Lost Boy by Christina Henry

Author:Christina Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

chapter 10

I’d never seen what a cannonball could do before. I’d seen a lot of blood in my time, though, and a lot of death. But I never saw death like that.

The ball tore through Billy first. The rest of them might have been all right except that they were directly behind him, and so that cannonball just ripped through all the boys like a finger flicking over a line of dominoes.

It hardly seemed to slow at all, just smashed in their ribs and pulled their hearts and guts out and then all that was left of them were heads on their bloodied bodies. The ball bounced off the rocks and tumbled in the direction of the marsh.

I cried out, and ran for them, unable to believe what my eyes told me. They couldn’t all be gone. But when I reached the top of the rocks, all six of them were nothing but mangled meat.

The pirate ship had anchored near Skull Rock, and I saw a rowboat with five or six of them lowering in the water. I didn’t see Peter, and the rest of the boys had disappeared into the forest.

I took off my red coat and covered the dead boys, then climbed back down and into the water. I didn’t know whether the pirates had seen me up there on the rocks and I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking of anything except killing all of the pirates, every last one.

The pirates were not going to follow the boys into the dunes. I would not lose any more of my friends. I would not.

I don’t remember swimming out to their rowboat. I don’t know how I got there so quickly, or how they missed seeing my shadow in the water. They must have been looking into the dunes for the boys who had run that way.

I surged out of the water and grabbed one of the pirates closest to me, and he was in the water with his throat slit before the others knew he was gone. I swam under the boat while they were all yelling and shouting and looking for their sinking fellow, and I took another from the other side and did for him the same as the first.

There were four of them left now, but they’d been spooked and none of the remaining pirates had managed to see me yet. I swam around under the boat while they peered like idiots over the sides and then gave it a great push. Two of them must have been standing for they fell in the water and made my task easier.

Blood churned everywhere in the water now, spewing from the bodies of the pirates. They couldn’t see me in that red fog. I was nothing but a shadow, a sharp-toothed hungry thing, and when I climbed over the side of the boat one of them was so terrified by my appearance that he jumped in the water and tried to swim back to the pirate ship.

I say “tried to,” because by then the sharks were coming in.

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