Panting, Spike dragged himself sightlessly towards what he hoped was the employee lounge, fingers groping high and low for familiar landmarks, legs trailing uselessly behind him.
There was the stack of broken chairs shoved to the side he was always catching his shins on.
That had to be the floor polisher, too big to go into a closet and reeking of stale pizza, mildew, and spilled Chica's Magic Rainbow wossit.
That might have been that oversized bale of paper napkins left out that the mice had got in to…
Leaving oozy hand prints on the walls, Spike pulled himself up on his one good knee, groping randomly past what felt like a light switch… ah-ha! He'd found the pull down fire alarm a few feet from the door to the employee lounge. If he kept going that way he'd… a spasm of pain from his broken leg caused him to crumple, fingers catching on the pull-down, which began to howl, adding to the din of the smoke detector in Security
As Jeremy and Mike watched expressionlessly from the smoky shadows cast by the emergency lights, love's bitch dragged himself into the lounge by his elbows in a grotesque parody of a low-crawl— over there was what felt like the broken Grandfather clock.
One door.
Two doors.
With a crash Spike pulled a chair onto himself in his blind search. He pushed it aside only to collide headfirst with one of the steel legs of the battered old kitchen table in the center of the room, his own catching on what might have been the edge of the vending machine, the pain causing him to curl in on himself retching until he collected himself enough to pull away.
What he needed should be about five feet that way if he remembered right.
YES! Door number three – "And what prize does our lucky boy get, Vanna?"
Mumbling under his breath Spike aimed his upper body so that it fell heavily against the door to the employee changing room and shower, ("Why, Pat me ol' mate, this lucky lad gets a…) the heavy wooden panel rebounding off the wall with a loud bang, slamming into him in it's abrupt return with an equally loud bang. (…lovely great big smack on the head – bloody hell, that soddin' hurt!)
Gasping, Spike forcefully shouldered the heavy wooden panel aside, tearing it from its hinges so that it landed on the tiles with a loud clatter.
Dragging himself over the fallen door, Spike, no longer breathing because it required too much effort, eased himself into the shower area, accidentally pulling the cheap vinyl curtain down on himself in a rattle of equally cheap plastic rings, scrabbling up the slick tiles until his fingers connected with first one knob and then the other, turning what he hoped was the cold one as far as it would go in a sudden downpour of icy water.
Tittering, Spike leaned rocking against the back wall of the stall, raising his still-sizzling face and hands into the painful relief, letting the water wash away the remaining battery acid. Bloody hell, but those damned ugly toys played rough – not content with blinding him and crippling him, good ol' Freddles had slugged him with a rosary wrapped around one catcher's mitt paw if he was any judge.
Nevertheless, wotta rush, mate, wotta RUSH!
Inelda Schnelz sat upstairs at her kitchen table, smoke curling up around her in delicate wisps from between the floorboards, the smoke detector over the stove joining the general clamor downstairs in a shrieking duet, looking up at the framed leftovers of a feast that had been neither good nor bad, waiting.