Gotta catch him before he finishes on two. Four's a maze.
Finding Jimmy on the fourth floor would be next to impossible. It literally was a maze, used for team-building exercises which often involved smoke screens, trip wires, and non-lethal sentry robots.
Man, I hate those robots.
Chapter 4
SECOND FLOOR.
The doors to the service elevator opened and Thad stepped out, checking the three long alleys between dozens of walled cubicles. A nondescript middle-aged man stood in the center aisle, leaning on the side of a woman's desk to talk with her, and two women strolled down the aisle to Thad's right. The left path was clear.
Thad listened for Sly Jimmy's unmistakable voice, expecting to hear him putting the schmooze on someone, but all Thad heard were one side of phone calls, the chatter the between the desk-leaning man and the blond seated next to him, and the clacking of computer keys, all slightly muted by the carpeted floor and the padded stain-resistant fabric which covered the partitions dividing the workstations from one another.
Where is he?
Thad briskly walked down the center aisle, eyeing each worker's cell, on the off chance Sly Jimmy had settled in to one of them to coat one of the newer female employees with his greasy talk. Thad knew the women who'd been with the company a while were wise to Sly Jimmy's ways, but there were plenty of new hires to deal with several big contracts the company had landed. If Jimmy hadn't gone up to the fourth floor yet, Thad knew that's how he'd find him.
But Thad was wrong. It was faint since it came from all the way across the room, which took up the entire floor, but he heard the ding from one of the main elevators. Looking around the desk-leaner who was blocking half the center aisle, Thad spotted Sly Jimmy wheeling the mail cart into the elevator, ignoring the rules, as usual.
He bolted down the middle path, hoping to catch Jimmy before the elevator door closed—a desperate attempt, since he'd probably need super speed to cover the distance fast enough.
"Excuse me, son." The desk-leaner turned toward Thad and reached out with one arm to block his path.
Thad kept running, instantly dismissing the need to weigh the consequences for ignoring the man, whoever he was. His replica hero boots had no problem with traction on the carpet as he pivoted hard to the left to slip the man's grasp. Stopping to apologize or explain himself was out of the question. But to his surprise, the width of the aisle didn't offer as much clearance as Thad calculated, and the man, showing unexpected adroitness, got a grip on Thad's trailing wrist and yanked him off balance.
The man lost his hold when Thad nearly fell into the cubicle partition beside him, causing a young brunette in a thin peach-colored sweater to recoil enough to take her rolling chair into the narrow side of her L-shaped desk, toppling her framed picture of her bulldog. Thad grabbed the top edge of the sound-dampening partition wall just in time to stop it from falling inward onto the woman, but the contortion he had to perform to accomplish that further compromised his balance. Barely in control of his legs, he spun around to the next cubicle opening, arms spinning out at full extension. But he braced himself against the side of the stacked shelving affixed to the that desk.
"Whew."
He looked to the elevator still hopelessly far away, just as Sly Jimmy waved back at him. Thad knew it was actually impossible for him to see Jimmy's face clearly at that distance, but he would've sworn he saw Jimmy sporting a grin and staring him down until the elevator door closed.
Thad glanced at the man who'd tried to stop him. "That wasn't cool."
With a deeply serious expression, the man pointed at Thad. "You-"
"I know," Thad said, tipping his weight forward to get off the partition as he withdrew his hand from the desk shelving. "But I gotta go. I'm supposed to be the one pushing that cart." He took a few steps, then glanced back to the two women he'd nearly fallen into. "Sorry, ladies."
One of them pointed at him, and opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, but Thad turned and ran the rest of the way across the second floor to the elevators and began pushing the up-arrow button.
Come on. Open.
He eyed the digital display above the door to the elevator Sly Jimmy had taken.
Five. Okay.
The display stopped at four. Thad checked the one above the other elevator door. It was on forty-three.
What's that smell?
"Young man!" the one who had tried to stop him said. "Your leg!"
What?
Thad looked back at him. "What are you talking about?"
The man pointed at Thad, shaking his finger.
For a split second, Thad thought the man was still chastising him for running through the cubicles and nearly toppling two partition walls, but then he felt the heat at the top edge of his replica hero boots and looked down at his leg and saw his pants were on fire.
"Ah!" Thad hopped a couple of times, then slapped at the flames , which thankfully were small. A few seconds later, he'd put them out, but he had to rub the side of his leg against the wall to get rid of the embers. When he took his leg away from wood veneers beside the elevator, he noticed the two-inch-wide hole in his khakis. The fire hadn't burned his leg, but he remembered he'd taken the spare pair of pants out of his locker last week.
He had changed into them after a mishap with a sample vial of a mild paralysis formula Franklin snuck out of the lab to show him during lunch. Franklin had created it after much trial and error, and he was proud of it. Thad was happy for Franklin to share his success with him, but that quickly changed when someone walked by an bumped the table, spilling the solution onto Thad's lap. For the rest of that day, Thad found it impossible to tell when he actually had to go to the bathroom...and, it turned out, the effect lasted through most of that night.
"It was this," the woman yelled from the middle of the aisle.
Thad looked at her, cupping his hand above his eyes to shade out the fluorescent lighting. Squinting a little, he saw the candle in her hand.
Must be one of those aromatic ones. Now I know why I hate those so much.
He started to ask her why she had something on fire inside the office—outside of the one of the approved areas—but the elevator dinged, indicating it had returned from taking Jimmy to the fourth floor.
"Uh, huh," Thad said as he turned around to the opening door and went inside.
FOURTH FLOOR.
As he felt the elevator settle gently, Thad took a deep breath and let it out, staring at the door before it opened. He knew there was only one mail delivery to be made on the floor. Sly Jimmy would be heading to the middle of the maze.
Probably take him at least five minutes. I've never gotten there any faster.
The door slid open, without the groans and creaks the service elevator would have. It didn't matter that Thad was entering the floor from the opposite side from his usual habit. The maze walls made the experience new every time, regardless of where one started into the labyrinth. He remembered that from the team-building exercise he had to do two months ago with the rest of the mail room employees. A dozen people shouting Marco or Polo repeatedly was enough to get on anybody's nerves, he thought.
Especially when the countermeasures were activated. What sort of company uses smoke screens and randomly placed electrical shock panels?
"At least it's just the maze this time," he said, stepping across the threshold. He stood, briefly considering his options: left, right, center. Each path offered nothing in the way of a clue. The walls were black, extending from the carpeted floor to the sheet metal ceiling without a gap. Led runner lights lining the bottom edge of every wall provided ample illumination to navigate, but it appeared more like a twilight sky than the inside of a skyscraper office building in the middle of the day.
He scanned the carpet for crumbs. He knew Sly Jimmy liked to carry a granola bar in his shirt pocket and munch on it throughout the day. Unfortunately, the carpet had those flecks of different colors in the weave, great
for hiding stains and soiled foot-traffic paths, but also for concealing tiny bits of granola.
He slid his gaze from the carpet to his Mr. Awesome replica hero boots.
What would you do? Knock all the walls down? Or blast a hole through them and walk straight to the center.
He considered waiting by the elevator until Jimmy returned from the desk buried in the middle of the maze, but he knew it was just as likely as not that Jimmy might find his way out of the maze on the other side of the floor and take the service elevator like he was supposed to do. Maybe a hundred walls stood between Thad and the service elevator. It was too risky to wait and hope Jimmy came out the same way, he thought.
He took the middle path, careful not to touch the walls—even though he knew there was no need to worry about the near invisible shock panels, wherever they might be located in this configuration. Ten steps later, his path split into three more choices. He stopped and listened for any noise in the room, aside from the faint distant hum of the air conditioning. Maybe I'll hear Sly Jimmy talking to Alexander, he thought. He heard nothing but the air conditioning, working a little harder than usual, but he figured it must be getting hotter outside. Writing off the slight change in the a/c sound, he continued farther into the maze, arbitrarily choosing paths as options were presented to him.
If he's not in the middle of the maze yet, I'll hear him talk to Alexander at some point. Then I can pinpoint them and double-time it.
Alexander came up with the maze floor nine months earlier. Before that, Thad had heard, the company team-building exercises took place off-site at one of those outdoor confidence-building adventure parks. But after it leaked to the press that people from the newly founded supers organization were gliding down zip lines and scaling rope ladders just outside of town, alongside anybody who wanted to sign up for the same weekend event, the place was overrun with the curious, a growing number of fans, and one self-styled non-powered supervillain who went by the name of Barry the Destroyer.
Barry showed up at the outdoor adventure park on the third weekend that some of the Supers Inc staff were there. It was later revealed in news coverage of the court proceedings, that after attending the safety briefing given to the day's participants by an adventure park staff member named Sharon, Barry went into one of the on-site port-a-potties and changed into his supervillain outfit.
After waiting a considerable amount of time on the toilet, he emerged as Barry the Destroyer and snuck into the back of the group of attendees putting on the zip line harnesses. Shortly after, Barry executed his maniacal master plan, cutting the zip line while five non-powered Supers Inc employees were sliding down it. Thankfully the zip line was only ten feet off the ground. The Supers Inc employees—mostly from accounting—suffered only a few sprained ankles and some mild bruises.
Barry the Destroyer was promptly apprehended and incarcerated to await trial, but not before a crack team from the Hero City News got him on camera outside the police station. Everyone watching the five o'clock news saw Barry wearing his homemade supervillain outfit, which consisted of black swimming goggles, an 'I Voted For Mao' t-shirt, soccer shin guards, and red yoga pants—which it turned out belonged to his neighbor Gladys, who, after seeing Barry in the news coverage of the incident, came forward to identified him and said she wanted her yoga pants back.
The higher-ups in Supers Inc instituted a policy of no off-site team-building exercises shortly after the incident.
Alexander, who previously supervised the cafeteria on the fiftieth floor, and was the building's resident sudoku and crossword puzzle expert, had been a regular golf buddy with Doug from the Domestic branch of Legal. Doug was the son-in-law of one of the company's board members. A well-timed conversation or two and the absence of any other viable short-term plan on how to handle team-building going forward—Legal insisted the company continue such a program—somehow resulted in Alexander getting a promotion and almost full autonomy to run team-building exercises on the fourth floor however he liked.
Two minutes had passed, since Thad entered the maze, and he had no idea if he was getting any closer to the center or not. He stopped walking and sighed with frustration.
Come on, Thad. You've done this a million times. Think about the pattern you've taken. Are you getting closer or not?
He shook his head, wrestling with the discrepancy between what he knew he'd done in terms of the paths walked and the fact that, from the sound of the air conditioning coming through the vents, he seemed to still be somewhere on the outer edges of the maze. He knew the a/c vents were weak in the middle of the room. He could tell the difference, having walked one version of the maze every day of the week for months.
Why is it harder this time?
He suddenly had a hunch, but he hoped it was wrong.
He turned and examined the black metal panel to his left, which, like all the other wall sections comprising the maze, was fixed into engineering tracks in the floor and ceiling, designed to move the walls to new positions at the beginning of each day. He reached into his left pocket and pulled out a folding, retractable box cutter. He kept it handy to cut the zip ties off the special mail pouches which came in from the new overseas Supers Inc field offices. The packages were usually hand-carried by Mr. Awesome if he had time, or by The Flying Rasputin, who worked out of the Eastern European Supers Inc Overseas Branch Office (Double E SOBO), though Rasputin wished it was the Russia SOBO, but there wasn't one.
The Flying Rasputin—who never got what people meant when they asked if he was a trapeze artist—always stepped up to gather and delivery any urgent classified parcels from all the European and Asian SOBOs and bring them to the Hero City headquarters building when needed—mostly as an excuse to fly to New York afterward and catch a Broadway show before returning to his overseas post.
Thad flipped open the box cutter and made a small scratch in the middle of the panel beside him. Since the panel, like all the others, was painted black, the scratch stood out well enough for him to see, if he was looking for it. But to someone who didn't know to look for it, the scratch would probably be undetected.
Yeah. That'll work.
He turned to the panel behind him and marked it too, but with a small X.
Keeping his box cutter out, he continued to walk the maze, marking opposite panels the same way every twenty steps or so.
At least, I'll see if my breadcrumbs move, unless I'm just backtracking.
He stopped when he realized the fault in his plan.
Crap.
As he was putting his box cutter back into his pocket, he heard a faint noise behind him. It sounded to him like one of the metal discs coasting over the sand on the shuffleboard in the normal's recreation room—where he played the game with Franklin on his lunch hour on Fridays.
Quickly glancing back to the noise, he witnessed one of the black panels he'd passed several seconds earlier shifting its position. It moved behind an adjacent panel, revealing a new opening in the maze. Then he realized the sound he heard earlier and attributed to the air conditioning working extra hard was actually some of the walls moving.
He's activated the maze's countermeasures! That's over the line, Jimmy.
Up until then, he had thought it best to go through maze quietly, not wanting to tip off Jimmy that he was still in hot pursuit. He knew Sly Jimmy would only move faster to get away with him if alerted. But Thad's frustration overcame his prudence.
"Jimmy! I need the mail cart!" Thad didn't expect an answer. And he realized the idea of carefully walking the maze, trying to determine the right path when the countermeasures were activated, would not pan out before Jimmy left the maze himself, and the floor. Thad ran, taking paths without thinking about the options. He knew speed was his best plan. He wished he could run like Alacrity, the company's fastest hero.
Several seconds later, after inadvertently knocking his shoulders against walls at several turns, Thad heard something which made him stumble to a halt.
"Oh, no." H
e knew the beeping sound had come from just around the corner up ahead. He thought about turning around and running the other way, but he heard Sly Jimmy on the other side of the wall in front of him.
"Yeah," Jimmy said. "On second thought, I'll take the direct way out. Which way again, Alexander?"
"Over there. Two lefts, then three rights, then straight. If you hurry. The walls will shift in another thirty seconds. Sorry. Can't turn off the maze tricks for another twenty minutes. Keeps the people from cheating."
"Thanks."
Thirty seconds. Gotta catch up before he gets out or there's no chance. And he'll be hitting on Allison.
"Shocker bot or not." Thad took a quick breath, preparing himself for the worst, then ran ahead and took the corner.
The shocker bot's sensors spotted him immediately, and the oversized, antagonistic Roomba moved toward him. Thad noticed the bot had already built up a heavy charge between the two antenna-like protrusions coming out of the top edge of the two-foot-wide metal disc on wheels.
He'd never suffered contact with the crackling blue-white electric arc of a shocker bot, but Franklin had taken the juice to his ankle three months back. Thad carried Franklin's lunch tray from the food line to the table for the next three lunches, since Franklin couldn't hold it and work his crutches at the same time.
Shocker bots could run down nearly anyone, especially inside the maze, where they had the duel advantages of great floor traction to make the turns at full speed and an integrated model of the maze layout, constantly updated whenever the maze reconfigured. Thad knew turning back would not only mean failing to catch up with Sly Jimmy, but also would most likely end up giving him a jolt on his ankle that would keep him off mail cart duty for the rest of the week. Thad knew his Mr. Awesome replica hero boots, while amazing looking, would offer little protection from the bot's zap. An image of Sly Jimmy putting moves on Allison flashed through Thad's head, spiking his adrenaline as he ran head-to-head at the shocker bot.
Supers Incorporated Page 3