I clicked play and laid eyes upon the mood-lighted room we were currently holed up in. Lying across the bed was a lanky woman, clad in cheap pink lingerie which barely hung to her body. The kind you might find lying on the dirty floor at Ross for seven dollars.

The recording was from a distant vantage point, but the woman wore the look of drugged, or at least heavily drunk – her purple eye shadow sweating away down her cheek, her mouth hanging just a little bit ajar, her hair slicked back like a male CEO’s. She seemed to be trying to give the camera a sexy look, but it kind of just came across as tragic, like the kind of look you would see on the face of a woman in a “Last Known Picture of Crystal” shot from Unsolved Mysteries.

Ray was now finally following along, pressed up against my side, neck craning like a freeway driver trying to get a glimpse of an accident.

Our old friend from the beach walked into frame, shirtless in just a pair of stained light blue shorts. Dangling from his right hand was the kind of taser you could buy in a gun shop. He pressed down on the thing and sent some crackling jolts into the open air. The woman on the bed didn’t even seem to notice.

The boat owner crackled the taser again and descended upon the bed with purpose, wiped his mouth before he reached the dazed woman, bent down to give her a kiss she barely returned. He sat down on the bed next to her, the mattress bending underneath the burden of his doughy physique.

The man placed a soft hand upon her back and gave her a quick stroke before he readied the other hand with the taser below the level of the mattress where she likely couldn’t see it. She started to rustle a little bit to wrap her arms around him when he struck with the taser.

The taser sizzled and burned upon her naked shoulder, I could almost smell the burning flesh through the little window of vision of the screen of the camera gave us.

“Oh my God,” I mumbled to myself.

The tazing went on and on and on. Long after I had turned my head away in the disgust.

“What’s happening?” I asked Ray softly, noticing he had yet to avert his gaze.

“Not sure, they ran off screen. The bed is just sitting there blank.”

I looked to screen. Ray was right, we were now just looking at a messed up bed which we had sex on not too much later. The deepest feeling of disgust ran through my body.

Ray looked away from the camera, looked to me with startled eyes. It took me a second to figure out why, but it eventually tickled into my ear.

The door handle was rattling.

“Shit,” Ray muttered.

I screamed out. Couldn’t help it. Ray slipped his hands over my lips.

The rattling stopped. I set down the camera and we stalked over to the door.

“Ray…” I whispered.

He shushed me. We walked on. Ray steadied the gun out in front of him, probably drawing off the training he received from cop movies and shows.

“Help me,” a pathetic voice squeaked out from the other side of the door.

Ray kept the gun held high.

“It’s probably just that woman. She probably needs help.”

He shushed me again. Dropped his free hand down to the door, unlocked it and threw it open.

What I immediately laid my eyes upon was something I felt in my gut I had seen before in the bowels of my deepest, darkest of nightmares. The woman from the video stood in the doorway, barely holding herself up, bleeding all over her cheap lingerie, the lion’s share of the blood oozing out of a deep, crude gash which ran from both of the edges of her mouth, somewhat in the style of what you can Wikipedia as a Glasgow Smile.

I jumped backwards, grabbed Ray’s back and fully realized for the first time, now that we had an audience, we were both stark naked.

Ray kept the gun pointed at the woman.

“Help,” she softly pleaded again.

“Stop Ray, she just wants us to help.”

The woman shuffled a little bit into the room, her dark eyes to the floor, still not acknowledging us.

Ray lowered the gun and ushered her in. Closed, locked, the door behind her.

“What’s happened here?” Ray asked.

The woman finally looked up at us. Furrowed her delicate brow above her dark eyes. Emotions, thoughts, fears seemed to form in those eyes for a few moments before they went blank.

The woman collapsed on the floor right in front of us.

Ray and I dropped down to aid her right away. She was unresponsive, but had a pulse, I could feel her breathing.

“What happened?” Ray asked as if I was some kind of medical expert as opposed to someone who just took a first aid class their junior year of high school.

“She’s alive, but she’s passed out. I don’t know. Maybe she lost too much blood, too drugged or something.”

“What do we do?” Ray asked.

“I really don’t know. I have no idea what we can do. We could call the Coast Guard or something, but do we really want to do that?”

“I guess no.”

“Well, I guess we should take a look upstairs then,” Ray suggested.

We followed the trail of blood out of the room and slowly up the stairs into the galley.

The bright lights of the galley were almost blinding at first after having spent hours down the pit of the master suite in the soft candlelight. The world was suddenly disorienting to me. I felt like I wanted to vomit.

Ray led the way, following the trickle as it turned into a gush and led through the cramped little living room of the vessel and out the open door which led to the darkness of the back deck where we had first met the owner. A cold, ocean wind burst through the open door, raising the goosebumps on our skin almost as if it was warning us not to go out there.

My eyes caught my crumpled up dress lying on the floor just inside the door.

“Maybe we should put out clothes back on?” I suggested.

Ray and I retrieved our clothes from the living room and put them on with our eyes rarely leaving the view of the open back door.

“We should try to wake her up, ask her exactly what happened here,” Ray spoke up once we were both nearly fully-dressed. “I’m going to pull the anchor though. Set us back on course so we can get the fuck off this thing as soon as possible. We never should have stopped in the first place.”

I was alone, back down in the master suite, with the mysterious woman. Ray out pulling the anchor.

She had stirred – turned onto her side from where we had left her face down and vomited up a little bit of clear, orange liquid which rested on top of the floor rug.

I knelt down beside her, spoke to her in the soft tone you would use with a kitten.

“Miss. Are you awake? We need to talk to you.”

My voice rustled her. She rolled over onto her back. Her eyes slowly opened up to mine.

Her eyes went wide when she focused in on me.

“Is he gone?” She asked.

The boat began to shudder, come to life. Ray must have pulled the anchor and set the course.

“He should be, we left him on the beach, back in Florida. A long, long ways away. We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

“Is he back in his room?” The woman asked, seeming to drift away again.

“We are in his room.”

The woman shot barely-conscious eyes all around the room.

“No we’re not,” she said.

“What?”

“This isn’t his room. I was locked down there with him before I fell asleep. It was cold. Underneath the deck. This isn’t his room. I was there. It’s by the anchor. He’s still down there.”

“Him?” I pointed to a frame picture on the wall of the boat owner posing proudly next to a hulking marlin, strung up upside on a dock.

The woman shook her head emphatically. “No.”

Holy shit. What is she talking about?

Just as the thought flashed across my mind. I heard a rapping sound upon one of the porthole windows above the bed on the other side of the room. Circular and not much more than one foot around in total mass, the window served as a little peephole out to the front deck where the anchor was. It only provided the smallest of vantages and in the horizon of the hole I saw something we had looked for earlier in the night.

The missing axe, glinting in the moonlight, resting just outside of the glass.

I screamed in unison with the woman. The axe disappeared from sight.

“Ray? Ray?” I screamed in the direction of the suite door.

No answer.

Suddenly one of those feelings someone might describe in a documentary about a disaster took over me. I had to get out of that suite and I had to do it at once. Call it a sixth sense, call it intuition, but staying down there, waiting for Ray, or trying to tend to the woman, anymore would have been a grave mistake. I just knew it somehow.

I took off for the door with the woman gurgling out pleads behind me. Cowardly, I know, but many times it is the coward who lives to fight another day.

And fight I would.

Waiting for me at the top of the stairs outside of the suite door was a bleeding Ray. Looking not too much different from the woman whose life was hanging down by a thread I had just abandoned in the dungeon of a master suite, Ray wobbled a few steps above me, seeming only vaguely conscious of living.

His tired eyes dropped down upon me when I crested the last of the steps. I wrapped him in my arms.

“Oh my God. What happened?”

Ray could not form an answer. Just a gurgle.

I wrapped my arms around Ray and started pushing him with my weight towards where I remembered the back deck door to be through the living room. I could not see, Ray’s torso stuck into my face, a wound from his shoulder oozing hot blood down into my eyes.

“What happened to you?” I squeezed the question out with tightened lungs.

Ray didn’t answer, just grew a little bit more limp and heavy in my arms.

“Ray?”

I felt the cool ocean breeze of the Atlantic upon my skin. We were close to the door now. I tried to pick up the pace, knowing whoever had that axe, the other man the woman had talked about, could be anywhere. I told myself our only hope was to get to the dingy I saw attached to the back of the boat when we boarded. We would have better luck floating the Bermuda Triangle than staying on the yacht of nightmares.

The growing sounds of the waves, the tickle of cool upon my arms wrapped around Ray and the feeling of moisture splashing around my sandals told me I was at the door. A sliver of hope and relief bubbled in my blood when I looked up to see the stars of the night sky above me. I had made it out the door.

My body desperately wanted to drop Ray. He was a rather svelte young man, but just under 120 pounds myself, my capacity for carrying human beings around a yacht was rather low.

I started to panic when I felt him slip and sag in arms – feared I would drop him.

But dropping Ray soon fell down the list of things I was worried about when I felt my arm brush up against the form of another body.

I jumped instinctively. Dropped Ray to the cold, wet deck and came face-to-face with the red head of the axe before I even laid eyes upon the face of the assailant.

I ducked down to the deck and started to crawl away. Felt the wind of the axe upon the back of my head.

I crawled as fast as I could to the little space in the deck wall which I knew led to the platform where the dingy was. It was not all instinctual this time. I knew Ray was lying cold on the deck with the madman, utterly helpless and vulnerable, but there was nothing I could do for him at that moment.

My hands reached the wet salvation of the ladder down to the back deck without harm. I crouched to jump down and felt a cold palm grab hold of my ankle. It pulled me backwards before I could grab hold of anything else.

I rolled over onto my back and finally caught a glimpse of who, or what was pulling me in.

Encased in a faceless, black leather gimp costume, my attacker gazed down upon me with the flat, expressionless lips of a thick zipper and the soulless dark eyes of dead cow skin.

I screamed and tried to slap away the hands still clutched to my ankle, but I wasn’t quick enough. The man in the gimp costume had already pulled me back within axe-swinging distance.

I tried to wriggle away some more, but it was helpless, his grip too strong for my tired, aching body. I watched in horror as he swung the axe back with his free arm.

I unintentionally closed my eyes for a moment until I heard a blast ring out across the boat and the surrounding ocean and then echo back off the Atlantic.

My open eyes no longer saw the gimp man standing up above me. He was prone on the ground. The axe resting harmlessly next to him. His grip removed from my ankle.

I worked way up to my feet to see something I had completely forgotten about. The gun smoking in Ray’s hand as he laid on his back on the deck, struggling to breathe, his foggy eyes hazily locking with mine.

“Oh my God. Ray.”

I got to my feet and clumsily stumbled over to Ray. Past the gimp who was bleeding profusely out of his piece of shit neck.

I dropped back down to my knees next to Ray, gave him a quick kiss before speaking.

“Are you okay? I forgot about the gun. Thank God.”

Ray shook his head “no” before speaking.

“I need help,” he barely got the words out.

I looked down to gut-wrenching image of Ray’s shoulder again. It was bad. I could see shards of bone, splintered by assumedly the head of the axe, but it was not the worst. A scan down his body revealed a deep gash through his shirt on his side, right where a lot of the important organs rest.

That high school first aid course couldn’t guide me through this one, but I tried to put pressure on the torso wound. I gave him one more kiss to make sure I could get one in before he said goodbye, if that was in the cards.

It didn’t work. I drifted with my hands pressed hard against Ray for hours, till long after the morning sun had rose. I collapsed upon him when I truly knew it was all over, his body cold and not just from the frigid air of the open ocean.

Hope was gone. I went down to the suite to check on the woman and she had faded away as well.

I thought about tossing the gimp man’s body over the deck out of disgust, but stopped myself, probably best to not disturb the crime scene. Instead, I found the emergency kit for the vessel and periodically starting shooting flares until I eventually saw a Coast Guard ship cresting the waves which lapped around my nightmare yacht.

The dread of knowing I was going to have to try to explain to the approaching officials what exactly happened grew inside me, but was still nowhere nearly as big as the dread and grief twisting through my heart and soul about Ray.

I told the Coast Guard officials exactly what happened in the discomfort of handcuffs but in the comfort of their boat. The only part of the explanation of which I think they didn’t believe almost anything was answering a question one official asked after I told him about how Ray and I would steal boats.

“So I guess you could kind of call yourselves pirates?” The official asked.

A smile which I’m sure looked guilty as hell built upon my face before I answered.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”