To the reader of this letter:

I sincerely hope that you are the one who found my last letter. Because this would be damn near impossible though, I shall tell you the bare essentials. My name is Daniel Blake and I am being held against my will in some part unknown. With this and other letters I write, I hope to alert people to my predicament and pray for a quick escape from this place. I cannot write for long, for I know that Murdoc will soon be making his rounds. Let me begin where I left off…

A while back, I was working in my office late at night, when suddenly, some sort of gas filtered into the room. Before I fell asleep, I smelt a familiar odor, something that I had only sensed once before, when I visited Kong Studios. It was like the ocean but tainted with the stink of decay and death. It reminded me of Murdoc Nichols, bassist for Gorillaz. I got up from my chair to investigate a noise, but the gas overtook me and I fell into deep sleep.

When I woke up, the entire room felt like it was spinning. I could hear propellers buzzing around me, so I knew that I was in a plane of sorts, but I could not see much else. As my senses came back to me, I found that there were a few other people near me in the cabin of the plane, two men and a woman. The men were seated against the plane and were making idle conversation; I think they were speaking in Vietnamese. I glanced over at the woman and found her to be young Hispanic, no older than twenty. She was pacing about the cabin in a fret, for obvious reason, I suppose, and she looked at me with questioning eyes. I suppose I might have shrugged to her to show my own lack of knowledge on our predicament.

A voice crackled through the lousy speakers in the plane, announcing, "Good morning, Mr. Blake! We were hoping you would wake up soon; your snoring was nearly as bad as the plane engines! All kidding aside, thank you for flying Air Nichols, we hope you enjoy the rest of your trip." When I turned to search for where the voice might have come from, I saw that there was a thick wall separating the cockpit from the cabin. Beautiful.

There was that name again. Nichols. Was it that devil man that put me on this plane? Had he kidnapped these other people and myself? And why would he do such a thing? I decided it would be best to ask the other captives what they knew of the matter. Asking the Vietnamese did nothing, as I learned they did not understand English. But when I was able to get the Hispanic girl to talk to me, she gave me a few details.

"I do not know much, but I think this is a plan that Murdoc made," she said to me. "I was in my dorm room, working on an art project, when I saw this giant man in a black cloak burst out of the floor. No, wait, he didn't burst; he appeared in a puddle of smoke on the floor. And I couldn't see his face too well; it was all covered with a mask. I tried to scream, but he covered my mouth and dragged me into his cloak. The next thing I knew, I was on this plane and lying next to those two guys over there."

So that was it. Murdoc Nichols, or someone working for him, had been kidnapping people. I could only assume that the other two were abductees as well. I had no idea why he would want me though, or why he would want some college girl, but if the musician was anything like I thought he was, it could not have been for any good. Perhaps he meant to get me out of the way; I almost certainly left a bad impression on him when we last met. But why did he want the girl and these two men? It made no sense.

"I suppose asking where we're going wouldn't do any good," I said to the girl, "but I would like to know why you're on this plane."

"What do you mean?" she asked me, obviously confused.

"I mean, what did you do to get Murdoc Nichols to kidnap you?"

"I don't know what you're –"

"Think about it. Why would he risk his career and future for the sake of shanghaiing some freshman, a reporter, and Lord knows how many others? I can only guess right now, but I think that Murdoc is pulling a Nixon move and making a list of his 'enemies'."

She still looked at me as if I had grown a second head, so I explained further. "A few years ago, after Gorillaz had just split up, I went snooping around in their old studio and bumped into Nichols on the way out. He didn't take kindly to my being there, so I bolted, but I can't help but think that he might have developed an animosity towards me. So I'm asking you if you can think of any way you might have attracted Murdoc's attention."

There was a moment of thinking as she tried to find a reason. Finally, she said, "I think I've got it! The band was always using crazy artwork, right? Like, they've got crazy album pictures and designs and stuff, and I'm an artist! Maybe they need me to do art for them!"

"Makes about as much sense as anything else," I told her. In truth, my entire theory was crazy. After all, why couldn't Murdoc just kill us if we earned his ire? Why take us off the map like this?

"If you two ladies are done starting wild goose chases," the crackly voice gargled, "Perhaps you would like to know that we are landing at our destination now."

The wall separating the cockpit and the cabin opened up, so I ran forward along with one of the Vietnamese to see who was piloting the plane. To our horror, there was no one controlling the plane, only a video of some alien from a bad 50s movie. But it wasn't in vain; we saw what the outside world looked like. And though the bright light hurt my eyes initially, I adjusted quickly and watched as we settled down into the ocean.

Our destination was an island, an island with what looked to be a batch of bungalows on one side of the beach. Atop a giant stem of land was a large, futuristic building like something a celebrity owned. A lighthouse sat at attention some distance from us. Palm trees were scattered every which way and swayed in the island breeze. Everywhere I looked, there was pink, nearly red soil that seemed hard and packed, like good clay. On the beach was some white sand that the water gently graced each time a wave swept onto shore. I could not wait to get out and explore this new landscape.

"Thank you for flying Air Nichols, we hope you enjoy your stay at the island," the voice on the screen told us politely.

"Are we really staying on this island?" the Hispanic girl asked.

"Oh yes, Miss Holiday. Welcome to Plastic Beach; we hope you enjoy your stay."

We all shuffled off the plane one after the other once the door opened. The first thing we did when we got outside was clasp our noses shut. Something foul was in the air, like burning plastic and rubber. Worst of all, it smelled like Murdoc Nichols. It was dirty, salty, and reeked of death.

I turned when I heard one of the foreigners shouting in disgust. Holiday looked at where the man pointed and we both reeled at the sight. We saw the ocean surrounding the island, and it was filled with debris, filth, and dead fish of varying species.

"Where in the world are we?" the girl cried.

"Nowhere decent," I told her.

That was my first encounter with the contamination that is Plastic Beach. Little did I know how much worse it could get…

Daniel Blake