3~
The ropes around their wrists were cinched tight and looped around the girth of the trees, and with working tugs, the Questoids secured the victims, spread-eagle, with their backs to their own personal, green alters, facing out to unsympathetic cameras, and even less caring viewers.
Pinioned to his Manchineel, Professor Hatecraft watched as a Questoid wielding a manual pole pruner reached above him and began slicing nicks across the boughs over the professor, and then, finished by lightly carving an x through the bark directly over H. P.'s head.
When the robot left to attend to the other trees, Hatecraft turned his face to address his student, who was already tied to a neighboring tree.
"Flim Flam," the professor called to him. "How are you fairing?"
The teen glanced over to Hatecraft, and muttered, "I feel like a piñata. How are you holdin' up, Professor?"
"I'm trying to forestall seeing my life pass before my eyes out of immediate curiosity about something," the teacher said.
"What's that?"
"Why did you decide to take a course in psychology, anyway?"
The student gave a chuckle, despite his surroundings. "Oh, that's easy. I wanted to know how people think."
"So you can better deduce how to repair their fragile psyches?"
"Nah, Professor, so I can better take them for all they've got," Flim Flam grinned. "No sense being sloppy about it."
"Of course," Hatecraft sighed. "So much for molding young minds."
"I still say that we should've fought them off, Professor," Flim Flam said, as a non-sequitor.
The professor shook his head, sternly. "No, we were smart not to resist. No telling what these machines might have done if we had fought back. The situation was too dangerous, and as long as you are under my tutelage, I am responsible for your safety."
"Aw, Professor, I could've taken them. They're just a bunch of suckers."
Hatecraft wished that one of his hands were free so he could rub the stress from his temples. "Flim Flam, in your juvenile mind, just about everyone you meet is a, quote-unquote, sucker."
"Not everybody, Professor," the teen said, looking at him with rare sincerity. "I don't think you're one."
"Oh," the professor said, caught off-guard by such sentiment. "That was...rather kind of you to say."
"Forgive the pun, but this is gettin' sappy, Professor," the boy groused, letting his emotions get the better of the conman inside. "C'mon, with your brains and my savvy, we can bust out of this place! Whadaya say?"
H. P. sighed, looking around at the other frightened victims in his field of view. "Your enthusiasm is admirable, Flim Flam, but that may be easier said than done."
The Questoid assigned to guard the lounge, stood beyond its door, motionless yet alert. It was content to fulfill that function, running the occasional program in its computer brain, more often than not, a diagnostic, to efficiently pass the time, as the corridor was empty of threats.
"Help! Help!" a voice from the lounge cried out. "There's been a fight! Somebody's hurt! Help!"
The robot stiffened and turned to the door. It was understood that the prisoners were to be executed; however, they were not to come to any harm before then, meaning that the Questoid was, ironically, programmed to protect the humans, in the interim.
It opened the door and looked into a dark room. A mass of shadows moving along the curved bench in the back told it that the prisoners hadn't escaped, but there were, also, no immediate signs of distress from combat. Further investigation was deemed warranted.
It decided to step deeper into the room, keeping its optics trained on the prisoners. Thus, it did not see the simple trap that it had walked into.
A trap so small, it was the size of several LEMP capsules lying unnoticed on the hardwood floor. One unwitting step, later, and the whole room flashed like a lightning storm, before the guard felled over.
Jason ran ahead and turned the lights back on, while Sheriff Stone went through the machine's pockets, fished out its found ring of keys to every door of the clubhouse, and then, followed the others out of the lounge.
Peering up one end of the hallway to the other, gratefully, showed no threats.
"Okay, I need a janitor's closet," Marcie instructed them. "I need chemicals."
As they headed up the corridor, they soon came to a T-section in the hall, where the rest of the group split up and took either end, with Marcie, Red, and Velma discovering doors that led to a row of restrooms, Daisy and Stone finding the clubhouse's mechanical/electrical room, on the other side, and Jason seeing a door marked 'JAN,' next to it.
"Found it," Jason called out.
The rest met up with him, and with the door unlocked, Marcie dove into the large supply closet, her eyes sweeping over brooms, mops, brushes, and every container of cleaning fluid she could see.
Grabbing copious bottles of glass cleaner and generous jugs of bleach, she set them outside the closet. Then, she went back in, and pulled out a cardboard box full of small, empty spray bottles that she noticed lying on the floor.
"Help me bring this back to the lounge," Marcie said to them, as she grabbed the box and went up the hall. "We've got bottles to fill."
"Wait," Velma said to the sheriff, as the others began to heft the chemicals. "While you're working with those chemicals, give me the key ring, so I can unlock us from the clubhouse."
"All right," the sheriff said, handing her the keys.
"I'll, also, need you to come with me," she addressed a stunned Jason.
He nearly blanked out from the infatuation. She wanted to step away with him, all he could hear in his love-addled brain was 'I need you...', and best of all, Marcie would be nowhere to interfere.
"Uh, s-sure, Velma," Jason stammered, giddily. "Anything you say!"
"Good," she said, simply, as they went down the hallway, towards the public, forward end of the clubhouse.
A video camera, covered in a plastic tarp, and closest to the Emperor's Box, angled up to aim at a pleased Greenman overlooking and residing over the grim spectacle.
He regarded the camera and made a bold proclamation.
"Traditionalists, I had been absent from you, lo these many years. My mission was such that I had to depart, but for a little while. Yet, I know what my absence from you cost all of us. It gave the converts we gathered the time and social leeway they needed to question our ancient rituals, failing to understand that nothing is more powerful than a bond between the faithful and their gods, and nothing strengthens that bond more, than blood."
The speakers of the Jumbotron rang with the cheers of his followers, as the image shifted from viewers in the States, to others, elsewhere in the world.
"These neo-pagans, with their liberal views, want to worship the gods, but don't want to do what's necessary to achieve that. A bloodless faith is a weak faith, for how can we appreciate life...without embracing the reality of death? And so, my people, what I do, I do to honor the gods, to show what the world once believed, and what it will, once again!"
He pointed to the rafters, dramatically, and somewhere, in the building, a Questoid activated the arena's expansive sprinkler system.
Unseen by the spectators and Greenman, under the cover of the man-made rain, four heads popped out from the shadow of the unguarded, above-ground clubhouse entrance, and watched, dismayed, as an indoor torrent lashed across the football field.
Around the grove, Thorn Soldiers stood as sentries, while Herb Hounds prowled and serpentined among the trees, giving the proceedings the look of some perverse, wooded wonderland.
"Oh, no!" Marcie moaned.
"What's wrong?" Stone asked. "Why are the sprinklers on? What are those trees doing here?"
"It's Greenman's first sacrifice, by tree! That's what those seeds were for! Those trees are Manchineels!" Marcie explained, glancing to her friends. "Remember back at the Botanical Gardens, guys? You can't stand under them in the rain because the water would mix with that killer sap of theirs."
"That's why the people are tied to those trunks, and why the sprinklers are turned on," Daisy reasoned, horrified.
"Well, let's cut 'em down," Red said.
"We've got to get rid of those guards, first, and all of this bleach and glass cleaner is useless, now," Marcie fretted. "It'll wash right off, even if it does reach those plant monsters. We've got to improvise."
"What about your Insta-Ice capsules," Daisy suggested. "Can't we freeze those guys?"
Marcie shook her head. "Possibly, but their wood looks relatively soft. I couldn't throw my capsules hard enough to break against it."
Daisy pondered, for a moment, and then said, with realization, "What if something else could? All you need is more force, right? Back to the clubhouse, gang! I've got an idea!"
Jason watched Velma disappear under yet another desk, in another unlocked office. So far, three, along with the receptionist's kiosk in the clubhouse's lobby, were opened, entered, perused around their desktop computers, and were discovered to only have USB wireless adaptors in them.
"What are we looking for, Velma?" he asked, feeling a bit bored. "Just about every room we've been in has a computer in it, if that's what you're looking for."
"It's more than that," she explained. "All the computers we've seen, so far, are all connected to wireless adaptors."
Jason shrugged. "Yeah, that means that they're all receiving info from some wi-fi hub's network. We're, obviously, in a hotspot."
"Exactly, and I'm looking for that hub, a computer that's, hopefully, connected to a powerful router," Velma said, climbing out from under the desk.
"Something to do with that flash drive you took?"
"Everything."
A hostage, one of the two employees from Orange Ya Glad, blinked some irksome water from of his eyes in frustration. He didn't understand why he was trussed up against a tree, and was now getting drenched. This all seemed far too strange just to be a simple prank.
While he pondered this absurdity, he barely noticed a tickle of irritation working its way from the height of his scalp, the sides of his face, along the nape of his neck, and down the length of his back.
"If this wasn't bad enough," he complained, aloud, wiggling against the bark of the tree, and feeling wet and crotchety. "Now, I'm getting itchy, too?"
Just then, as a light mist from under the canopy began to settle in from above him, he found himself blinking more intermittently.
A sudden cough blasted from him, followed by more bouts of coughing that began to last longer and more persistently, to the fearful point that, eventually, he discovered that he no longer had any bodily control over it, or his ease at breathing.
A spasm overtook him, as fire suddenly raked along his head, face, neck and back, as if he were struck, repeatedly, with an invisible scourge. His face was a grimacing, blister-scarred mask of immediate suffering, where his eyes were now screwed shut, as opening them only brought unbearable agony.
His breathless cries and sobs of pain, confusion and terror started to rise with the others into a lugubrious chorale, as the sprinkler water became contaminated with the hellish sap and oils of the scored trees they were tied to, slowly and chemically killing them within inches, to the great delight and fervor of the Questoid and Jumbotron crowds.
A Thorn Soldier angled to look at a nearby victim, to make sure she didn't escape, and then, it exploded with a shower of wet crystals, as ice spread across its wooden body, slowly killing its cells from within.
A nearby Herb Hound reacted to the fallen plant monster, moving to where it thought the attack originated. Two long things from a dark tunnel swiped across its neck and throat, slicing them open, and felling the beast.
Greenman noticed the commotion and agitation, by the grove, and called out, "What's going on, out there?"
The answer came in the form of four figures coming out of the shadow of the underground entrance, armed and dressed for battle.
Helmeted Red and Sheriff Stone sported the shoulder pads and other pieces of upper armor from a football player's uniform, while Daisy and Marcie wore only the helmets, but there was meaning behind that.
The males carried a staff each; a cobbled-together invention of Daisy's that she christened a longsling. They lowered these staves made from broomsticks, used their greater strength of arm to draw up the sling, the removed elastic waistband from jock straps that were looped through and tied into the holes at the end, where the brooms would be hung on hooks, hooked the waistband around a bent nail at the other end, and placed a single Insta-Ice capsule in a roughly carved notch, just before the nail.
Bringing the longsling back to a ready position, held like a shotgun, they both selected their newest targets and thumbed the band free of the nail, catapulting the capsule at sufficient speed to shatter against the bodies of the surprised Soldiers, dutifully encasing them in lethal cold.
Due to the fact that these were short-ranged weapons, the two of them had to be close enough to be successfully counter-attacked, hence the protective armor. They were the obvious tanks of this operation.
As for the girls, limited protection, but more speed and maneuverability were the watchwords of the day, as they wielded the pole pruners that were left behind near the entrance, like slashing naginatas, harassing, out-flanking, and then, crippling any Hounds that came in to investigate, or defend the Soldiers.
"These work like a charm, Daisy!" Red laughed. "How did you come up with them?"
"Oh, I used to crawl around my uncle's attic, when I was little. I saw an old spear gun, one time, and I was just inspired." she said, cheerily, while her pruner's teeth ripped across a Hound's leafy back, gashing the sap out of it.
"Hey, less jawin' and more shootin'!" Stone advised, sounding and feeling ever more the cowboy he always wanted to be, as another Soldier became entombed in ice.
"Do you see, my followers?" Greenman called out from his box to the camera watching him. "Our enemies are desperate, and where is the rest of their little band? I don't know how they escaped, but all they've earned is my wrath and a front-row seat to their own failure and doom!"
He brought fingers to his temple and concentrated, as he spoke, aloud. "Soldiers! Hounds! Eliminate them, and then, search the clubhouse for the others. Get rid of them, as well!"
His commands were carried across the field, where Marcie, grimly, heard them over the constant shower, after she and Daisy dispatched the last Hound. "You heard him, let's make sure the rest of these guys don't get past us. Whatever Velma and Jason are doing, they don't need these things ruining their day."
Daisy ran over to the Manchineel closest to her, and yelled to the victims. "Hang on, guys! We'll get you out!" She then turned to Red. "How many of these things are left?"
"No prob!" Red replied, easily, aiming his longsling at an approaching Soldier. "Watch this!"
He released the sling and from a fair distance, the Insta-Ice capsule shattered against the creature's bark, freezing it into place. "There! That's the last of those Soldier things. You cut the people down, and we'll cover you!"
Quickly, the girls took a tree each, ran behind them, and while their helmets shielded them from the toxic dew of the Manchineels, they began sawing the ropes of the captives, to the new howls of displeasure from both the Questoids and the viewers, worldwide.
Some distance from the rescue party, a partially frozen Thorn Soldier, twitched its bulb-arm, moving it gradually. The limb slowly rotated and twisted, until, finally, the weight of it caused it to tear and hang from its shoulder by the thinnest scraps of plant tissue.
Marcie spared a moment to see this, musing to herself, "Hmm, cellular breakdown's happening much faster than I thought. That can only be a good thing." Then, she went back to cutting.
The bulb fell, unnoticed, to the ground, and with magical, instinctual drive, its tendrils probed the wet earth, and then, dug, pulling the bulb-arm further and further into the depths of the soil.
Soon, the other Soldiers who were still, more or less, immobilized, were becoming partially thawed under the continuous downpour, with their bulb-arms, also, twisting with increasing torque, to tear off, and then, plant themselves, clandestinely.
Once the prisoners began falling to the ground, Red and the sheriff ran over and carried or walked them over to the clubhouse entrance, carefully laying them down, so that the water would soothe and wash the poisons from their faces.
Professor Hatecraft and Flim Flam were the last to be released, lying on the ground to recover.
"You'll be all right, citizen," Stone tried to pacify Hatecraft, who, despite his injuries, seemed adamant about moving. "Don't be impatient. We'll be out of here in a jiffy."
"B...Beh..." the professor wheezed, his arm trembling, as he tried to point it.
"No, citizen," the braggadocio misunderstood. "The name's not Ben. It's Bronson. Sheriff Bronson Stone."
"Beh...Behind...you!"
"Huh?" Stone asked, glancing over his shoulder to see the broad shadow of a Thorn Soldier coming up to him.
"Whoa!" He ducked, as the tip of a thorn-sword sliced where the nape of his neck was, a moment before.
"Look out, guys!" Marcie warned, running from the grove with Daisy.
Stone stood up, and with Red joining him, leveled his longsling into a firing position, interceding between the recovering people behind him, and a small horde of Thorn Soldiers made up of limping, wilting, frost-damaged, and curiously one-armed specimens, and reinforcements that weren't there, moments before.
"Where did they come from?" Red yelled, arming his staff.
"How did they get back-up, so fast?" asked Stone, wondering what other headaches they would have to deal with.
"I think the other Soldiers grew them," Marcie posited, brandishing her pruner near Stone.
"You mean they can replace themselves?" Daisy asked, incredulously. "Unfair, much?"
Marcie looked over at the two males. They had been launching capsule after capsule at their targets. Now, that the water from the sprinklers was nullifying their effects, she worried how long they could hold out against them, and protect their charges, before they ran out of ammunition.
"Guys, how many capsules do you have left?" she asked them.
"Two," Stone answered.
Red patted his vest pocket, and it flattened. "Aw, man, I'm out! Hey, Sheriff, how come you've got more?"
"Because I don't fire my weapon like I'm playing a video game," the sheriff chided him. "It's called fire discipline."
He glanced to Marcie and Daisy. "Okay, you girls switch up! Give us the pruners, and you take the slingshots, split the ammo between you, and guard those hostages! You're my deputies, now!"
The weight of Stone's command and his conference of deputy upon them brought Marcie's memories rushing back to Dead Justice, another dire situation and another sheriff deputizing them. She hoped that at the end of this case, everyone and the sheriff will walk away from it with a good story that they can all get wrong, years later.
With the swapping of the weapons, Stone stepped up to the approaching throng. "We'll handle this," he growled.
"Yeah!" Red concurred, eagerly. "Let's turn 'em into a salad bar, and I hate salads!"
"You're all right, kid," the sheriff nodded at him. Then, he let loose a bellow and charged into the enemy line, Red, running and yelling, close behind.
The length of the pruners gave them the edge they needed to keep a safe distance, and still be able to engage with the Soldiers.
The ice-damaged ones were easier to face. Not only was being one-armed throwing off their balance when they swung with their sword-arm, but their frost-related injuries slowed them down, considerably, allowing a sidestepping Red or Stone the chance for a sudden, flanking decapitation of a semi-wilted head-bulb, dropping the monster to the muddy ground.
A headless Thorn Soldier, falling at the feet of Red, had the muck-covered teen, triumphantly, hooting in the torrent, raising his bladed weapon, like an Irish warrior born, none of which was lost of a suddenly mesmerized Daisy.
There was no denying that for a bad boy, he was, also, a bit of a softie, but here, in the midst of battle, she could see the glint of danger in his eyes, under the mud, and, with a blush, it excited her.
The newer troops were not so easy to dispatch, as they were intact, studied the simple tactics of the humans before them, and made sure that they tried to out-flank them by cutting them off, individually, and then, ganging up on each one, certain that the two man-creatures couldn't fight them all off, defensively, before one got close enough to strike with a sword thrust.
Indeed, one did managed to find an unguarded moment upon the base of Red's spine, and lumbered over to run him through.
Instead of great, terminal pain, Red felt a blast of winter behind him, as Insta-Ice splashed against the plant creature, burying it in its own little glacier.
Red sidestepped and deeply slashed the knee of a Soldier facing him, crippling it enough for him to kick it over. That bought him time to see who fired the precious shot. The jock strap on Daisy's longsling was loose, its ammunition spent.
Red gave her a grateful thumbs-up, and she returned the gesture, now brandishing the sling as a simple staff.
It wasn't a moment too soon, as the low, dark shapes of two Herb Hounds stalked from the center of the grove, and crept in the girls' direction.
"Head's up!" Marcie alerted.
"I could do with a little help, here!" Stone called out, swiping and slashing the pruner at the remaining Soldiers as fast as his tiring arms could swing, and as quick as he could twist to face them.
Red ripped through the napes of two Soldiers that were so focused on flanking the sheriff, that they hadn't notice him. As they fell over, Stone saw his opening and ran out of the trap the monsters sprung around him, following Red back to where the girls stood guard.
"Where did they come from?" asked Red, cleaning sap and wood from the pruner's serrated blade. "Are they replacements, too?"
"I wouldn't doubt it," Daisy moaned. "This looks bad, guys."
"I don't know what Velma and Jason are doing back at the clubhouse, but I hope they found a place to hide," Marcie muttered.
As the reduced group of Thorn Soldiers approached, steadily, one of the Hounds, suddenly, gave a commanding bark, startling everyone, and allowing the other Hound to bound at the group.
With a frightened yelp, Marcie fell to the ground, as the beast bolted to her location, leaped over her and the brandished weapons that missed it, and headed for the tunnel entrance.
Her glasses bounced out of her helmet, fouling her sight, but she recovered her wits enough to twist around and snap off a desperate, clumsy shot from the longsling, expending the capsule's spreading freeze against the inner wall of the underground tunnel, while the Hound ran down it, full-tilt.
"No! Jason! V!"
"Wait! This is it! This computer has a router!" Velma exclaimed, spotting the dark, multi-antennae device wired to the computer tower under the desk of the next office she and Jason had entered.
Jason looked past the innocuous desktop PC to the photos, awards, and trophies that were hung and shelved on the surrounding walls, signifying the importance of the place.
"It makes sense that the Head Coach's Office would be the hub of the hotspot," he said. "I wish we'd come here sooner."
"Hindsight's twenty-twenty," Velma replied, sitting in the coach's chair and turning the computer on. "I'll boot up, and then, I'll run the override code."
"Wait, is this going to work, Velma?"
"I'm...reasonably sure it should," she hesitated. "These aren't the same conditions that the programmer worked with, back at his base, but if Greenman brought all of his Questoids to the arena, this router should have the necessary range to be able to reach them...I hope."
The PC's wallpaper, a typical overhead view of a football field, appeared, along with a few folders tucked in the upper corner of the screen. Velma plugged the flash drive into the forward USB port, and waited. A window called "Questoid," popped into existence, filled with a descending string of folders, a moment later.
"Wow, nice directory!" Velma replied.
She moved the mouse, and brought the cursor over to a folder marked: Skeleton Key. It opened, revealing a small, but a potent file.
Velma, then read the text in the file, informing her of an alphanumeric string on display, below it, and what it did, specifically. "Ah, so that's their password! So much for their encryption software. They're wide open, now. I can send the code to them."
She moved the cursor across the password, cutting and pasting it onto a blank bar, below. Under the bar were two commands to chose from: Enter and Cancel.
After clicking Enter, and after a loading icon spun, the computer informed her that, at that moment, every Questoid was now accessible.
"Yes!" she cheered.
Then, prompted by curiosity, Velma went back to the directory, moved the cursor to the folder marked: Systems, seeing a sub-menu of folders descend: Diagnostic, Sensors, Memory Access, and Remote Command.
An eager smile crossed her thin lips. Power was literally in her hands.
"But, that's not all I can do, Jason!" she gasped, megalomaniacally, "I can access their memories, hook into their optics and audio. I can hack them! Make them my puppets...my slaves! The power is literally in my hands!"
Jason felt the need to disregard his crush's exploration of her cyber dark side, and just reminded her, "Okay, fine, Puppetmaster, but could you stop the killer robots, first?"
"Right, right," she sighed. "Sorry. This is what happens when I'm away from technology for over a century. I'll just tap into their optics, so we can see what they see. Maybe we can find out what's happening with the rest of the gang."
Another small window popped up on the monitor, serving as a separate screen that gave a POV perspective from the arena's bleachers, down, incredulously, to a patch of trees.
"Hmm, good frame rate. Wait! What are those trees doing on the field?" Velma pondered aloud, making Jason to stand behind her and see for himself.
"Trees? No idea," he admitted.
"Maybe I can switch to a pair of eyes that can see around back of them," Velma muttered, experimentally tapping the eastern, and then, western directional arrow keys on the keyboard. The view began jumping from one Questoid's individual line of sight to the next, each jump bring the view further and further to the left side of the grove.
Finally, one robot was seated far enough to the left, that they could see, halfway, to the grove's other side. Lying on the turf, in front of the underground entrance, was a haggard group of bodies that the two recognized as the hostages from the lounge.
In front of the bodies were Daisy and Marcie, swiping and jabbing at a Thorn Soldier and an Herb Hound, with sticks, barely keeping them at bay. Because of the extreme angle of the view, Velma and Jason could just see Red and Sheriff Stone's attempts to repel the few Thorn Soldiers that tried to out-flank them, from their end.
"Jinkies!" she exclaimed. "Look! They're cornered by more of those plant creatures!"
This was not a situation that made Jason particularly sanguine. The two of them were too far and too unarmed to make any difference, and the dire knowledge that they may have taken on more than they could handle, put a dread in him so bad, that panic overtook him, easily.
He stepped away from Velma, and began pacing, tightly, in the center of the room. "But, we're in here! Wh-What do we do? What can we do?"
He turned and walked to the closed door. "We have to do something, before Greenman knows that we're not out there, with them!"
He opened the door in time to see an Herb Hound prowling the hall outside of the office. It heard the door, and bounded over to Jason, who wailed and slammed the door on it, but not in time to lock it.
Terrified, he backed his full weight against the shoving door, and whimpered, "He knows!"
"Keep him out, Jason, while I try to think of something!" Velma told him, while trying to keep the rising fear from her voice.
The sounds of the beast ramming against the door and trying to work a wooden paw in through the threshold, along with Jason's blubbering, was distracting, as she mentally ticked down their dwindling options.
"No weapons, no chemicals!" she fretted.
"There's a phone on the desk!" Jason suggested, recovering from almost being knocking down by that last ram. "Call the police!"
Velma gave a hopeless glance to the telephone near the keyboard. "They wouldn't get here in time! What do we have that can tear one of those things apart?"
For a second, she went back to looking at the screen within the monitor to see how their friends were faring, when she spotted the cursor resting on the sub-menu folder, Remote Command.
A folder screamed the solution to their problem directly into her fear-addled brain.
"That's it!" she yelled, clicking open the folder.
"What's it?" Jason asked, almost losing his footing from shoring up the door against another slam from the monster. "What do we-What do we do?"
"What else?" a desperate and fearful Velma asked, rhetorically, as she typed commands, and prayed that her reckless hunt-and-peck wasn't so fast that she made typos.
She tapped the Enter key. "We introduce them to the new boss!"
Wood clacked against wood, as the group parried the thorn-sword, -clawed and -toothed strikes of the single Herb Hound and the small number of Thorn Soldiers that doggedly remained.
Greenman had the satisfying feeling that the interlopers were having a hard time of it, and wanted to see their demise more clearly from that side of the grove. Knowing how sensitive their hearing could be, he bade the Questoids manning the video cameras across the field, "All cameras on the grove side of the field focus on the intruders."
The cameras tightened the angles of their coverage on the detectives' and hostages' last stand, as the dire image was sent up to the Jumbotron, so although his followers could still see it all from their televisions, Greenman could enjoy a private, imperial-class viewing of Marcie and the others' fall.
They were all wearing down, arms burning and slowed by constant defense. Their opponents closed in, forcing Red and Stone to huddle in with the girls, still facing out defensively.
Greenman debated with himself on whether he should release more plant monster seeds to the ground, and simply overwhelm his enemies, but he stayed his hand, and watched in fascination, wondering if three Thorn Soldiers and a Herb Hound could rip them all to pieces, thoroughly enough.
"It seems that my sacrifice will proceed, after all, with some additional lambs for the slaughter," he said, contentedly, smiling at a quick close-up of a tiring Marcie.
Just then, a massive call rose from the bleachers around him, and the field, all at once, catching Greenman by surprise.
"Orders confirmed!" cried every Questoid in the arena.
"What? What was that?" Greenman grunted in confusion, glancing hard at his appropriated machines. "I didn't-"
The robots in the stands all stood, and took up the chant, "Destroy all plant creatures! Destroy all plant creatures!"
Greenman stood up in his box, now in anger at this inexplicable betrayal, as waves of Questoids poured down the seated rows and ran across the field. He knew of their strength, and what that strength could do, if applied to his warriors, who now seemed considerably fragile, in comparison.
"No! No, you can't!" he implored, at first, trying to reason with them. When that failed to move them, he raged, "You obey me! You obey me!"
"Don't despair and keep watching, my flock! You all will see these sacrifices offered up to our gods before the sun sets down on this wretched town!" Greenman cried out, looking up to the Jumbotron, to explain to his vexed and perplexed believers, but the screen hadn't switched back to the viewers.
Instead, it gave him a worthy view of Questoids swarming the oblivious Thorn Soldiers and Herb Hound from behind, bringing them down with their victims' yowls and grunts of pain accompanied by the sounds of wood cracking and breaking apart, before the stunned amateur sleuths and sheriff.
Then, the Jumbotron's screen became the portrait of a test pattern.
There was no reason to stay, Greenman knew. The beautiful beginning of his planned-out ritual was ruined, and if he remained, then he might captured or worse. Someone obviously took control of the Questoids, and he cursed himself that he didn't kill the programmer sooner, but there was no way he could have wrested control while he was being tortured.
That only left the few of Marcie's bothersome band that didn't leave the clubhouse. With whatever resources and access they came across, they turned his game around, and now, the full might of re-reprogrammed Questoids stood between his wrath and his foes.
Taking advantage of the robots' distractions, Greenman slipped out of his box, from the rear, ran quietly up the aisle, and out of onto the stadium's wide concourse to escape, cursing his turn of fortune, with a single word.
"Marcie," he hissed.
"I'm getting tired!" Jason wailed next to Velma, who was helping him keep the tenacious Hound out by bracing her shoulder against the door. "We're not going to make it!"
"Don't say that, Jason! We'll be fine!" she tried to convince him, but she was having trouble believing that, herself.
By her reckoning, too much time had passed since she sent the order to the Questoids, which begged the question: Were they obeying her, or were they too far out of range to receive the transmission, thus dooming them all?
"Velma, since this...this is the end, I-I might as well come clean about something," Jason wheezed with fatigue and panic. "I'm...in lo-"
The hard sounds of a violent scuffle breaking out behind him, took his attention away from his confession, as he listened in with Velma, against the door.
Furniture crashed and broke, a growl issued, followed by a canine yelp of terror and pain, ending with the breaking of thick branches. Then, a gentle knock came upon the door.
Velma, cautiously, opened it to see a female Questoid with disheveled hair and clothes give a polite smile, and say, "Orders received. Standing by for new commands."
Both teens sighed in gratitude, as Velma walked back to the desktop and sat down.
"All of you help the hostages and our friends on the football field, please," she told it. The robot soon departed.
"And I thought things were tough in the Old West," Velma muttered to herself.
Jason took a seat in a corner of the office, and said, jokingly, to lighten the mood, "Boy, some date, huh?"
Velma, barely paying any attention, as she looked to the monitor and watched her new thralls assist by the sidelines, asked, "What did you say?"
Remembering how everything he had fantasized about being alone with Velma had quickly turned into a scene from either a slasher or nature-run-amok film, Jason hung his head in disappointment.
"Oh, nothing," he sighed.