Imitation is flattery, Disney. Strike me not.

This is not an unspecified year in the 1700's. This is the modern era, our era. A couple centuries ago, they found the Fountain of Youth.

Welcome to Pirates of the Caribbean: Age of the Uzi.

Takin' Care of Business

Workin' overtime.

On a second-hand cigarette boat cruising for leisure near Haiti, a pirate was threatening two Americans with a three-hundred-year-old naval dress sword.

He flicked the saber in Mr. Porter's face, shearing off a scraggly nose hair that wafted gently over the rail. Behind him, Dave's hands shook as he lifted the sundeck cushion. In the little well underneath, under some screwdrivers, duct tape, and a crescent wrench, lay a proud and disused Desert Eagle, quietly rusting in a greasy puddle. Its weight slipped under his fingers. He flinched at the click of steel on fiberglass, staring at the grubby trench-coat and matted black hair of the man busy threatening his uncle. No change.

Mr. Porter saw the sundeck open and his jaw dropped slacker. The stranger began to turn.

With a lightning shudder, Dave seized the gun and swung it level, trigger finger miraculously ready behind the guard. The stranger's eyes popped—brilliant white next to black eyeliner—and Dave found himself staring down the bulky black barrel of an Uzi.

Dave raised the handgun with a shaking wrist. The stranger wobbled slightly and caught himself, smirking as though he'd planned to. "Safety," he exclaimed, resting his gun back on his shoulder.

"Drop the sword," Dave hissed, remembering his Boy Scout training and sighting on to the man's forehead.

"No." The stranger smiled and spread his arms as though in welcome, saber and automatic pointing off to the sky. "You went off half-cocked, as it were, importuning me wi'nought t'back up yer impetchious bid for the alpha position. Check the safety; 'till then, I've no cause to trouble meself on your account, now do I?" He glanced back at Mr. Porter, who had started to inch for the nearest blunt object, a Corona bottle, and shooed him back to his seat with the saber.

Dave watched him, frozen, his numbed mind struggling to pick through the invader's…what was that speech? Advice? A warning? A trick? The Uzi now pointed every which way, as the arm that held it wandered and flapped. Was his uncle the type to leave a loaded gun lying around with the safety off?

Squinting to focus, Dave drew the gun in to check.

Snake-quick, the saber tip lashed out and caught up the gun by the trigger guard, taking a slice of Dave's finger with it. The gun spat, declaring war on Haiti, and flew high over the fishing chairs. In a single lunge, the stranger reversed grip on the saber and swept up his sword arm to catch the gun barrel in his finger and thumb, stumbling over a rubber fender and crashing to a seat against the engine block. With a splitting grin, he stuffed Mr. Porter's gun into a sash around his waist, and waved Dave, who dumbly clutched his bleeding finger in his left fist, to sit next to Mr. Porter.

"You idiot," his uncle groaned, kneading his head on his knuckles.

"Listen to 'im, boy, he's a keen judge," said the stranger, tucking his sword alongside the Desert Eagle and helping himself to a beer from the cooler. With the Uzi still trained on the Porters, he took the bottle cap in his mouth, revealing scattered gold teeth and, on the right side, two pair of some silvery metal, with which he popped the beer open. With a goatish, meditative expression, he crunched the cap in half and spat it at Mr. Porter's feet before taking a long chug.

"What do you want?" asked Mr. Porter, when the stranger had finished and was inspecting the bottle for clarity.

"What have you got?"

Dave grimaced in rage. "My father is a marine," he snarled. "He's got friends here, he'll hunt you down. He'll strap an anchor to your feet and send you to the sharks."

The stranger rolled his eyes. "You know what I love about these guns," he said, turning the Uzi over in his hands and incidentally squinting right down the barrel, "Loads of bullets. Plenty for everyone. Wish they'd make bottles that way… And I repeat, what have you got?" He flipped the gun right-way-round, rising from the sundeck with a quickstep and a shuffle for balance.

"We don't have cash," Mr. Porter began.

"I'll take the beer," the stranger interrupted. He kicked the cooler and jerked the gun at Dave. "Load that in. Load in the gas cans, too, and you," he grabbed Mr. Porter by the arm, "stick close."

The stranger disappeared below with Dave's uncle.

Dave opened the sun-deck again and stared in at the screwdrivers and the crescent wrench, trying to decide which weapon to hide in his shorts and where. He was only wearing a tank top and swim trunks, but perhaps he could rig something with the duct tape… A clunk from below startled him, and he grabbed the cooler and pitched it harshly over into the mangy little skiff that had tied up alongside.

A mangy aluminum skiff with a 200-horsepower outboard engine nearly swamping its stern, counterbalanced by an army-green steel trunk in the front. Dave hopped in and tried the trunk lid: locked. It probably held more like the Uzi. The hull was awash, probably from its recent leaping sprint over the choppy sea, and the three orange gas cans—mostly empty—that sat just aft of the trunk floated occasionally when the waves pitched bilge-water under them. A knot Dave had never seen before made the stern fast to the Porters' 401-K, and the bow… The bow clung to the 401-K's railing by a metal grappling hook. The sun sluggishly lined it out, showing its coiled eye and faceted surface. Dave supposed it was hand-wrought, and belonged in a museum.

At the joint of the bow, a pole flew a variation of the Jolly Roger, nearly half the length of the boat. "Bastard," Dave snarled.

Cigarette boats—streamlined fiberglass day yachts with engines a semi truck might be proud of—are fast. The skiff saddled with the ski-boat engine, overpowered like a Dodge Viper catapulted forward by its V-10, was as fast or faster, jolting over the light swells and throwing up a twenty-foot-high rooster tail of spray. Still, in a hard chase, the cigarette boat could have run until the small craft shook itself to pieces or capsized. There had been no chase.

When the skiff had blazed up next to the drifting 401-K, Jolly Roger streaming over her bow, and interrupted Dave's fishing, Dave and his uncle had simply shook their fists at the asshole—until he'd slung a heavy hook at their rail, leapt from boat to boat, and trimmed Mr. Porter's nose hair with his sword.

Dave was startled out of his musing when the stranger appeared above decks for an instant, jerked the stern line and the grappling hook free of the 401-K, then started the engine and jerked down the throttle, leaving him alone on the skiff, bobbing in a furious foaming wake. In seconds, the boat broke onto a plane, skidding across the waves, the mighty engine roaring to the skies, spray bursting against her bow. In a few minutes, she shrank against the horizon.

Dave had no cell phone, no radio, no water. His uncle was hostage to a madman with a machine gun. He sank to the skiff's hot metal bench with a thunk.

The puny white point that was the 401-K threw up a towering arc of water, curving back the way it had come. Dave jumped to his feet, sending the bilge-water sloshing and nearly capsizing himself. The speedboat whirled like a lone kid on a merry-go-round, spitting up a tight donut of white mist, then cut a hard S-turn, arcs, more S's, figure-8's, lashing the blue. "Go, go!" Dave yelled. His brain leapt to heroic conclusions. His uncle must have made a grab at the tiller. They were wrestling for it. Mr. Porter must be holding his own.

Dave hoped the kidnapper wouldn't kill him.

The boat broke out of its contortions for a long sprint back toward the skiff, its hull slamming and thundering from peak to peak. Dave stood up on the bench, straining to see into the cockpit past the big boat's high, pitching bow, as it grew larger and larger. Any second now, the boat would slow or turn to avoid him, and he ought to catch a glimpse.

Any second.

The bow charged the skiff, shading the water beneath.

Dave bailed out.

The engine's roar died, then switched to a whine as it slammed into reverse, the hull sinking off its plane, wallowing, and gliding petulantly to ram the skiff and knock it aside, nearly clocking Dave on the head with it.

The motor stopped with a choke. Dave surfaced, grabbed onto the skiff, and hid behind it in the water. He heard the stranger's arrogant British slur yelling at him to get his arse aboard and tie up the launch to the bloody barge. "Go on," came his uncle's voice, cowed by the gun but furious at the slight to his watercraft. "Tie the skiff to the K, like he says."

Dave sullenly obeyed and clambered up, dripping, and scowled at the man in the trench coat and biker boots who was gripping his uncle on tiptoes by the ear and waving that Uzi with his free hand, like a drunk sloshing a bottle.

"You call that a clove hitch?" the stranger snapped, poking him in the shoulder with the gun. Dave recoiled and slowly bent to fiddle with the knot, clutching for memory. The man leaned over his shoulder, breathing rankly down his neck, and curled his lip at his efforts. "'Vast that," he spat. "Get me me gasoline, chop-chop. Go on," and he shoved Dave below with his boot. "And the sack in the galley," he added.

The sack was Dave's fleece blanket wrapped around the 401-K's radio, supplies, cutlery, and apparently everything small enough to fit that wasn't nailed down, including Mr. Porter's treasured home-made lure set. The sack went in the bow of the skiff next to the trunk. The Porters exchanged all their full gas cans for the stranger's empties. The stranger perched on their windshield, one boot on the driver's seat and the other dangling free. "You keep the barge," he announced. "Too bloody sluggish peeling out of those loopy-turns. Hands and knees!"

Mr. Porter sputtered. "The K's the fastest boat in Esther Bay, you crack-head!"

"Aye, but we're not in Esther Bay, ergo, she's a slug. On your knees—you, too."

Dave knelt by his uncle, the two of them facing the stern, watching the horizon toss, squinting as the sun flared off the fiberglass. Such a bright, perfect, cheery day. A terrible day to die.

The man produced a bundle of cheap nylon rope and hogtied them, using one hand and the toe of a boot, the other hand still waving the Uzi. He finished off each foot rope with a noose leading to their necks. Satisfied, he hopped up on the rail and gave Dave a kick in the shoulder. The Porters toppled like dominoes, Dave scowling up at him and squirming. He tried to straighten his legs and choked. "Not smart," said the stranger, wagging a bling-covered finger at him.

"There's cops around here," Dave hissed. "When we get to shore, I'm telling them—agh!"

With terror mounting as Dave talked, Mr. Porter had elbowed him viciously from underneath. "Shut up!"

"Oh, feel free to sing like Britney," said the man. "Say 'Captain Jack Sparrow sends his regards,' and stretch the tale however the fancy strikes you. Don't shave your head, though, you'd look like a newt with ears." He hopped down and freed the skiff. "Many thanks for the gasoline," he said, as he grabbed the rip-cord. After a few increasingly frustrated tugs and much cursing, the engine turned over and he happily put a hand to the tiller. "And also for the pistol!" he added, shouting now over the motor and the growing distance. "My own was quite empty!"

And that's the end of that.

If you liked it, tell me! If you didn't like it, please for the love of zombie monkeys tell me. Flames welcomed.