties” pirate.
That’s what the doctors are saying, anyway – they seem to think it’s a mental condition related to the trauma he suffered.
Me and my camera guy, Mitch, (not hard to work with a hottie like him!), set up in the chilly, sterile, white-walled private recovery room on the fourth floor at Miami’s Kendall Medical Center. A smell of ammonia permeated the air as I sat down on a metal stool, its feet making a spine-chilling scraping sound on the linoleum floor as I got comfortable and crossed my legs. Not sure why I wore such a short skirt, since I’d already decided to have Mitch shoot my standup as a medium close-up next to a digital recreation of the ill-fated aircraft’s crash.
Still, I always looked great in red – especially on camera – my long blonde hair contrasting perfectly against my blazer.
“Almost ready,” said Mitch as he adjusted the tripod and used the wall to get a white balance before focusing in on my face. He brushed his black hair away from his forehead and I noticed the cut muscles in his forearm.
The door opened and I was not quite prepared for what I saw. Mitch quickly swiveled the camera to catch a shot of him entering: instead of a hospital gown, he was wearing the clothes he was to be discharged in – a worn black three-cornered cap over shaggy brown hair, a leather eye-patch, gold hoop earring, long red beard, frilly shirt, baggy khakis and a rosewood peg-leg on one side, tall black boot the other.
A freaking pirate.
I’d never interviewed a mentally ill person before, and wasn’t sure where to start. I decided to ignore his eccentricity and just play the interview straight, asking him questions relevant to the plane crash.
I stood and extended my hand. “Hello, Mr. Sebastian, I’m Holly Gooding from Channel 8 Eyewitness News. And this is my camera man, Mitch. Thank you for giving me a chance to speak with you today.”
Sebastian surprised me by taking my offered hand and instead of shaking it, drawing it up to his bearded mouth for a prickly little kiss. His breath smelled like rum, despite the fact he’d been in hospital for over twenty four hours.
“The pleasure be mine, lassie,” he said with a sing-song gravelly voice and a wrinkly grin that revealed crooked, blackened teeth.
I looked over at Mitch and rolled my eyes in a “get a load of this guy” way. Mitch just kept peering through his viewfinder, fascinated by this bizarre presence who filled up the room like Johnny Depp filled the screen.
“Tell me, milady,” he said, “are ye come to return me to me ship? Avast! I’ve complained to these bloody scallywags, but they won’t tell me where me ship be, or what’s become of me blasted crew. There’s a gold doubloon in it for ye if ye can get me out of this white-walled brig.” He winked with his unpatched eye – an odd sort of gesture for a one-eyed man.
“Um, well,” I stammered as I tried to think fast, “let’s talk about that a little later. First, I’d like to ask you a few questions about your experience on Flight 440. How is it that you came to be aboard the flight – were you traveling on business or pleasure?”
“Ah, yes, the four-forty. That’s all ye rapscallions want to speak of around ‘ere, ain’t it?” He hobbled, peg-leg clicking on the floor, to the stool across from me and hopped into it with surprising alacrity. “I’ll tell ye what I told them men in white robes. But I shan’t tell ye everything – not until I ‘ave ye word that I’ll be let out of this laboratory and taken back to me ship.”
He stared at me with that one eye, squinting intensely, his arms folded across his chest.
“Very well,” I said, knowing full well that I was in no position to strike such a deal. Once I had my story, it wouldn’t matter. “What’s the name of your ship, anyway?”
“Aye, well that’s where the story begins, lassie. See, I were standing at the helm of The Coral Phantom, a perfectly clear day ahead of us as we left ‘arbor from Nassau, headed northwest.”
“About what time was that, Mr. Sebastian?”
“Argh, it were ‘bout five shadows past me tree.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what they calls it in them parts. ’Bout midway ‘tween noon and dusk, what it means.”
“I see. Go on.”
“Well, the sky be perfectly clear, as I says, and the sea be like rolling glass. Me men be in a right good spirit, dividing the booty from the last plunder. I could hear them below decks, gettin’ right rowdy. We’d put one horizon between ourselves and the island, when the sky took a nasty turn.” He screwed up his face and got a faraway look in his eye. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. “The wind dropped, leaving us adrift, and the sun was blotted out – midnight before sunset it were.”
“A storm blew in?” I asked.
“Ye not be listnin’ lassie!” he growled. “No wind. No clouds. Just an evil blackness, thick as molasses, choking me and me ship like the hand of the devil ‘isself were clutched ‘round our very necks.”
“Wait, a minute,” I said, “how does this relate to your trip aboard Flight 440?”
“Patience,” he hissed. “I be gettin’ there.”
Mitch looked over at me and gestured to the door, raising one finger to indicate “one moment alone.”
“Um, Mr. Sebastian, would you please excuse us for just a moment?”
“Aye.”
We stepped outside the room into the quiet hallway. A nurse sat at a station a few yards away, playing solitaire on her computer.
“What if we have him show us the story?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Look,” Mitch said, “I’m a camera man – a visual man. To do this right, we need more than a dumb graphic of the crash map and some b-roll stock footage of the blue waters of the Caribbean. I say we shoot ol’ Redbeard in there giving us a tour of the actual scene. We overlay the audio from this interview and make it a feature piece.”
I slowly nodded. “I like it, I like it a lot. We need to get Sebastian released. You go talk to the nurse and find out his status – I’ll go talk to Sebastian about taking us out.”
I stepped back into the room to see the pirate peering into the camera lens, his eye about an inch from the camera. “This blasted spyglass don’t work a’tall,” he barked.
“Oh, that’s not a – never mind. Listen, we’re working on getting you discharged. It shouldn’t be a problem since you seem in good health.” (Insanity aside.) “We want you to show us where it all happened. Can you do that?”
He glared at me. “Long as this ain’t some trick to get me to show ye where I stashes me booty.”
“No, of course not, Mr. Sebastian. I just want to get the story straight and get some good shots of the sea.”
“Shots? That reminds me – these bilge-suckers took me pistol and me cutlass. I’ll be needing them back, luv.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
۞
Mitch ended up having to get our news director, Jim Hatfield, to call the hospital and get Sebastian released into our care. He had a clean bill of health, but they had wanted to keep him for psychiatric observ
ation – and they were concerned that he had no identification, with no one stepping forward to claim him as their own. We promised to make sure he got back safely to the hospital, and said our excursion may help shed some light on his real identity.
However, they refused to surrender his weapons to him. He was pretty steamed about that, but we managed to calm him down.
“Look,” I said as we hopped in the yellow and white Channel 8 Jeep Grand Cherokee and headed toward the harbor, “have you noticed that nobody else is carrying any weapons, either? You’ll be fine. If any – uh, scallywags – give us any trouble, you and Mitch here can just settle it with fisticuffs, man-to-man, okay?”
Sebastian gave a terse nod and started looking around the interior of the Jeep, frowning. “What kind of conveyance ye got ‘ere? No ‘orses?”
He feigned his culture shock quite convincingly.
I ignored it and asked him about his background. “So, where are you from,