by Mark Tufo
“Well, that’s it, man.” And those were the last words Farley ever uttered. He was another one I was going to have to chalk up for the nightmare list. He didn’t deserve to die here and I had no right to mete out this justice. One day I was going to have a good old talking to the aliens, but for now I was going to claim my gift, get cleaned up and go to sleep for a week. It appeared I had won a few of my fans back, the crowd was going nuts. When in doubt, take the points and bet on the underdog. I was tired, who was I kidding? I was bone weary. But at least most of the wounds I sustained were far from life-threatening. For one of the few times I was actually able to meet my gift and not have to be carried back to my living quarters. She was a black girl, maybe five-foot seven, jet black hair that stopped just shy of her shoulders and dark brown liquid eyes. She was a knockout. She seemed relieved enough when she was led to me. We didn’t say much on the way back; I was still too hopped up on adrenaline. My entourage at the house was immensely pleased I had suffered very few wounds. I thought, They’re getting as desensitized to all of this as much as I am. I just killed another human being and they wanted to know what I wanted for dinner. Maybe that was just the way they coped. Did they not yet fully realize what would happen if I lost?
“Hey, Steph!” I yelled across the room.
“Yeah, Mike. What do you need?” she yelled through the din.
“Could you check the vitals on Farley and see how many guests we should be expecting later? Thanks.”
“Sure thing, I’ll check now,” she yelled even louder, apparently the women were finally letting their collective breath go and it wasn’t quiet. It appeared to me all of them were talking at the same time, how do they do that? But women are funny that way; they can talk at the same time and still understand each other perfectly. Men on the other hand step on one word of their friend’s sentence and they have to start over. It was harder trying to follow one of their conversations than the battle I just had.
“Deb, could you please tell me when the grub’s done? I’m gonna lie down.”
“Don’t you think we should get you cleaned up before that?” she asked with genuine concern.
“I’m just going to hop in the shower and into bed. I’m pretty drained. Adrenaline crash,” I explained.
She nodded but I could tell she still didn’t think this was a prudent course of action. If I waited an extra second, I’m sure I would have gotten the whole spiel on infection and bacteria and bogeymen under the bed. But in truth, I just needed to get out of that room and that seemed the most graceful way to go about it. I wondered if I asked the aliens if they would give me guest quarters. It had to be worth a shot.
“Deb, please make sure you guys prepare enough food for the newcomers. Make sure we have some cake too. They’re going to be upset and maybe you guys could bond over some chocolate or something.”
“You really don’t understand women, do you?” she responded.
“Please tell me that’s rhetorical, ‘cause I don’t have enough in me to go a round or two with you.”
Apparently, she didn’t see the humor. She turned her head so fast to go in the other direction her hair whipped up and slapped me across the face. Wait, she probably had meant that. No, I was way out of my league on this ship. The men I could handle, we each had a job to do, and we knew each other’s roles. But women, well she was right, I had no clue. All I knew was they were soft in all the right places and they smelled pretty. Sometimes it was good to be a man.
I had just meant to rest my eyes and actually join in for dinner, if for no other reason than to let the new women meet me so they could put some of their fears to rest. But coming down from adrenaline can be as bad as any drug. It took my body a full sixteen hours to recuperate. I awoke in time for brunch the following day. I hadn’t even awakened when someone, probably Deb, had dressed my wounds. The new women had arrived right after dinner the night before. Farley had been a decent host, he hadn’t abused any of them, but they had been summoned for his every beck and call. To him, they had been pretty much glorified servants. A couple of the original girls giggled a bit when they noticed my embarrassment when the new girls came up to me and bowed. I could have done without that.
“Please,” I said, “get up.”
“Yes, master,” they said as one. They obviously had had a lot of practice.
“And no more of that ‘master’ crap, either.” My cheeks reddened even more.
“I think he likes it,” Tanya giggled as she nudged Stephanie.
Deb didn’t see the humor. She threw a glance at Tanya, but she merely shrugged it off. However, when Deb gave that same glance to the newcomers, they scurried like mice caught in the pantry.
“Deb, please make sure that doesn’t happen again. I definitely don’t need or want that kind of attention.”
“What kind of attention do you want?” she asked.
“Why are you starting with me? I just got out of bed and all I want to do is go eat some blueberry pancakes. Did someone rain on your parade?” I hadn’t really meant to add that last bit, but the day had already gotten off on the wrong foot. There was no reason to stop now. But much to my surprise, she acquiesced. I’ll never understand women.
“I’m sorry, the stress of this place is really starting to wear my soul thin. Not only do I have to worry about your fights and what could potentially happen to the rest of us, but also I have to deal with this household. I must quash a dozen fights a night. Women just weren’t meant to live communally. I’m sure for the most part guys would be fine. But the jealousy runs rampant in this household. They practically kill each other just to decide who is going to bring you juice in the morning.”
“I had no idea it was like that,” I said, astonished.
“You see what I want you to see. Most of these girls won’t even talk to me. Most of them downright hate me.” She began to cry.
“Why?”
“Because of you,” she moaned.
I might have been slow, but I caught on pretty quick this time. They were jealous because she had been with me. So now she was caught between a rock and a hard place. She couldn’t get solace from the women and she couldn’t get comfort from me.
“Well, we might as well make it worth your troubles,” I said.
She looked up at my eyes and wiped a tear from her eye. “Do you mean it?”
“You can sleep with me, but I mean sleep.”
Her face fell a little, but I’m sure the mechanics in her mind were working overtime. She had her foot in the door and I’m sure she was under the belief she would be able to throw that door wide open given a little time. Lord knew I wanted the comfort, there was still no guarantee I was ever going to see Beth again. The way these women were acting, I might be lucky just to make it to the next bout. I was feeling more anxious now than I ever had since being on this ship. I was so close. There were only nine of us left. But what was I getting close to? I knew I would get to see Beth, but then what? I was fairly certain they weren’t going to give us a shuttle and let us live happily ever after on Pluto or something. Would they bring more people to fight? Would they just leave us in the houses until we died gracefully of old age? Or would they just kill us when our entertainment value was gone? These were aliens and so were their thoughts. There was no way to predict what they were going to do with us. I was trying not to think that far ahead but it was difficult. I wanted to see Beth so bad, but there were eight of the biggest, baddest killing machines still left who had other thoughts. Yeah, I definitely wanted comfort and companionship from Deb; would I be strong enough to resist? If I let her back in now and then won the tournament, then what? It was there and then I made my decision to find a way off this bucket. Whether it was on a shuttle or a body bag I was sick of being these aliens’ entertainment. Now I just had to find a way out. It was long into the night when my door opened. Deb had not forgotten our agreement and the night would get longer still.
CHAPTER 30 - Journal Entry 22
I had one o
f the most peaceful rests since coming onto this ship. I didn’t dream about fights or aliens or even women for that matter. I relived a slice of life, more specifically a small sliver of my childhood. It was a time long before any of this present nightmare materialized. It might just have been one of the best summers in my life, we were fifteen. It was the in-between time before we were truly adults and not quite kids. We were explorers, oh not your garden-variety ocean explorers or even space explorers. We explored a place called Indian Hill. It was the summer after the ‘initial discovery.’ It was a place probably no more than a mile from our houses but it might as well have been ten thousand miles from any place we called home. Just to get to the ‘Hill’ required no small amount of danger. First, was the required pass through Rusty Grant’s territory, he was the local bully and at sixteen he was huge and we were afraid of him. But luckily he was slow. So unless one of us was dumb enough to trip, we could generally make that part without too much difficulty. The next major part was the train trestle we had to cross. Dennis had somehow garnished enough courage to make this crossing without too much bellyaching. Although we did our best every time to let him know only wimps were afraid of heights, every single one of us never said so much as a word while we were crossing the trestle. It was all business then. We’d go one at a time, head down, watching where our next footfall would land. The rest of us, whether already over or waiting our turn, kept a vigilant eye out for the train.
The trestle was in the neighborhood of one hundred fifty feet across and fifty feet down into a raging river. That, however, was not the catch. Much like Stephen King’s Stand By Me, there was a curve in the track less than a quarter of a mile away. It was a difficult maneuver to not constantly keep looking up at that bend. The biggest fear was being in the middle of the bridge and looking up to see the train bearing down on you. It had happened more than once, but luckily none of us had ever gotten a foot stuck, but your heart would still pound for minutes after the event was over. I guess if we were a little brighter we might have gone down to the local train station and gotten a schedule, but what kid thinks like that? Once past the train tracks, we would have to traverse the embankment leading down to the river and then cross. Enough people had ‘explored’ Indian Hill as to put together a makeshift bridge across the river, but it usually included some pallets or small trees. It was generally not very stable and for some reason or other it was always slippery. More than once one of us had taken a plunge. But once over, we felt like masters of our universe. Our parents could never find us here, we were free, at least until dinnertime. When you came up the embankment you would approach a beautiful huge oak tree that seemed so out of place. It was the only tree in the entire meadow. We always thought it looked lonely. Off to either side were the hills we liked to explore, these unlike the meadow were covered with trees and hid all sorts of treasures. There were old cars that had been ghost ridden off small cliffs. We once found an old boat. I have no idea how that got there.
My mother was angry when I came home with the ship’s steering wheel. I didn’t have a good explanation for that one. Indian Hill was off limits; I couldn’t tell her that was where I got it. Once in our deepest search we stumbled across an actual log fort. We were amazed, but we were also leery. Whoever made this wasn’t a kid, so we threw some rocks at it from a distance to see if we roused anybody out of it. Nobody showed, so we picked our way through the brambles and scrub brush to gaze in. It was a kid’s paradise. It had to be around fifteen by fifteen feet made with some pretty good-sized logs; it stood about five feet tall and was covered with a green tarp. Whoever had built it took great care to make sure it wouldn’t be found by the casual observer. But we were explorers. It was about fifty feet off the normal path and through some of the thickest scrub we had thus far encountered. When we got in we found our biggest surprise. Rusty and his friends had built this masterpiece and their names were carved into the woodwork. I wanted to leave; I had no desire to get pummeled today. But then Paul found the coup de grace, comic books. That pretty much put an end to any of our thoughts on leaving. They were twelve of the most beat up magazines any of us had ever seen. They looked like they had gone through the wash. Twice. Yet they were still awesome. And then Dennis stumbled over a bottle of Jack Daniels, we tried it. It burned worse than the Tabasco sauce I was forced to swallow when I swore in front of my mother. But the aftereffects were quite soothing. So there we were, dancing around this cabin singing and shouting like Indians. If Rusty and his friends had been anywhere within the vicinity, we would have been dead meat. But the gods were shining down on us that day. It must have been the effects of the alcohol, but Paul felt the need for some false bravado.
“Let’s take this fort!” he shouted.
“Yeah, we’ll just stay here and defend it with big sticks,” I laughed, “Rusty and his friends won’t mind.”
“No, I’m serious,” he said and by the look on his face I knew he was.
“What do you mean?” Dennis piped in. “Rusty and his friends will kill us.”
“Not if they can’t find us,” Paul smiled evilly.
“What do you mean, Paul? They built this place, of course they’ll find it,” I moaned. My mom would kill me if I got blood on my clothes. Especially if it was mine.
“Not if it’s not here.” His smile grew even bigger.
“What are you talking about, Paul?” Dennis answered. “You drink too much?”
“No- no, I mean if we take this thing apart and move it somewhere else,” he said.
All of our eyes lit up then. We would have the coolest fort and at fifteen years old that still meant a lot.
“But what if they find it? They’ll know we did it,” I pleaded.
“We’ll just have to hide it even better than they did. I’ve got a plan.”
So for the next few days we all raided our parents’ garages for tools, pick axes, shovels, and saws. We moved about a half mile farther into the brush. We cleared a spot roughly the dimension of our soon to be palace and started digging. It was the hardest work any of us had ever done, but we loved it. We dug a huge hole six feet deep and fifteen by fifteen feet across and wide. We couldn’t believe the work we had completed, it was awesome, and it was just a hole. Now the real fun was to begin. We took turns having a scout. That person would have a walkie-talkie and keep an eye out on one of the two routes available to enter Indian Hill. We fortunately only had one false alarm. We would learn later Rusty and his pseudo gang had probably stopped visiting this place months earlier. They were out of their exploring stage, they were driving and girls where pretty much all they wanted to be with now. But we didn’t know that then and we always felt we were moments away from mortal danger. Log by log we moved that fort, doing our best not to leave a telltale trail back to our new hide out. We borrowed another huge tarp from Dennis’s dad and that became our makeshift floor. Then piece by piece we stacked our logs against the earthen walls. For ten hours straight we worked on that fort, we dared not leave that part for another day. If by chance Rusty came up here they would see their fort being ransacked and would just lie in wait for us. We capped it off with the original tarp and then cut down a few more logs and placed them on top. Then we covered that with pine needles and scrub brush and whatever else we could find. The only way anybody would ever see this place would be to step on it. It was awesome. We had even dug out our sloped entrance on the far side to make it that much more invisible. Paul liberated a gas lantern from the local hardware store and I acquired a couple of bottles of booze from my parents’ never used liquor cabinet. I think it was a bottle of crème de menthe and some Bailey’s Irish crème. But we didn’t care; we had an awesome fort, comics and booze. What more could a fifteen year old want? We spent virtually that entire summer up there, bringing our treasures to display on the walls like trophies. It was one of the last happy summers I ever had before the whole teen angst stage moved in. From time to time, I would go up there by myself when I needed to get away from my mothe
r. Unfortunately, the spirit of the place had diminished, without all the mirth and friendship it just became a hole in the ground; the old comics had been replaced with newer ones but even that couldn’t make the atmosphere any lighter.
And what a quandary my life had become, I had had one of the best night’s sleep in months, remembering some of the best times in my life, but when I awoke I had a strange taste in my mouth. It was bittersweet. Oh how I wished I could go back to those simpler days. But the fates had stepped in and they were not to be denied.
“Mike, get up!” A disembodied voice yelled. All I could think was that I didn’t feel like going to school today.
“Mike, get up!” Geez, my mother was adamant today.
