MAINTENANCE MERGENCES: "CHUCK'S CAGEYNESS AND THE WHOLE KEIJI MESS"
Only another thirty-five minutes or so, and the military brass were coming to get them all. It was the fourth day that Chuck Greene and the others had been cooped up in the safehouse…well, at least the most of them, with Chuck itinerantly speeding about from place to place in Fortune to get more and more of them. Just a few items were all Chuck needed at this point, and he could huff on back to the safehouse safe and sound once again. It was just a matter of getting the necessary PP.
No, not Prestige Points.
Or that other PP, either (matters are contaminated enough as is, what with casinoloads of zombies milling and moaning around…let's keep the dirtiness down, shall we?)
See, over the course of the last three or four days he had obtained the necessary means for his daughter's survival through pharmaceutical, paramedical, postal, and plump-paunchy-pudgy-portly-person-al (ie Richard Kelly) means.
PP, to Chuck, meant "P_ Procurement"…all for the sake of picking up Zombrex.
Chuck was indeed inventing his very own lexicon while here in Fortune City…"p(a)wnage" could, yes, refer to his perennial pouncing upon unsuspecting undead…but it would, more prominently in his near future, mean a jaunt to the nearest pawnshop—looters, looming more creepily, honestly, than a humvee full of zombies—the next kind of "P" he would probably need to deal with, he'd figured, in order for him to score his fifth dosage of Zombrex for his beloved daughter.
And oh, how utterly, unimaginably grateful that precocious Katey Greene was.
Sending her father out to accumulate a whole plush menagerie for her—the blue donkey, the brown bull, the pink elephant—even after he had secured nothing less than a live flesh and blood Bengali tiger for her as her very own pet.
Yes, in this small control environment full of flesh-devouring creatures from casino to casino, there was nothing like a giant carnivorous predator to put a once-munched-upon-already single-digit-aged daughter at ease.
And yet, Katey would look up at Chuck reassuringly from her position on the cat-cohabitated-couch, waving her zombie-bite-scarred arm at him as she ran her hand up and down Snowflake's fur, the latter purring back, satisfied.
When Chuck had brought the sizeable synthetic animals, Katey started getting them all in a semicircle, then carrying them here and there and such. The harried hero figured she was trying to emulate him, imitating her father in pantomimes of rescues to get survivors to safety.
But then, a straggler grab or so later, he'd come back to Katey: "Daddy, I heard Jacob say something 'bout giant dice out in the casino outside our safehouse…"
And then a couple of runs after this, during which he'd procured said die…oh, Katey and her fluffy animals were in a configuration alright.
But it wasn't about search and rescue.
"Come on, seven!" he'd heard his daughter say, to the bewilderment of Sullivan and others around, in the space near the bathrooms. He then caught sight of her…and the huge bumbling red die she was pushing around…and the donkey and the bull and the elephant, with about two or three hundred in cash at the foot of each.
And about $10,000 right next to the telltale "Puff Puff" backpack lying on the end.
"I gave her some scratch for play money," explained Janus, elbowing Chuck playfully. "I figured, what the hell."
What the hell, indeed, Chuck thought, wondering really what the hell was happening to his daughter. Besides nearly missing "turning" every morning.
When she grew bored of this, she'd left the beastly runner-ups to the mercy of Snowflake, who'd welcomed them with open jaws in their new capacity as his newest chew toys.
Now it was another several hours later, with only a little while to go before the soldiers' splashdown. Our hero was still pushing through Palisades, planning to go the long way and not take Linette's jaunty shortcut out of a need to stock up on a variety of foods for himself, Stacey, Rebecca, Sullivan, Richard, Stuart, Vikki, Randolph, Royce, Walter, and yes of course his daughter. As Chuck pressed forward, pacing past the Shanks, he thought about the several conversations he'd had with Katey since her unbecoming craps rout.
Chuck recalled that, many hours ago, he was in the room with Stacey and Snowflake, taking the three-minute (in our time, yes, fifteen seconds) vacation he always gave himself before pushing back out into the plazas.
"Daddy," began Katey, from her ordinary couch-potato position—from which she was starting to migrate periodically and alarmingly, "I really appreciate all you've done, in getting my medicine and the toys."
"Oh honey, it's nothing," said Chuck. "It's the least I can do, considering things." He was thinking about his soul companion, her mother, the one they had lost back in Vegas (the real Strip, not the unnecessary superfluous faux one that was Fortune City).
"And I managed to beat Mega Man, just a couple of hours ago," she offered idly, sort of hinting.
Chuck nodded, staring emptily into the twirling atoms of dust in the security camera room air.
"As…as much as I appreciate all you've done…I wouldn't mind, perhaps, Daddy…if you could please please…do a bit more again."
Chuck looked sideways, out of the corner of his eye at his daughter.
"What…what do you mean, honey?"
"Well, like I said, I've beaten one of the recent Mega Man games—one of them," she started, emphatically stressing the "one" so that the word pretty much launched into her father's face. "I kind of…sort of wouldn't mind if you perhaps managed to get a few more for me."
"Now where would I..." Chuck started, as he could swear that he never saw any videogame places out in the various sections of the City.
"I've saw on security feeds that some of the Tape It Or Dies have a stash in their hideout…maybe, Daddy, you can go and scare up some from them…even if you might have to pay a little. I just need all of what's on this little list here."
There were about thirteen games on the list, all for what appeared to be a Playstation Portable, but wasn't. (It was actually a portable emulator which Katey had forced Chuck to get from looters in Vegas, just before the two of them got out of dodge; among others, it played prototypes of games that weren't even out yet to the mass public and might not be out for several years, if ever). "The ones I want the most are the Mega Man Battle Network games."
Then she looked up, at a corner of the room, as if gazing directly into some imagined camera mounted there, and said, "Be sure to check out the new Mega Man Battle Network 70, designed by Keiji Inafune, in stores now!" (This one was available to the purchasing public.)
This made Chuck blanch somewhat, Stacey turn from her watchperson position at the security controls, and even Snowflake perk his head up and growl at bit.
Chuck figured it was just a bit of cabin fever with his daughter, though. He sighed, then seconds later gave in. "Alright, alright, anything for my little Kateykins. Anything else you need?"
Katey looked up at the ceiling a second. Then: "Well, it might be sweet of you if you maybe got me a pretty knit cap and one piece pajama. You can get it at Small Fry Duds, I saw them from the security feeds. I kind of need it, …for him." She muttered this last phrase under her breath.
"What? Who?"
"Oh, nothing Daddy." She reached over and ruffled the mane of the once psychotic but now inexplicably gentle Snowflake. (Yes, I know about the steaks, but still, beings get hungry again, you know? And that was like three days ago). "I can't wait till you get back again."
"Me neither, my precious Freedom Cub." Chuck stepped out again into the security hallway, to once more take on the zombified zones of Fortune City.
The motocross champ was crossing Donatucci's, grabbing lobsters off counters (as he might have done similarly in an alternate reality with a better ending, snatching lobsters off of the cement underfoot to put directly into his mouth for energy while fighting a wayward final enemy firing at him from above), while he thought of what happened thereafter in the security area.
"Honey, I managed to get you most of what you asked for…Ultimate Apocalyptic Ghouls n' Ghosts n' Goblins, Super Duper Street Fighter 5 Hyper ADHD Returning Defending Champion Edition, and two of the three Mega Man Battle Network titles you wanted me to get."
"I see, Daddy," said Katey, her face lighting up a bit especially at the last part. Not focusing at all on the four that Chuck did succeed in getting, she said, "Which…which one didn't you manage to find?"
Chuck crinkled his brow. "It was Mega Man Battle Network 69, honey. Johnny Pipes just didn't have one on him."
"But that's the best one!"
"Look, honey, I went all over the place, I checked Children's Castle, I checked the Robsakas. Okay? They just didn't have it. …Oh, by the way, I also got the cap and PJs for you from Small Fry." He threw the clothing to his daughter lightly (when before he might have handed them to her…he was getting a little impatient with her).
"But you know that I just have to have all of them. I can't believe that you couldn't find…"
"Katey, I told you, I went all over!" returned Chuck firmly, his voice a little raised. Paces away, Rebecca Chang was just coming back from interviewing some of the Looters, spinning their trade as a story on "capitalism thriving in the face of undead catastrophe." "I'm telling you, I just couldn't find it! I couldn't get a 69 out there! I just couldn't get a 69!"
"Chuck 'Still Creek Savior' Greene!" purred Rebecca, as she alighted into the room. "That is not something you discuss with your young daughter."
He ran a worn hand across his face to straighten out all the excitement.
"Now with me, of course," she said a bit more softly, sauntering toward him in her inappropriately unsettling vampy come-on tones as she approached, "you can discuss matters such as this. In fact, I would be delighted to table this discussion for the not too distant future."
"That's not what I meant, Becca," said Chuck, also softly, so that his daughter didn't hear. He didn't want her to grow up too fast—though between her exposure to the undead hordes as well as her ever-increasing spirit of materialism, she was growing up pretty damn fast nonetheless. Still, he wanted to preserve some part of her innocence, while he could.
"Well, it's something we can…get into…later, at any rate." By this point Rebecca was lustily circling Chuck so many times she was basically doing laps around him. "You'll see why I work for…Action News…"
"Alright, alright. Later," he told her, Rebecca backing off at last. She smirked at him suggestively, then slinked off into another of the safehouse's many rooms.
Chuck of course didn't really mean anything sexual when he mentioned the Mega Man sequel's oversaturatingly high numeric designation…though he had to admit to himself that when he said to Katey "I was gonna get some right after the show," just as the two reached the security camera area for the first time, he definitely wasn't talking about Zombrex.
And he'd also had saved…
"Daddy, I was gonna ask you about this, too!" Katey piped up, pulling an envelope from the table upon which there was milk and OJ days before. She pointed: "This here…SUMMER FUN(D)." Are we gonna go somewhere again next summer? Are you gonna take me on that trip to Capcom Headquarters like I asked before? Are we gonna meet Keiji, like I always wanted?"
At this point Chuck wanted to sit down, right next to Snowflake, bury his head in his hands, and wonder if he should want to have his head chomped off by the titanic, if tranquilized, tiger. "…Yes," he lied, finally. "Yes, it was supposed to be a surprise, but yeah, I'm taking you there next June. Although I told you before, Keiji Inafune doesn't reside on our version of Earth."
"Oh boy! I can't wait anyway, Daddy!" Katey said, a bit more mollified after the trauma of not completing her Battle Network collection, uninterrupted up to 71.
Chuck smiled sheepishly at her, shaking his head at one of Cora Russel's "employees" who was walking past outside—the one for whom the envelope was originally intended, for use hopefully sometime in the next hour or so.
Ah, well; there was still Rebecca.
"Maybe I'll be able to get Battle Network 69 then, Daddy," she added, pointedly, at Chuck.
As the hero was leaving once again, to risk his rear for the sake of friggin' peace art, he could hear his daughter once again crowing up into an imaginary camera in a corner of the security room, "Be sure to pick up Dark Void -17—yet another "minus" prequel delving in the muddled past of Will Grey—Executively Produced by Keiji Inafune and in stores NOW!"
Now Chuck was sprinting through passels of the creatures, busting open an occasional teller machine or two to bring the aforementioned "fun" funds back up. Hopefully he would be better able to hide these assets from his daughter next time.
He thought about what she had asked him to do next.
"I'm a bit tired of Mega Man and Arthur and Ryu and Wayne from Lost Planet Colonies Edition and Viewtiful Joe and Dante for right now, Daddy," she had said. "I was wondering if you could possibly get me something to draw or paint with. I have some really fun pictures in my head I wanna draw."
Chuck opened and closed his mouth at this, refreshed somewhat that his daughter was at least asking for something that was not completely consumer-based, something creative and constructive instead. "Well, okay…what is it that you'd like?"
"I want some of the spray paints that are out there—maybe like the green ones, like our last name, Daddy, we could live up to it and make everything green!—and some of those construction cones to mark off my work."
Chuck had kind of had it with making everything green or "going green" lately, having endured Vikki's fetch favor and her own terrible pun on his surname. Still, he'd had a twenty-second wind, so he obliged her.
In the ensuing hour and a half or so (his time), Chuck had recovered the artistic items Katey had requested, bestowed them unto his now-somewhat-beloved child, and had snatched up Lillian and her mother Camille to boot. He brought the older woman and her daughter back, then skipped up the stairs, ready once again to check on his daughter (as well as involuntarily check upon Snowflake).
She wasn't there.
"What the hell?" he started, looking over at Ray, who was just leisurely hoofing into the room. "Where's Katey?"
"I tried to stop her," the seeming security guard said, near the doorway, "she was too fast for husky old me."
Chuck looked incredulously at Ray…
…then looked in wide-eyed disbelief at the giant red door out and to the left.
Between two of the three orange pylons Chuck had nabbed for his daughter were huge letters scrawled out in green: "KT + KG 4FR."
It was a good thing for Katey, too, that she managed to hide soundlessly inside the maintenance room just near to the airduct, while Chuck cantered past with his latest two survivors…good thing he didn't need to make a tape-it pit stop then and there.
Because now it could be seen, in the small enclosure, a small pair of hands barely clearing the tabletop, with a can of spray paint in one hand and the third pylon in the other, while painfully generic metal music played in the background.
Minutes later, after wasted instants of fruitless searching: "Do you have any idea where she might have gotten to?" Chuck demanded, ready to pin Ray against the wall. "Any idea where she might be?"
"Take it…take it easy, man. That cute little CURE number's out there now, trying to get her to come back in. You must have just missed her."
"LET OUR CASINO MANAGEMENT KNOW THAT I WILL NOT STAND FOR THE SYSTEMATIC NEGLECT OF MY RELATIONSHIP WITH KEIJI INAFUNE!"
It sounded like it was coming from the television inside the security camera room.
Chuck hurried back into the security camera room a moment, ignoring Snowflake's of course understandably booming restlessness, and stared.
He couldn't believe it.
Out there—right out in Royal Plaza, atop the awning of the second floor Players, was Rebecca with her ever-present camcorder, filming her, his daughter, dressed in the duds Chuck secured for her from Small Fry (in an attempt to impress an Executive Producer from another reality), standing around with a taped-it makeshift airhorn. Somehow she managed to configure the device such a way that she could speak into it, rather than just make the horn's head-exploding sound.
"WE MUST TAKE DRASTIC ACTION NOW!" she finished, lowering the device and looking around at several zombies who couldn't give a good damn about her cause. (As if ordinary humans would care, either). Regardless, Katey somehow managed to get her hands on the red/white/blue spray paint as well, and had graffitied KURE (which stood for Katey and keiji United across Related Earths, as she explained to Rebecca moments before) all across the windows and walls nearby.
Fortunately for her, and for Chuck's sanity, out rushing towards both Katey and Rebecca was Stacey Forsythe, finally taking action once again after enduring her three-day-long bout of the sedentary armchair-commanding disorder known as Otisitis. (Her case was not as severe or intrusive as that which occurred in Willamette, however, which was a plus for Chuck (and a minus for Frank, back then)). Stacey quickly whisked up Chuck's daughter, shot Rebecca a condemningly sour look, and, accordingly, the three began to beat it back to the safehouse once more. Stacey, for one, couldn't believe that things had regressed to this point with Katey. (Though she had to concede that the girl would make a good activist someday…she just needed an adjustment regarding her desired missions and visions).
So now Chuck was finally making it through past the last few stores of Royal Flush, running just past The Man's Sport, sort of sideways drop kicking through windows to nab some boxing gloves on the way. He'd already had a bowie knife in his possession, and (not to be blasphemous or anything but) everyone was lately comparing him to Jesus almost, citing the trite phrase "What would Chuck do?" which everyone adopted as a credo except of course for Seymour, whose messiah was apparently John Wayne instead. Chuck was also blasphemously Christlike in terms of the miracles he could seemingly perform; among them was indeed the miracle of the gloves and knives, in which he could amazingly multiply one meager bowie knife into ten to use for his knife gloves. (Who knows, though, perhaps Christ himself might have performed that miracle as well, had He been around a bit longer). And also like Jesus, Chuck showed off his great miracle(s) to women of ill repute with whom he fraternized—though unlike in the Good Book, Summer was no Mary Magdalene, and Chuck had less honest intentions with his own professional lady than did Jesus.
He was anxious like nothing before, because he knew he was almost going to miss his deadline. It was well past 8:00am, and reassuringly, Katey was all 'brexed up for the day—yes, she'd already had her "'brexfast"—so that was not the concern right now.
What Chuck was now hurrying about was of much more paramount concern.
It was 9:44. He was running through the first set of double doors, then down past the maintenance ones (ducking his head in despite his rush…just to make sure about any more possible wayward activity on Katey's part), then at last into the steamy subterranean areas just before the airvent, which this time Chuck took on with a jumping baseball slide of sorts.
Flopping out of the duct a few seconds later—9:46 now—Chuck huffed back into the security camera chamber.
Again, no sign of Katey.
He was about to throw up his hands (as well as whatever was in his stomach, once again about to live up to his name by literally up-CHUCKing as he did after he had a spoiled hamburger or too much vodka), when all of a sudden:
"FULL HOUSE, FOOLS!"
He couldn't believe it. Because he was so busy recently settling the Family Feud, castigating the perpetrators of the World's Most Dangerous Trick, and paying his dues (not moneywise, but the hard way) to become a member of the Fortune City Botany Club, he'd never made time to Ante Up.
Katey, though, apparently just did.
Chuck ran through the labyrinthine, confusing-ass corridors of the safehouse, going up and down staircases and getting lost a bit to eventually get to the source of the sound.
He then bent to one knee and punched the ground in utter, my-daughter-has-turned-esque frustration.
"Katey, what in Gordon Dawkins's good name…?"
In the room before him, there were survivors out of sorts, clotheswise. Yes, Kristin was wearing her blue robe deviation from the flouncy entertainer gear from before…but the others. Jack was now in full-out armor, his green and yellow shirt and other telltale clothing (other than his helmet, which now matched the rest of him perfectly) cooped up in a far corner. Woodrow was similarly outrageously decked out, in an orange jumpsuit (which Jack and the others here figured he should get used to anyway, with his federal offenses), Woody's suit stashed near to Jack's plus-size wear. Trixie-Lynn, still with her inbred-Cobra-Commander-esque red bandana, yes…but her own duds additionally in the same nook, and herself with a Willamette Security uniform on. The heavenly hayseed returned Chuck's incredulous look with a glance that seemed to say, "What? It's cold up in here, yo."
It was then that Chuck realized that his alternate hero costumes were likely not in his locker anymore.
And yes, what else was situated atop all of that apparel in the corner but…
…Puff Puff.
His daughter was reverting back to her "giant red die" days…only this time, the stakes were much higher, and individuals other than towering stuffed animals were being affected.
And Katey herself, well she looked almost the same as before…but her headphones were now replaced with nothing other than a bright white Terror Is Reality baseball cap. At this point he didn't even want to know where or how she got that.
"Hey Chu-… I mean, Daddy."
He ignored this filial insubordination. "Honey, what are you…"
"You're late, you know. Two minutes." She held up two forefingers to punctuate this. It was 9:49.
"I can't…GIVE THESE PEOPLE BACK THEIR CLOTHES!"
"What was the deal? I was supposed to be given Zombrex between the hours of 7:00am and 8:00am…then I was supposed to be given a new Capcom video game between the hours of 1:00pm and 2:00pm, 5:30pm and 6:30pm, 9:13 and 10:13pm, 3:56am and 4:56am, and…what other time?" She finished this last phrase condescendingly.
"8:47am and 9:47am." He was more tired than anything at this point.
"Right, right. And, as with the shots, not a minute before or after each window."
He just looked at her. At her, with yet again stacks of money behind her…and the others with not even the threads originally on their backs to their names.
"Stacey must have called about your running short, so there's no excuse. It doesn't matter anyway, I guess, because I'm bored with this. Hell, I can even give these people back what they wore…and you can get your old costumes back, Dad. Just let them use your bathroom/saveroom for a few minutes."
Chuck's head was about to explode like that of an undead upon whom he had delivered a DDT. As the other poker players were filing out to go to his bathroom: "What do I have to do, to get you to stop, Katey?"
The precocious, too-cute-under-any-circumstances,-even-these tyke merely shrugged, then looked at the ground for a bit.
She then turned her head back up to look him directly in the eye:
"Give me thirty million."
"WHAT?"
"Think about it, Chuck. You paid some tacky leather-wearing gambling-problem hillbilly twenty-five thou to accompany you back here. You put up half a mil with the useless Looting bastards for the sake of a spin or three in that ugly orange convertible. And don't think I didn't figure out what that envelope back there was for…ten thousand just to bring those floozy "professionals" to the safehouse…and then what you wanted to pay for with that…Chavez imbecile on top of it? Surely I'm worth much more than that.
"And besides," she continued, "I'll put the money toward a worthy cause; I'm gonna find a way to cross over to Inafune's world, in time. Keijunior, his son, is pretty high maintenance…and for once I think I'm gonna take care of someone else, rather than be taken care of."
Chuck looked off petulantly into a corner of the room. After all of what he did and provided.
"Man, f**k this."
He started off back towards the security camera room, on his own.
"I KNEW YOU WERE THE BAD GUY!" screamed Katey from the now-distant makeshift hustler den.
"Go advanced-zombie-vomit in your TIR hat, honey," the man said from over his shoulder.
Chuck went back to the camera room and just lay down for a while, taking an extended vacation of about six minutes. By that point, the zombies from the worst ending possible came lurching to the threshold; Stacey tried to stop them, but before they could bust in, Chuck leaped forward and spread the door wide, welcomingly open.
"I literally couldn't afford to save her," he said to Stacey, who cupped her hands aghast with eyes wide as he spun out back first onto the floor, cradling his fingers relaxedly behind his head as he waited for the incoming undead to work him over.