"Do I look like Theo?"
Lucas raised his head. Nobody was there. "Winnie? Did Theo talk you into this?"
"I'm not Winnie."
Lucas identified the location of the voice. He made a quick lunge, grabbing with his hands for the source of the voice.
"Hey, take your hand off my boob, Lucas."
"That's not funny. I didn't touch your boob. I didn't connect with anything."
"Yeah, I know that you didn't touch anything, but still, you tried to grab something. Would you like another go? I'll stick my boob out where you can grab it."
"Who are you? Where are you?" Lucas started feeling with his hands. There. A tingle. But it wasn't a body.
"I hate to be repetitive, but if you search with your hands at chest level, sooner or later you'll connect with a boob. That type of inappropriate contact may cause me to have severe emotional difficulties when I'm older."
Lucas took off his light jacket and swung it around in a circle. Nothing. "What's your name?" he asked.
"None of your business."
"Do you actually have a name?"
"Yes. It's None of your business. You can call me NOYB for short."
"Why are you bugging me?"
"So that you'll be late for work."
"Why don't you want me to get to work on time?"
"What time is it?"
"Almost two minutes to nine. I have to go."
"Wait ten seconds more."
"Why?"
"Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ..." The window of the Chocoholic Shop exploded outwards and a giant flame filled the space where the window had been. Lucas could feel the heat all the way across the street.
"That's why," NOYB said.
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Chapter 24
It was an early October afternoon at Safe Haven Ranch #4. Pililiani was sitting in the backyard on the top step of the short set of stairs up into the kitchen. Karita had just emerged from her drugged nap and was sitting next to her. Both had cups in their hands and were sipping quietly. Pililiani was drinking warmed-over coffee from breakfast. The head cook made sure that Big Momma and Big Daddy always had more than enough coffee for their breakfasts. The rules stipulated that anything left over from breakfast had to be thrown out. Slaves were not allowed to eat the same food as the high and mighty. Sadly, all that extra coffee had to be thrown out too. The head cook just opened a kitchen window and dumped the remains of carafe onto the ground below. Big Momma watched her do that frequently enough that she was reassured that the cook was obeying the rules. She didn't see Pililiani standing underneath that window with an empty bucket that didn't stay empty for long.
Big Momma also watched the head cook char whatever toast had been left over. Slaves can't eat bread that Big Momma or Big Daddy might have breathed on. But the head cook was allowed to burn leftover toast and scrape the burnt toast into a bucket so that she and Pililiani could make burnt-toast coffee for themselves. The coffee that emerged from that process tasted remarkably good. Almost like real coffee that had been percolated that same morning.
Karita was drinking a brown liquid too, but not coffee. Pililiani gave her an afternoon treat of hot water with a brown sugar and cinnamon flavour. The kitchen had both substances in abundance and Big Momma did not track how much was used or when. Karita watched as one of the Safe Haven copters landed in the large clearing behind the house and the pilot emerged. "Have you ever seen inside a copter, Karita?" Pililiani asked.
"I've always been asleep when they took me places," she replied.
Pililiani knew that both Big Daddy and Big Momma were on their way to separate meetings. Big Daddy was scheduled to get stinking drunk in a private bar this afternoon. He'd sleep over, enjoy some feminine companionship, and return tomorrow. He'd tell Big Momma that he was meeting with the other Big Daddies. Big Momma was off for a week to places unknown. Unknown to Big Daddy, at least. Pililiani and all the other Big Mommas knew where she was going. They'd hear the juicy details later.
The Safe Haven organization provided each rancher with two personal copters as part of the franchise fee that they paid to acquire the ranch. Both had room for up to six people. If the back four seats were removed, they had decent cargo space. The copter that had just landed was not one of those ranched-owned six seaters. Safe Haven had larger copters available for ranchers to rent by the day or by the week when they needed to transport a lot of people or cargo. Pililiani recognized the pilot – one of the bosses from Ranch #10. They were borrowing some of Big Daddy's field slaves to help with their harvest and they'd be gone for three days. She watched as the pilot sauntered down the well-worn path to the slave huts in the gully below. He'd be gone for at least half an hour. "Let's go look at that copter," she said to Karita.
# # # # # # # #
Pililiani didn't know anything about piloting a copter, so she couldn't tell Karita much. She just let her sit in the seats and look at all the dials and buttons, but without touching them. Then they moved back to the cargo area. Pililiani had to stoop, but Karita didn't have to worry about that. The back of the copter was empty space right now. The hatch at the back could be opened, but Pililiani could only tell her about that.
"What are these?" Karita asked, pointing at some metal things hanging from the copter walls.
"Those are metal bracelets that are locked around the wrist of the slaves when they're being transported. The short chain keeps them sitting down so that they can't cause trouble or try to escape."
"But don't the pilots have wands? They could zap them, right?"
"Not really. These locked bracelets are necessary because the slaves aren't wearing their dog collars when they fly."
"Dog collars can come off?"
"Yes. Bosses have to remove them before they take slaves away from the ranch." And then, because Karita wouldn't understand why that was, Pililiani gave her the full story, but in words she would understand. Essentially: there was a machine hidden in Big Momma's bedroom that would send out zaps to any slave that tried to escape. So long as the slave was wearing that dog collar, the machine wouldn't let him leave the property. If a boss had to take a slave to another ranch, he'd take off the collar so that the machine couldn't zap the slave. If a slave ever tried to take his collar off by himself so that he could escape, the hidden machine "would hurt him a lot" no matter where he was. Pililiani didn’t say kill him, although that was what it did. She was trying to save Karita from words like kill and death. She needn't have worried. Karita had been on a working ranch for a month. She had seen what happened to chickens and hogs. She knew about death. Sort of.
"If a slave tries to escape and he's killed, do they cook up his body for people to eat?"
"No. That doesn't happen. You don't have to worry about being badly zapped, Karita. Don't try to take off your collar and always stay close to the Big House."
"So the bosses take the collars off when the slaves are going to fly away," Maddy pursued. "That way the slaves don't get big zaps. Then what?"
"When they arrive at the other ranch, the bosses put the dog collars back on and unlock the metal bracelets. If they try to escape from the new ranch, the same thing will happen. Big zaps."
"Were you ever zapped hard?"
"Yes. When the bosses took my son away."
Pililiani changed the subject at that point. Later that evening she showed Karita the ranch's nursery.
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Chapter 25
Friday, October 5. Two meetings were in progress – one in the Wilizy community hall and the other in a Toronto health clinic. Let's look at the Wilizy meeting first.
Hank was chairing the meeting and the three other directors were with him at the table. The attempt to kill both Lucas and Theo had raised a lot of anxiety – especially since it was just blind luck that Theo had been out of town and Lucas had lost track of time. Lucas did not reveal what had actually happened to ma
ke him late. Not even to Theo. Let's see why he made that decision. Here what he might have said:
An invisible girl that wasn't a Wilizy member and so wouldn't have a sling and invisible powers came up to me on the bench and started talking to me. I tried to find her by feeling for her body, but grabbed her boob instead, at least that's what she said, but I couldn't actually find anything to touch, which means that she wasn't in a sling but was still invisible which is something that we don't know how to do! Her name by the way is None of Your Business and she disappeared immediately after she saved my life.
Yeah. That would work.
Also present at the meeting with the directors were Lucas, Theo, Dreamer, and Wizard. Their first decision had been easy. The store was a complete loss. The heavy presence of a protection racket in Toronto combined with lax policing meant that they would be fighting an uphill battle to establish enough of a viable presence to penetrate the confectionary market and achieve wide profit margins. They should collect the insurance and discard further plans for the project. You can probably tell that Wizard was driving this part of the discussion. Nobody objected to what he proposed.
Wizard's motion to bring everybody associated with the project back home to the compound where they could take on other duties did meet some opposition.
Lucas agreed that re-opening the store wouldn't work, but he said that the Wilizy shouldn't be running away. The mention of the We are aboriginals; we fight to the death; we do not run away motto received a lot of murmurs and head nodding.
"What do you suggest instead, Lucas?" Hank asked.
"We should find out who tried to kill Theo and me and bring him to justice."
"How difficult is that going to be?" Yolanda asked.
Lucas described the meeting that he had with Basher and what he had learned about their neighbourhood's protection racket. It was run by one salesman and one goon who had severe mental issues, probably because his father and mother were closely related. Lucas didn't mention anything about the time that he had spent working undercover in the Toronto bars or how that had worked out. He did offer to take the lead on the planning and the research. That raised four sets of directorial mental eyebrows. Lucas? Planning?
"How would you go about this, Lucas?" Doc asked.
"The mother had a dancing name. Sparkle. I know roughly when she would have been dancing, I know the costume she wore, and I know what she looked like. There are only so many bars and pubs in Toronto that have exotic dancers and they usually post pictures of their featured dancers on posters outside the entrances. A little time-travel and some walks down the main streets should give me the mother. After that, I can TiTr back to watch the mother and see who she's dating. That gives me the father. After that, I can TiTr back to watch the father and look for meetings where he's instructing his workers to kills us."
"Promising leads," Granny said.
"Or I could also use TiTr to identify the man who planted the bomb and follow him backwards in time to when he received his instructions. One way or the other, I should be able to find the father. Once we identify all the players, we can look at how we're going to catch them."
"Sounds like you've worked it all out," Hank said with a nod and a private mental approval. "Will you and Theo be working together on this?"
"Yah. We're used to working together. This first part should be easy. I was thinking that Dreamer could help us out too if she wanted some time-travel experience."
A giant invisible monster jerked on the puppet string holding Wizard's body upright. Wizard had been sitting back in his chair and staring at his shoes under the table. Now he was sitting up erect and staring at Lucas. If Philadelphia is considered the city of brotherly love, Wizard was not living in Philadelphia.
"What about it, Theo?"
"We can do that first part real easy, Dad. But I have another reason to stay in Toronto." Theo went on to describe what the basketball opportunities were in the city, and how he had been working out in the university gym with the university coach. "I believe that I can be good at basketball and perhaps get some financial help attending university. If I become good enough, I could play professional basketball for a few years. I'd like to stay in Toronto after we catch Basher's dad."
"Dreamer," Hank turned to her. "What are your thoughts? Are you interested in staying in Toronto to help Lucas and Theo?"
"I'd like to learn how to do some undercover time-travel work so that I'd know how to do that when I join the Raging Gardeners as an agent, not as a victim. Momaka says that I've turned the corner and the worst is behind me. My projects here at home are all operating properly and I have effective vice-presidents in place. They can easily report to me while I'm in Toronto. Plus I have the same goals as Theo. I'm also working out with the Toronto men's coach and he has introduced me to the assistant women's coach who is also spending some time with me. I don't believe two university coaches would be working with me if I didn't have a chance to be good at this. I'd like to stay in Toronto so that I could see how far I could go with basketball."
You mean so that you can see how much sex you can have with Lucas and Theo. (Narrator: I don't have to tell you who had that thought.)
"I'm thinking of getting serious about basketball too," Lucas jumped in. "I tried boxing, but I don't want to pursue it as a sport. The university basketball coach said I could work out with them if I wanted to. I'd like to stay in Toronto for the basketball too."
"Can the three of you live together alright?" Yolanda asked.
"Yeah. We're getting along well," Dreamer said.
They're all sharing Dreamer's body if that counts as "getting along well."
"What do you do about food?"
"We'll have to do something about that." Dreamer was taking charge of answering for the trio. "None of us can cook. We'd be OK for breakfasts..."
Lucas and Theo eat. Dreamer provides the view.
"...but we should be eating proper meals if the three of us are training hard. Restaurants are expensive and take-out not much better. Plus none of us knows enough about nutrition to know what to eat."
"Way back in time, before the dinosaurs became extinct, a university coach tried to talk me into playing hockey for his team."
Granny looked sharply at Doc.
"For a starving aboriginal kid living in the slums, one of the attractions of that offer was the free food that I could have in the student union building. Universities make sure that everything they sell is nutritious."
"I didn't know you were approached by a hockey coach." Granny couldn't help interrupting the discussion about Toronto.
"University of Calgary had a good hockey program. The Dinos. I was planning to accept his offer but the troubles came."
"Does Toronto have a student union building with good food?" Yolanda asked.
"Easy to find out," Doc said.
"They're not members of the university," Wizard said. "The university would probably have rules about letting outsiders have food tickets."
"We could explain to the coaches that they're living away from home but want to eventually play for the university," Yolanda offered. "We could even pay for tickets. We could afford to do that, right Wizard?"
Only if we don't have to bail them out of jail for having underage sex. "Sure," he said instead.
# # # # # # # #
The second meeting – the one in Toronto – was at the clinic of the doctor where Basher had been treated for his cracked ribs. Three henchpersons were in attendance. All three had the required skills for general henchperson services. These were: (1) general assault including shooting, stabbing, beating, and their favorite, kicking when their victim was down; (2) general mayhem including vandalizing, looting, and terrorizing; and, (3) general villainy including deceit, foul play, and double-dealing. As such, the three henchpersons were interchangeable cogs in Toronto's insurance racket. They could fill in for each other in the event one was engaged already on a professional call. However each had been hired
for a specific expertise: to sell insurance, to blow up people and things, and to kill from a distance. All three had been with the good doctor for years and each had a certain physical peculiarity from which they had been given their nicknames.
The insurance salesman was the most senior. On his sales calls, he always wore a suit, a white shirt, and a conservative tie. Underneath – women's red lingerie. Not because he was a deviant, but because he liked the feel of the soft satin clothes on his very sensitive skin. In his outward appearance, he was non-remarkable and blended into the background wherever he went. The red lingerie gave him something that made him non-average. On a sales call with a troublesome client, he would listen in sympathy to the client who was trying to explain why he couldn't come up with this week's payment. He'd nod his head, and say "Ayup" in a soft very slow drawl to every excuse. Nod ... "Ayyyyyyy-up." Nod ... "Ayyyyyyy-up." Nod ... "Throw him in the freezer, Basher." His nickname was Nod.
A second henchperson was the explosives expert. She was the reason why the good doctor's criminal organization called their staff henchpersons rather than henchmen. Killing was acceptable; politically incorrect references were not acceptable. The explosive expert was also the source of Nod's red lingerie. (Nod was a little anxious about the impact on his reputation if he were seen buying women's underwear.) In providing Nod with her own underwear, it was fortunate that she had lingerie in the large economy size and she didn't mind sharing. She even offered to help with the fitting if Nod wanted such assistance. He didn't. Perhaps that was because of the bleeding mole on the tip of her nose that she was always scratching; perhaps it was her fat thighs rubbing against each other in a scrinch-scrinch sound with every step she took; Or perhaps it was the sound of her cackle when she blew things up. Whatever the reason, Ms. Blow'em Up didn't have much success with men. She did have good success with explosives. With one exception. She had created so many explosions and fires that the smoke from her professional endeavours was now causing allergic reactions in her eyes. They were dry and, in an unconscious effort to keep them lubricated, she'd blink about every ten seconds. For obvious reasons, she had been nicknamed Blinker.
The most junior henchperson was the sniper. He was very good at his job – partly because he was short enough to squirm into the smallest of vantage points that would give him shooting lines at his victims. He claimed that he didn't need a spotter, and indeed, his record said he didn't. Not one of his assignments had survived. The sniper was small enough to wear small teenager clothes, or in a pinch, children's clothes. (He had also served as Basher's teacher years ago because he was able to be on the playground with him during his lessons.) After killing his victims, he'd leave the rifle where it was and skip away. The biggest risk to his disguise was the facial hair that grew back very quickly after each shave. But since he was fair-haired, it couldn't be seen at a distance. Close up, a person might wonder what he used to comb his face.
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