CHAPTER 9: Dismissed

Alex immediately backpedaled away from the swinging mace. The giant demented doll brough the mace down where he had been and suddenly froze, looking like a robot that suddenly ran out of power. Alex took the opportunity to put some distance between him and the doll before it suddenly moved again!

"Grr, quit moving!" Ms. Delight snapped.

Backing up into the computer lab, Alex's head swiveled around in sharp jolts. Forget the generator, he needed a way out! Ms. Delight gave a charge and he quickly side stepped and ducked around the desk of computers. She didn't lag behind as she swung again, caving in a computer monitor into a shower of glass and ancient plastic! He ran to the opposite side of the row and Ms. Delight hurried behind. Seeing the door of the storage closet, and knowing he had no time to push the filing cabinet away from the front door, Alex dove for the door. He got inside and slammed the door shut just as he felt the angry toy crash against it!

"I must say, 'A' for being fast, but 'F' for where you've ended up!" came the shrill screech from behind the door.

The door knob began to twist and Alex gripped it hard, turning in the opposite direction. The pressure on the knob was intense and all at once he was struck by the horrifying thought that despite having the limbs of a doll, Ms. Delight was scary strong! He could hear her snarling and growling on the other side, at times the door would slip past the catch and open a foot before Alex would charge his shoulder into the door to slam it shut again! But he was rapidly weakening, his hands ached and his muscles burned.

"No, I can't die here! I didn't come all this way to die here!" he thought.

A flash of silver at eye level caught his eye and Alex saw his saving grace: a deadbolt lock. With a titanic shove to the door so hard he swore he heard a scream followed by a heavy THUD, Alex reached up and snapped the deadbolt closed! Another THUD came not long after as the teacher came back and began hammering at it, only the door stayed solidly shut, the handle windmilled around as Ms. Delight tried to open the door.

"Whatever you did won't make a difference, young man!" she roared.

Looking around the room Alex saw that he was in a room that seemed to have been repurposed. A sink sat along one wall while a toilet stall stood in the corner partly disassembled. Spare computer monitors sat on carts and small industrial grade shelves. What had once been a bathroom was now monitor storage. A discarded note on the floor told him in brief words that the custodial staff was very mad their break room was being turned into a computer lab and moved across the school. A series of crashes from the door he'd locked reminded him of his very trapped nature, followed by a crack, then a crunch as the wooden door began to be broken down.

"She'll be here soon… what do I do?"

CRASH! CRUNCH! CRACK!

CLANG CLANK!

The foreign sound in the room immediately grabbed his attention and he turned to see a vent fall from the ceiling and crash onto the floor!

"Hurry! Over here!" cried a vaguely familiar voice.

Alex didn't stop to think, he turned and ran towards the open vent. Looking up, he couldn't see the owner of the voice, but he did see a sturdy pipe. Perfect. He GrabPacked onto it and winched himself up and out of the room just as he heard the lock on the door give away, and Miss Delight shambled into the room, snarling hungrily. He pulled his foot in and out of sight as he heard the teacher pause under the vent.

"Running won't help you!" she growled. "I will find you and when I do…. hehehehehahahahahaha!"

Alex stayed silent until he heard the teacher rapidly turn around and leave. As he turned to look up in front of him he met the snout of Picky Piggy!

"Picky?!" he gasped. "You're alive!"

The small critter quickly came up and gave him a small hug.

"Yeah, thanks to you," she said. "Oh my goodness, I'm glad I was able to find you before she got you!"

She soon parted her little hug and turned, heading down the vent, pausing when Alex didn't follow.

"Come on!" she called. "We gotta get out of here."

Alex sighed and started following her.

"Thanks, Picky," Alex said as they crawled. "But, why are you here?"

"Well, after you saved me, I got thinking. You saved me when you didn't have to. You could have left me to die, to be fed to Catnap's flock, saved yourself so easily. But you didn't, despite that I was… well… less than welcoming," she said sheepishly. "It made me realize I was being a bit selfish, looking out for myself and no one else, not even my friends. I thought it was time to stop hiding and get back to the others. I was crawling through the vents, making my way to the bunker when I thought I heard your voice... and hers. I owe you a favor so I followed that crazy banshee's wailing until I found you."

"And I'm grateful you did," Alex said. "So there is a way out?"

"Yes, follow me."

As they crawled they could hear the mumbling of the crazed teacher echoing through the vents. Picky shuddered.

"I can't believe one of them survived down here. He told us they were all gone…" she mumbled to herself, but not quietly enough for Alex to not hear.

"He? Who is 'He?'" he asked.

But before the critter could answer when a sudden gust of wind began to blow through the vents, kicking up dust into their eyes.

"Ah! What's happening?" Picky cried in shock.

"Someone turned on the air!" Alex shouted.

Struggling to look against the gale, Alex could barely see anything. Reaching up, he brought up the gas mask over his face. Through his blinding tears, a hazy red cloud barreled down the vents.

"The smoke!"

"Picky, we have to get out of here!" he cried.

"What wa-" Picky managed to gasp before the smoke was upon them.

Thanks to his mask, Alex remained unaffected, but Picky had no such luck. Her eyes went wide as she suddenly realized what was happening, coughed a couple times, turned to Alex… then dropped like a stone, fast asleep.

"Oh no! Now I have to get us both out of here!"

Dropping his GrabPack hands, he scooped up the unconscious critter and began to rapidly make his way down the vent. With no idea where to go, he just followed the direction of the wind. He figured that if the air vents were blowing air in, it had to be going out somewhere. He just hoped that he didn't need to look too far.

A left turn, then a right brought him to another vent cover that came loose with a couple hard kicks. It didn't matter if Ms. Delight heard that or not, they both needed to get out! Down into the smokey depths brought them into a smoke-filled classroom.

"How do I get out of here?" he thought as he looked through the red haze.

Alex looked and saw the desks of the kids, all the chairs still pushed in. Alex followed the direction the chairs faced. He was soon at the front of the classroom where he saw a teacher's desk, covered in dark red blood, and the light of a doorway. He nearly ran at the door and pushed through it, the air became clear again.

"She must have done that on purpose! How damn lucky did she have to be to turn on a vent with red smoke in it?"

And it wasn't the only vent as down at the end of the hallway, red smoke was pouring through a vent over some dented lockers. But Alex knew they couldn't stay, he and Picky needed to hide again. He investigated the first open door he saw. It appeared to be a nurses office with a few rows of cots inside. But it was clear of red smoke, and that was good enough for Alex. He slipped inside, locked the door behind him and laid Picky down on the cleanest cot he could find. The pink pig was still completely out of it, deep in sleep.

"Hmm… that stuff is really potent if she's still asleep," he mumbled to himself as he removed his mask.

Alex took a seat on one of the other cots. He wondered what he should do now. With the vents blowing red smoke, and the closed security gate at the front, he was starting to wonder what he'd do.

"There has to be a way out of this. But what can I really do? Getting away from Huggy was dumb luck. I only got out of Statues because Long Legs thought she'd trapped me. But here? I'm trapped in a school ripped out of a nightmare, under a concrete dome, in a cave, miles under the ground! What great leap of stupidity possessed me to even come to this hellhole in the first place?!" he thought, his frustration quickly growing.

"NOOOO! I WON'T DO IT! I WON'T EAT THEM!"

Alex leaped out of his skin as Picky suddenly began screaming. She shot awake, her glowing eyes shrunk to the size of pin-pricks. Clearly a nightmare… and an awful one as she gasped for breath. Alex didn't think as he moved to comfort the still terrified critter.

"Picky! Picky, breathe! You're okay, it's over. You're awake now."

As he gently rubbed Picky's shoulders, he could feel her muscles twitching like mad. The fabric covering she had felt hot to the touch. But Alex knew this couldn't be the case as fabric doesn't act like human flesh, it had to be under the cloth. Then the sensations echoed back to his mind.

"This… this feels like what Ms. Harper described."

Slowly Picky began to calm down, her breathing slowed and her eyes returned to normal. She still shook, clearly still mentally stuck in the nightmare. Slowly she looked up and around the room.

"Alex? Where are we?" she asked.

"I guess the nurse's office of the school," Alex explained. "I had to get us out of the vent soon as possible."

"Oh," she said slowly. "Thanks for not leaving me behind."

"You saved me from Ms. Delight, I couldn't leave you behind."

Picky smiled but then it fell into a frown.

"Thank you, but… how are we going to get out now? We can't get into the vents," she said, her voice quivering at the mention of the vents.

"And we can't open the security gate," Alex said with a sigh as he sat on the floor. "But there has to be something we could do. Ugh… why would a school even need security gates like that? I mean, this is meant to be the orphanage, who would they be trying to keep out?"

"Well," Picky said. "It was to keep the kids inside."

"Huh? Why would they do that?" Alex asked, looking at the pig critter.

"This was… before we came along, but we heard some of the employees who'd come down and repair broken stuff. It was to keep kids from disappearing. Something about some troublemaking older kids going missing from school, slipping out through employee only areas, or something. I didn't ask, though it's not like they would have responded. A lot of the workers didn't treat us well, regarding us like animals, even though we could talk and feel and…" She said no more.

"So… they abused you?" Alex asked slowly.

Picky didn't answer, but she nodded sadly. Then her ears perked up and her eyes widened.

"Wait, I… I think I remember something," she said excitedly.

"What is it? Tell me!" Alex demanded, hope starting to rise in his chest.

"A long time ago, I came down here to help the staff in the cafeteria, and the gate was closed. One staff member came down, also going to work in the cafeteria for lunch and he let us both in using his badge, or something. He was one of the few nice staff members and told me about how the principal could also open the gates from his office. Maybe we could get out that way."

Alex began to sift through this information. This had to be the way Ms. Delight had trapped him in the first place. It may even be where the controls for the air flow were, but the big security gate was his best bet for getting out of this place. But then he remembered why they were hiding in a dark room.

"Maybe. But if that's true, then Ms Delight probably knows that too."

"Oh, right," Picky said, her face falling before it suddenly brightened. "Wait, that crazy teacher is not only insane, but starving. I came across one of her notes while looking for you. Said how she was so hungry she…. ate…. the other teachers."

The pink pig critter paused and grimaced, the nightmare she'd awoken from clearly still fresh in her mind. She continued quickly, shaking her mind free from that thought as she tugged the backpack off her shoulders.

"I still have some of those supplies you gave me back in Home Sweet Home. If she smelled some of it, she wouldn't be able to resist. I know I wouldn't if I was that hungry," she explained.

"That's a good idea, but she'd probably eat it fast and she'd be after me again," Alex said. "Not enough time to open the gate."

"No," Picky said, as she flipped the bag open, pulling some items out. "But maybe I can help buy you time."

From the bag, Picky pulled out a battered mixing bowl, and a meat tenderizer. Alex stared at the small critter, shocked at the idea she was planning. Hell, it sounded like a suicide mission!

"No. Picky, that's too dangerous!" he firmly stated.

"She's crazy, but she's not powerful like Catnap is."

"She turned the generator into junk with just a few swings from her mace!"

"Alex, someone needs to buy you the time you need once she leaves the office!"

"Well it's not going to be you!"

"Then who will it be, Alex?! You?" Picky shot back. "No, it can't be you, you need to survive! You managed to get all the way down here in one piece, when we couldn't even leave freely. Whatever plan Bubba has cooked up, you're the only one who can carry it out."

"That's not true. If you all worked together, you could-"

"None of us can achieve human size, Alex. We're all kid-sized. It would be like an ant trying to move an apple. Catnap might be bigger than you, but he's way bigger than us! We wouldn't stand a chance against him. Only you do."

Rising from the cot, Picky marched across the room towards the door. Her permanent smiling face set in determination. It was clear she wasn't going to be reasoned with.

"Picky," Alex said, "if you're so set on doing this, at least take this."

Picky paused and turned to look back at Alex. The human reached up and plucked his gas mask off his head. He then held it out to the pig critter, who stared at it confused.

"Why?"

"That red smoke is pouring into a few classrooms. If Ms. Delight gets too close to you, that might be the only way to keep away from her. She might be crazy but I don't think she's immune."

Picky slowly walked back to accept the offered mask.

"But what about you? What if you end up needing it?"

"Then I'll just find a different way. You can return it to me afterwards."

Picky said nothing before she slowly took the mask and slipped it over her head. Thanks to her small size, the mask was able to fit over her face. A couple breaths and the sound of the respirator filters hissing confirmed an airtight seal.

"Okay… be safe, Alex," she mumbled.

"You too."

The gas-masked critter turned, and walked back to the door. She paused for a moment before she opened it and slipped out into the hallway. Alex took in a deep breath before he followed behind. He didn't like the idea of sending Picky out there, or giving up his one defence against the red smoke. But, if the small critter was insistent on helping in that way, it was better that she had some kind of protection.

"I just wish I had the same protection."

"Hehehe, I think this plan is an A, don't you think Barb?" Ms. Delight cackled at her improvised weapon.

Across the few intact monitor screens, she could see red smoke pouring into classrooms and hallways. The other monitors had been smashed years ago and no longer worked. A shame to have blind spots in her school, but the Hour of Joy had been a messy affair with all those humans trying to avoid their fate. She could remember when she dragged the lab coat wearing louse who called himself a principal. That struggle was the reason why most of the screens were broken.

"Yes, Catnap will be pleased," Ms. Delight said, speaking for Barb before she switched back, "Oh Barb, thank you for reminding me. I should let him know."

The demented teacher turned towards the phone on the desk and she pressed the speed dial for the playhouse. The line buzzed as the phone rang, but then suddenly….

"Barb… do you smell that?" she asked. "Yes…. strawberries…. mango….FOOD."

Staggering to her feet, she threw the door to the small office open, hungrily scanning around the dark corridors. The phone call was completely forgotten. Catnap could wait. It had been years since she had smelled food. Already she could hear the howling starting again in her stomach… the howling… THAT… MADDENING… HOWLING…. Forget Catnap, forget the prototype, forget any caution… she had to find the source of that smell. She turned, sniffing the air to follow the smell.

"Foooood? Where arrrre yoooooou?" she sang out

The crash of the door opening nearly made Alex leap out of his skin! It was close. That had to be Ms. Delight. When he heard her calling out, he knew.

"She sounds more delirious than ever," he thought. "This could be a good thing, but I better act fast."

Creeping along the hallway as quickly as he dared to move, Alex made his way to the principal's office. As the sound of the teacher's footsteps became faint, he quickened his pace, before ducking inside the room. It looked more like a monitoring station from the bank of video monitors and notebooks crammed with observation notes on the kids. In one monitor he saw the demented teacher stalk past. In another monitor, he saw the small shape of Picky sit a mixing bowl on the floor filled with some re-hydrated food before turning around and running into a cloud of red smoke that was pouring in from the overhead vents. Another monitor picked her up darting around a corner a couple moments later.

"Good at least the mask is working for her," Alex mumbled to himself. "Now, let's see about opening some doors."

Looking to the wall left of the security monitors, he saw a switchboard and a map of the school. Green lights showed the status of the security gates and yellow lights showed status on air vents. Below was the bank of switches that controlled everything.

"Okay, this should be easy."

Locating the switches that were labeled for what system, a thought occurred to him. The moment he flipped any switch, a lot was going to happen. The demented teacher (who was now very hungrily devouring the food bowl Picky had left her by the sound coming from the monitors behind him) would know something was up and come bolting right back to this room. If he turned off the air vents, Picky might not have a safe place to hide. After doing any of that, he'd need to quickly navigate the hallways to get to the front entrance before Ms. Delight would have the chance to return and block his escape again.

"I'm damned if I do anything, but I'm damned if I do nothing. I need to act. And act fast!"

Looking up at the map of the school, Alex quickly began to mentally prepare. The moment he felt he had the route memorized; he flicked all the switches he could find. Vents stopped blowing and the security door at the front noisily began to roll up. It seemed Ms. Delight was right about noises carrying in the empty halls.

"Huh? What's that?!" came the startled cry. "How… NO! NO! HOW?!"

Darting from the office, Alex ran as fast as he could. He didn't have time to worry about the noise his shoes were making, it was now or never! Right out the office, left down the first hall, leaping over the desk barricade, charging through the dissipating cloud of red smoke (holding his breath as he did), all the time, hearing the thunderous bellowing of Ms. Delight as she became aware of his presence.

"NO NO NO! I WON'T LET YOU GET AWAY! IT'S DETENTION FOR YOU! WHERE ARE YOU?!"

Alex turned down another hall. This was it, the final stretch. In the flickering lights he saw Picky standing in the open hallway, the stairway unobstructed. She'd made it. She waved encouraging him to speed up and get there. Soon this stage of the nightmare would be over. Then suddenly, in a flash of blue, yellow and rejuvenated red from her recent meal, spiraled across the hallway and smashed a green power node! The circuit was disconnected and the security gate dropped down like a ton of lead! Alex slipped as he skidded to a stop! The plan… it had been working well, and now… it had failed. Picky was free, but he was still trapped!

"NO RUNNING IN THE HALLWAYS, YOUNG MAN!" she bellowed.

"Alex!"

"Picky, don't stop, keep running! Get away!"

The pig critter paused and stood silently. Despite the distance, Alex could imagine her feelings of wanting to help but starting to understand that right now it's best to retreat and save herself. She then rose and ran away up the stairs.

During this, Alex had managed to stumble back to his feet, facing the mad teacher head on! Backing up all the time, before she reached out and grabbed his shoulders! This began an immense tug of war between Alex and Ms. Delight for control, which Alex was already losing.

"Detention is not good enough for you! PERMANENT SUSPENSION SOUNDS BETTER!" she roared!

Grabbing back, Alex fought control away from her and tugged her violently to one side trying to break her free him. When that didn't work, he tried the other side. CRASH! They had just shoulder-checked themselves through a door into the custodial closet by the number of mops, garbage cans, and bottles of cleaning supplies. But Ms. Delight was quick to respond.

"SUSPENDED! THAT'S WHAT YOU ARE PERMANENTLY!" she bellowed.

Alex looked back to see a large dark hole. If there was any way to get free, and get rid of this beast, it was this way. At any rate it could buy him time to try again.

"SUSPENDED YOURSELF!" he shouted as he pushed the teacher back with all the might he could summon and drove her backwards towards the hole!

Alex tried to stop himself, but the teacher's grasp was stronger than he'd hoped. She yanked him easily into the hole with her, her grip only loosened when she hit the wall at speed as they both tumbled and fell into darkness. It wasn't long before suddenly Alex fell onto a bunch of trash that had accumulated down in this trash chute. Getting out was now looking vastly impossible as Alex slowly shifted to his feet. The room was very dark before it was suddenly lit up by flashing alert lights revealing where he was.

He was in a massive compactor that seemed to be connected to the other sections of the Playcare by the appearance of separate hills of trash at the far end of the chamber. And by the sound of things, like the hum of huge machines and the creaking dry crunching of the walls moving, the compactor was starting to do its job of compacting!

"God… no… no… not like this….." was all Alex could think.