You can lock the other thread if you want.


I'm going to put one chapter in each post, since it's too long to put all in one post. I have decided against getting it published because I do not believe in copyright. All information should be free.


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One Way Out
A story about rabbits with guns


All soul substance will be saved forever in every way. If I had just been told this, I wouldn’t have become mentally ill. I don’t know much, but I know this much. I could have been saved from a lot of crap a whole lot sooner, because I would have known the meaning of life.


1


Myron stood over the dead body, not being able to really take in that he had killed this person.


The other kids were cheering, but Myron felt sick. Myron blinked, and there his girlfriend was, holding up the severed head by its white hair.


Myron turned around and ran. He ran to the bathroom. Inside was a staff member. A female staff member, shocking a female student for vomiting on the floor. Myron ran into a stall and vomited, not caring that he was in the female restroom. A peaceful feeling came over him as he knelt there puking up his guts. This was one moment he had to himself, with nobody bothering him, shocking him, telling him off, threatening him, giving him dirty looks or forcing him to work. It might be the last time without torment that he would get, but it was still a time when he wasn't being tormented.


Myron stood up, kicked the flush handle and, watching as his vomit washed down the hole, began attempting to remove the belt around his stomach with the electrode attached to his bare skin.


He had gotten four of the five electrodes off of his arms, legs and stomach when he heard yelling from outside. It sounded like a student, thankfully. So the students still had the upper hand in this riot. It had been an hour since it had begun.


He took a deep breath and headed back out into the hall. A girl sat curled up against a wall, sobbing. He grabbed her by the arm. "Come on; let's go! Or his death would have been pointless."


The girl did not get up. "I loved him! He was my first crush and he was always kind to me!" she shouted.


"You were brainwashed," Myron tried to explain, but he couldn't think of another way to explain it. "Do you like what OTHER things he did to you?"


Five students came running down the hall, carrying pencils like spears and broken halves of Bic pens like knives. The girl began to sob harder.


"Why are you crying?" Myron asked, trying again. This was going to be harder than he had thought. He had thought it would be so simple. They would sound the alarm and the entire student body would erupt, slaughtering their way out if they had to.


But they hadn't.


Most of them weren't even trying to get out.


And he had killed the head honcho, but instead of thanks, he was getting hatred. Except for a few people, the ones who had watched him kill the man. But they were the ones that simply loved chaos, not the ones that wanted to make a political and social statement.


Once again, Myron Jeffries, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at age five, was all alone.


Myron looked around for his one-on-one. He was nowhere to be found. Probably escaped. Probably scareder than Myron was.


Myron had no choice. He had to get back to his girlfriend and the kids that had cheered at Dr. Bobby Boler's death. They were the only people that would help him, or at least try to help him.


"The police are here."


Myron did a 120 and saw his girlfriend, Helen, coming up the hall towards him.


"But they're busy with Franz and Luigi," Helen continued, a broad smile on her doughy face. Myron could see that her electrodes were gone too, as was the backpack she had had to carry her Graduated Electronic Decelerator in all the time. She looked like she hadn't felt so good in ages. Without being forced to slouch under that ten-pound backpack, without the wires going into her shirt and skirt, even though she still weighed 200 pounds even after months of that vegetarian diet and forced exercise, in Myron's opinion she was absolutely beautiful. Bad, evil maybe, but enchanting. He knew then that he couldn't maintain the relationship with her, or she'd seduce him into evil with her looks alone.


But today he needed her help.


Because he did not know what the flying *** was going on.


"What's the deal here?" he asked.


"They hid that corpse in a washer in the home ec room," she said calmly. "The big one, ya know? I mean, the big guy in the big washer. I don't know what we're gonna do with Boler; we might have to burn him to prevent them from finding your fingerprints on him."


"What's happening NOW?"


"We kill the rest of them that stand in our way, and get into Stevie's car, and leave." She was so calm. So damn mutherfuckin calm.


"We'll get caught."


"Do you know how many cars there are with escapees in them? Yes, some of us will get caught. But the ones that get away already have some staff with them for ransom."


"For the freedom of the oth-- the ones that get caught?"


"Yep." She smiled. So confident.


Having vomited up his lunch-- a nasty vegetarian lunch that looked and smelled and tasted like cat food, but a lunch just the same-- Myron was hungry. It wasn't that he was ready to enjoy eating so soon. He just needed the damn food so that he wouldn't throw up again. It was hard to explain. "Do we have time to go to the vending machine? Or the kitchen; whichever's closer."


"I think we can do it. If we miss Stevie, one of the others will pick us up."


"No, you go. I don't want you getting caught."


"YOU go. You're the one that killed the ***. You need protection."


"Fine; come with me. To the kitchen."


"HEY! WAIT UP!"


Myron did not want to see, so he did not turn around. It was over now. The public and the officials would never agree to a prisoner ransom. No matter who or how many his friends would keep prisoner until they let him go... they would not let him go.


"I'm sorry, man, it's me."


Myron almost fainted with relief. It was just Jeremy. Jeremy, the kid in his class who had been shocked for asking to go to the nurse, then vomited all over his keyboard.


"I'm going to the kitchen. Where you headed?"


"I was looking for you, man! Where were you all this time?"


"In the bathroom and trying to convince people to come with us."


"Damn! We gotta get out of here NOW."


"I know. I guess there's no time for food."


But as they passed the kitchen, Myron quickly grabbed an unfinished bowl of something that looked like dog food, and then he and Jeremy rushed to the nearest exit.


What a cacophony. Police cars, ambulances, even three fire trucks. They hadn't even planned to set the school on fire, but come to think of it, that wasn't a bad idea. But there was no time now. He had a feeling the ones that stayed behind would do it, though. They would have nothing to lose. Hitting rock bottom was funny sometimes. The only way to go was up.


There were other vehicles too. Cars, vans, trucks, station wagons, buses. Their thousand friends from the International Incident Initiators had turned up just like they'd planned. Suddenly Myron felt so much better, knowing there was not one, not two, not three, but one thousand people in this world that he could trust.

It was Anything Goes now. No more "this one in this vehicle, that one in that other one over there". Jeremy, Myron, Helen and three others, including a teacher, filed onto a school bus, the multicolored psychedelic one that had probably been painted by hippies.


The bus was so full Myron had to sit in the aisle near the front. Younger children sat on older kids' and adults' laps. Others were crammed three to a seat meant for two. There wasn't enough room in the aisle for everyone to sit, so some had to stand. One girl stood holding a three-year-old because there was no space to put him down. She leant against the emergency door in the back, hoping she and the child would not fall through. It was scary to look at them. One young boy straddled the back of a seat, holding onto the ceiling, his right leg between the two fat teenagers sitting in the seat he was straddling.


Everything had to go. No space, even under the seats. One of the International Incident Initiators yelled at the rest to throw their backpacks, lunch bags and books out the windows. Soon books, pencil cases, even geometry sets flew or were passed here and there until they got to the windows and were thrown out. Then the driver started shouting at them to stop because they might cause an accident with so many vehicles and now stuff all over the road and the parking lots.


The bus finally got to the road. "It's a miracle!" someone exclaimed.


"Nope, it ain't," a kid with dreadlocks said. "Look." Myron and the others looked. There was a great crowd of students, some laughing and some crying, some children as young as four and some prisoners as old as sixty who had been there for most of their lives. They had formed a human chain. Even the youngest and the oldest and the most disturbed did not move even when they were sprayed with gas and then Mace. They were distracting the police, then a group of black teens went and grabbed a gun out of an open police car while the officers continued to spray at the human chain.


The bus was driving so fast that some of the younger kids were screaming. Then they passed by two cars crashed into each other, on fire, and soon everyone was screaming.


But Helen was calm.


Perched on the leg of a fat person sitting on a seat, her legs in the aisle, Helen said, "You'd think that they were kidnapping us."


"Well, technically, they are," an III member said. "It's not what the student wants that goes here; it's what the judge thinks they would have wanted if they were competent."


"****' shitheads!" a nearby teenager said, attempting to spit on the floor (but the spit landed in a girl's lap instead and the girl screamed and slapped him).


"WHO YOU CALLIN SHITHEADS!" the biggest person on the bus said. He had a whole seat to himself and a sleeping child lay on his stomach, which was like a shelf or table or bed, depending on what you wanted to use it as.


"Them, not us. Not you," one of the III members assured him, patting his shoulder. He calmed down, but looked totally taken aback at this gentleness. He was used to getting zapped under the skin and into his muscles for lesser transgressions, like blowing his nose because it had thick gloopy green snot oozing out of it.


Myron wondered how his friends were doing in the other vehicles. Who had been caught and who was still on the run? Who was still rioting and who had been neutralized, and who had just given up? Who had managed to escape, perhaps even on foot? There was one couple, members of the III, that had an apartment on the same long street as the school. Surely the fuzz wouldn't do door-to-door searches, would they?


Jeremy must have been thinking the same thing. "HEY!" he shouted at the people in the back and on the sides where the windows were. "Look and see who's doing what!"


"They just got Heather!" a girl in their class said. Even one of the captured teachers joined in, saying "They just got Bethany! They just got Lisa! They just got-- nope, he broke free again!"

"Where we going?" Jeremy, who was sitting closest to the driver, asked.


"To the Arizona desert. We're going to get into different vehicles once we get to the shipyard, then go cross some state lines!"


It seemed so unlikely. Like a dream. Jeremy opened his eyes as wide as he could, preparing to wake up and find himself in his room in the Hope House residence, under his bug-infested blanket, still attached to the GED, the backpack right there next to him and a camera watching his every move from high in the corner of the room.


Next Jeremy slapped himself. Then he bit his arm till he tasted blood.


"Jeremy, what the *** you doing?" his friend, Lester, shouted over the din from where he sat in the front seat on the aisle, with a captured teacher next to him on the inside.


"Trying to find out if this is real!"


Then Lester started abusing himself too, trying to wake up because this really wasn't funny. Lester became angry at God for giving him this dream and thus reminding him that he could be free. He bit his lip until he tasted blood, poked himself in the eye, punched himself in the head. But he still didn't wake up, and now he had burning pains in his lip and his eye and he felt woozy.


"Let's see who can go the longest without passing out," Jeremy said, watching Lester and giving up on this being a dream.


One of the III had been watching. His stomach hardened. He wondered if coming and getting these kids was a good idea or not. What if the school was right? What if the kids were safer there? He watched as Jeremy and Lester squeezed each other's necks, waiting for one of them to pass out. He watched the young man who had spat in the girl's lap yelling at the driver to stop at a brothel. He watched a boy shaking so hard he was rattling the seat... not from a seizure but from not taking his Cogentin, which wore off before the medication he was taking Cogentin to quash the side effects of did.


Indeed, none of the students had their medications with them, and even though most were not on medication, everyone knew that most of them should be. The school had used punishments rather than medication to keep the students in line, but the students had still been suffering in silence all along at that school without their medication.

The III member who saw the guy shaking and the other kids losing it had an idea. He yelled at the driver to turn on the radio full blast, then he yelled at everyone to sing along as, coincidentally, "I WANT TO BREAK FREE! I WANT TO BREAK FREEEE!" flooded the bus and even shook the windows a little.


This calmed them down, although, naturally, there was still some scratching, head banging, skin picking, nose picking, hair pulling, teeth grinding and skin rubbing. These students needed stimulation, not forced sensory deprivation. Why had he almost forgotten this, after a year of training with the International Incident Initiators, the best underground activist group in the world as far as he knew?


Myron was crying like a baby girl as he thought about his mother, and about probably never seeing her again, at least not for a long time. He cried as he sang I Want To Break Free. He cried as he and his friend Bartholomew took a leaf out of Jeremy and Lester's book and tried to strangle each other into unconsciousness. He cried as he "talked shop" with Helen and the driver. But then something cheered him up: he remembered that his mother had put him in this situation in the first place by sending him to that dad-blasted school.


And so he started a new game... the Bragging War. It went like this:


Myron: "My mom knew I would get shocked if I even slouched a little even before she sent me to Hope House!"


Jeremy: "So? My mom kicked me in the nuts when I tried to shoplift and she had left my GED in the car. I was on a home visit with no staff and I had taken the 'lectrodes off in the car and nobody noticed until we got in the store!"


Dannisse (girl who had gotten spit on): "SO? MY DAD raped me and my mom didn't believe me. When I told her she slapped me. When I came here I told her about the abuse here and she didn't believe me because of that. She thinks I'm a chronic liar, but I never lie! I hate liars!"

They could still hear sirens. All around them was a mixture of emergency vehicles and III vehicles. A helicopter hovered overhead. At least the military hadn't arrived yet. That was something good to think about.


Everyone on the bus was speculating.


"They've got the pictures of us. They'll never let us over the state borders."


"I heard someone say we're gonna go through a secret tunnel."


"To the plains of Arizona or something."


"The desert of Arizona."


"What's there?"


"Nothing... just desert."


An III member, Sharona, looked at the GPS on the phone she had confiscated from one of the teachers, and showed the student sitting next to her. "We're not going to Arizona. 'The desert of Arizona' is actually a code word we used in our planning, for 'The forests of Canada'. Remember that tunnel between Canada and the US that was on the news a few years back? They used it to smuggle drugs. Well, we've got another one. We just need to get to our private airport in the woods here. Nobody knows we have a runway and we built our plane in the woods so that nobody would suspect."


The student, Igor, was impressed.

Suddenly, there were less vehicles, and then they were in the woods. And then suddenly, it was dark.


The bus suddenly stopped. The driver got out and yelled, "YOU ALL STAY IN THERE!" The ones in front could see him passing in front of the bus and then saying "We got Boler reeeeeal good!"


Jeremy could tell it was a code sentence when the solid back of the tunnel suddenly opened like a door and light streamed in. The driver ran back into the bus, looked behind at two cars that were also in the tunnel, then floored it. The bus shot into the light. Jeremy stood up in time to see the two cars following the bus into the light, but was quickly knocked down by the movement of the bus. Then the bus screeched to a stop again.


Myron blinked, stood up and looked out the window. They were in a long passageway, going straight ahead, and the driver of the bus was trying very hard not to knock people over. Yes, people! Twenty or thirty people, clapping and cheering, standing on wooden platforms along the edges of the tunnel. About half of them were wearing International Incident Initiators shirts. Others wore other orange clothing. Orange was the III color.


Some III members were also holding signs. WELCOME BACK. YOU ARE FREE NOW.


WELCOME TO THE FREE WORLD.


One even said, "We are trying to get Dr. B.B. excommunicated from the synagogue."


The two cars were unmarked III vehicles. Out of them came more students and III members.


Myron felt like he was in a dream as he ran to his friend Isis and hugged her and screamed and cried like a girl. She was alive! And she had made it to the hideout!


But what would happen next?


"ATTENTION!" a man shouted through a bullhorn, as if on cue. "We have been informed that we are not to wait for the rest, but to continue on to the runway and take off. We have enough prisoners and students. The rest will keep the enemy busy."


Myron grinned at Isis and Isis grinned at Jeremy and Jeremy grinned at Lester and Lester grinned at the III member standing next to him. Nobody, except for nutjobs on message forums on the internet, had ever openly called Hope House or Dr. B.B. enemies before.


And so they got on the bus and drove for hours into the darkness, the headlights of the bus and the two cars being the only lights outside the vehicles.


And then there was light again. Myron jumped up and looked around, before falling on Helen's head and having to apologize. Before he fell, he saw a kid with a bloody nose, a girl with a bald spot and blood clots in her hair, a huge bump on an III member's head and a bloody gash on a retarded kid's forearm. Had the lower-functioning students really done all that?


They were in a clearing, and everyone knew it was time to get off the bus. They jumped out through the windows and the emergency door, and the rest fell out through the front door on top of each other, anxious to get out, knowing or, in the case of the low-functioners, sensing, that they were in a race against time and that their friends were putting their lives on the line to give them a chance at freedom.


They piled into the plane. Isis, Helen, Jeremy, Lester and Myron were separated in the chaos, but it didn't matter. This could be their last day on Earth and they were going to make the best of it.


Myron played tic-tac-toe with the retarded boy, and both were crying the whole time.


Helen got up to help two III members serve water and fried bannock-- they had never heard of it, but it was wonderful.


Jeremy taught a boy with Williams Syndrome how to play Flatliners, like he and Lester had been playing on the bus trying to strangle each other.


Lester wrote good-bye notes to his family and sealed them in a metal canteen an III member gave him. The III member was walking around asking for notes to outsiders to put in the canteen. Lester was proud of what he had written. He had astonished himself with intellectuality that he had never known he had possessed. He knew that they would probably survive, but he grinned just thinking about how heroic he was acting and how he was going to be able to be even more heroic as an activist if they succeeded in this, their first mission.


Isis gossiped with Dannisse about all that had happened at Hope House. Finally, after five years of court-approved captivity, they were able to talk freely about what had gone on there.


Myron had Asperger's, and he knew an autistic person when he saw one. He felt a rush of empathy as he heard the autistic kids moaning and screeching and saw their hands over their ears, as the plane took off. One girl moaned, "Oh, God!", looking at them with the same expression Myron had on his face.


"It'll all be f--" Myron began, then shut up when he remembered that this particular group of autistic kids hated noise. They had all fallen to the ground in pain when they had heard the sound of another student receiving a shock at Hope House. The teacher had thought they were imitating the kid or exaggerating their pain for him hoping the shocks would stop forever. And so they had then received shocks too, and screamed even louder, and gotten frightened by their own and each other's screaming, and had henceforth walked around in a doped-up zombie daze, though they weren't doped up with anything but their own shock chemicals.


Instead of talking to the kids, Myron told an III member about their problem. The III member said she would see what she could do, and ran all over and came back with some cotton balls and Q-tips for the group of autistics. The Q-tips were for unblocking their ears, the cotton balls for plugging them.


Meanwhile, at the back of the plane, Sharona led some small children in a singing chant: "I don't know but it's been told!"


"I don't know but it's been told!" the kids echoed. Sharona wondered why these kids, who seemed perfectly able to follow directions, had been at Hope House. Until, that is, Myron told her they were autistics with echoalia.


"Dr. Boler's mean and cold!" she singsonged, and they repeated her.


Next was "I don't know but it's been said; Dr. Bobby Boler's dead!"


And then cheers erupted. It seemed they had forgotten to inform everyone that Myron had killed Bobby Boler.


Myron suddenly felt a panic attack coming on, ran to the bathroom and vomited. But this was more than just a panic attack... or a heart attack. His ears were ringing, he was freezing cold and shaking and he felt a huge solid dark lump of something behind his right eye. He suddenly had indigestion. He suddenly had shortness of breath. His vision blurred for no reason.


"So all you have left is your mind," Myron told himself. "What is seven times nine?" But he couldn't think of the answer. Suddenly, he couldn't move. He couldn't even control where his eyes went. Was this a panic attack? A heart attack? A stroke?


He had all the symptoms of a stroke.


Yeah, he must be having a stroke.