Episode 35
Sharp leapt over the giant cable that connected the wormbox with the wormhole generator and met Cattleya halfway. “Breath through your shirt!” he shouted in between coughs. The smoke was thick as it billowed around their heads, making vision difficult. Cattleya’s high pitched coughs came on heavy as the smoke seemed to affect her lungs more than his. The smoke also had a curious effect on the leeches which were no longer flying. As the smoke swelled in rolling puffs around the swarm, they dropped to the lab floor, writhing, wriggling, then not moving, not even a twitch.
“I sure hope this smoke isn’t toxic!” Sharp held the torch away from both of them and coughed into his covered mouth.
“Are you stupid!” came Syd’s comforting voice over the intercom. “She could be dead right now! You shouldn’t be experimenting on her, you creep!”
“Yeah, you could have killed the only real live furry on the planet!”
Sharp sighed.
That has to be Julian.
Sharp did what he did best when annoyed and ignored them. The leeches in Cattleya’s hair came out easily now that they were dead or stunned. He tossed them to the floor and was about to step on them when Cattleya began hopping up and down on their still bodies. If they weren’t dead before, Cattleya had sent them onware towards whatever heaven treasured flying, repugnant blood sucking monsters.
“Die! Disgusting! Revolting! Die! Die!”
Leaving Cattleya to her cathartic therapy, Sharp ran about the edges of the room catching stragglers and sending them to the same end as their previous companions. Although the portal was still open, and more flying leeches were coming through, the wet brush fire Sharp had started was pouring smoke all around the gateway opening. All flying leeches that broke through the portal hit the lab floor with a wet plop. Sharp observed the smoke bouncing and rolling off the event plane as he looked over his AR stats. The timer read 18:41.
We have another twenty minutes of this at most?
Freed from their leech prison, surviving beetle-bees began to angrily buzz around. The smoke didn’t seem to have any effect on them, but it did obscure their vision. They flew above the smoke and flew around the rafters.
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“Cattleya! Want to kill some more?”
“YES!” she growled in reply.
Sharp put his torch over by the fire and jogged over to the scissor lift parked by the bathroom.
“Get your bat. We’re gonna hoist you up high so you can kill the beetle-bees.”
Cattleya walked over to the scissor lift cautiously. Sharp helped her mount the folded ladder to sit in the cabin.
“Is this safe?”
“NO!” came a chorus of voices over the intercom. The observation window was filled with employees waving their hands, crossing them into Xs, and clamoring for her attention.
“Well, if we don’t kill them, they’ll visit us while we sleep.”
“Ugh.”
“I drive slowly. Just don’t swing too violently.” Sharp gave her stomping ground a side-eyed glance and then winked at her.
They spent the next seventeen minutes driving around the lab while Cattleya made a well paced half century or two with her flying adversaries, and Sharp would leave her at the top while fetching his torch and dispatching more flying leeches that escaped the smoke barrier by the portal.
When the air filled with the sound of a rusty door screeching and echoing around the lab, Sharp brought Cattleya down as she whacked the last remaining beetle-bee out of the air. Together they shambled over to the wormbox.
The air rippled.
“It’s a beach,” whispered Cattleya.
“I’m so happy,” said Sharp with a tired voice.
They both slumped down to the floor with the wormbox island at their backs. The sun was rising on a distant ocean the color of warm teal.
“It matches your eyes.”
Cattleya turned to Sharp with a sour look.
“Hey, I’m not trying to hit on you, Princess! You’ve got teal eyes. It’s not a color we have here.”
“Fine.”
“BUT…I do have to say, you look lovely today. Yes, I’ve never seen anybody wear smoke and soot quite so regally.” Cattleya’s colorful hair was dingy and mottled from soot, its perfectly coifed waves a jumbled mess, as if bed head picked a fight with tornado.
“Oh, really, you cheeky rascal? You should see yourself. There are twigs and a dead beetle-bee nestled in your hair. You look quite frightful.” Sharp looked no better. His usually shiny black hair was ash gray and hid his white lock. The twigs and bug corpse added to the élan.
“Yeah, well, it takes a lot of style to make this amount of mess look this good.”
Cattleya simply rolled her eyes and gave him a tired smile, then began picking things off of her clothes and straightening the folds.
“We probably should do something about this fire,” Sharp said to nobody in particular.
On cue, the sprinklers went off.
“What?” Sharp exclaimed. “They’re going off now while nothing is happening?”
“Sharp, I think a fire in the lab qualifies as something happening,” Isabelle softly admonished him.
Sharp slumped his shoulders in response and looked over at Cattleya who had started laughing with the “moo hoo hoo”s that Sharp found stranglely appealing.
“You people make it rain inside and have captured a Traveler’s Door? Yet you can’t find the door to let me out?” She leaned on him while shaking softly and bumped his head gently with her horns. Sharp couldn’t tell if she was crying or laughing. He let her lean on his shoulder, a frown on his face as he poured over his data and formulated plans. He wanted to go home, too.
During this portal window and the next, they were both washed clean by the sprinklers until somebody finally remembered to shut them off. The brush pile was too wet to even smoulder.