Come Hell or Highwater: Sir Sanjay Gupta to the Rescue! by Albereez (best ereader for graphic novels .txt) 📕

He Sees Himself in Flames

A billion embers smoldering
Helium charcoal
Lithium licks his toes
Sonic grave under heavy conscience
Snaps!

Burning as the sun
he buries his thoughts in the flame
Furious sparks charge his immortal core
This is what they call a heat-crunch neutrino spinal tap
The blue point screams where the candle is hottest

Until the gas ghost is delivered by a freezing jet-stream
of frozen mercury aimlessly melting,
He sees himself in flames
Like fire to a feather:
Incinerated rapidly
to a glowing crisp
of dust

CHAPTER 1

"Ouch! Don't pinch me, you yellow-bellied buffoon!" Kayla Gupta twists her head to slap her first-mate, Norton, rightfully in the smacker but then thinks otherwise.
"Why don't you keep your ragga-muffin mitts in your pockets where they belong? How am I supposed to finish my famous apricot-curried chutney with you abusing my delicate bodice?"
"Ptooey to your disgusting goop for chutney! chortles Norton with a playful glint in his right eye -- the other more inquisitive eye lies dab-smack centered on the ripe bottom he had just managed to goose.
"I'm off to the poop deck for some real chow. I'll save you a seat."
"Thanks Nort, you scurrilous boob, I'm almost finished so I'll meet up with you in two shakes of a lamb's tail."
But Kayla has other things on her not-so-expansive mind. Her famous concoction of stewed apricots, nutmeg and other forbidden spices was the talk of the town, or rather the navy frigate of Operation Pacific Thunder, as it were. And she wasn't about to let it boil over. She stirs it with a passion. She is quite attractive for a 3rd-rate kitchen hand. Her pretty coconut-shaded skin and gracefully sine-like form had caught the attention of more than a few deck-hands -- not to mention the admiral's youngest son, playfully nicknamed Dweezle, for his endearing frizzled mullet for a hairdo.
Clocking in at 32 years of age she has seen her share of the world. Yet, the icy cold seas of the southern Pacific have always pulled a string in her heart for a reason she would never be able to fully explain. Kayla sincerely missed her much older brother, Sir Sanjay, stationed in a decrepit old New Zealand lighthouse for the last 14 years. Perhaps her great desire to reunite with him was the key to her urges to see these miserable waters neighboring the antarctic north coast.
"Finite'!" she voices aloud in her best Italian accent to no one but the Mickey-Mouse clock hanging on the aft wall.
"If only I were payed extra for this delicacy." Kayla carefully flicks off the burner and removes the crock pot from the heated surface.
"Chow time!" She then extricates herself from her apron and bounds up the steep staircase out the kitchen and into the poop deck where Norton and Dweezle eagerly await her company.
"There you are, my Sri Lankan beauty! Saved you a seat," burps out Nort as he smacks his beerstein on the cedar table."
"No ma'am, you should sit next to me," belches out the delightful Dweezle as he gives Nort a stiff shove. Now Dweezle was a good man. A bright man. With a mangy mullet and a prominent nose, he dazzled the ladies back home in Corpus Christi, Texas. His southern roots shine through his infectious smile. Nonetheless, he often acted brazenly when confronted with competition.
"I took the liberty of ordering for you, Kayla. Beetroot salad sprinkled with oregano and a little curried quail. Purple kool-aid to wash it all down."
"No thanks," replies Kayla with a frown. "I'm a strict vegetarian. You continually forget!" She heads over to the food line and serves herself a satisfactory breakfast portion (because it is only 6am) of collared greens and turnip stew, then returns to where the blaberus men sit.
"Do you know what I hate most about you guys," Kayla voices with a hint of a smile. "It's that every time one of you makes an attempt at being chivalrous, you get it all wrong and do something thoughtless. Last time it was you, Nort, ordering that roast antelope with deviled desiree potatoes and gravy. Vegetarians don't eat anything that once had blood -- that includes your 'vegetables of the sea', as you so stupidly put it, Dweezle," Kayla says, referring to Dweezle's not-so-clever euphemism for dead fish. She then proceeds to daintily scarf down her chow as she pretends to enjoy the fellas' playful banter.
...
Ten minutes later, their world is suddenly shattered by a piercing scream coming from the stern of the ship as a massive sonic boom reverberates all around the sailors eating their meals. Over the PA, the voice of the captain announces that they have just collided with one of their oil tankers and that every man must fend for themselves.
"This ship is going down! abandon ship!" They happen to be only 10 kilometers off the coast of the South Island, New Zealand when this most unfortunate incident occurs. Thankfully, dear Sir Sanjay Gupta, estranged brother of Kayla, is all eyes and ears waiting in his little lighthouse for such a moment as this to come to their rescue. But that account will have to wait. Here is where the suffering begins: but not for Kayla and her crew, but for me, Antoine Musclejouz, of Operation Pacific Thunder...

Chapter 2

I am left forced to swim in dizzying circles within a roaring sea of fire. Vast tongued sheets of lighting shatter the early morning sky. Jellyfish in the rip current cling to my scalp sending synaptic shocks down my porcelain spine, and I scream in terror.
The water is nearly saturated with the petroleum spilled from the tanker struck down by incendiary napalm (or so I thought) but a few minutes ago. My flesh soaks with fuel as my hair becomes singed from the flames. So this is akin to the hell my grandfather told me about as one bitter cold winter night he relayed to me his experiences in the death troughs of WWI. Then, he told me, that he was under heavy artillery fire from the enemy as the air wafted the fumes of mustard gas toward his trench. That couldn't be much worse than I felt this minute as the flames licked my shoulder blades and the jellyfish made a meal of the receding hair loosely attached to my skull.

This was suffering at its worst.

I am alone with my thoughts on mandatory autopilot as I await an unlikely rescue. The waters are anything but pacific, and I am somewhere beyond 10 kilometers northeast of Gore, New Zealand. I read during one quiet moment of my tour of these seas that hammerhead sharks frequent these tumultuous waters. Yet I doubt that the sharks would approach now. Thank God (as if he actually exists)!
My mind, in one blessed moment, wanders to the thought that those ferocious and magnificent creatures must never cease moving through the water lest they die. They even sleep as they swim. I too, must imitate their behavior now.
Before my thoughts could arrive at a more meaningful conclusion, I am jostled by the deep booming of thunder sending hollowed sound vibrations through my ears tympani. My now brittle bones reverberate with the aftershock of the storm. The dark of night now almost constantly eerily illuminated between the green haze from the wreck and the ceaseless forks of lightning skating across the sky as if vipers wielding roller skates.
I let out another hideous scream for no other reason than the fear of a toxic death trap as this was.
Was there nothing beautiful or peaceful I could now think of to distract me from the tearing pain ripping across my saturated body? Impossible! Or was it? My eyeballs rolled up into my skull, and if anyone were watching, they would have seen just the muddied whites of these ball-bearing eyes now marred by the thick sickly black fuel.
There was a time many years ago when I had taken a vacation out to the majestic mountains of the Rockies. It was the birth of summer in Aspen, Colorado and my beautiful newly wedded wife and I were strolling through these lush pastures of yellow poppy plants. The weather was an amazing 76 degrees with but a speckle of cumulus cloud here and there. The horizon hinted of a fiery gold and violet luminance as the sun was setting beyond those beautiful mountain peaks. Our love was so strong, the heat felt between the palms of our enjoined hands. We had set up our little two person bivouac by the crystal lake and I remember our passionate positions as the cicadas droned across the warm evening air....
The memory was not to last. I returned to my current terror-gripping position lost at sea as my mind recoiled into a midnight cloud of despair. My legs now numb from treading in the brine-laden ocean felt like they would fall off any minute. Yet the heat of the flames all around was keeping me warm from the pressing cold.
I know now that Operation Pacific Thunder was a failure as we were blasted out of the water before we completed our mission to transport 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel to the Chatham Islands where our fighter pilots waited. Nothing was worse than the failure of our mission -- my final thought as I slowly and agonizingly began to sink into the depths never to be seen or heard from again (or so I thought). Little did I know, but Sir Sanjay Gupta was to come to the rescue. And our story now turns to him and his exploits...

Chapter 3

Deep, deep south. Bluff, New Zealand
0600 hours
A cold and blistery morning

Age is absent for this old man. Why? because he is content in a place any other soul would despise. Stationed in a nearly derelict lighthouse 600 km or so, north of Antarctica, he holds high his responsibility to keep his light beaming into the darkness of the sea. The gale force winds bash walls of icy water onto the persistent little lighthouse. Like the grizzly man, it stands against all odds in the line of duty -- battling the storms with blanched impunity.
This pillar of hope has stood tall for nearly sixty-seven harrowing years. At first, it was a post-WWII beacon allowing