by Mark Tufo
“I’m pretty drained. Adrenaline crash can be tough,” I responded.
She nodded but I could tell that she still didn’t think that 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.
“Deb, please make sure that you guys prepare enough food for the newcomers, make sure that 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 that her hair whipped up and slapped me across the face. Wait, she probably did mean 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 that they were soft in all the right places and they smelled pretty. Sometimes it’s 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 that 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 must have been out cold, because I hadn’t even awoken when someone, probably Deb, had dressed my wounds. So she pretty much got her way anyway. Ah, natural order was restored in the world. 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 were summoned for his every beck and call. To him they were pretty much glorified servants. A couple of the original girls giggled a bit when they noticed my embarrassment when the new girls came up and bowed to me. I could have done without that.
“Please,” I said “Get up.”
“Yes master,” they said as one, they obviously had a lot of practice.
“And no more of that master crap either,” I said as 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 piss in your Cheerios?” 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 was beginning to cry.
“Why?”
“Because of you,” she moaned.
I might be slow but I caught on pretty quick this time. They were jealous because she had been with me. So now she was caught between the 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 hers eye. “Do you mean it?”
“You can sleep with me, but I mean sleep and nothing more.”
Her face fell a little bit, 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 system that she would be able to throw that door wide open given a little time. Lord knows 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 that I would get to see Beth, but then what. I’m 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 who had other thoughts. Yeah, I definitely wanted the comfort and companionship of 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 that I made my decision to find a way off of this bucket. Whether it was on a shuttle or a body bag I was sick of being the 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 of the most peaceful rests I'd had had since coming onto the 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 the present nightmare materialized. It might just have been one of the best summers in my life, we were teenagers. It was the in-between time before we were truly adults and not quite kids, we hadn’t started the heavy experimenting with booze, drugs and ultimately women. 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 16 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 garnered enough courage to make the 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 though, 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. Even at that tender age I knew what it meant to have your balls crawl up into your belly. 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. The catch was that 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 our 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? Anyway we were explorers, danger was our middle name.
Once past the train tracks we would have to traverse the embankment that led down to the river and then cross said river. 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 that we liked to explore, those unlike the meadow were covered with trees and hid all sorts of treasures. There were old cars that had been ghost ridden off of small cliffs. We once found an old boat. I had no idea how that got there. My mother was pissed 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 that day. But then Paul found the coup de grace, Playboys. That pretty much put an end to any of our thoughts on leaving.. They were three of the most beat up magazines any of us had ever seen. They looked like they had gone through the wash, twice. They were the best things any of us had ever seen. And then Dennis stumbled over a bottle of Jack Daniels, what the hell, 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 our age 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 further through the brush, we cleared a spot roughly the dimension of our soon to be palace, and we 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 the only route available to enter Indian Hill. We fortunately only had one false alarm, we would learn later that 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 explore now. But we didn’t know that then and we always felt that 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 there 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. Than we covered that with pine needles and scrub brush and whatever else we could find. The only way anybody would ever see the place would be to literally 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 stole a gas lantern from the local hardware store and I stole 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, Playboys and booze. What more could we want? We spent virtually that entire summer up there, bringing various treasures there 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 mother. Unfortunately the spirit of the place had diminished, without all the mirth and friendship it just became a hole in the ground; the Playboy’s had been replaced with newer Penthouse’s but even that couldn’t make the atmosphere any lighter.
And what a quandary my life had become, I 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 later that I realized it was the taste of 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 she was adamant today.
CHAPTER 31 – Journal Entry 23
“They’re posting the new rankings and I really think that you should see this!”
“That definitely wasn’t my mother, where the hell?” and then I woke up. I liked my dream world much better. Even if it was a time long forgotten. The worst I would suffer back then was a bloody nose, not a spear in the belly.
“I’m coming!” I shouted. “Just let me put on some pants.” Damn, that didn’t sound good. If I had been a little more awake I would have chosen a better selection of words, especially with the tension that was flowing through this abode.
“You’re ranked seventh!” Tanya shouted with an almost gleeful tone. “That’s awesome.”
“Yeah,” I replied sarcastically. “If there were more than nine of us left.”
“Oh,” she sighed as the wind flew out of her sails.
“It says that you’re fighting the second and seventh ranked contestants. What does that mean?” Francesca, one of my new acquisitions said.
“No, you must be reading it wrong.” Or so I sincerely hoped. “I should either be fighting the third
or fourth seed or by some grace of God I should have a bye.”
“No, it says you’re fighting Leonard Bernstein, number 2 and Troy Trentner number 6, what does that mean?” She was almost pleading.
And so I paid a little more attention to what I was actually reading. The aliens had decided to do one on one on one-ers. Basically it was going to be every man for himself in a three-way. This was a very twisted and unwanted surprise. The odds of dying in this mess had increased geometrically. Not only would I have to study two men’s fighting techniques, I would also need to try to figure out how they would interact with each other and with me. If they decided to team up against me and get me out of the way first I was a goner. But I had to believe that each of the other men would consider me the weakest link and would rather have my help in eliminating the other and then try to finish me off. Or else they would just play renegade and kill the first thing that got in their way regardless of who it was. This was not a pretty turn of events, and of the three men going into the ring I was picked as a 50 to 1 long shot of being the one coming out alive. Troy, the number 6 guy, was in the neighborhood of 6’ tall, he didn’t look overly impressive but according to his bio he had been a fitness trainer another lifetime ago. He was agile and fast, his preferred weapon was the mace, and he wielded it like it was a child’s toy. Even with a miss he was able to bring it back around before his competition was able to parry a thrust. Leonard, number 2, was even less impressive but there he was. He looked like a lost accountant but the man had an uncanny ability with the bow. He had killed everyone he faced with that bow and arrow. I don’t know how many of you folks read Lord of the Rings but he was as impressive with that bow as was Legolas the elf. I watched in fascination as he placed two perfectly aimed arrows into the chest of a running man from fifty yards away before that man could take five more steps. I don’t think the poor bastard had even registered the fact that he had been shot by the first arrow when the second one slammed home. A deal with Leonard was out of the question, he wouldn’t give two shits who was coming. I couldn’t imagine that he was afraid of either one of us. But Troy, well, he had to be a little concerned with the speed and accuracy which Leonard possessed. But I wasn’t even sure if the both of us together had a shot in hell. And could we possibly build enough mutual trust in that short of a time knowing full well that we would have to kill each other before the night was through? What a fucking mess. I was scared, and I didn’t want any of the women to know. I’m sure that they were suspicious but the drama in this place was already to a boiling point, I didn’t wish to be the flashpoint. I had not a clue what my next plan of action was. Luckily the aliens opened the door for me and I took full advantage.
