Leela's heart thumped heavily in her chest as she half ran, half stumbled down the middle of some anonymous downtown avenue. Behind her she dragged what amounted to a one hundred seventy five pound dead weight on wobbly legs. Fry had long since reached the limit of his endurance. He'd tried to stop for breath at one point, and had nearly been blasted to mush for his trouble. Now he barely managed to stay upright as Leela's unrelenting grip on his arm forced him onward.
"Leela" He wheezed. "I- I can't." A rack of dry coughs shook him before he could continue. "I can't breathe."
"If you can talk, you can breathe." She was beginning to loose her patience. If Fry had ever bothered to exercise, even just a little, he wouldn't have these problems. Besides, what was she going to do, let him collapse there on the sidewalk so that Chelsea could saunter up to him and rip him limb from limb at her leisure? Not bloody likely.
"But Leela!"
"Oh, for the love of- Alright, fine!" With Fry slowing them down, they were losing the little bit of lead that they'd gained anyway. Leela looked around her, but there wasn't much to see. Somehow they had ended up in an old warehouse district on the banks of the Hudson. There was a hulking Momcorp storage facility of some kind to their left that they might be able to hide in long enough for Fry to get his second wind. With a little luck, Chelsea and her goons might not even see them enter. Shifting her hold on Fry's arm, Leela turned and dragged him into the absolute blackness within.
Without any source of illumination beyond the meager bluish-green glow of the screen built into her wrist computer, it was almost impossible for them to find their way through the interior of the building. Leela tried to guess at her surroundings in case she needed to retrace her steps in a hurry, but all she could make out were vague impressions. The front entrance had led them into a narrow corridor, of that much she was sure. But, after what had probably been only thirty feet or so- it was even harder for her to judge distances than usual when it was dark- the hallway opened out into a room that was too large for the light from her wristcomp to reach the far walls or the ceiling. It was clearly a storage room, as it was filled with piles of containers of varying sizes and shapes, which were organized into 'islands' that were scattered, seemingly randomly, across the floor. Each container was adorned with the official Momcorp seal. Leela had to settle for the first hiding place she came to- she wasn't willing to risk getting turned around looking for better cover- which ended up being a sliver of empty space between one such island and the only wall she could see. There they waited uncomfortably for about five minutes while Fry's loud wheezing steadily faded away. Leela couldn't see her friend- she'd turned off her wristcomp to avoid being seen, of course- even though his face was close enough to hers that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck. She found herself in an extremely uncomfortable position- not just physically, but emotionally as well. At the same time that she was thoroughly annoyed and disgusted at Fry for once again dragging them back into trouble when they were just about to escape, she couldn't help but respect and even admire his admittedly botched attempt to 'take a bullet' for her, as the outdated saying went. And then there was what he had said back in the construction yard, six innocent words that had made it impossible to be angry with the redhead, damn him, no matter how much she wanted to be.
There was a clunk, and then the hum of machinery somewhere above them, followed moments later by the tiniest sensation of moving air. "What was that?" Fry hissed into Leela's ear.
It took a moment for the sound to register. It was familiar, something she'd heard a million times before but never really paid any close attention too… "I think it's the air conditioner." Then the importance of having an electrical device turn itself on sank in. "Aww, crap."
Lights turned on all over the building. Fry, who hadn't been expecting it, instinctively jumped to his feet. Leela was a little slower to stand. Chelsea's voice boomed through the storage room over a loudspeaker that was probably mounted on a wall, somewhere out of view. "Ah, there we go." The disembodied voice said cheerfully. "These crazy computers you have in the future are hard to control; I can never figure out which function does what. Oh, and Leela, for future reference, when you're trying to hide from someone that controls every bit of electronics within a thirty mile radius, it probably isn't a good idea to turn on a computer that's attached to your arm, especially not one that's equipped with GPS."
Leela winced when she heard that last remark. Well, she reasoned, I must have turned off the wristcomp before she could get an exact fix on us, or she'd have just come in here and wiped the floor with us. She must be hoping to flush us out into in the open.
"By the way," Chelsea continued conversationally, "if you were thinking about trying to escape, don't bother. I had Locuteus lock down all of the doors, and there's an army of drones outside with orders to shoot anything that has a pulse. Call me cliché, but I could never resist a good climactic, fate of the universe hangs in the balance type battle. Since it doesn't look like I'm going to find much of an adversary in the DOOP, the two of you will have to suffice." She chuckled. "Now, to make everything fair, I've turned the lights on so that your unmodified eyes can see. It'll be the two of you versus Locuteus and me. Whoever isn't dead in the morning wins. Sound like a plan?" Another laugh, this time with a bit of a gloat in it. "I'll give you a couple minutes to strategize. Good luck!" The loudspeaker died.
Fry was visibly trembling. His eyes kept darting back and forth, as if Chelsea was just around the corner. Of course, if she had been right around the corner, there wouldn't have been much need for the loudspeaker, but Leela didn't bother trying to explain that to him. "What are we going to do?" The panic in his eyes was troubling.
"The first thing we're going to do is find a better hiding place." Leela said with all of the fake confidence that she could muster. "Here, take this." She handed him the small stunner that she'd been carrying at her waist since leaving Momcorp Headquarters. It probably wouldn't be of any use, but Fry didn't know that. It would act as a little reassurance, maybe enough to keep him from completely losing his nerve.
Leela eventually found what she was looking for, a maintenance hatch built into the wall. It served as access to the maze of ducts, pipes, and electrical conduits that snaked throughout the building. Fry would have a good chance of remaining undetected in there.
When Fry was safely wedged out of sight behind an air duct, Leela turned to go. She stopped when Fry called after her. "Wait! What's going on? Where are you going?"
"You're staying here out of sight where you'll be safe. I'm going to go finish this." Leela replied, and started to move again.
"Leela, no!"
Leela whirled on him. "What do you want me to do?" She demanded. "This girlfriend of yours has tried to kill us half a dozen different ways in the past half hour, she's turned Amy into a mindless zombie, and wants to take over the world and wipe out all alien life in the universe!" The PE captain's grip tightened on her plasma rifle as she thought about the three soldiers that had died because of what Chelsea was doing. "She's got to be stopped Fry, and you know it."
Deep down he did know it; she could see it in his eyes. It was hardly fair for her to blame him for not being able to face that knowledge. "But what about Amy?" He pleaded.
That was harder. "I don't know. We'll have to see." If it came to it, Leela wondered if she'd have the strength to do what needed to be done. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that.
After putting some distance between herself and Fry's hiding place, Leela settled on one of her own. There was no reason to wander aimlessly through the building, waiting to stumble into somebody's crosshairs. If Chelsea wanted to play cat and mouse, Leela was willing to play along. But when the cat eventually tracked her prey to its nest, she was liable to find that this particular mouse packed quite a bit of heat.
It didn't take long for Chelsea to appear, as Leela had anticipated. She'd purposely left a trail of moved boxes behind her, leading away from Fry's hiding place. When she thought of the ex-delivery boy squeezed into a dark space behind an air duct, she couldn't help but feel bad. There hadn't been much of an alternative though. Fry was a great guy, but he didn't stand a chance in hell in a serious firefight. And Leela doubted he had it in him to shoot back at an ex-coworker, let alone an ex-girlfriend. What was really surprising was that Fry hadn't demanded to try and help regardless.
Whatever the case, it looked like Leela's strategy of drawing Chelsea away from Fry was working. From her vantage point high up in a colossal pile of two-meter metal cubes of indecipherable purpose, she could catch occasional glimpses of the woman's jet black hair as she moved stealthily from island to island. The plasma rifle that Leela carried with her wasn't particularly accurate, but it didn't really have to be. The PE Captain was lying full out on the top of the box pile, her weapon cradled securely against her right shoulder. All she had to do was wait for the unwitting cyborg to blunder into her sights and… She fired. A ball of green plasma screamed across empty space and exploded into a ball of fire. Flaming cardboard, bits of packing material, and other detritus rained down on Leela's head as a stack of boxes collapsed. There was just enough time for it to occur to her that shooting a ball of plasma in what amounted to a gigantic tinderbox might not have been such a good idea after all before the muzzle of a nasty looking weapon appeared from behind a ten foot, steel canister of dehydrated buggalo milk. She'd missed Chelsea by about five feet. Leela almost realized her mistake too late. Sudden fear stabbing at her like a knife in her gut, she threw herself off of the towering metal conductor on which she was perched just a fraction of a second before Chelsea's gauss rifle discharged. Several thousand amps ripped into a metal box that had been a couple feet below Leela's hiding place. A web of bluish-white electricity fanned out from the point of impact, melting and fusing the containers together. One of the tendrils of light snaked out and connected with Leela's ankle, sending a jolt through her body. The smell of ozone and singed hair reached her nostrils as she landed none-too-gently on an adjacent box pile. Another gauss bolt snaked its way toward her. She fired a few quick blasts in the general direction that the shot had come from, jumped the five or so feet to the ground, and took off running- thankful to still be in one piece.
Back in the crawlspace, Fry found himself in a most unwelcome situation. Amy, or Locuteus, or whatever he was supposed to be calling her now, was somewhere outside the closed hatch to his hiding spot. He couldn't see her, but he'd recognized the high-pitched scream followed by a crash that was her signature. Apparently assimilation wasn't a cure for clumsiness.
His mind raced as he tried to figure out what to do. On the one had, Leela wanted him to stay put. If I go out there, I'll just get in Leela's way. He reasoned. And I don't even know how to help anyway. All I've got is this little stunner thing. He fingered the weapon. For some reason, the weight of it in his hand was immensely reassuring, even if he knew it was no match for the firepower he was up against. He kept his eyes on the tiny rim of radiance that leaked into the crawlspace from around the hatch. But what good am I in here? It's two on one out there, and what if Leela gets injured or something? A loud concussion from somewhere in the building seemed to underscore the possibility.
Fry had had a lot of time to think while the rest of his coworkers had slept back in their cell at Momcorp headquarters. Lying there among his old friends had felt so right, even considering the circumstances of their imprisonment. Even with Leela seemingly still angry at him, he'd felt almost instantly like he'd fallen back into his old life. It's almost like I never left. He'd remarked to himself at one point. And that's when he'd finally realized his mistake. For the last three months he had been trying to rebuild his life. He'd been convinced that his friends had deserted him, that he'd destroyed the chance he'd been given to make something of himself after defrosting on New Year's Eve two years earlier. But here he was, surrounded by the people who had supposedly betrayed him, and they'd taken him back without hesitation, even after he'd abruptly cut them out of his life. Even Leela, who Fry knew he'd hurt more than anyone, seemed willing to forgive him. And he knew, as he'd always known, that he belonged with them. Somehow, despite their faults, their arguments and petty jealousies, he, Leela, and Bender, and to a lesser extend Amy, the Professor, and Hermes, had formed a type of family. A dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless. Only by almost losing it forever had he even figured out that he'd had it in the first place, but now that he recognized it for what it was, he wasn't about to have it snatched away from him again while he sat cowering in the dark.
As silently as he could, Fry disentangled himself from the air duct and groped his way through the dark toward the hatch. Amy's probably still somewhere nearby. He thought as he waved his hands in front of him to give him early warning of obstacles that he couldn't see. All I have to do is pop out, surprise her, shoot her with this thing, and then go- Clang! Fry's head connected with a lead pipe that crossed the narrow service corridor precisely at the level of his forehead. Stunned, he sank to a squatting position and held his head as tiny, multihued sparks exploded in his eyes. He didn't have long to recover, for the sound of his clumsiness had not gone unnoticed. A soft, muffled "Guh?" drifted to his ears from the other side of the service hatch. Horrified, Fry backpedalled a short distance down the corridor until his back came up against something hard and metallic. The hatch in front of him opened, bathing him in a pool of light that was almost blinding to his darkness-adjusted eyes. Amy was a dark shadow in that pool of light. No. Fry reminded himself. Not Amy. Locuteus.
"Fry, is that you?" the figure asked. "Don't resist, Fry. It's, you know, futile and stuff."
Fry almost completely forgot that Leela had given him a means of protecting himself against this precise situation. If he'd worried earlier that he wouldn't be able pull the trigger if he found Amy in his sights, his doubts were now entirely extinguished. The little stunner seemingly aimed itself and fired of its own volition. A diffuse, bluish-green glow reached out from the weapon and hit Amy in the chest. The electric crack that marked the stunner's connection made Fry jump. Amy convulsed, letting out a shriek that was metallic and inhuman before her body hit the ground like a sack of space potatoes. It was too much. Fry, unable to even to move, let the suddenly heavy stunner fall from his trembling hand. What have I done?
Ok, so this isn't working. Leela thought to herself as she skidded around a corner and cartwheeled over a handful of packaged Xbox 16200s. Chelsea wasn't far behind; Leela could hear her footfalls just a few paces behind her. Leela seemingly wasn't able to lose her, even in the maze of boxes that were piled everywhere. She was holding on to a lead of a few seconds, but that couldn't last forever. Leela had been running all night. She wasn't at her limit yet, but she was starting to notice an ache in her legs, and each breath was just a little more labored than the last.
There was some kind of horrible scream somewhere in the distance, and Chelsea stopped running for a moment. Leela brought her plasma rifle up to her waist and squeezed off two shots. Chelsea clumsily moved out of the way, and the rounds tore through a pile of mattresses that reached nearly to the distant ceiling. The top third of the pile fell away from the rest and tumbled to the ground, burying Chelsea 10 feet deep. A siren started to wail overhead as tendrils of smoke rose toward the ceiling. Leela turned away and began to put as much distance between her and her opponent as possible. A whitish foam began to rain down on her from above as the building's emergency fire suppression system tried to put out the rapidly growing fire.
"Amy? Amy, can you hear me?" Fry shook the intern's limp body, but he got no response. "Amy?!" He was starting to panic. Amy had a pulse; he'd learned just enough from watching M.A.S.H reruns to figure out how to check for it. But she'd been out cold for five minutes, and there was smoke rising from somewhere not too far away.
Fry gave Amy one last shake before letting her slide to the floor. He sat down next to her and exhaled loudly. He had no idea what he was supposed to do. Out in the open, he was a sitting duck, but he couldn't just leave Amy alone in the middle of the floor. And then there was that column of smoke, which seemed to be a bit thicker than it had been when he'd last looked at it.
Amy's only a hundred pounds or so. He thought. I could probably carry her. But where was he going to go? Even if he managed to get out of the building without Chelsea finding him, there was an army of cyborgs surrounding the place with orders to shoot him on sight. His only other option was the crawlspace that he'd been hiding in. There was no way to know where it led, but it was the only route away from the strengthening fire that didn't end at the business end of a gauss rifle. At least, he hoped it didnt.
Leela stopped to catch her breath. She was fairly certain that she'd lost Chelsea. No one had tried to shoot her for several minutes, which was a pleasant change of pace. The white foam falling from the sky was making things difficult. It was like an ankle-deep sea of styrofoam clinging to every surface, and Leela couldn't help but leave tracks in it as she scrambled from one box island to the next. She'd had to double back and retrace her steps several times before she was confident that she couldn't be followed.
Leela just couldn't get over how mindbogglingly big the warehouse was. She and Chelsea had been playing cat and mouse for half an hour now, and Leela had yet to see the entire structure.
About 30 seconds passed before the PE Captain started to move again. She didn't have much in the way of a plan yet, but she was certain that her current strategy of running around in circles in a building that was on fire wasn't paying off. Now that she'd lost Chelsea, she was slowly working her way back toward Fry. Somehow they were going to have to escape the building, and then try to get out of the city. How all of that was going to happen, she hadn't the slightest idea.
When she'd made it about halfway back to Fry's hiding place, she came across a set of tracks in the deepening foam. Her first thought was that they belonged to Locuteus, but she immediately realized that they were too big. Fry? But that didn't make sense either. The tracks were heading in almost the same direction as she was, which meant they were headed toward Fry's hiding place, not away from it. Remembering the scream that she'd heard earlier, Leela decided to follow the tracks. It wasn't hard to do; whoever had left them hadn't even tried to mask them.
The tracks didn't lead to Fry's hiding place, although they must have passed close by. Instead, they headed straight for the far wall and disappeared into a small hallway that had been hidden behind a stack of crates. Leela would never even have known it was there if not for the trail she was following.
The hallway was short, 10 yards at the longest, and soon emptied into a long, narrow chamber filled with row upon row of gigantic metal silos. An open corridor, really just the extension of the hallway that she'd just left, ran down the middle of the room and ended at a solid-looking door. There was no fire depressant foam here, and the tracks Leela was following petered out to nothing. It didn't matter though, for she could see her target walking confidently away from her down the center of the corridor.
Leela let out a growl when she recognized the grey uniform and black boots. She leveled her weapon, and the figure stopped and turned to face her.
"What are you doing here?" Leela demanded.
Walt smiled and shrugged. A laser pistol was in his left hand, held at the ready. "Why, I'm here to help, of course." He said oily.
In a few seconds, Leela had closed the distance between them. "Bull pies. You wouldn't help us if your life depended on it. You'd better tell me what you're really doing here, and do it now, because I promise I will kill you where you stand if the next words out of your mouth aren't the truth." She cocked her rifle. "Actually, now that I think about it, don't tell me the truth. I'll enjoy blasting you to pieces." It wasn't an idle threat this time, either. She fully intended to vaporize his sniveling face.
If Walt was worried, he certainly didn't show it. "I didn't say I was here to help you." He said evenly. "All I said was that I'm here to help. Myself, as it turns out. But, what is good for me is also good for you."
"Yeah, and how's that?"
"Well, this cyborg friend of yours is planning to take over the universe. That's not very good for business, now is it?" When Leela didn't respond, Walt continued "When mother discovers what happened to the Moss crop, and she will find out sooner or later, I'll have to take the fall, but saving the universe will more than make up for the lost revenue."
Leela wanted so badly to pull the trigger that her finger was twitching, but she stayed her hand. The problem was that Walt wasn't lying; she could read it in the steady confidence of his body language. It was hard to swallow, but Walt, who obviously knew his way around the facility, might be useful to her. For awhile. "Only you could be twisted enough to have to rationalize saving lives as good business sense." She spat. She was silent for a few seconds, and then, reluctantly, she lowered her rifle. "But, as dirty as it makes feel to admit, you're more useful to me alive than dead." When Walt bowed graciously, Leela raised her weapon again. "But you're going to hand over your pistol, and if I get even the slightest feeling that you're not on the level, I won't hesitate to use this. Understood?"
Walt nodded, and handed over his weapon butt first. "Then we have a deal. Excellent!"
Leela took the weapon and tucked it into her waistband. She felt the bile rise in her throat as Walt gestured for her to follow him down the corridor. She swallowed hard. "Do you at least have a plan?" she asked as she hurried to match his step.
"Of course!" Walt said. "There's a plasma fusion boiler not too far from here. I'm no engineer, but I assume that, if we shoot a few holes in it..." He shrugged.
Leela stopped in her tracks. "Wait a minute. You want to blow up a fusion boiler while we're still in the building? That's your plan?!"
"I admit there's a few, ah, minor issues with it, but I'm sure we'll work them out."
"Great." Mentally, Leela was kicking herself for not just shooting Walt the moment she'd seen him.
Leela and Walt had made it about half way down the corridor, which was deceptively long, when there was a loud noise ahead of them and to their right. Leela pulled Walt behind a nearby silo, and the two of them waited. The PE Captain made sure to watch Walt out of the corner of her eye, but he didn't even look at the pistol that protruded from her sweatpants.
There was some kind of a scraping sound, followed by a barely audible clang and a thud. Someone began to speak in a low whisper. She thought she recognized Fry's voice.
"Fry, is that you?" She hissed. The whispering abruptly stopped. A few moments later, there was a cautious answer.
"Leela?"
Now Leela was sure that it was him. "Fry, its me." she said, a little louder. "I've got Walt with me. He's decided to help us. We're going to come out now, so don't shoot, alright?" She gestured with her rifle for Walt to follow her out into the open. The two of them stood quietly in the open for a second or two before Leela saw Fry cautiously round a silo on the opposite side of the corridor. The ex delivery boy looked exhausted. He was covered in dust and grime, and there was a nasty looking bruise on his forehead.
"Fry, what happened to you?" Leela asked.
"I- I shot Amy." he said and looked away.
There was a moment of silence before Leela could manage a reply. "Oh. Oh Fry, I'm- I'm so sorry." She moved to embrace him, but something caught her eye. A leg protruded from behind the silo that Fry had been hiding behind. "Wait, what's that?"
Fry didn't even look. "I had to get her away from the fire." He said. "The only way was through the maintenance tube thing. I had to drag her." On the verge of hysteria, he reached into his pocket and threw his little stun pistol across the room. "Leela, I shot Amy!"
"Wait, you shot Amy with that? With the stun pistol I gave you?" Leela rushed to the intern's side, and felt a wave of relief wash over her when she felt the regular beat of her pulse. "She's alive! For God's sake, Fry. Don't scare me like that!"
"But I shot her!"
"No" Leela replied. "You shot Locuteus. And she'll be perfectly fine when she wakes up, just like you were when Walt shot you, remember?"
Fry started to protest, but seemed to give up. He nodded.
"Okay, good. Now come on, we've wasted way too much time. Chelsea wasn't that far behind me; she'll be here at any moment." And then there was the fire. The suppressant was slowing its growth, but she could now just barely smell smoke wafting in from the storage room where it had started.
"What about Amy?" Fry asked nervously. "I don't want to leave her behind again."
"We aren't going to. You and Walt are going to carry her while I cover you. Alright?" Walt began to protest, but a slight movement of Leela's weapon was enough to shut him up.
Fry seemingly noticed Walt for the first time when he took a step toward Amy. The redhead moved to put himself between Walt and the intern. "He's going to help us?" He asked, dubiously.
Yes, by being another target for Chelsea to shoot at. "Walt wants Chelsea stopped as much as we do. He wants to help us."
When Fry gave Walt a sideways look that clearly showed how little he believed that, Leela added "I don't like it either, but we need him, Fry. And I trust him more where I can see him than I do skulking around on his own."
The redhead still looked suspicious, but when he looked into Leela's eye and didn't seem to find anything to contradict what she'd said, he nodded reluctantly, and let Walt pass. The two men knelt by Amy's side. After they both put one of her arms over their shoulders, they stood in unison. They began to half walk, half stumble toward the door at the end of the corridor, but they didn't get far before they heard footsteps running down the corridor after them. A gauss bolt ricocheted off the floor not too far away. Leela cursed loudly. They had taken too long; Chelsea had found Walt's trail in the foam.
Another bolt whizzed by, and Leela had to duck out of the way. "Move!" she yelled.
Fry and Walt tried to pick up the pace, but Amy's dead weight was too awkward for them to manage more than a fast walk. It was immediately obvious that they weren't going to make it. Leela yelled for the two men to put Amy out of harm's way behind one of the silos. Then, rolling across the width of the corridor, she took cover behind a silo of her own. She aimed her plasma rifle and sent three blasts crashing into the corridor where Chelsea had been. Chelsea ducked out of the way. The three smoldering craters that Leela's rifle had left in the floor made the PE Captain hesitate. She had no idea what the towering silos contained. For all she knew, they were filled to the brim with explosive darkmatter oil. Firing a ball of superheated plasma into one of the gigantic cylinders was probably not a smart idea. She dropped the rifle and pulled Walt's laser pistol from her waistband. She glanced at it quickly, noted that it was fully charged, and leaned around the edge of her silo. A crackling bolt of electricity shot by close enough that her bangs were singed. She cursed loudly and fired back.
