by Dustin Brady
BAM!
Something whacked me hard in the head, causing stars to flash in front of my eyes. While I tried to figure out what had happened, I got pinched on the leg. “Mmrmph!” I let out a muffled scream to keep from alerting the robots underneath. Another pinch. “MMMRRRMMMMPH!”
I looked down to see a mechanical spider the size of my head tormenting me. I tried to throw it off the ledge, but when I reached for it —
BAM!
Another spider jumped from the ceiling and landed on my visor. I stumbled around in full panic mode, unable to see a thing.
BAM!
Another spider hit me in the chest. When I tried to rip it off, I took a step backward, rolled my bad ankle on the first spider and completely lost my balance. I clawed wildly for something — anything — to keep me upright, but it was no good. I fell off the ledge.
CHAPTER NINE
The Pit of Despair
I fell and fell and fell some more, and just when I thought that surely this was the end of the falling — nope — the falling continued. I curled up and prepared to do a cannonball into the smelly water, but the water never came. Instead, I crashed through some boards on the walkway next to the river. Then I fell even more. Finally, I landed with a gigantic SQUISH.
After a few seconds, I realized that I wasn’t dead and opened my eyes. I had fallen on top of one of the robot spiders (which was now quite dead) inside a squishy mud pit. When I looked up, I could just barely make out a thin stream of light 30 feet above me. I tried to move. Although my entire body was sore and covered with mud, all of my limbs seemed to work OK. I looked around for some sort of ladder or rope. Nothing. The pit was pretty narrow, so I tried to Spider-Man crawl my way up. I just slipped back down. I wanted to yell for help, but the only thing that would accomplish would be attracting every robot in the sewer to my location.
I crumpled at the bottom of the pit and — don’t tell anyone — started to cry. Hard. Like that cry where you’re not able to catch your breath, so in addition to being really sad, you’re also a little panicky because you can’t quite breathe. In the span of two hours, I had lost two friends and buried myself deep inside a smelly sewer. I was tired and cold and alone. On top of all that, I just remembered that this whole day had begun with me unable to eat breakfast. I was starving.
Suddenly, a noise above interrupted my pity party. Footsteps! Then, one of the boards moved!
“Sam!” I yelled. “SAM!”
But it wasn’t Sam. Instead, a metallic face looked down at me. I put my hand over my mouth, and we stared at each other for a few seconds. Then the robot pushed the board back over the hole, making his level perfect again and sealing off my last chance for rescue.
I stared in disbelief for a while longer, then curled into a ball and positioned the broken spider robot under my head for a pillow. Might as well get comfortable. I cried myself to sleep.
CHAPTER TEN
Blast Number Three
Poke.
I kept my eyes closed.
Poke poke.
Don’t you hate it when your mom wakes you up for school by poking you? Yelling is fine because you can always “Mmmmf coming” your way to a few extra minutes, but moms don’t stop poking until your butt has left the bed.
“Mmmmf, coming,” I tried.
Poke poke poke.
“OK, OK.” I rolled over to get out of my nice, warm bed. Except I didn’t get out of bed. Instead, I just squished into more mud. All of a sudden, I remembered where I was. “Mmmmmmmmf!”
Poke-poke, poke-poke.
If I wasn’t in bed, then what was poking me? Just then, a light flashed in my face. I squinted and saw a small drone hovering next to me, preparing to poke again. “Roger?”
beep-beep beepity boooooooooop!
Roger made a happy loop in the air. Sam’s face appeared in the hole. “Jesse? Is that you down there?”
“Sam?!”
beepity boooooooooop!
“No way!” Sam said. “This is bonkers! Positively BONKERS! Wowwy! OK, hold on while we find a rope or something.”
Roger zipped back up to the top and joined Sam. Ten minutes later, they returned. “Well,” Sam said. “We can get you out, but you’re not going to like it.” She explained that they’d found some rope, but it wasn’t long enough to reach me. What they’d have to do instead was divert the sewer water into my hole and float me to the top.
“So your plan is to pour thousands of gallons of sewage onto my head?”
“Roger found something for you to hang onto,” Sam said.
Roger did a very proud “beep-beep” and pushed a dirty beach ball down into the hole.
“Thanks,” I said sarcastically. Roger made a thumbs up with his claw.
Sam and Roger disappeared. A few seconds later, I heard a chink-chink-chink-CHUNK. On the CHUNK, smelly sewer water started gushing into my hole. I covered my head to protect myself from the ickiness, but eventually gave up and held onto the beach ball as I floated to the top like a drowned rat. When I finally flopped out of the hole, Roger cheered.
beepity beeeeeeeeeeep!
He circled me while whistling the same happy tune over and over.
“Thank you,” I said to Sam. “That was — I just can’t believe you found me.”
“No worries,” Sam said as she helped me up. “I found this for you to dry off with if you want.” She held out a disgusting rag.
“I’ll air dry, thanks.”
Sam led me back to the cavern while explaining what had happened. After I’d left, she’d gotten the shockwave blaster off the robot’s arm, but it turned out to be way too heavy to carry herself. Sam then tried finding me but figured out pretty quickly that I’d gone missing. She panicked and scoured every inch of the sewer before Roger finally noticed the plank that had been moved.
“How long was I down there?” I asked.
“A few hours I think.”
“A few hours?! They could be anywhere by now!”
“I know,” Sam said. “That’s why we’ve just got to focus on helping Mark now.”
We trekked back to the big shockwave blaster. “OK, you pick up this side, and I’ll take that side,” Sam said. “Together, I think we can drag it back to the door.” We got into position. “One, two, three, heave ho!”
We moved the blaster a foot. After a half hour of heaving and hoeing the blaster foot-by-foot through the tunnel, we finally reached the door. Sam positioned the mouth of the blaster on the door, moved to the trigger on the back and took a quick breather before shouting “Here goes!” and pulling the trigger.
The blaster hummed, then whirred, then —
POW!
It blew the door into oblivion. Sam ran through. “Mark! Mark, are you there?!”
Roger flew ahead with his flashlight, illuminating a balled-up lump on the tracks.
“MARK!”
The lump lifted its head. Mark squinted at us. “Guys? H-how…”
“Don’t worry buddy,” I shouted across the chasm. “We’re coming! Sam has a plan!”
“Well I don’t know about ‘plan,’” Sam whispered to me.
“You don’t have a plan?”
“I figured something would present itself when we got here.”
“OK,” I shouted back to Mark. “No plan yet, but we’re working on it!”
“What are we going to do?” I asked Sam. “We can’t jump. We can’t fly. Roger’s not big enough to carry him over.”
Sam wasn’t paying attention. She was staring at the ceiling. “What if we crumble it?” she said.
“Crumble what?”
“The ceiling. What if we crumble it? We could use the blaster to make the ceiling fall like we did back there.”
I stared at her with my mouth hanging open.
“See that crack in the ceiling?” she continued. “If it crumbles along that crack, the cave-in will fall into the pit and maybe make enough of a bridge for Mark to walk to us.”
I stared for
a few more seconds to make sure she was serious before offering my opinion. “That sounds like a great plan if you’d like to crush us all,” I finally said.
“Oh yeah, well what’s your great idea?”
I had no great ideas. So after arguing about it for a while longer, we finally decided to “give it a go” as Sam put it. We used rocks as a wedge to get the blaster pointed at the ground; then Roger flew my helmet over to Mark for protection.
“Blast number one!” Sam shouted from on top of the blaster.
POW!
The ground shook, and a few rocks fell from the ceiling, but that was it.
“Blast number two!”
POW!
A few more rocks fell.
“Turn up the dial,” I suggested.
Sam nodded and tinkered with the blaster a bit. “Blast number three!”
POW!
The shockwave sent me to the ground and Sam off the blaster. Bigger rocks fell from the ceiling, but still nothing big. Then the cave started rumbling.
“Do you feel that?” Sam asked.
The rumbling got louder. The ceiling cracked.
“TAKE COVER!”
CRAAAAAAAACK! BOOM!
I dove just as the ceiling started tumbling down. The crashing lasted for a good 30 seconds before everything went silent. I waited a few more seconds before opening my eyes; then I immediately had to close them again with all the dust in the air. “Mark!” I yelled into the darkness. “Are you OK?”
“More than OK!” Mark shouted back. “Check it out!”
I squinted and saw that against all odds, Sam’s plan had worked. Somehow, the cave-in had filled the pit with enough rubble to form a rocky path from the minecart track to the ledge. Up above, fluorescent office light streamed in through a hole in the ceiling. We’d managed to blow a hole all the way up to Bionosoft without crushing anyone. It was a Super Bot World miracle.
“Let’s move before anything else comes down!” Sam said.
Mark whooped as he climbed to the edge of the tracks and jumped onto a chunk of concrete.
“Hey!”
Mark stopped and looked up. We followed his eyes. One of the men in suits from earlier was standing at the top of the hole.
“Don’t move!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Glug
Another suit joined the first one. “I think that’s one of them,” he said. “Can you take off that helmet so we can talk to you?” he called down to Mark. “Where are the other two?”
Sam and I edged back into a shadow before they could see us. Mark did not take off his helmet. “They’re looking for our friend,” he said.
“Your friend’s fine,” the first suit assured him. “Everyone made it. We checked the records. Now — this is very important — have you told anybody what happened to you?”
“They have our friend,” Mark repeated, a little agitated. “The robots have our friend, and we need to find him.”
That caught the suits’ attention. “What robots?”
“The robots from the game. They escaped, and they’re getting away.”
That was enough for Suit Number One. He spoke into his radio as he jogged away. “We have a containment issue,” he said. “Ready the explosives.”
“Explosives?!” Mark yelled. “They have our friend! Hey!”
“We understand that this is a serious situation,” Suit Number Two said. “We’re getting you to safety, but first, it’s very important that you…”
Before the suit could finish the “very important” part, Mark shook his head and walked across the rubble bridge.
“Wait! Stop!” The guy pulled out his radio. “He’s on the move! Send in a team!”
“Let’s get out of here,” Mark said as he stomped past us.
Sam and Roger followed him. I tried to keep up with my bad ankle. “Hey guys, don’t you think we should talk to them? Remember that treason thing from before?”
“Remember that explosives thing from just now?” Sam replied as she squeezed into the tunnel that led to the sewer.
We all followed behind. Just as I ducked into the tunnel, I heard boots in the cavern. “They’re coming,” I whispered. We all ran a little faster.
When we emerged from the tunnel, Sam punched two robot spiders before I even saw them. “You two go ahead,” she said, smiling at her metal fist. “I’ve got a surprise for those guys.”
“No way,” I said. “We stick together now.”
Sam gave me a weird look. “Since when?”
“Since splitting up didn’t work out for us last time.”
Sam rolled her eyes.
“Can you get us through this level?” Mark asked.
“Well there are two ways to do it,” she said. “There’s the safe way and the fast way.”
“Fast way,” Mark said.
Sam nodded. “I agree.” She looked at me.
On one hand, the last “fast way” is what got us into this mess in the first place. On the other hand, I imagined things might get even worse if the suits caught up with us. I took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”
“Good on you!” Sam gave me a playful punch on the arm with her metal fist. It hurt a lot. We took an elevator platform down, and Sam picked up a few planks from the hole I’d fallen into earlier. “Board or ski?” she asked me.
“I’d prefer neither.”
“You ski, I’ll board,” she said, grabbing three planks. “Now where was that rope? Ah, here we go.” Then she took all her supplies to the power-up cube I’d seen earlier.
Mark was looking at the cube through his helmet. “Aqua combat boots?” he said. “Do you want to tell us what you’re doing?”
“Turning you into a speedboat,” Sam replied as she looped the rope around Mark’s waist a few times. She turned to me, holding out one end of the rope. “Grab this and step onto those boards.”
I gave her an uneasy look.
“You asked for the fast way!” she said. “Roger! Tape!”
Roger duct taped my feet to the boards, then moved onto Sam’s board.
Mark looked down at the questionable skis. “Are those going to hold up?” he asked. “What if…”
“THERE!”
We all looked up. Five suits had made it to the overlook.
Sam grabbed the other end of the rope. “Hit that button and jump in!”
She didn’t need to tell Mark twice. He hit the button on the cube in front of him, and it instantly transformed into rocket-powered boots that wrapped around his feet. He took a deep breath and jumped into the river of sewage, dragging us with him.
“I don’t know anything about water skiing!” I managed to say before falling in and getting a mouthful of sewer water.
“Lean back!” Sam called out from her wakeboard.
I struggled to do anything but hold onto the rope and flop in the water. Something clamped onto one of my legs.
SMASH!
Sam leaned over and punched what looked like a robot piranha. She then pushed me upright. “I SAID LEAN BACK!” she said.
“Lean back?” Mark asked.
“NOT YOU!”
Too late. We were already flying through the air. Mark came back down on the head of another robot piranha, and I came back down mouth-first in a river of sewage. To be honest, I can’t describe much of the rest of our journey down the sewer, because I spent most of it flopping in sewer water like a floppy fish. Here are all the things I heard when my head wasn’t underwater:
GLUG, GLUG, GLUG
“Turn left here! I said left! Are you deaf?! LEF —”
GLUG, GLUG, GLUG
“Why don’t you just drive if you know everything?!”
GLUG, GLUG, GLUG
“ROGER, GET OUT OF MY FACE!”
Finally, after what felt like an hour of flopping and glugging, we jumped our last ramp and tumbled to a stop in another tunnel. I stumbled around on my skis for a couple of seconds until Roger cut them off. “Can we not do the fast way anymore?
” I asked before puking all over the ground.
Sam and Mark patiently waited for me to empty my stomach of sewer water before pressing forward into the next room. “Whoa,” Mark said as we walked to the middle of the chamber. The walls created a perfect circle around us, and the ceiling was at least 100 feet high. It felt like we were standing inside the world’s biggest Pringles can. Right in front of us was a power-up cube.
“Why don’t you take this one, Jesse?” Mark asked.
I smiled and walked to the cube, excited to see what sweet ability I’d get. Body armor would be nice. Maybe one of those big fists. I pressed the button, and the cube transformed into a — boomerang?
A door slammed behind us, and I started to panic. “I don’t know how to use one of these!” I said. “Sam, shouldn’t you have taken this?!”
“Why, because I’m Australian?”
“No, I just…”
“You think all Aussies are boomerang experts? Maybe we get one when we’re born and start hunting roos straight away? Is that it?!”
“No, literally I just thought…”
“Can you show me how to ride a bucking bronco, partner?” Sam said in a bad American accent. “Why not, you’re American?!” She finally paused to take a breath and glare at me.
“I just meant that you’ve played this game before,” I said.
“Oh.” Sam had not considered this possibility. “Well it’s quite simple, really. The boomerang is rocket-powered, so you just have to…”
BOOOOM!
Sam’s explanation got cut short by a giant metal spider landing inches from our faces.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pringles and Piranhas
Don’t tell anyone, but I’m secretly afraid of spiders. I don’t really know what most of the poisonous ones look like, so I’m always a little nervous that every spider I see is going to kill me. It’s not like spiders make me scream or jump on a chair or anything, but any bravery you might see from me during a standard spider showdown is definitely fake.