Olivia by R. Lee Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

he asked.  His voice was dull, emotionless.
    She shook her head, her throat too tight to speak.
    He reached out to touch her arm, and when she didn’t throw him off, he rolled close against her and wrapped her in a wing.  “I am…not bad, Olivia,” he said quietly.
    And maybe it was even true, but it didn’t matter, really.  She was his.  And this was just the way it was.
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    REFLECTIONS
     
     
    1
     
    Once, in another life, when Olivia had lived in the real world without monsters, she had gone to college and taken a sociology class because word was the teacher was a flaky old hippie who gave easy credits.  The teacher was indeed something of a soft touch, and a flake, and a hippie, and to illustrate his various points, he liked to use the characters of Gilligan’s Island as the ideal working model of sociology in action.
    “This show,” he used to say, “is a completely accurate depiction of the reformation of civilization.  Note the importance of class in social structure.  Note the use of gender roles.  From a sociological and psychological viewpoint, this is pretty much we could expect to see if seven people were isolated from culturally-enforced standards of behavior.”  Whereupon some jackass would invariably ask if that meant that seven people stranded on a tropical island would build a working radio out of coconuts and meet the Globetrotters, and the class would bust out in a more or less serious debate on whether or not the Professor was having it off with Ginger or Mary Ann or both or, heck, Gilligan.
    Olivia found herself thinking back on that class quite often in the first days after her capture.  Not about Gilligan’s Island (even the slaves of cave-dwelling bat-monsters had some standards), but rather on the subject of what her teacher had called ‘instinctive sociological reversion’.  Essentially, he had put forth the idea that when separated from the security of the familiar, any individual will fall back on the same behaviors which were instinctive to his or her primitive ancestors and which lie more or less dormant in civilized society. 
    Example: A front-office receptionist named Olivia Blake, twenty-four years old, college-educated and reasonably independent, has been essentially removed from the planet Earth and set down in a cave with a monster.  There’s no phone, no lights, no motorcar; not a single luxury.  Like Robinson Caruso, it is as primitive as can be…and this time, there are no coconuts.
    In the movies, this would be young Olivia’s cue to devise some sort of daring escape, probably killing her captor in the process, although he would keeping popping up sporadically like some demonic Billy Bop’em doll, until she finally, what?  Dropped a giant satellite dish on him?  Shot a rusty cannon at him?  And then she would stand triumphant on the side of the mountain with the wind in her hair and utter some unbelievably bad-tasting joke (“He had to catch a call,” in the case of the dropping satellite dish, and maybe that old tried-and-true, “He’s fired,” in the event that she went along with the cannon).  Ideally, she should also have a good-looking guy under her arm, but in any case, she would definitely have all the other captive women in some state of undress scrambling for their freedom down the mountainside before her as the music swelled and the end credits began to roll.
    This was not the movies. 
    Olivia was caught and most of the time, she didn’t even care.  She knew she should.  She even wanted to.  But when she did care, the feeling came with such a splintering sense of anguish and loss that some vital part of her simply couldn’t bear it, overloading like an emotional circuit breaker and switching her off into disconnected darkness once more.  It was better to just go along and make the best of things.  It wasn’t a heroic way to think and she knew it, but it was the only way she had to cope.
    And now and then,