Flailing with his arms and lashing with his legs, Chief Fresco was involved in a desperate struggle - a struggle in which he felt the stakes might be nothing less than his very life.
He had been pulled to the floor of the school hallway, and as he had fallen, his free hand had struck the cart of food. The impact had caused it to topple over, and there was a great hullabaloo of clangs and bangs as metal platters collided with the tiles.
Foodstuffs went flying every which way, resulting in a tremendous mess of spilled pizza, mounds of macaroni and cheese, and a great puddle of chocolate milk. Much of it had splattered upon the chief, covering him in a colorful mosaic of edible artistry.
The chief was concerned with none of that, however. His attention was devoted in full to the doorway of Jasper’s supply closet. For it was from there, within that darkened space, that those strange hands had emerged and seized him.
They were odd hands, a study in curious contrasts. They were very small in size, yet they had fingers that seemed impossibly strong, grabbing hold with an immovable grip.
And they were of a strange color, as well. They weren’t like the skin of any person the chief had ever seen… they were silver, and they had weird, knobby knuckles that glittered when light struck them.
They were, as Chief Fresco had instantly deduced upon seeing them, not human.
Those oddly powerful hands were currently clutched around the fabric of his pant legs, just below the knees. They had pulled at him so hard, he had been thrown to the floor like a child, releasing an oof as he landed upon his back among a splatter of spilled foods. For a moment, the breath had been knocked from him, and he could only stare at the ceiling in stunned silence.
But the strange hands had given him no time to recover. They had pulled at him, and he found himself being dragged into the supply room. Quickly, the chief pushed aside the pain he had incurred when he had struck the hard tile floor.
There was no time to waste, he realized. He had to act now!
As he felt himself sliding across the floor, he sat up and did his best to resist the pulling hands. But they held fast, undeterred by his kicking legs and flailing arms.
Chief Fresco still clutched the stale loaf of French bread, and he began lashing out with it, swinging it in the direction of his odd assailant. The supply room was too dark, and he could not see anything other than a glimpse of the hands that had seized him, and the beginning of narrow wrists and rather slender forearms.
“Who are you? What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded, as he struck out with the loaf of bread.
There was no intelligible answer, but to the chief’s horror, he heard a giggle emanate from the darkened room. For some reason that he could not articulate, the sound of that laughter sent a chill down his spine. It had a peculiar rhythm to it, and it was like nothing he had ever before heard.
How can this be, he wondered? How can this be happening?
“I demand you release me! I am an officer of the law!” he cried out.
But the assailant did not obey the command, and the hands did not let go. They continued pulling him along the tile floor at the same steady rate, reeling him into the darkened room. He sat up further, flexing his abdominal muscles so as to get into an upright position, and he wailed with his French bread with renewed vigor.
“I can’t believe this,” the chief muttered, his mind reeling with the surreal nature of his situation.
He reached backward with his free hand, desperately clutching at something - anything - he might be able to grab onto, so as to halt his movement. But there was nothing to take hold of. There was only the smooth tile floor, which was slick with spilled foodstuffs. His hand uselessly dragged through a pile of warm macaroni and cheese, leaving finger trails across the tiles.
Onward he slid, farther into the supply closet. Suddenly, the supply room was filled with additional light. A door at the rear of the room had opened, and the chief realized it was an entry to the furnace room. Warm air rushed forth like a hot summer breeze, and the chief felt beads of sweat pop across his forehead and temples.
A reddish, glowing light poured from the furnace room and into the supply closet. And by that light, Chief Fresco was able to more clearly see the individual who had seized him.
“Gears and sprockets,” he whispered in a hoarse voice, his eyes grown wide with shock. “What… on… earth…?”
A second pair of hands materialized from the darkness, grabbing hold of the chief. And then a third.
Chief Fresco continued to struggle valiantly, flailing with his French bread and kicking with his legs, but it was a futile effort. The combined strength of those additional sets of hands was too much for him to overcome. He was pulled into the supply room at an accelerated pace, sliding across the waxed tile floor with ease.
In the final moments before he was dragged into the supply room, it occurred to him that the question was no longer a matter of who was taking him. The question was… what was taking him?
Chapter Twelve
A Trail of Cheese
The Green Beans, Volume 5: The Phantom of the Auditorium Page 11