Chapter 16 - A Ride to Trinidad
They flew over the trees and saw the city of Santa Cruz below. Blossom motioned for them all to land just outside of the city limits. They followed her lead, landed, then looked around.
Butch scratched his head. "Why are we down again?" he asked.
"'Cause there's the bus station." Blossom stated.
Buttercup grumbled, "Oh, not another nasty old bus! Why don't we just keep going the way we were!"
"Low profile, remember?" Blossom explained. "We still need the last clue in Trinidad, we have to travel somehow, and flying will probably just get us shot at. Military, remember?"
"Oh yeah." Buttercup replied glumly.
They walked into Santa Cruz, looking around to see if any enemies were watching or following. As they passed a market, Butch ducked inside one door as the others kept going. He emerged on the other end of the building, his shirt full of whatever he had lifted. He dragged Boomer and Bubbles into another doorway and gave them new clothes. They came out in minutes and tossed their old clothes into a dumpster. Boomer, now with a white tee shirt, blue jeans and his black sneakers was also wearing a black baseball hat. Bubbles had a lavender skirt with white lace, a white blouse with short billow sleeves, and white slip on shoes like Blossom's. She had taken down her pigtail hairdo and was now wearing a straw sun hat with a purple flower on it.
"Hey, you look cute!" Blossom told her.
Bubbles giggled. "I love the hat!"
They walked towards the bus station, passed a turn-style display rack with maps on it. Blossom stopped and picked one of the country, paid for it, and they continued on. She opened the map and they all looked over her shoulder.
"OK, we're here now..." she explained, pointing to Santa Cruz, "...here's Trinidad. According to this route map, we can take a bus from here directly there. No layovers, at least."
Butch pointed to a picture of a river map. "What's that?"
"Oh," Blossom began, "that's a route from someplace called Puerto Villarroel. That's like 125 miles from here. It goes to another place called Guayaramerin. Then I guess you take a bus or a cab or something to Trinidad."
"What do we look for in Trinidad?" Buttercup asked.
"Yeah, where's the next letter?" Brick added.
Blossom pulled out the latest letter and looked on the back. "A place called Santuario Chuchini. Mojo says the clue will be in one of the pottery pieces with a fish on it."
"Yeah, and the last one was supposed to be 'under the mummy', remember?" Brick said.
"Under the mummy??" Boomer asked.
Bubbles shivered. "EW!"
They reached the bus station and approached the counter. Blossom had their remaining money, mentally figuring their approximate total in her head when Buttercup stopped them. She pointed to a group of military men who had seen them walk in and were now running towards them.. "That's bad!" she exclaimed.
They turned around and ran back out of the bus station. They went down the street they had come up and turned right into an open field. There, they came upon a group of Mojo's men heading towards town. The men saw them and started running after them.
"...and that's worse!" Buttercup shouted.
They ran from Mojo's men and as the military men reached the end of the street, the three groups met. The six children took off in a northeastern direction, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the men chasing them.
"Guess our disguises didn't work!" Bubbles cried.
"Apparently not!" Boomer added.
"Why do we keep running from these guys??" Butch shouted.
"Yeah, let's beat the stuffing outta them!" Buttercup added.
They continued running as Blossom exclaimed, "No, we'll only get in more trouble with the locals, we're the freaks, remember? Do you really think any one of them will actually help us after we beat these guys up, especially if we beat up their military?"
She turned and looked over her shoulder to see the men all drawing guns to fire at them. "We need to speed this up, though. C'mon!"
She blasted off and the rest followed as both groups of men began shooting at them. They dodged bullets whizzing by and headed toward the river. "Boat it is!" Blossom exclaimed.
They landed in Puerto Villarroel and saw more military men at the port. They skidded to a halt as the men saw them.
"How did they know to come here??" Boomer shouted.
"Well, they already had the bus station covered, this is the only other way out of Santa Cruz besides the airline." Blossom yelled as they ran from the men. "They're probably there, too, waiting!"
Brick saw a small wooden boat on the river heading in the general direction they needed to go. He led the group around a line of buildings and took off for the boat. They followed him and landed on the boat. They quickly ducked under benches on the boat's deck and hid from view as the boat came into the men's line of sight. The men looked around, frustrated that they had lost the children again. They ran back to the port to regroup as Blossom cautiously poked her head out from one of the benches to watch them go. They had not seen the children get on the boat.
The boat's operator looked back when he heard them land on his deck. He wrapped a rope around the steering wheel of the boat to keep it from drifting from its course and headed back to where the children were hiding under the benches. He stooped down and looked under one to find Bubbles huddled in a corner of the boat's deck. He smiled kindly and reached his hand out to her.
"It is OK, you come out now little one." he said in a soothing voice.
Bubbles smiled at the man and reached for his hand. Butch slapped the man's hand back and got in front of Bubbles. The man was surprised to find six children on his boat. "Dios mío!" he exclaimed. "Six? What are you doing here? You lost?"
They all came from their hiding places as the boat entred a long stretch of the river surrounded by thick forest.
"No, we're not lost." Butch stated sternly.
Blossom spoke up. "We just needed a ride."
The man looked at them and asked, "Where you go?"
"Trinidad." Blossom replied.
The man's face lit up at the mention of the city. "Ahh, Trinidad! My home! I live there many years ago! You like it there, I promise! I live on boat, now, fish to make money."
"So, we can ride with you?" Brick asked.
The man beamed. "Of course! I catch many fish this trip. Plenty to eat and drink for long trip!"
Boomer sat on one of the benches. "How long?" he asked.
The man rubbed his chin and replied, "Could be three days, could be ten days."
"Ten days!" they groaned together.
"Yep," the man replied, "depend on tide and weather. Don't worry! I have much onboard. Ride be over before you know it!" He turned and returned to the controls of the boat.
Brick plopped on one of the benches. "Ten days? Sheesh, what else can go wrong on this trip?" He put his hand under his shirt and held his aching side.
Blossom sat across from him and rubbed her eyes. "Well, maybe it won't be so long. He said it could be only three days."
"That's still a long time, Blossom." Bubbles piped up.
"Well, it doesn't matter, I guess. We're stuck here now." Boomer added. He reached under the bench and pulled out an old turn buckle that had both its ends broken off. He toyed with the chunk of metal, then found a piece of thin rope behind the seat. He fashioned a yo-yo from the pieces and proceeded to entertain himself with it.
Brick leaned back against the cabin of the boat and watched Boomer playing with his yo-yo. Bubbles sat looking out across the water. The sunlight glistened off the surface making it look like clean glass. "This is really neat!" she exclaimed.
Butch looked at her and replied, "It all looks the same after awhile. Hot and dreary."
Bubbles giggled. "It's fun for now. Me and Boomer spent most of the last few weeks riding in a dirty old truck! This is a new thing to me."
"Weeks?" Buttercup said. "Sheesh, has it been that long already?"
Blossom nodded. "Yep, it's been that long."
"Professor is probably really worried about us, isn't he?" Bubbles asked.
Blossom again nodded. "Yeah, Bubbles, he probably is. He knows we can take care of ourselves, though."
Butch snickered. Buttercup looked at him. "What's so funny about that?"
Brick spoke in his brother's defense. "Nothing, just that at least somebody actually notices that you three are gone, that's all."
Blossom looked at Brick who had lifted his shirt to examine his sore side. She felt a moment of sorrow for the Boys. "You guys really never had a chance in life, did you?"
Brick put his shirt down and laid his head back again. He closed his eyes and replied, "Well, let's see, made out of snips, whatever they are, snails, and puppy dog tails, borne out of a jail cell toilet by a lunatic monkey too smart for his own good, only purpose for us was to get rid of you."
Boomer continued, "...and when that didn't work, we got dumped into the sewer after you three got rid of us instead."
"Sounds like a bad movie, in a way." Butch added.
"How did you guys end up in the sewer, anyway?" Buttercup asked. "I mean, we saw you guys break down into nothing, yet you're here again."
Brick, eyes still closed, shrugged his shoulders. "Beats me." he replied.
"So, since we're playing twenty questions here, where did you three come from?" Butch asked.
Blossom giggled. "Oh, Professor Utonium wanted to make something good. Townsville was a pretty horrible place then, crime everywhere, dirty, you know..."
"He used sugar, spice, and everything nice!" Bubbles continued.
"OK, that's a given, I guess, but the super powers bit?" Boomer asked.
Buttercup yawned and said, "Oh, that's 'cause Mojo pushed him and made him crash into a container of Chemical X."
Boomer and Butch burst into laughter. "Wait, wait, wait, Mojo Jojo lived in your house? What was he, like your family pet or something?"
"No, he was Professor's lab assistant. The Chemical X blast affected him, too. It made his brain grow really big, so that's why we have Mojo Jojo now." Blossom explained.
The days and nights dragged on as they traveled slowly down the river. The boat captain prepared meals of some of the fish he caught for the day and chipped beef for them with sides of beans and rice, rice and beans, and leftover rice with a little bit of beans thrown in. They ate as the captain spun tales of his life on the river fishing for his income. He had seen pink dolphins, found sunken treasure which had in turn made him extremely wealthy, even though to look at him, they couldn't tell, even claimed to have wrestled an alligator. He smoked a large ceramic and wood pipe, the fragrant scent of mint tobacco filling the air around them.
As days turned into nights, they settled on the benches to sleep. The captain, whose name they had discovered was Ricardo, brought out blankets and rough burlap pillows for them to use. Bubbles shivered with cold one night, and he handed her his own thick down comforter. She thanked him and snuggled in the worn but soft blanket.
As the others drifted off to sleep on the fourth night, Brick sat up, watching the water and looking at the sky. He had a thousand thoughts in his head, but the one that kept coming back was Buttercup's question. Why were he and his brothers back? He couldn't remember anything from the time Blossom kissed him to the time he woke up in the sewer. He and his brothers had wandered the streets of Townsville at night for weeks, looking for places to hide, scrounging in trash bins for anything edible, and avoiding the citizens. They had slept in alleys, underneath bridges, and in abandoned cars during the days, terrified that someone would find them and destroy them again, or, worse, drag them back to Mojo.
After getting soaked in a rain deluge one night, Butch had come down with a vicious case of flu. His temperature had skyrocketed as he shivered uncontrollably with chills. Finally, after three days, Butch's fever broke.
They then decided to leave Townsville in hopes of finding a place more willing to take them in. The same afternoon, Mojo Jojo made his move, snatching Boomer as the three Boys slept in a car in the local junkyard. Brick and Butch found Mojo's letter taped to the car's broken windshield, but were oblivious to its meaning. They spent the next several days searching for Boomer to no avail. They finally sought out Ms. Keane, the school teacher, to ask for her help. Brick could still see her face when he closed his eyes, her eyes wide with shock as she backed away from her front door upon seeing them. They had begged for her help and her silence and she had agreed. She had told them what was written on the envelope and directed them to the Utonium residence. She had also remarked that Brick and Butch seemed more "civilized", though at the time, neither had understood her meaning. The only difference Brick had sensed in himself and his brothers was their now missing need to trash everything in their paths. Did this mean that the Rowdyruff Boys were now suddenly "good"?
Brick chuckled to himself as he realized no one in Townsville would believe that scenario. He decided to relieve his thoughts by practicing writing his name as Blossom had instructed him. He found a piece of burnt wood and used the blackened end as a crude pencil. He said the letters softly to himself as he wrote them.
"B...R...I...C...K..." he finished, pleased with himself for remembering them all. He noticed the map and the letter tucked under Blossom's hand. He reached for them and gently pulled them out. He looked at the letter and tried to sound out the words written on the paper. He made little progress on it and gave up in frustration. He put the letter and map in his back pocket and settled down to sleep.