As Gyro once more settled into the strange feeling of carrying her weight about her midsection instead of across her four hooves, her eyes fell on a figure she hadn’t noticed earlier lying across Rainbow’s back. Between the excitement at seeing her two friends alive and the dark cover of the night, she hadn’t noticed the pony’s black coat against the blackness of the night. “Who’s your friend?” she asked as the four survivors made set to leave for safety.
Rainbow blinked and flipped her head over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah, I almost forgot I was carrying him. It’s been a long night.” Then, blinking, she raised an eyebrow at Gyro. “You mean you don’t recognize him?”
“No?” Gyro cocked her head to the side, suddenly worried. “Should I? he’s not another mechanic or something from the Concordia, right?”
Ratchet preemptively shook his head. “The pirates never took any of us alive. They killed whoever they got their hooves on. I’m amazed they didn’t kill you two as well.”
“He’s not one of the ponies from the Concordia,” Rarity said. She hesitated, searching for the right words to frame her next statement. “He’s… well, he’s your friend, darling. Hot Coals.”
Gyro’s breath caught in her throat. She shook her head in disbelief, but nevertheless pulled herself a stride closer to the mysterious pony. “No, that’s… that can’t be right,” she said. “That can’t be him… can it?”
“He was captured by the pirates years ago,” Rainbow said, stepping forward so Gyro could get a better look at his face. “They forced him to serve on their crew as their engineer. He’s been stuck there ever since.” She shot another worried look over her shoulder. “And he needs some medical attention like, hours ago.”
The brief flash of joy and elation Gyro felt at seeing a long lost friend for the first time in years was swiftly washed away with icy terror. “What happened to him?” she asked, awkwardly trying to hover over him like a worried mother while her cumbersome walker made it difficult for her to even move. “What’s wrong?”
“Squall shot him,” Rainbow said, perhaps a little too flatly. “When I told him that you were here on this island, he risked everything to help me. He never wanted to be a pirate, and he was looking for a chance to escape. But Squall found out, and she shot him.”
“How long ago was that?” Ratchet asked.
Rainbow shrugged. “Hours ago. Around dinner time. I did the best I could to stop the bleeding, but…”
Gyro immediately started trying to find the wound with a hoof. “Where did he get shot? Can I help? What can I do? Will he be alright? Please tell me he’ll be alright!”
Rarity immediately stepped up and put a hoof on Gyro’s shoulder, gently nudging her away from Rainbow and Coals to give them some breathing room. “He’ll be fine if he can get some stitches,” she said. “He’s lost a lot of blood and we still have to remove the bullet. I can take care of that on my own, but without a needle, I can’t stitch the wound together and stop the bleeding entirely.” Her eyes swiveled to Ratchet. “Which is why we need to go someplace safe immediately.”
Ratchet nodded and moved next to Rainbow. “Do you want me to take him for you? You look like you could use the help.”
“I’m fine, dude,” Rainbow insisted, grunting and shifting her balance to something more comfortable. “I can carry him back.”
Nevertheless, Rarity’s blue magic carefully lifted Coals off of Rainbow’s back and transferred him to Ratchet. “We appreciate the offer,” Rarity said with a flash of a smile. “Rainbow especially, though she won’t admit it.”
Rainbow sighed and let her wings sag. “I could’ve handled it, Rares…”
“I know you could have.” Rarity stepped forward and pecked Rainbow on the cheek. Then, nodding to Ratchet, she gestured vaguely off into the jungle. “I suppose we should get moving now before the pirates return, yes?”
-----
Black Flag was panting by the time he and the other two pirates returned to their camp. They’d completely taken the bait and fallen for the trap, and now it’d cost them two more crew. At the very least, it’d been an even exchange of two lives for two lives, but it tipped the balance of power on the island towards those damned survivors from the Concordia. Now there were merely six of them and an unknown number of survivors who’d undoubtedly stolen the weapons they’d left behind.
He needed to talk to Squall. As much as he disliked and feared their rabid captain, he knew she was the only one who could keep them afloat. When she focused her burning rage and menace on something, that something tended not to last very long.
“Captain?” he called into the night once he’d finally got some breath back in his lungs. The campsite looked abandoned, and he noticed that the structures they’d spent so much time building over the past month were all severely damaged if not outright destroyed. A tiny, limp tongue of fire flickered and faded in the firepit, and the sand was all churned up from numerous hooves frantically running across it. Sniffing the air once, he caught a whiff of copper, and when he looked down, he saw blood on the sand.
Something had happened while he and his party were away. Suddenly, even their camp didn’t feel safe anymore.
“Find the captain,” he said to the two other pirates with him. “See if she’s anywhere around here. This place was attacked while we were gone.”
The other two pirates nodded and breathlessly set about their task, desperation slicing out any grumbling or banter that would normally accompany such an order. Flag, meanwhile, looked over the camp, making a mental tally of the carnage. Their supplies had been raided, leaving them with precious little, and the prisoner and the treacherous rat, Coals, were both gone. But other than that, there wasn’t any record of what had happened.
“Flag! Over here!” one of the pirates shouted, and Flag immediately galloped over in their direction. Emerging from behind the camp buildings, he saw a blood red figure lying on her side in the sand, completely still and limp.
He immediately knelt down at Squall’s side and looked her over. Her body was covered in all sorts of horrible wounds, and her coat was sticky with drying blood. Somepony had shot her in the back, and that wound still bled slightly. He figured it must’ve been the blow that put her down. Cursing, he put a hoof on the mare’s neck, just under her jaw, and felt for a pulse.
“Is she still alive?” the other pirate asked. He nervously shuffled his hooves in the sand. “I can’t believe somepony got the best of her…”
Flag bit down on his lip. He moved his hoof around, looking for a pulse, wondering if maybe he’d simply looked in the wrong spot. Squall couldn’t be dead. It was almost impossible to think of.
In the center of the camp, the tiny tongue of fire faded into a wisp of smoke.
Eventually, Flag swallowed hard and took his hoof off the mare’s neck. “She’s dead,” he finally confirmed. “There’s no pulse and she’s not breathing. She’s dead.”
The other pirate cursed and hung his head. “So what do we do now? There’s only three of us. I have no idea what happened to the other two that were here with her.”
Flag stood up and kicked at the sand. “First, we bury her,” he said. “Then, we grab every weapon we have and we find where these rats are hiding. Tomorrow, we’ll slaughter them all in their sleep. We’ll end this, once and for all.”
The other pirate saluted and stood up. “On your orders, captain.”
Flag blinked, but accepted the title with a weary nod. He was captain now, and this was all the crew he had left.
He had to protect them, and there was only one way he knew how.