The Bird Women Part 3

CHAPTER V – The Bird Women
The following evening capped off a long day for Katie. Those two months had been so bleak and hopeless for the once–serene girl, now that she had found a ray of hope, she’d found herself clinging so fiercely to it that she was beginning to get paranoid about things slipping away once again. It was two minutes to the start of Free Hour, and Katie had been pacing furiously back and forth across the floor of her hideout, praying that Penny would be there and that she’d had better luck than Katie in tracking down recruits; Katie hadn’t seen Lisa or Caryn at all that day.
Her fears subsided a bit when a tall, stocky girl with blonde curls appeared in the doorway. Initially terrified that she’d been discovered, Katie heaved a sigh of relief when she realized who her visitor really was.
“Katie, right?” Lisa asked, sounding almost happy.
“Shhhh!” Katie said a bit harshly, panicked that a Swineherd might walk by and hear them. But she hugged Lisa quickly, and there were no hard feelings. “Yes, I’m Katie. I guess Penny talked to you?”
“That’s right,” Lisa whispered back. “We got thrown in together today in a thing where we had to give Swineherds backrubs with our breasts. Ugh! But it was really a blessing in disguise when we got to talk afterwards.”
“That does sound awful!” Katie remarked, taking note of the twin bumps underneath Lisa’s jumpsuit, which were not much smaller than Penny’s. “I just know there’s a special place in Hell designed for these guys when this thing is through.”
“I certainly hope you’re right,” Lisa agreed, wiggling one leg. She was one of the luckier ones with respect to the bathroom; before the Deluge she’d long been in the habit of drinking a lot of water each day, so that her bladder was toned and strong from lots of exercise. But even she was rarely comfortable by Free Hour, which usually came at least three hours after the previous bathroom break – and often much longer. Hoping to get her mind off the tickle between her thighs, Lisa went on talking. “Have you and Penny had any ideas yet?”
“None,” Katie replied. “But we just started last night. And, you know, there’s strength in numbers.”
“I believe that,” Lisa said. Katie was surprised at how easy the onetime sports editor and belle of the Homecoming found it to smile– the eternal optimist, no doubt.
The two girls were still rejoicing in having found each other and the hideout when Penny showed up, hand in hand with Jae. Lisa and Katie both recognized the ex–cheerleader immediately, but didn’t look impressed.
“Meet my cellmate,” Penny announced to them both.
“We’ve met,” Lisa said a bit icily. Didn’t we have a math class last year and you wouldn’t talk to anyone but the jocks?”
“I’ve heard of her too,” Katie said to Penny, looking a bit irritated.
“I told you this wasn’t a good idea, Penny,” Jae said, turning to go.
“Wait!” Penny whispered huskily. “C’mon, guys. She’s all right; we talked about this last night. And the last thing we need to do is fight against each other.”
Lisa didn’t look convinced. “But she was in with the Swineherds last year! How can we trust her?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Jae whispered.
“Besides,” Penny said, “she knows about the hideout now. And I trust her,” she quickly added.
Katie and Lisa looked at each other. Finally, Katie said, “I didn’t like you before, but you had better be on our side now.” Then to Penny, “Okay.”
“So what did you do to get here?” Lisa asked her.
Jae looked annoyed. “Let’s just say I had a bigger reputation than I deserved.”
“Do you wish that you’d lived up to it?” asked the former journalist, not smiling for once.
“Not at all,” Jae answered. Both her critics seemed satisfied with that response.
Silence for a few minutes before finally, Katie spoke up again. “Okay. I guess we’d better get started talking about how we can get out of this. Is anyone else coming, Penny?”
“I saw Caryn, but–”
Penny was cut off by the appearance in the doorway of a towering, muscular young woman. Her very presence seemed to dominate the room, even before she’d said a word.
“I decided to come, Penny,” she said.
Penny’s face softened at the sight. “But here she is!” She looked quite satisfied. “This is everyone I told.”
“Looks like a tight ship,” Lisa said.
Caryn took her seat among the others in the middle of the floor. “Penny told me about this gig,” she explained, “and I didn’t want to take the risk of anything like this. Those guys have been beating up on me like you couldn’t imagine, and this’d just make it worse if we got caught. Besides, I do my own thing. But you can’t do that here, I decided.”
“We’re glad you came along,” Katie said demurely to the girl she’d secretly looked up to since the fifth grade, always so tough and independent. It came as a surprise to no one that the Swineherds had been particularly hard on her. Lisa couldn’t help smiling at the memory of how Caryn had once had a reputation in middle school for “breaking guys’ balls.”
“So what’ve I got to do to help you girls?” Caryn asked.
“Any ideas you have are just great,” Penny told her.
“Don’t you all have any? You’re the smart ones.”
Katie shook her head. “You know how they keep us all in the dark. But we all think, now that we’ve found each other at least, that’s a beginning.”
“I guess so,” Caryn said. “It’s a beginning. It ends when we get as far away from here as we can. Fly away, that’s what I want to do all right.”
Recalling her name for Katie, Penny immediately piped up. “The Bird Women,” she said. “We’ll fly away like birds.” She smiled as she whispered it, and soon the five of them were all laughing. But the name stuck.
When the laughter had died down, Lisa spoke up. “What do you say we meet here twice a week, maybe Tuesday and Thursday on Free Hour? We don’t want to attract attention by meeting too often.”
Katie nodded. “And we can share any ideas we get, or anything new we find out about the guys.”
“Perfect,” Penny said, laying her hand flat in the midst of the circle. “It’s war, then.” One by one, the other girls did the same, Jae taking the longest time to come around, though come around she did.
“War,” they each agreed. And the remainder of that Free Hour was spent in conversation and support for one another’s plight.
CHAPTER VI – THE COLD GRAY LIGHT OF DAWN
Nearly three months had passed by since that May morning, when Jae and Penny made their way back to the hideout after their humiliating class episode. Penny still couldn’t shake the sense of filth she felt on her breasts where Dan had fondled her. If she ever did escape, she often expected she’d never be able to look at men – even nice ones – in a positive light ever again.
Those three intervening months hadn’t made anyone’s situation much easier. After the initial optimism of finding one another had worn off, the Bird Women had been confronted with the harsh reality that the Swineherds ran a fairly tight ship. A straightforward rebellion was out of the question; there just weren’t enough of them to carry it out. No, they would have to find a way to destroy the Maxiversity from the inside out. A foolproof way, as penalties would be severe if they were ever caught. As Katie pointed out at one of the meetings, “If you’re going to shoot the King, you’d better shoot to kill.”
The Bird Women’s love and support for one another had proven to be quite helpful along the way; they all had their particularly bad days, such as the time Penny finally lost control of her bladder and was whipped for making a mess in the hallway. Those meetings in the music room offered the only friendship they could possibly expect, and the five of them quickly came to cherish one another. But something would have to give soon, and in three months there’d been nothing to make any of them believe that they were making any progress.
Jae couldn’t forget the young boy who had smiled at her that morning; it was the closest thing to a positive sign she’d seen in all those months. “You know, Penny,” she said as they approached the lair, doing their best to look inconspicuous, “one of those boys smiled at me this morning.”
Penny wasn’t impressed. “Of course he did, Jae. You were naked, and he’s a boy, remember?”
“That’s not what I mean, though,” Jae insisted. “All the others got all uncomfortable when I made eye contact and looked away. As well they should, you know, since we are people too and they were treating us like meat, but this one didn’t. He smiled at me.”
“Well, that’s sweet, but what can he do?” Penny asked.
“Nothing, I guess. But it made me feel good anyhow, the first time anyone besides you and the girls have humanized me in all this time. I couldn’t help thinking, maybe there is hope for us on the outside, somewhere, whatever it is that’s out there.” Little did Jae know!
Back in room C–15, little Charlie crawled out from under the teacher’s desk. It had been at least ten minutes, and whatever netherworld his teacher had brought him and his classmates into, he figured they were back home by then. Time to have a look around and, if he was lucky, find that beautiful girl who’d smiled at him. It was a strange world to be sure, but Charlie was in no mood for going back to his grim boarding school or his distant mother. Time to explore, and to search for the vulnerable naked young woman who’d taken his heart with a smile. Charlie was growing up fast for his age, he guessed.
Out in the hall, there were girls everywhere, some of them looking quite happy, others looking positively flustered and uncomfortable; but one thing they all had in common was the awful, baggy jumpsuits each and every one of them was wearing. Charlie wondered what was going on, but there was no one to ask. No one he saw in the hallway showed any interest in talking to the boy.
Charlie was hungry. He looked at the diver’s watch he’d received for his birthday, from some uncle whose name he couldn’t recall. Just after 11:00 AM. Maybe they’d be serving lunch by now, wherever the cafeteria in this weird school was. Wide–eyed, he wandered out past the old guidance offices into the locker area, which he found plastered with posters of women in strange positions. He was quite repulsed by them, as young boys often are, and he did his best not to look straight at any of them. One thing he did notice, though: like the two girls he’d seen back in the class, most of the women in the pictures were hairless. No hair, anywhere, nothing like the one glimpse he’d caught of his older sister in the shower that time; she’d had a dark patch between her legs and some under each arm as well. Nothing like that was to be seen in any of the pictures. Charlie began wondering if all the women in this world were like that, and why.
Winding his way past the lockers as quickly as possible, Charlie finally found himself outside the cafeteria. There was an older boy standing there with a gun, but he was busy yelling at two terrified looking girls, and he didn’t see Charlie as he wandered inside.
Charlie found that lunch was laid out at all the tables, and it looked wonderful. Soup, sandwiches, chips, salads, cookies, and juice were everywhere. He quickly found an empty seat and grabbed a spoon for the great–looking soup.
Before he could get a spoonful, someone grabbed his arm from behind. “Kid! Don’t eat that!”
Frightened, Charlie turned around to see another older boy looking down at him, pulling the soup bowl away. “I – I’m sorry, mister,” he stammered. “I just got hungry after my class and came in here–”
“That’s fine,” the other boy said. “You can eat all you want. Just don’t touch the soup. That’s for the girls.”
“The girls, like in class?”
“No,” the older boy laughed. “The good girls. The soup has an enzyme in it that keeps the girls calm. We feed it to them and then they do whatever we want, understand? They think they’re free to do what they want while the bad girls are the slaves, but this soup makes them, um… pushovers. Get it?”
The boy nodded. “I guess so. But why do you have to make the girls into pushovers?”
The older boy just laughed. “You’ll understand when you’re older, kiddo. But you don’t want that soup– trust me. You know how we get the enzyme in there?”
“How?” Charlie was suddenly curious.
“Well,” the boy hesitated. “You’ve got to promise not to tell any girls about this before you leave the school.”
Charlie nodded, thinking by then that he didn’t want to leave the school anyhow.
“We make the bad girls drink lots and lots of water so that they have to go to the bathroom a lot. The enzyme is in their pee. We add it to the soup.”
“Ewwwww!” Charlie said. “You mean you make them drink piss?
“It is clear piss, kiddo. That’s why we make the bad girls drink so much. It comes out clear. The other girls never know. Our friend Angela figured it out in bio class last year, how the water running through someone’s body produces this enzyme that makes you woozy. We depend on it.”
“I see,” said Charlie, though he obviously didn’t. “But the bad girls don’t eat the soup?” By then he was looking around, hoping for a glance of Jae, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“No, kid,” the older boy told him. “They don’t come in here. We feed them later on, and they don’t get the good stuff.” His beeper went off. “I gotta go, kid. Enjoy your meal, but don’t touch the soup!”
“Thanks, mister!” Charlie called. He was hungry enough to stay, but he knew exactly what he would do when he was done eating. He’d go looking for the bad girls. Maybe he could get some of that enzyme into Jae somehow!
Charlie looked at his watch as he began eating. 11:09 AM.
CHAPTER VII: A LEAK AT LAST
The hideout had increasingly become a daytime haunt for the Bird Women over the intervening months. So it was no great surprise that Caryn was sitting on the floor of the hideout, shaking, when Jae and Penny returned.
“Oh, no,” Jae said when she saw her sister in arms shivering. “What did they do to you now?”
“It was a bunch of Donny Chase’s buddies,” Caryn sniffled. “They put me in the middle of a big semicircle of all of them sitting in chairs, and they tied me to a chair, and they took one of those little battery–operated mice, the ones that wiggle back and forth, and stuck it in me and watched me fidget all over the place. I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t pull it out, nothing.” Caryn, six foot two and stronger than a lot of the boys, the Amazon Woman of the eighth grade so many years before, was by then crying uncontrollably.
Penny knelt down and put her arm around Caryn. “Oh God,” she sighed resignedly. “I’m so sorry, Caryn.”
Jae was crying by then as well. This just can’t go on, she thought to herself. How can this possibly be going on even this long? Once again, she shuddered to think how big, strong Caryn could lose all hope. But given what she’d just been through, Jae could hardly argue the point with her.
“What’re we going to do?” Caryn sobbed.
“I don’t know,” Jae couldn’t help saying. “I don’t know.” A pall of silence fell over the Bird Women’s lair as the three girls pondered the sheer hopelessness of the moment, and what might come next.
Out in the hallway, the 11:30 bell rang. Jae cringed in recognition. “I forgot– I’m on kitchen duty! I have to get going right now!” She leaned down to kiss Penny and Caryn’s cheeks for encouragement, and– barely remembering to check the hidden mirror for hallway traffic – took off towards the cafeteria.
As Jae raced to work, she saw a vaguely familiar child standing by the cafeteria exit. As she approached, the image suddenly clicked in her memory: the boy who’d smiled at her that morning! At some point he’d caught sight of her too, and was gazing happily at her by the time she reached the kitchen door.
“Well, hello,” she said to the boy, looking confused but not angry.
The boy looked delighted. “You’re…from this morning! I’m sorry, I just…” He looked shyly at the floor and smiled. “You’re pretty.”
Jae smiled self–consciously, recalling that he’d seen her naked. “Well, thanks. But what are you still doing here?”
“I ran away from the group,” he said proudly. “I hated them, the way they brought us in here just to stare at you. The girls are so beautiful, except for their clothes.” That brought a laugh from them both. “I wanted to stay. I wanted to see you.”
Jae was flattered, but worried about what might happen to the poor boy if the Swineherds caught him wandering around. She needed to get him out of sight, and now. “Come in here,” she said finally, taking his hand to his visible delight and leading him toward the kitchen door. “I need to wash some dishes, but we can talk when I’m done.” She peered around the corner into the kitchen to see a guard just heading into the dining room to bring out more dishes. The coast was clear.
Jae led the boy into the bread closet, which was warm and even dimly lit. “What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Charlie, ma’am.”
Jae smiled. “My name’s Jennifer, but my friends call me Jae. Stay here and don’t make any noise, I’ll come back for you when it’s safe.”
“Okay, Jae,” Charlie said happily.
Jae took a deep breath and headed out into the kitchen just in time to see the guard coming back in. “Where you been, cunt?” he asked her.
“Sorry, I was over in the Spanish department when the bell rang.” She braced herself for his hateful touch, which, sure enough, she received.
“That ain’t no excuse, cunt,” he said, running a hand up her inner thighs to her ticklish crotch and squeezing her neck with his other hand. “Don’t be late again on my watch, y’hear?”
“Yes sir.”
He turned out to be a fairly quiet guard, and Jae didn’t receive any more trouble that afternoon. It took nearly two hours for her to finish loading all the dishes onto the washer, but she never for a moment forgot about Charlie. After the cafeteria had closed down, Jae managed to look inconspicuous enough for the guard to take off and leave her to her own devices in the kitchen, not that there was much potential for troublemaking there. If there had been, she or Katie or Penny, the other Bird Women with kitchen duties, would have already found it by then.
The moment she felt safe in doing so, Jae opened the bread closet door to find Charlie in there, safe and sound, though not looking very happy. “Okay honey,” she said quietly. “I’m done.”
“What do you do now?” Charlie asked her.
“Wait until the guys call us to do one of their stupid favors like this morning,” Jae said.
Charlie nodded. “I’m sorry about that. That was really weird, having to see you and that other girl naked like that.”
“Yes, it was,” Jae agreed. “But they don’t give us much choice.”
“Why do they treat you like that?” Charlie was more confused than ever.
“They’re bullies, Charlie. My friends and I are trying to escape from them, but we haven’t found anything we can do about it yet. They don’t make it easy.”
Charlie looked about ready to cry. “Can I help?” he asked.
What a sweet kid, Jae found herself thinking. It would break her heart to tell him she didn’t think he could stay, never mind help them. But then, she didn’t know where else he could go. Whatever sort of world–warp they’d found themselves in, he was there now as well, while his classmates were back home. Finally she just told him, “Maybe.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, Charlie, but I’m sure we can find something for you to do.” She took his hand in both of hers, “I’m sure there’s something. Now, I think I should take you to the room where my friends and I hide from the Swineherds. We’ll need to hide you too, and I think the other girls would like to meet you.”
“Okay!” Charlie said excitedly. “But can I use the bathroom first? I really have to go.”
Jae cringed. “Oh, no, Charlie. The guys don’t let us girls use the bathroom very often, and when they do, they watch us pee. Only a guy would have a key to the bathroom, Charlie. I really have to go, too, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do for either one of us.”
“They watch you pee?” Charlie was more grossed out than ever by then. “That’s disgusting! The guys watch you pee, and then the girls have to drink it?”
Jae’s eyebrows flew up. “The girls drink our pee? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, no!” Charlie exclaimed. He’d forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to tell any of the girls! Now he hesitated, wondering whether he should tell his new friend what he’d heard.
“Charlie?” Jae pressed him. “What do you mean, the girls drink our pee?”
“Okay,” Charlie said sadly. She was his friend, he decided, and he should tell her. “This guy in the cafeteria told me they put your pee in the soup, and they give it to the good girls, and it keeps them, you know, pushovers, I think he said. Something about enz, enz…”
“Enzymes?” Jae asked excitedly.
“Yeah! Enzymes.” He was delighted to pronounce the word at last.
“My God,” Jae thought out loud, realizing what all this meant. “Charlie, you’re wonderful! I’m going to take you to meet my friends, and then you’re going to help us get free of those guys. What do you think?”
“Yeah!” Charlie smiled. “But Jae, I really have to pee.”
Jae couldn’t say no, not after what he’d just told her. “Wait right here,” she smiled. She went back to the kitchen and found an empty yogurt container she’d washed earlier on. Back in the bread closet, she set the container before Charlie. “There you go. You can pee in that.”
Charlie hesitated, looking Jae up and down.
Jae realized what he was thinking. “Well, you saw me naked, didn’t you?” She couldn’t help smiling, but she turned around all the same. “I won’t look, but I have to stay in the room for both of our safety.”
Charlie couldn’t argue with that. “Yes, I did.”
With her back to Charlie, Jae reluctantly listened as the boy knelt before the container and relieved himself. He really had been feeling quite desperate, and it went on for quite a while. When he was finished, Jae hurriedly picked up the container and ran back to the kitchen, pouring the foul smelling liquid down the drain and washing the container out as thoroughly as she could, lest some guard smelled urine in the kitchen later on and suspected her of relieving herself illegally. Her own bladder was in fact nearing capacity as well, and listening in while Charlie peed hadn’t been easy.
Charlie had gotten dressed again when Jae returned. “Don’t you want to go too?” he asked, smiling at the prospect of maybe getting to see Jae naked again.
“I’d love to,” she told him sadly. “But if the Swineherds see that I don’t pee very much next time I’m allowed to go, they’ll know I went when I wasn’t allowed to go and I’ll be tortured even more than usual.” She said it as matter–of–factly as she could while she went around loading bread onto a pushcart to serve as a hiding place for Charlie.
“That’s terrible,” Charlie said.
“You’re telling me!” Jae said. “Here, sit on this cart, in the middle.” She beckoned toward the center of the cart, where she had left one side empty. Once Charlie had settled himself into the center, Jae loaded up the empty side with bread and placed a full rack on top, so that Charlie was invisible. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to take you to my secret hideout. Don’t make any noise at all, under any circumstances, until I tell you it’s okay, understand?”
“Yes,” Charlie said meekly.
Cautiously, Jae wheeled the cart out into the hall, and immediately began going over alibis in her head in case a Swineherd stopped her. How about an afternoon tea? The guy would come after her when he found out there wasn’t anything planned. She’d been ordered to bring it to the theater for snacks? She was heading in the wrong direction for that. She was still working on ideas when Jimmy Draper stopped her on the last corner before the music department. “Where you goin’ with that, cunt?” he asked.
Think!
“I got buzzed,” she said with just a hint of nervousness – which, she reasoned, was understandable for any girl who’d been buzzed. “And he said to bring a cart full of bread from the kitchen with me. He didn’t say why.”
“Who buzzed you?”
The perfect opening! Jae rejoiced in her own genius as she answered, “Larry Bowen.”
Jimmy looked disgusted. He and Larry had hated each other ever since a bungled play in the final moments of a game during sophomore year, which they’d blamed each other for. Jae and the other cheerleaders had witnessed the whole thing from the sidelines. “Okay, cunt, go ahead.” Jae looked happily over her shoulder as Jimmy went on down the hall, his hands stuffed in his pockets. She knew he’d never check with Larry to see if her story was true; the two of them hadn’t said a word to each other in almost three years.
Mercifully, the hallway was momentarily empty as she approached the music room. Jae couldn’t even recall the number of times she’d had to walk all around the loop two or even three times in order to make her escape without being seen. She pushed the cart through the large, darkened music room, to the secret door at the far end. The other Bird Women were gone, so Jae was at least temporarily spared the need to explain about the boy that she now beckoned out of the cart.
“This is our hideout,” she told him. “It’s the only place we know about that the Swineherds don’t.”
“What do you do here?” Charlie asked.
“Oh, talk, cry together when we need to, just spend time together. We really need each other’s support in this place. Sometimes we nap in the middle of the day if we need it.”
“I’m pretty tired myself,” Charlie said. He’d had quite a long bus ride that morning.
Jae smiled. “Actually, I’m kind of tired myself, from washing all those dishes.” She beckoned to a makeshift futon the Bird Women had made from the cushions from some old teacher’s chairs they’d found elsewhere in the music department. “Want to lie down together?” Charlie only grinned and nodded.
“I thought you might like that,” Jae said. She lay down on her side and held out one arm for Charlie. “Okay, come here, sweetie,” she said gently. And Charlie did, settling naturally into the woman’s curve of Jae’s body, exulting in the maternal affection he hadn’t had enough of since he was very young indeed. Nestling close to his friend’s breasts, enjoying their slight rise and dip that came with each breath she took, he quickly drifted off to sleep. Jae, for her part, enjoyed the unconditional love which the very young alone can give us, and put her free arm around Charlie. Tuning out the screaming signals from her bladder as she had learned to do out of necessity, she too eventually fell asleep.
Whatever shock the four other Bird Women had upon entering the lair and finding a boy asleep in her arms was lost on Jae, for she awoke to find Lisa chatting with Charlie in whispers while the other three sat close by. They all looked slightly bewildered, but not unhappy with their new comrade. “Morning, dear,” Caryn said when she saw Jae’s eyes open.
Jae sat up. “I see you’ve met Charlie?” she said to the others.
“Yes,” Lisa smiled. “He told us all about how he escaped from his class. What a brave kid!”
“And how he went looking for you because he thought you were so pretty,” Katie went on.
“You remember him, Penny?” Jae couldn’t help asking, remembering the other girl’s reaction that morning.
But Penny didn’t seem upset by the development. “Yes,” she smiled. “I remember him just fine.” She was blushing slightly, perhaps reminded of the fact that Charlie had seen her naked as well that morning, but she didn’t seem to mind too much.
“Did you tell them about the soup, Charlie?” Jae asked excitedly.
“The soup?” Two or three of the other girls said it in unison, as Charlie shook his head.
“This is beautiful!” Jae said excitedly. “Charlie told me about this soup they feed their girls, which has our pee in it. Some other guy told him there’s an enzyme in the pee that makes them submissive.”
“Oh, my God,” Caryn said immediately.
Katie caught on just as quickly. “If we can get it in their food…” Suddenly there were smiles all around.
Lisa looked back and forth between Penny and Katie. “Aren’t the two of you on breakfast duty tomorrow?”
The two looked at one another and nodded. The smiles grew broader by the second.
Caryn scooted across the floor to Charlie and hugged him tightly. “You are a hero, kiddo!” she said. “You’re gonna get us out of here, and we’re gonna take care of you!”
The quiet celebration was still ongoing when the pre–dinner bell rang. Time to line up for the afternoon bathroom break – as usual, not a moment too soon. While Penny took off immediately to get to the head of the line – as the others always let her – Lisa and Jae began instructing Charlie on what to do. “We have to go away for a few hours,” Jae said. “We’ll be back as soon as we can, but you’ve got to stay out of sight until then. Don’t make any noise, just like before. Understand?”
Charlie nodded.
“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” Lisa asked him. He shook his head. “Good,” she said. “If you need to go later, wait for us and we’ll help you, okay?”
“Okay. It’ll be like an adventure in here. Stay away from the bad guys.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Katie said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “We’ll see you when we get back, okay?”
He nodded and smiled, and one by one the Bird Women scattered out into the hallway, careful to look inconspicuous and not like a group.
TO BE CONTINUED
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