Hello, my Lovely Readers, and welcome to Chapter Seven of my Invader Zim fanfiction! I'm so very sorry that it has been so dreadfully long since my last update. I will do my best to keep them frequent from now on for you guys. Okay. So then, the disclaimer, I do not own anything about Invader Zim, hopefully you know that by now, it all belongs to Jhonen Vasquez. For the love of God, don't sue me. All you will get is fifteen bucks cash, a ten-year-old junky laptop, and some crappy furniture from Ikea. So then, I sincerely hope that this chapter is better than my last one, please enjoy!
Dib's P.O.V.
"No… No, no, no! How could this have happened? Who could have done this?" Zim said, breaking the shocked silence.
We had been standing in the doorway and staring at the ruins of what used to be a house for several minutes. The base was a complete wreck. Sparking metal tentacles and ruptured wires dangled from jagged holes in the ceilings and walls. Claw marks marred almost every surface. The TV was a shattered mess, having been pounded into the wall. The couch looked like a pile of stuffing, and the slightly creepy picture of a large-eyed green monkey that formerly hung over said couch had been torn down and lay snapped in two on the floor. It looked like a hurricane armed with a mace had blown through.
He ran into the kitchen, and took the elevator in the fridge. It was the only one he could fit into by this point, and thankfully, it was still working. I followed him. It was bigger on the inside than it looked, but it was still a little cramped. He didn't comment on this, in fact, he just stared at the floor the whole way down. When the elevator reached the bottom, the doors only slid open a fourth of the way. I nudged Zim, and the wrenched them open enough for us to walk through. The lower levels of the base were in even worse condition than the house.
Broken glass and shards of metal were everywhere. Any equipment or tech that might have once been useful, or even mildly functional was lying in pieces on the floor. Every computer, keyboard, machine, console, monitor, or anything similar had all been reduced to smoking piles of chips, hard drives, and burned-out motors. Still more claw marks scored the walls. So many live wires erupted from the ceiling, floors, and walls that it looked like a jungle. A mechanical jungle. Whoever had done this had certainly been thorough.
Explosions had taken out many of the rooms, so there was a pretty straight path to follow. Neither of us spoke. I wasn't sure what to say, and Zim just kept looking around and muttering to himself occasionally, looking broken. At the end of the path there was a large room. It was just as bad as everything else, maybe worse. But the one difference about this room was that the computer was completely intact. Everything was destroyed and completely useless, but the computer in this room had been left intact.
I hung back as Zim dejectedly trudged over to the computer, clearly not knowing what to do with it. But no sooner had he turned it on than a huge image of the black wolf from the previous night came up on screen, a demonic grin pasted across its face.
"Hello," the wolf on the screen said, smirking, its voice mocking and genderless.
"YOU! YOU DESTROYED ZIM'S BASE YOU LITTLE-" Zim yelled, only to be interrupted.
"Don't bother replying, this is a recording," continued the wolf. "As you already know, your base is decimated, destroyed, wrecked, however you want to put it, I have quickly and efficiently made it completely and utterly useless. And, to add insult to injury, I did this all while you were busy saving that pathetic excuse for a human you call Dib. Wondering why I've done all this? It's pretty easy. I play the long game. I'm a killer. I'm dangerous. I'm the Alpha. I want to be the boss, and you two and your tech and your stupid heroics are all that stand in my way. All I'm looking to do is bring this city to its knees, and I have the means to do it.
"But you two are looking to stop me. You want to stop the killings. You want to save lives. You want to cure me, and I don't want to be cured. I've never felt better in my life. I have wiped all the memory from this computer, this little warning is all you'll find on it, so don't bother looking. I'm not just going to stand back and let you stop me, so I've prepared a trap. The end of this message starts a countdown; as soon as this recording is over, the entire lower base will self-destruct in three minutes. Feeling lucky? Want to take a chance and play with me? Game on, and game over."
And then the screen went black.
"LOWER BASE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN THREE MINUTES," blared a computerized voice.
Ohcrapohcrapohcrap... I started to frantically stumble backwards, toward the doorway, but tripped over a loose wire, falling backwards and landing hard on my back, hot sparks dancing down my broken arm.
I was wrenched upward by a green paw, and shoved in the direction of the door.
"Move!"
I didn't have to be told twice. I started making my way over the debris as fast as I could, leaning a bit on Zim for support.
Back in the hall, there was less debris, so we moved faster. Even so, I don't know how we can make it. It took us almost seven minutes getting down this hallway, and even if we did manage to make it, we would have to wait for the elevator. Judging by the look on his face, Zim knew it too.
"MINIMOOSE!" he suddenly bellowed down the hall.
What looked like a purplish-brown football with antlers flew out of nowhere, emitting panicked squeaks.
"Minimoose, I need you to go up ahead and get the elevator, alright?" Zim said.
The moose squeaked one more time and shot ahead of us down the hall.
We're relying on a squeaking potato to save us. We are so dead, I thought.
By the time we finally got to the elevator, the doors were open and Minimoose was hovering outside the door. I had been sort of timing us, so I knew the clock was down to around thirty seconds.
We both dove into the elevator, I went first, and Zim wedged himself in behind me, grabbing Minimoose and wrenching the doors shut. Ten seconds. Zim turned around in the cramped space and began frantically pressing the button, but the elevator wasn't reacting fast enough. Just some clanking and grinding. Five seconds.
Zim turned around, facing away from the door.
"COVER YOUR EARS!" he yelled.
I slapped my hands over my ears as he did the same, and Minimoose, possessing neither hands nor ears, shut his eyes as tight as he could.
3…
2…
1…
Then it blew. There was the most deafening noise. And I mean DEAFENING. Allow me to put it into perspective for you. Can you imagine a cannon going off? Think how loud that would be. Now, multiply that by a thousand. And now imagine that you're in a metal phone booth, and all those cannons are pointed at you. That bad? No. Worse.
The elevator shot up the shaft like a bullet. I could only feel it banging off the sides, because the second that explosion went off everything became a soundless whitewash, even though my ears were covered.
I wasn't sure how long we had been shooting up the elevator shaft, but the next thing I knew all three of us were being violently thrown out of the fridge.
We all bounced across the room, followed by the blacked chunks of smoking metal that were now all that remained of the elevator shaft and the lower base.
I just lay there, curled up in a ball, too shocked to do much of anything for a few seconds. Zim got up before I did.
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" he screamed at Minimoose. "YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE GUARDING THE BASE! HOW COULD YOU LET IT GET IN? AND WHERE IS GIR?"
The tiny floating robot squeaked a few times in return.
"HE WHAT? HE RAN AWAY? HOW COULD YOU LET HIM RUN AWAY? ARE YOU JUST COMPLETELY USELESS? GAAAAHHHH! This means back to square ONE!" he yelled, picking up the now-detached fridge door and ripping it in two. "My base is destroyed, Gir is missing, and whoever this black wolf is, they are REALLY getting on Zim's nerves! Ugh, let's just get out of here! There's nothing even LEFT! Come on Dib-human, we're going. Minimoose, you stay here and see if there's anything worth saving, although Zim highly
Clumsily getting up on my one good arm, I stood and followed him towards the door, only to walk right into his back.
"What? Why did you- Oh."
Peering out of the doorway, the first thing that was noticeable was the fact that there were four news vans, and a massive amount of people, cars, and news reporters everywhere. Heck, it was bigger than the Moofy incident. That stupid Girly Ranger.
Snippets of dialogue came drifting over from the crowd.
"The mysterious tremor…"
"Largest one in years…"
"Traced to this area…"
"Scientists are unsure.."
"Well, this is really great. How are we going to get out of here now?" I muttered.
"It isn't that…" came the strangely pained reply.
"What?"
"On the news van."
I shifted my eyes to the largest van, and I saw what he was talking about. I don't know how I missed it before. And I don't know how no one
Sitting on top of the van were three humanoid black wolves, all with burning yellow eyes. They were huge, and built like football players, but that wasn't what was scary.
The scary part was that they were staring right at us like we were dinner.
That's all for Chapter 7! I hope you enjoyed it, I am starting work on Chapter 8 right away. Thank you all so much for being so patient during the unfairly long wait. I'm so sorry I did that, and I'll do everything I can to make sure it does not happen again. And don't worry about Gir, he'll come back. I apologize once again for my own incompetence, and promise to do better. Invader ShadowWolf, OUT!