Motorplex

A great many ideas were contributed by my friend Red and my friend whose pen name is Lust_Demon!

Mike's blood ran cold. Everything he'd said to the Managers spun through Mike's mind in frantic donuts. The trade-in offers. "Item return". Chuck's posture, Mike giving orders- good lord Lickety-Lips had given him a "manager's only" offer to his face and he didn't even think about it! The managers in the vests- they weren't just the ruling class, the 'customers' were their slaves! Lickety-Lips had been trying to buy Chuck from him!

"CHUCK!" He stuffed the receipt into his jacket and ran for the door. He slammed shoulder-first into the glass, and it didn't open. "I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! Let me back in!"

The door slid open just a sliver, and a voice- not Quintessa, Marcus this time- smarmily chimed, "All sales final."

"Chuck wasn't for sale!" He wedged his fingers into the door and pulled them open enough to get the toe of his boot inside. "He's not my property!"

Marcus's voice dripped with sadistic delight as he explained. Mike felt the weight in his stomach lighting into a raging fire that licked at the bottom of his heart, focusing his anger into a rage point towards that one disgusting man. "Admission to handling stolen property renders all sales void. Property will be repossessed. Thank you for shopping-"

Mike was going to stomp his face into the concrete. With a primal roar, he shoved the doors apart and solidly kicked into the wall of boxes. They broke with a satisfying rumble and pinned Marcus to the floor. Once Mike's eyes adjusted to the dark, he took a special delight in planting his foot down on Marcus's solar plexus. Chuck had to be at Front Desk, it only made sense that she'd bring Chuck back to where she lived-

Marcus coughed and shouted, "Security!"

Mike was ready for anything. He had his staff handy, he had the emergency supplies pack strapped to his back, he had Marcus under his boot heel. He could handle any guy "Security" could throw at him.

His heart nearly stopped when he saw the box walls moving to make way for a pack of attack dogs.

He really panicked when the shoppers on either side of him started closing the gap to grab at him.

He had to move, not think, just move. He vaulted to the top of a box wall and started running, towards the attack dogs only because it was the direct path in front of him. The boxes weren't stable at all, and every step nearly sent him flying because the cardboard crumpled under his heel, or the shoppers underneath were moving the wall to trip him up. He jumped a gap onto another wall, which gave out under him completely and sent him falling backwards onto a clump of shoppers. He struggled out of the hard landing, his feet finding more people than floor, and only just made it back onto the higher ground when he felt fangs clipping around the sole of his boot. He kept running, and this time he wasn't sure of a direction, he just went.

Shoppers on either side of the wall surged up like a tide of hands, trying to catch him, all on their manager's orders. He could hear them shouting indistinctly over the din. He called out to the crowd, "You don't have to listen to them! I'm on your side! Don't you want out of-"

A hand caught his ankle, and its owner shouted, "Trade-in offer!"

With a pang of immediate remorse, Mike deployed his staff and planted the end straight into the shopper's face. They let him go immediately, and he leaped for a wall. His staff dug into the concrete with a satisfying 'shunk', and he pulled himself off of the box wall and up into the ledge of a neon sign. Pulling the staff back out of the wall was a trickier maneuver, but at least here, he had room to breathe. He was out of the reach of the dogs and the shoppers, and if he got his footing, he could make the jump from here onto a rope bridge.

He scanned the crowd. One of the managers was pulling out a shotgun. An actual, metal, pellet-shooting shotgun. Mike only knew about them because Jacob told stories about using them on little clay frisbees for fun, and how one of them exploded and nearly took off his father's arm.

The neon sign cracked and dropped, and Mike thought "Screw planning" and jumped for the rope bridge. It immediately snapped under the sudden weight, pitching sideways and dumping every shopper on the bridge into the crowd below. Only reflexes and crazy high luck kept him from falling; his hands locked around a wood plank and left him dangling, and the adrenaline in his system made him haul himself up and onto the remaining rope of the bridge. On his hands and feet, he could dart along the rope like a slack line. It only barely worked, and he couldn't tell how he was managing it even while he was doing it. He could only keep running with the dogs baying below him and the knowledge that somewhere behind him, someone had a gun leveled at him and he couldn't see whether he was pulling the trigger or not. Just as his feet hands connected with the floor on the other side of the bridge, the rope snapped, and a chunk of the ceiling that had been roughly in line with his head burst into splinters above him. Little orange pips dropped onto the floor below the explosion of plywood. Rubber bullets. Well, he thought distantly, at least they weren't trying to outright kill him, maybe just... catch him and keep him here forever.

He pulled himself up and ran, just in time for more dogs to round the corner running towards him, and he was up and onto the box walls in an instant, gunning for the stairs.

It never let up. Somehow security on every floor knew to be after him, and he couldn't stop to get his head together. He just had to move and run, up those same stairs he and Chuck had been casually hiking before, except now they threatened to shatter with every panicked step, and behind him they rumbled with the scratch of claws and a stampede of non-slip shoes. One flight, another, three, four-

By the eighth, his legs were starting to ache, and with that thought he steeled his shoulders and sprinted. He heard the guards gasping and wheezing behind him, and by the next few flights, he was starting to lose the dogs. He wouldn't be able to lose them, though. They would pick up his smell and keep looking for him while he was catching his breath. The thought, the mental image of an attack dog digging its teeth into his leg, terrified him enough to keep him running even with his muscles screaming at him to just stop-

At the fifteenth floor, Clearance Section, automotive parts, he whipped his staff on fully and sliced down the wooden stairs. They fell from the opening in the floor in tiny, smoldering pieces and folded into themselves like a house of cards. He could hear the managers shouting something to the shoppers downstairs, but while they did, he got an idea. He turned off the fire on his staff blades and sliced open boxes of supplies. The foul-smelling mix of oil, steering fluid, soap, and any other car-related liquid stashed inside spilled onto the floor behind him. His trail covered, he dashed up to the next floor.

He hid in a corner, behind a pair of refrigerators, and waited.

It was a tense hour. It felt like years. A constant shuffle from below, and finally, feet sloshing against a wet floor. A manager in charge sounded off in disgust one item after another. "Damaged good... damaged good... damaged good... send to Customer Service for disposal. Damaged good..." He couldn't hear any dogs. Flashlights combed over the floor, peeking through the cracks in his hiding place, but none landed on him.

Eventually, they left to look for him upstairs. Passed right over him... not payed well enough to look, he thought with a little humor.

He didn't dare check his clock until he stopped hearing any noise at all. The managers had passed back downstairs. His plan must have worked. The dogs couldn't smell him under all the chemicals, and the managers looked right over him.

He checked the time. It had been seven hours since they left that morning. He was starving... good thing Chuck had packed him some...

Mike's heart hurt. Curled into his dark little hiding spot, his appetite dropped out of his stomach, replaced by thick, heavy guilt. He could handle anything, he said. He could keep him safe. Mike raked through his hair to rub at the back of his head. It barely helped... what was he supposed to do now? He couldn't fight his way through an entire tribe of innocent people and a pack of trained dogs... He couldn't call for backup, and he hadn't established a rendevous time with the gang or anything. Sometimes he and Chuck were just gone for this long, and usually they wrapped up, picked up a pizza or two, found a good high spot and enjoyed the view. Nothing like this.

He wondered. He couldn't get calls out. Maybe within the building? He pulled his comm open and whispered. "Chuck? Can you hear me?"

There was a long second of fuzz... and then a pixellated image of blue, the blue of Chuck's shirt, but no sound. Well, no, there was sound. If Mike strained his ears, he could hear some faint shuffling around, but couldn't see anything else. He tried again. "Chuck?"

The image violently jerked, flashing concrete gray before shifting back to the blue, and then he could hear it. It was definitely Chuck's voice, but extremely muffled, like he'd been gagged. He still reached an impressively loud pitch behind his gag, and something Mike couldn't see thumped against- something solid. It was all so frustrating!

He heard the smack of lips, and Mike and Chuck both went stock still.

"It's time for your performance review..." Lickety-Lips giggled and pulled up a chair- the scrape of chair against concrete was pretty distinct- and sat down on it with a heavy "Oof. Chuck. New hires, very promising... Training will begin at opening, so look your best! Dress code requires short, soft hair-"

Mike wasn't sure what Chuck did, but judging by Lickety-Lip's sudden, solid exhale and the ugly "HWUFF" noise she'd made, it hurt, and he was instantly proud of Chuck for doing it. He was especially proud when Lickety-Lips started wailing "DADDY! This merchandise is defective!"

"The Manager's office is now closed!" Manager Tony was just barely audible from Mike's viewpoint. "Please try again. Our office hours are 9 a.m. to 11 p.m."

Lickety hissed in a long breath. "Chuck, I'm going to need you to stay late tonight."

Again, he waited in the dark for silence. Only the comm screen kept him lit, and his breath caught until, finally, he heard nothing. The color of Chuck's shirt changed from normal to a dark blue: the lights had been turned off.

"Chuck?"

Chuck whimpered.

"I'm so sorry," was the first thing that spilled out of his mouth, without even meaning to, and he cradled the comm screen in his hands. "You were right, you were right about everything- I'm coming for you, and we're getting out of here and never coming back."

The camera moved haltingly, and with a little wiggle, the pixels changed. Now Mike could see bars, and a few shoddy-made cages across from where Chuck was being kept, housing more normi- slaves, Mike reminded himself. They all had blond hair. Lickety-Lips must have had a thing for blonds, and oh that made him feel gross thinking about it.

"Maybe they're going to sleep..." Mike thought out loud. "I'll be on my way. If she tries anything funny... I don't know! Kick her in the nads or something for me."

Chuck, through his gag, laughed, and Mike felt the weight in his gut lift.