Chapter 2
It was official. They were definitely looking for something.
And they were looking for it in the wrong place, Thor realised. Still, he couldn’t very well point that out to anyone, because then Fighter might get into trouble for taking credit for his find, and then the whole of Cabin D might turn against him.
So, he kept quiet and just dug alongside the others, as instructed by the Warden, whom, it had turned out, was actually a woman. Somehow she seemed to know his nickname, even though he was certain that Dr Pendanski wouldn’t have told her, nor would Mr Sir. Dash maintained that it was because she had the whole place wired and bugged with cameras and microphones. If that was true, Thor reflected, that was probably another reason why no one here ever ran away, she would probably know in advance.
By the end of a long week of digging out a whole underground city, however, and finding nothing, Mr Sir announced to them all that the Warden wanted them to go back to digging their individual holes, and that was exactly what they did.
Whatever it was they were looking for, and now Thor knew that no one could deny that that was what they were doing, it had to be pretty important for all this trouble, he reflected.
XXX
The next day, Mr Sir filled their canteens with water as usual, making some anecdote about all life beginning with water as Thor waited for his, and drove off as usual when he was done. However, not long after he had disappeared from sight, Dash exclaimed “Hey, guys! Anyone want some sunflower seeds?”
He held up the burlap sack Thor had seen on Mr Sir’s desk that first day.
“Can never resist an open window,” he grinned, tossing the bag to Fighter, who tossed it on to Axel, who tossed it to Grimm, who tossed it to Thor...who missed it. The bag hit the floor of his hole and the seeds began to spill out.
“Oh, Thor, butterfingers!” Grimm called.
“Shit!” Dash exclaimed. “He’s coming back!”
Thor sprang up and attempted to bury both sack and seeds in the dirt in his hole just as the truck pulled up beside them. Mr Sir stepped out, glared around at them all and then his eyes fell on the edge of the burlap sack that Thor hadn’t done a very good job of hiding.
“You’re coming to see the Warden,” he growled.
XXX
Thor left the Warden’s cabin some time later with a shudder and made his way back to the holes. He didn’t want to replay what had just happened in there over in his mind. The Warden hadn’t been the least bit interested in the story of the stolen sunflower seeds, which Thor had taken full responsibility for, even though Mr Sir didn’t seem to believe that he had acted alone; and the whole thing had ended with her slapping Mr Sir right after she had painted her nails with a polish made of adder venom.
Something about her array of nail polish bottles, perfumes, lipstick tubes on the dressing table had struck a chord with him, but he couldn’t think why. Something else had struck him in that cabin too, old newspaper clippings and Victorian-style Wanted posters of some outlaw named Kissing Kate Barlow. Why did that name sound familiar?
Oh, yes, his great grandfather, Thor Burison had been held up and robbed by her years ago; she had been a highway woman, one who had never been caught, quite famous in her day, leaving lipstick marks of kisses on the men she killed. He couldn’t remember his Granddad telling him how she had gone from being a quiet, loveable schoolteacher to a rough law-breaking highway woman, but he remembered the part about his ancestor being robbed by her.
“He found refuge in the desert, he said on God’s Thumb,” he had stated, “but who knows what that means? He was half crazy when they found him.”
“Hey, Hammer, what’d you tell her?” called Fighter as he approached.
“Nothing,” Thor replied.
“What’d she do?” Axel asked.
“Nothing,” Thor repeated, and then he noticed something. His hole had already been dug, in fact, it was almost complete. He laughed in delight. “Thank you, guys!”
“Don’t look at us,” Grimm said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “It was Frost.”
“Guess he really does just like to dig holes,” Dash mused.
Thor went over to Frost and crouched beside his hole. “Hey, Frost, what gives? Why’d you dig my hole?”
“You didn’t steal the sunflower seeds,” Frost replied.
“Yeah, but neither did you,” Thor pointed out.
Frost fixed him with a look. “You didn’t steal the shoes.”
Thor was surprised. Frost actually believed him? He took a deep breath. “Well...thanks. Still want to learn how to read and write?”
Frost looked up at him in surprise, and when he saw that Thor wasn’t bluffing, he nodded. Thor held out his hand and after a brief hesitation, Frost shook it.
“Ok, later,” Thor said.
XXX
Mr Sir was in a foul mood that night at dinner. Thor noted the sticking plaster over his face, the blood from the cuts still visible through it, and literally kept his head down when he received his helping of the stew. Beside him, Frost frowned but said nothing, unlike one of the boys from Cabin A who leaned in and exclaimed “Whoa! What happened to your face?”
Immediately, the poor boy found himself seized by the collar as Mr Sir hissed “Something wrong with my face?”
“N-no, Mr Sir!” the boy gasped.
“You got that right!” Mr Sir growled, before throwing him to the floor and stalking away.
Thor breathed out, reminding himself that it could have been him.
The next day, though, he found out just how much Mr Sir had come to hate him, when, instead of filling his canteen with water, Mr Sir let the water run on the ground before thrusting the empty canteen back to him with a grunt of “There, that should hold you.”
Thor swallowed. “Thank you, Mr Sir,” he muttered politely, going back to his hole. As usual his mind was elsewhere, thinking about that gold tube they had found, with the letters K.B engraved on it...and what K.B could stand for.
Frost joined him after Mr Sir had gone and held out his own canteen. “Want some water?”
Thor accepted, gratefully and then said “Hey, you remember that gold tube we found?”
“Yeah?”
“I think it might have been a tube of lipstick, and that K.B was Kate Barlow.”
Frost looked at him, sceptically. “Kissing Kate Barlow?”
“Kissing Kate Barlow,” Thor agreed.
XXX
Afterwards, when everyone else was chilling in the Wreck Room, he led Frost back to their cabin, found a pencil and some paper and wrote out his name in large capitals.
“F-R-O-S-T,” he said, showing Frost each letter and then handing him the pencil. Frost watched him rubbing his eyes.
“Are you sure you can stay awake?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Thor insisted.
“I can help you dig your hole each day so you won’t be too tired to teach me,” Frost suggested.
“Nah, I’ll be alright,” Thor insisted.
Frost grinned. “Look, you’re a slow digger-”
“Oh-ho, look who’s bragging,” Thor teased.
Frost grinned, mischievously. “If we do it that way, we’ll be done at the same time.”
“Well, it couldn’t hurt,” Thor shrugged, before gesturing for Frost to copy out what he had written. He did it very well for someone who had never learned before, or maybe he had been taught before and just forgotten it.
“You know, Frost’s not my real name,” he said.
Thor looked surprised. “Well, I figured it might not be, but even Pendanski calls you that, so...”
“My real name’s Loki, Loki Laufeyson.”
Thor grinned and then shook his hand. “Thor Odinson, nice to meet you.”
Loki actually laughed and then, sobering up, asked in a serious, soft tone “So...how do you spell that?”
Thor showed him, pronouncing each letter as Loki copied it. “L-O-K-I.”
“And how do you spell Georgiana?”
Thor thought for a second. “Um, I guess like the name Georgia, but with an N-A on the end.” He took the paper and wrote it down before nodding. “Yeah, that looks right.” As Loki began to copy it, he asked “Who’s Georgiana?”
Loki glanced around to make sure that no one else was in earshot before replying. “She’s my...girl.”
“As in girlfriend?” Thor asked.
“Well, we sort of skipped over the whole dating thing and went right to the falling in love bit,” Loki admitted. Thor must have looked confused because he elaborated. “We were living on the streets about the same time, in the same area. We became friends and formed a group with some of the other homeless lot, we all moved around together, like a family. I mean, it wasn’t easy, scraping to stay alive, sometimes relying on shelters or the Salvation Army for food and a bed, but we managed.” He sighed. “We always said though that no matter what happened, everything would be alright as long as we were together.”
Thor sensed that there was more to the story. “Where is she now?”
Loki sighed again and put down the pencil. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “She went out for food one day and didn’t come back. I looked all over, but I couldn’t find her. No one could. I’ve no idea what happened, whether she’s still...” He broke off and shook his head. “I wish I knew.”
“I’m sure she’s alright,” Thor tried to console.
“Well, if I could, I’d hire a whole team of private investigators just to find her,” Loki replied.
Thor laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Must have been hard for you both, living out on the streets.”
“We managed,” Loki shrugged. “We moved about all over the place, wherever we could. I remember once we lived near Alfheim Park.”
Thor looked surprised. “I used to play at Alfheim Park all the time.”
Loki smiled, thinly. “We slept on one of the benches once, cuddled up together.” He shrugged. “But, you know, no big deal.”
Thor thought for a second. “You know the other day, when you got up in the night?”
“Yeah?”
“Were you thinking about her?”
Loki looked up and for a second Thor thought he had hit a nerve. Then, Loki nodded with a small smile. “Yeah. I’m always thinking about her, Thor. That’s what keeps me going, keeps me digging.”
“I did wonder how you dug so fast,” Thor grinned, and they both laughed, feeling for the first time since either of them had come to Camp Greenlake, that they had found someone to confide in.
A friend.
XXX
“Twenty six letters, so if we do five letters for four days and then six on the fifth,” Loki worked out.
“That’s good maths,” Thor replied.
“I’m not stupid,” Loki shrugged. “I know everyone thinks I am, I just don’t like answering stupid questions.”
“Fair enough,” Thor agreed.
It was the following day, and they were digging Thor’s hole together out in the hot sun. Thor watched Loki’s digging and tried to speed up his own to match. He wondered briefly if every thrust of the shovel was another angry dig at himself, for not working hard enough to find Georgiana. It was obvious Loki blamed himself for her disappearance, even if he had never actually said it.
“Hey, where’s your whip, Hammer?” Dash snorted, shoving some dirt down their hole as he passed. “Your slave’ll be getting tired.”
“It’s not slavery, it’s agreement,” Thor retorted. Loki, of course, said nothing, just continued shovelling.
“Whatever,” Dash retorted.
By the end of the week, Thor discovered that everyone thought the same way as Dash, that he and Loki were somehow ganging up on them by working together to dig a hole whilst they stuck to digging theirs individually. If they’d had any sense, he reflected, they might have thought up doing the same thing ages ago, pairing up with one another to lighten the load. He did his best to keep his temper though, head down, keeping calm and carrying on as usual, ignoring what they said in the day and continuing to teach Loki in the evenings.
It all came to a head on Friday, though, when Axel made a remark during their lunch break, out of earshot of Dr Pendanski, about Thor going to America and opening up his own slave plantation “since you seem to be so good at it,” and Thor decided that he had had enough.
He sprang to his feet with a mutter of “That’s it!”
Loki got up quickly and grabbed his arm. “Don’t,” he muttered. “It’s not worth it.”
“Boy, it’s true,” Axel goaded. “Slaves get devoted to their Masters.”
Loki hesitated and then let go of Thor. “Kick his butt,” he muttered.
Thor marched up to Axel. “You can stop with the “slave” stuff already, alright? I get it. I’ll dig my own hole from now on.”
“Why? Your slave not working hard enough for you?” Axel provoked. “Maybe you should get a whip for him.”
“Shut up!” Thor snapped, shoving him harder than he had meant to. Axel went sprawling, his food flying into his half-dug hole as the others watched, open-mouthed. He wasn’t down for long, though, he quickly sprang back up and gave Thor a shove in kind that send him stumbling back against the truck.
“Hey, what’s going on over here?” Dr Pendanski asked, coming over.
“Nothing, Mum,” Fighter insisted. “They were just playing around.”
“I saw what was happening,” Dr Pendanski replied. “So, go on, Thor, hit him back.”
Thor sighed. “I really don’t want to.”
“Go on, teach him a lesson,” Dr Pendanski insisted.
“Yeah, teach me a lesson,” Axel taunted, giving Thor another shove. Thor responded in kind and the next thing he knew, Axel had hit him so hard in the stomach that he could barely breathe. Winded, he stumbled to his knees and then felt another blow to his temple that knocked him down.
“Alright, that’s enough!” Dr Pendanski called, seeing he was losing control of the situation.
Axel went to throw another punch, however, but it never came as suddenly Loki had seized him in a choke hold. Axel tried to throw him off, but Loki wouldn’t be budged, he was clinging on to the bigger boy like a limpet.
“Hey, Frost, stop, he can’t breathe!” Dash exclaimed, running over to pull the apart. At the sound of a gunshot, however, they all jumped away from one another. Dr Pendanski lowered his rifle, which he had fired into the air to break up the fight.
“I said that’s enough!” he commanded. “When I say to end something, I mean end it! Now get back to your holes!”
Straightening himself, Loki went over to Thor and offered him a hand up. “You ok?” he muttered.
“I think so,” Thor groaned, rubbing the side of his head. “Where’d you learn to do that, anyway?”
“Streets,” Loki shrugged.
“You’re probably going to get in a lot of trouble for that,” Thor told him.
“I don’t care,” Loki muttered.
“Thanks, though,” Thor added as they climbed back into a hole.
“Don’t mention it,” Loki replied.
As predicted, though, the Warden soon arrived, with Mr Sir, and Dr Pendanski explained what had happened to them.
“Basically, Frost almost killed Volstagg,” he finished.
“Basically?” the Warden repeated.
“Axel was beating on Hammer,” Dash supplied, “and then Frost started choking Axel. I had to pull them apart.”
“Look, Ma’m, Axe just got a little hot, you know?” Fighter ventured. “Being out in the hot sun all day makes the blood start to boil.”
“Is that what happened, Axel?” the Warden asked.
“Yeah, well, it makes my blood boil when everyone digs their holes and Hammer just sits around doing nothing,” Axel responded.
“Excuse me?”
“Ma’m, Frost’s been digging part of Hammer’s hole every day,” Grimm explained.
Thor and Loki both sighed as the Warden turned to them.
“Is this true?” the Warden demanded of Thor.
Thor’s shoulders slumped. “I’m teaching him to read and write. It’s an exchange policy.” The others gave him a disbelieving look. “What? He’s a bright kid.”
“Bright?” Dr Pendanski laughed. “Hey, Frost, tell me what C-A-T spells.” Loki just offered him a scowl. “Brilliant, boy’s a genius!” Dr Pendanski added, sarcastically.
Thor knew that Loki knew the answer, he just didn’t want to answer that stupid question.
“Ok, from now on, I don’t want to see anyone digging anyone else’s holes,” the Warden commanded. “And no more reading lessons.”
Thor frowned. “Why? I mean, the hole still gets dug, so who cares who’s digging it?”
“You know why you’re digging holes, Odinson?” Mr Sir demanded. “Because it’s good for you; teaches you a lesson!”
“If Frost digs your hole, you’re not learning your lesson, are you?” the Warden agreed.
Thor sighed. “Alright, well, why can’t I did my own hole and still teach him to read and write?”
“Because I said so,” the Warden hissed.
“Oh, Thor, we all know you mean well,” Dr Pendanski replied, condescendingly, “but let’s face it, it’s the mental stress you give him that made his blood boil, not the hot sun.”
“I’m not digging anymore holes,” Loki ventured.
“Good,” the Warden supplied.
“I mean, you might as well teach this shovel to read,” Dr Pendanski added, picking it up and thrusting it towards Loki. Loki flinched but didn’t take it. “Go ahead, Frost, take it. It’s all you’ll ever be good for. D-I-G, what’s that spell?”
For a second, nothing happened, as if everyone had frozen in time, and then Loki quietly took the shovel, before swinging it and whacking Dr Pendanski around the back of the head with it. The other inmates all crowed in alarm and delight as he went down like a sack of potatoes on the desert ground.
“Dig!” Loki answered, loud enough for everyone to hear, before he took off across the desert.
“Go, Loki, go!” Thor shouted as Mr Sir took off after him. “Run, Loki!”
“Don’t shoot him, you idiot!” the Warden shouted.
“You think I would?” Mr Sir exclaimed, brandishing his gun.
“That last thing we need is an investigation,” the Warden hissed.
Loki kept on running.
“Where’s he going to go, anyway?” Mr Sir added. “He won’t get far without water.”
“Then I want round the clock security on all water sources,” the Warden replied, emptying a canteen of water over Dr Pendanski to revive him. She looked up at Thor and hissed meaningfully “I still expect to see six holes.”
XXX
By the time Thor had finished digging, it was growing dark. He sighed as he finally pulled himself out of the hole and glanced around the empty landscape. Loki had long since vanished into the horizon and Thor found himself praying inwardly that his friend was alright. After all, it was the desert, and without much water, he wasn’t likely to survive very long.
As he was making his way back to the dining hall, he caught a snippet of the conversation taking place inside the Counsellors Cabin.
“Are we sure he had no family?”
“He had nobody. He was nobody. He was living on the streets when he was arrested.”
“I just don’t want any social workers or anyone like that to come looking for him.”
“No one’s going to. I’m telling you, no one cares about Loki Laufeyson.”
Thor stepped through the door and folded his arms. “I do,” he said.
The three adults gave him a hardened look.
“His blood’s on your hands now, boy,” Mr Sir stated.
XXX
“If he’s not back by morning, he’s dead,” Axel said that night in Cabin D.
“He’s dead anyway,” Fighter pointed out. “Whether he stays out there or comes back.”
“When do you think they’ll find his body?” Dash asked.
“What body?” Grimm replied. “Frost’s buzzard food. You know they pick out the eyeballs first, right?”
“Ah, don’t be disgusting!” Fighter retorted, throwing a pillow at him.
Thor said nothing, just turned over and tried to forget his worries, but it wasn’t easy.
“Loki!” he found himself shouting into the desert the next evening when, once again, he was alone in finishing off digging both his and Loki’s holes. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted again. “Loki! LOKI!”
But no one responded.
Thor rubbed at his eyes, pretending that it was because he had sand and dust in them.
XXX
It didn’t take them long to find someone to replace Loki. The new offender was a girl this time, named Sigyn, but her twitchy attitude instantly earned her the nickname Twitch. It turned out she had been caught out joyriding; even telling them all about it she seemed jittery.
“You should have seen me behind the wheel of that Mustang Convertible,” she said, shuddering a little. “Ooh!”
Thor listened, wondering if she could teach someone else to hotwire a car if they needed to, a plan slowly forming in his mind, to go out after Loki and bring him back...providing he was still alive, of course.
Don’t think like that, Thor, he scolded himself, of course he is!
“First hole’s the hardest,” he advised her the next day during their water break.
“Thanks,” Twitch replied, taking his proffered hand and pulling herself out of the hole. She studied him, carefully. “Are you alright? You seem really distant all the time.”
“I miss Loki,” Thor replied, simply.
“Oh, the boy I replaced?” Twitch asked.
“He was my friend,” Thor shrugged, brushing down his overalls. “My only one.”
They wandered over to the water truck, past the line of their inmates waiting to get their canteens filled, and Thor peered inside. The keys were still in the ignition. Twitch seemed to anticipate what he was about to do and nodded, vigorously. She kept an eye out whilst Mr Sir was distracted breaking up a dispute between Dash and Axel, and Thor quietly opened the truck door and slipped into the driver’s seat.
The sound of the ignition alerted Mr Sir to what was going on.
“Come on, put it in gear!” Twitch called.
Thor found the gearstick and did what she said. The truck took off at a rather alarming speed with Mr Sir running after it, and the others shouting out encouragement behind him, crowing with laughter when Mr Sir fell into a hole.
“Keep going, Hammer!” someone shouted as he passed more groups of inmates.
“Goodbye, Camp Green-!”
The truck tipped up over into another hole and Thor’s words were drowned out by the steering wheel’s airbag.
“My truck!” gasped Mr Sir.
Thor quickly scrabbled out of the truck, out of the hole and began to run as fast as his legs could carry him.
“You’ve done it now, boy!” Mr Sir shouted after him. “Keep running, or there’s not going to be a Thorson in your family!”
Thor looked back only once, to see the other inmates cheering and waving after him, before the desert horizon swallowed him up from their sight. Only when he felt like his heart was about to burst did he eventually stop running. He stumbled, catching his breath and checked over his shoulder. No one was following him. With a deep breath, Thor straightened up and began to walk.
Passing by a hole, he glanced over it and shuddered at the sight of about six Yellow Spotted Lizards nestled inside it, hissing at him.
“Whoa,” he muttered, making a mental note to watch where he was walking.
After a while, the giant holes became few and far between and eventually he was walking on solid, flat plane. He felt like a giant weight had been lifted from his shoulders, the feeling of finally leaving Camp Greenlake behind.
Now all he had to do was find Loki.
Presently, he spotted something flapping from a dead bush and walked up to it. It was a sunflower seed bag. He frowned, thoughtfully, as he picked it up, before turning it upside down to see if there was anything in it. It was empty. Then, he noticed, not too far away from the bush, a long, overturned wooden rowboat. At first he was puzzled, and then he remembered Dr Pendanski once telling him that Greenlake was once a town with an actual lake right beside it, before it dried up, so of course it would be natural to find a boat here somewhere.
Thor made his way over to the boat, noticing that someone had recently dug underneath it to make some kind of shelter from the sun. His heart lurched when he saw a pair of feet, legs clad in orange overalls, sticking out from underneath it.
“Loki?”
The legs moved and he breathed out, letting out a laugh of relief as Loki emerged from underneath the boat. It looked as if he had just woken up.
“Thor?” he groaned, groggily, rubbing his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“I was worried about you, you fool!” Thor laughed, grabbing him for a hug before looking him over. “I thought the lizards might have got you or something!”
Loki laughed. “I’m fine. Got any water?”
Thor wanted to kick himself for not topping up before stealing the truck. “No, I’m out,” he replied, showing the empty canteen. “But you know the water truck? I tried to drive the whole thing out here for you. I drove into a hole.”
“Figures,” Loki smiled. “What’s in the bag?”
“Nothing, it’s empty,” Thor replied, leaning against the side of the boat. After a moment’s silence, he added “Look, Loki, we’ve got to get back to camp.”
Loki looked at him as though he’d gone nuts. “I’m not going back. Want something to eat?”
Thor looked surprised as Loki ducked back underneath the boat again. He followed, glad to be in the shade again and away from the sun. Loki picked up a glass jar from what must have once been some kind of storage space inside the boat and began to crack the top of it against the edge of the shovel he had hit Dr Pendanski with.
“I call it Sploosh,” he explained, “because, well, it’s not exactly like anything I’ve ever eaten before.” The jar smashed open and he held it out to Thor. “I think it might have been jam before, or something like it.”
Thor sniffed it before taking a gulp of the thick, soup-like liquid. “That’s really good,” he admitted. “It tastes like peaches. How many have you got left?”
“Just two,” Loki replied. “Looks like most of them smashed when this boat capsized, whenever that was.”
“We’ll take them with us,” Thor decided.
“Thor, I’m not going back to Camp Greenlake.”
“You’ll die out here if you don’t. Anyway, I’ve got a plan. We’ll go back and tell the Warden exactly where I found Kissing Kate Barlow’s lipstick-”
“What’s Mar-yu-low?”
“What?”
“It’s written on the side of the boat,” Loki replied, sliding back out from under it again. Thor sighed, seeing that it would take a lot of convincing to get Loki back to Camp Greenlake, but he followed and realised what Loki meant.
“Oh, it’s Mary Lou, it’s a girl’s name. Most boats have names.”
“Oh. But I thought that “Y” made the “yuh” sound?”
“Yeah, it does at the beginning of a word but not at the end...” Thor broke off, noticing a peculiar looking mountain a little way away. “Loki...you see that?”
He pointed and Loki followed his gaze.
“Yeah.”
“What’s that look like to you?”
With a thoughtful frown, Loki gave him a thumbs-up. Thor copied him and they both nodded before glancing up at the mountain.
“You know,” Thor added, thoughtfully, “my great grandfather almost died out here, but he said he found refuge on God’s Thumb.”
“You think that’s it, then?” Loki asked. “He meant that mountain?”
“Only one way to find out,” Thor shrugged. “Come on.”