The only thing I could taste was the nylon rope placed in my mouth to stop me from talking.

  It pulled against the corners of my mouth, cutting into it. The more I moved the more it rubbed the skin raw.

  I hardly noticed it, as metallic-smelling smoke filled my nostrils and whirled around me like mist; my eyes tried not to focus on the bodies that lay unmoving around me. I tried to avert my eyes from their twisted and mangled forms, but it felt impossible to do so.

  I willed my eyes to stop but they had a life of their own.

  Their gaze crept towards the pools of blood. The discarded guns. The impossibly large holes in the middles of foreheads.

  All for what?

  They had been told what would happen if they resisted, if they fought back, but they refused to listen. All for the company. A company they didn’t own, a company they only worked for and that paid their wages, yet their unwavering loyalty to said company that hardly gave two fucks about if they lived or died was maddening.

  They should have just surrendered.

  Footsteps coming towards me forced me to lift my snot-filled face up; they thundered against the floors of the ship, disturbing the eerie peace that had come over it. I squinted my eyes trying to penetrate the smoke and I couldn’t see anything till he was right in front of me, appearing like a ghost out of thin air.

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  He had dark skin and a bald head with a tattoo of a gun target just above his temple. A short goatee speckled with a few grey hairs covered his chin; tinted shades covered his eyes. Beads and bracelets hung from his forearms as he stood in front of me and looked into my soul.

  “‘I fell in love with a hooker who robbed me of my soul. I fell in love with a hooker who robbed me of my sight. I fell in love with a hooker because she was the only woman for me. I fell in love with a hooker till the only thing I had was two packs of cigarettes and thirty dollars on me.’

  “That song,” said the newcomer, “was my father’s favourite, from a band called Junk Yard Dogs. It was a band he loved more than me, it was a band he saw more than me, and it was a band that meant everything to him. One day I grew the balls to ask him why, and you know what he said, amigo?”

  I shook my head from side to side, fearful of the answer.

  “Because, boyo! That song represents life. No truer words have ever been sung in no song. Then he passed out on the sofa, drunk off his ass.”

  I looked at him not knowing what to say. Hell, I couldn’t say much anyway seeing as how rope filled my mouth.

  “I bet you’re wondering why we hijacked your fine ship here?”

  The thought had crossed my mind.

  “It’s simple, you have something we want and we have something you want.”

  My eyebrows raised in confusion. These assholes had nothing I could want.

  “Oh, I can see in your eyes you don’t believe us. But we have the most important thing you value… your life.”

  The canine-filled smile he sent my way told me everything I needed to know. I was in a world of shit with no way out. How was I going to survive this?