"They get drunk every night?"
"Sure. Real men go to pubs, remember. For male companionship. That's what pubs are for. So let's pretend now that both of us are drunk. When you're drunk, you don't know what you're doing. But you do know that you're drunk and you want to make sure that everybody else knows it too. It's bragging. That's what real men do."
Doc stood up, began weaving around the campground and slurring. "Ho, ho, ho. I'ssse exstremibly durunk. You try it."
"Ho, ho, ho. I'm really drunk."
"Not bad for a first try. But you have to talk in a deep voice because real men have deep voices. Plus you have to slur your words because when you're drunk you don't talk so well. Plus you have to stumble a lot and almost fall. Try that now."
Wizard did.
"Do more stumbling. More slurring. You're so drunk you can hardly stand up. Keep trying."
Doc kept him working at it until he had it right. Practice makes perfect.
"Real men like to fight when they're drunk. Even with their friends. So let's do that now. We'll both stumble around and bump into each other. That will make us mad, so we'll start swinging. Let's try it."
"Ho, ho, ho. I'se so realieeee strunk. Hey, why'd yoused pusssht me? You can't do theet! I'se gwanna to teached you a leston." Doc swung at Wizard but missed and fell over. "You do it now. I'll stand up so you have something to aim at."
Wiz ended up on the ground as he was supposed to. So did Doc.
"You should roll over a bunch of times now and try to stand up, but you can't. I'll do the same thing."
They did.
"Hey, you rowed on top of me. Youse can't dew that. Ho, ho, ho. I'so struunk. I have to tich you a letsson." Doc grabbed Wizard's shirt, pulled him close to him, and pinned him to the ground. Wizard tried to roll him off.
"That's right. Keep fighting. Real men don't know when to stop."
"I'm not fighting Doc. I'm trying to push you off me so I can breathe."
"Good. Good. But remember the deep voice." Doc wrapped him in a wrestling hold and started rolling the two of them around the camp. At one point, Wizard ended up on top.
"Good. You should take a swing at me now, but miss. Oh wait. I forgot. You have to puke on me now."
"I what?"
"When you get drunk, you almost always end up puking. The stomach becomes upset from all that rolling around and fighting. Puking on each other when you're drunk is a sign that you're a real man. Go ahead. Puke on me."
"I'm not going to puke on you."
"Well, let's crawl over to the bushes instead and we can pretend to puke there." Doc did, and gave an impressive rendition. "Your turn. Don't forget to gag and moan. Puking is not a lot of fun."
Wiz tried, but his heart wasn't in it. Or perhaps his stomach wasn't in it.
"Now that we've puked, we're feeling better. We should probably move onto the swearing part now. Usually, real men put three or four swear words together at a time. You know some swear words, I'm sure. You go first."
"Dang, dang, dang, dang?"
"No, no, no. Wizard. Your words have to be so bad that women and children will flee the area. Like this." Doc let a couple of sentences fly.
"Doc! That was gross!"
"Thank you. You want to give it a shot now? I'm sure you've heard those words before."
"Not like that. I'm not going to say that."
"Fine. Be that way. It's time now that we start talking about women, but you gotta remember that we're still drunk. The important thing to know here is that real men can be charming and can talk some women into having sex with them. But behind their back, they'll be as demeaning as possible about the woman they lured into sex. Real men can't reveal that they might like a woman to their friends. That would be fatal to their image. So they do a lot of ugly taking about women's body parts. Do you know their favorite part to talk about?"
"Uh. The chest area?"
"Right. But a real man would never say chest area. Nor would he say breasts because that's what they're actually called. He's has to say something extremely demeaning. Do you have any ideas?"
"Uhm. Boobs?"
"Too tame, Wizard. Let's see. Ho, ho, ho, I'sse sew strunk. Hey, d'yu sieze that gurllie over dere. She's sure has the guuuuuud flour sacks on her."
"Flour sacks? Really?"
"I guess not. I was just making that one up. The favorite slang words change all the time. I don't know what's in use these days. Let's make some up. The trick here is to treat women like a piece of meat. They're only something to have sex with and then throw away. You go first. Your goal is to be so gross that if a girlfriend heard you talking about her, she'd break into tears. Remember too that you don't have to make fun of her for having big breasts, you can make fun of her for having tiny breasts."
"I don't want to be a real man any more, Doc."
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Chapter 21
The morning of February 22 dawned clear and bright. Not being used to sleeping in a room with a window, Maddy woke with the sun. She had breakfast and stowed some extra food in the backpack. She was almost ready to leave when she remembered the dog collar. Pililiani had said that she'd be safe from the zaps if she stayed near the transmitter machine. Pililiani had even told her where this machine was hidden in ranch #4 and what it looked like. Maddy had snuck into Big Momma's bedroom and looked at it. So when she searched Brute and Pissy's bedroom, she found it quickly. It was on the floor in their closet. Maddy pulled out the plug of the machine and its green light turned to a flashing red light. She stuffed the machine into her backpack so that it would always be close to her.
It took her only a minute to put on warm outside clothes and then Maddy was outside. She could go to her right or she could go to her left. She chose to go to the right. This put the waters of Lake Ontario on her right side.
Maddy followed the coastline as closely as she could, never losing sight of the water. But sometimes that meant that she had to climb some hills and then come back down to the water again. She paused now and then for a drink of water and a bite to eat. But she didn't pause long because she was worried that Brute would be coming after her. She didn't know that Brute had found it impossible to climb up to the ceiling using the bed's box spring as a climbing wall. Maddy didn't know that the ceiling was the only possible way out of that cell, short of somebody opening the door from the outside.
The boggy part of the shoreline was difficult to walk through. Maddy's boots kept getting stuck in the mud, and if she tried to walk, she'd leave the boots behind her. She decided to walk with her boots in her hands and that worked better. But she saw some snakes slithering around, so she put them back on and struggled through the mud with the boots. When the land started to rise out of the bog, she relaxed.
Maddy became quite cheery when she caught sight of the house off in the distance. The shoreline would take her right by it. She thought about how she could ask for help without being able to talk. When she reached the front door of the house, she realized that the people in the house wouldn't be able to help her. They were locked inside a bedroom that had no windows.
# # # # # # # #
That same afternoon, Doc and Wizard were sitting behind some brush watching the hillside below. Doc had said that he was tired of fish for breakfast and then fish for lunch. Why not have rabbit for supper? Wizard had told Doc that yes, he knew how to set snares; Doc happened to have some snares in his supply kit that he had left on the hillside when he was hailing the camp. Wizard had set the snares and said that he would kill and dress out any supper they trapped. Doc agreed to cook. They were watching Wizard's snares from high above so that they wouldn't scare off any prey.
"You decided that you don't want to be a real man after all?"
"Yeah. That's not the kind of man I want to be. That kind of man is a brute."
"Not somebody you're cut out to be, I think. But you do want to be something other than what you are now? You still want to have a hairy chest?"<
br />
"I don't know about the hair, Doc. I do know I don't want to be one of the rabbits we're hunting."
"In what way?"
"Being timid. I want to be able to fight – not like a drunk, but like a brave warrior."
"A hero? Able to defeat villains in a fist fight, sweep a damsel off her feet to safety, while simultaneously fending of nasty people who are trying to have their wicked way with her?"
"Yeah. Sort of like that."
"Captain Kirk of the starship Enterprise?"
"Not a bot hero; but a brave warrior, yeah."
"You're a warrior now. We go into battle and fight for weaker people."
"You may go into battle, Doc. Lucas and Theo do. But I stay on the ship and communicate. I'm not a brave warrior; I'm only a person who knows how to turn on a communication device."
"A necessary function that helps the people in battle survive."
"For people too scared to go into battle."
"Are you too scared to go into battle?"
"I'm always scared in those battles."
"I am too. I am scared that one of the children will be hurt."
"I'm not good at the battle part. Even when we were kids and fighting mock wars in the woods, Lucas was better than I was. He'd lead the team; I'd plan. He does all the scary stuff without flinching or even thinking about it."
"And you flinch? And you think about it?"
"Yah."
"Everybody is like that in a battle. They go in nervous and then they perform the way they've been trained. Not being a little scared would be dangerous for everybody. That kind of person would take too many risks. When you have to face scary things, it's alright to be a little scared."
"I can't even fight normal fights. Against a single person."
"Is that why you tried to learn to box and to do judo? So that you could have a physical fight?"
"Yeah. I was no good at any of it."
"Physical skills are not your strength, Wizard. They never have been. Your strengths are your mental skills. Sort of like Melissa. She does the battle command part; others do the battling. There's no shame in being more of a thinker than a fighter."
"You say..."
"But?"
"A person who can't fight is a rabbit."
"Who would you want to fight?"
"Lucas. And Theo. Mostly Lucas."
"Why would you want to fight your brothers?"
"Because of what they're doing to Dreamer."
"What are they doing to Dreamer?"
"They're turning her into a prostitute."
Doc looked up in disbelief.
"I have proof, Doc. I tried to fight them. To stop them. They ignored me like I was a rabbit."
# # # # # # # #
Back in a certain cottage near Watertown, Maddy was ignoring the sounds coming out of her bedroom the evening of the 22nd. She ignored the instructions to open the door. She ignored the assurances that all would be forgiven. She ate some cereal for her supper. Then she washed and dried the clothes that had gotten all muddy when she had gone through the bog. She had nothing else to do to get ready for the next day, so Maddy went to sleep on the sofa in the living room. Tomorrow would be different. She'd escape.
Five year old children have no sense of geography. Maddy knew her way around her neighbourhood on Bainbridge Island, just west of Seattle. She could lead her mom to the school she'd be in next year and all the way back home too. She knew her way to the playground down the block and could be trusted to look both left and right, and up and down, for copter traffic. She knew about the water and how she should never walk too close to it. But she didn't know that islands were surrounded by water and she didn't know that unless you had a bridge, a boat, or a copter, there was no way off the island. All she knew was that home was just a couple of blocks away from any place that she went to. Most importantly, she didn't know that Brute and Pissy lived on an island that was connected to the mainland by a muddy, boot-sucking, snake-hiding bog.
When Maddy had set out that morning to find her mommy and daddy, she thought that all she had to do was walk a few blocks and she'd be in a place she'd recognize. She'd go home to find her mommy and daddy waiting for her there. She didn't know that Seattle was about 3,000 miles from Watertown – as the crow flies.
# # # # # # # #
Doc hadn't believed that he'd be flying 3,000 odd miles when he set out to have a friendly chat with Wizard. He certainly never expected that he'd be TiTr'ng either. But Wizard insisted on proving that Lucas and Theo were turning Dreamer into a prostitute. So they flew to the Wilizy/Asia and then they TiTr'd back to the time when Wizard tried to fight his brothers.
"This is your evidence, Wizard? This conversation tells you that Dreamer has been having sex with your brothers and Lucas is becoming a pimp again?"
"I have more. I can take you to the time where Dreamer took off her top in front of both of them in our own gym. I can take you to the time when Dreamer was walking around in the galley without a top and both Lucas and Theo were there. I can show you Dreamer kissing both of them passionately on the lips. I can even show you the time when Lucas was in her bedroom and Dreamer took off her top and let Lucas look at her. Then she took everything off and started kissing him. I left at that point." Wizard was quite confident that Doc would believe him. After all, video evidence is very hard to misinterpret.
"And where were you when you were watching this? Were you time-travelling or in real time?"
"I was in real time, Doc. In my sling; high in a corner; invisible. I told you I could prove it."
"Let's go back to camp, Wiz. It's late. We'll talk tomorrow."
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Chapter 22
The morning of February 23 dawned bright and clear again. Maddy rose with the sun, had breakfast, and left the cottage. There were three differences about this trip as compared to the previous one.
First. She decided to go left, not right. She didn't realize that the result would be the same.
Second. When she reached the boggy area, she took off her shoes and socks, rolled her pants high up her leg, and walked tentatively, but steadily through the mud carrying everything in her arms.
Third. The transmitter in her backpack started to make loud beeping sounds partway through the trip. Maddy took it out of her backpack and looked at it. The red light was flashing quickly in time with the beeps. She thought that perhaps she wasn't close enough to it, so she put it inside her shirt. The machine went quiet soon enough and the light disappeared. Maddy didn't know what to make of that, so she continued to carry the transmitter with her. She didn't realize that the dead light meant that Brute and Pissy had rented Safe Haven's cheaper security system – the one whose battery would be allowed to run down without consequences to any slave within transmission range.
On other aspects, the trip was the same. Maddy found herself once again back in front of Brute and Pissy's cottage. She went inside, had cereal for supper, and slept on the sofa.
# # # # # # # #
That same February 23 morning, Wizard awoke to find Doc sitting on a stump in front of his shelter. Wizard lifted himself off the ground to put on some clothes.
"Don't bother putting anything on, Wizard."
"But I'm in my underwear."
"That will be enough. I have some things to say to you about last night and what you have done recently." Doc didn't wait for a response.
"First: That discussion you had with Theo and Lucas where they talked about Dreamer enjoying sex, how they were helping her to practice it, and how Lucas was turning her into a prostitute. They were talking about basketball, Wizard. They help her practice basketball. They all enjoy basketball. Dreamer is thinking of turning pro as a basketball player if she can get good enough. The directors knew this. None of this was a secret. You could have found this out simply by talking with Dreamer as a friend."
"Second: Dreamer was walking around with her top off in the galley because Momaka had re
commended that she gradually get used to somebody she trusted seeing her undressed. That way, she wouldn't freak out if her husband saw her naked. That way, she'd be able to have sex with a husband and make a baby. Theo and Lucas agreed to help her. Theo always kept his eyes closed when Dreamer was partially undressed. Lucas would look at her, but only because she needed to have somebody look at her. He wasn't interested in her body."
"Third: The scene you saw in her bedroom. Lucas was there so that she would gradually get used to undressing for bed in front of a man. He stared at her body because she asked him to. They gave themselves a time limit. Each time they met at bedtime, she'd try to increase the staring time. The day that you saw her fully naked, she had decided she was ready for the next step and took off all of her clothes. When you saw Dreamer kissing Lucas' ear, she was actually whispering in his ear that he wasn't supposed to turn around before she was ready. She was very nervous about it. Lucas didn't turn around until she told him to, but by then you were gone. All he saw was her backside. They didn't have sex. He left the room. They've never had sex. Thanks to Lucas and Theo, Dreamer is almost over her difficulty. I know this because Dreamer tells Momaka everything and Momaka gives reports to the directors. Dreamer knows that we know."
"Fourth: You know how Dreamer was so creeped out about how her father would peek through the keyhole to try and see her naked? When you were invisible in your sling and watching her walk around in the galley, you were peeking through a keyhole. When you were invisible in your sling and watching her undress, you were peeking through a keyhole. If a woman wants you to see her body, she will invite you to do so. Dreamer did invite you once. You turned her down. You were not invited to spy on her in the ship, or anywhere else for that matter. What you did was creepy."
"But Doc, I didn't know any of this. I just stumbled into the bedroom when..."
"Be quiet, Wiz. You never go into a woman's bedroom unless you knock first and are invited in. You weren't invited in. You didn't belong there."
"Fifth: You have treated Dreamer extremely poorly. You have treated her like a real man would, and I don't use that term in a complimentary fashion. You could have avoided this whole sad story of you and Dreamer if you had followed Granny's advice and talked to her about things moving too quickly for you. You chose not to, for reasons that I don't want to know. You know though. You could have avoided this in many other ways, as well. But you didn't."
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