Day 30

This one's awful.  Sorry guys

 

            Don pulled the switch on the red rubber machine standing in front of him.  It resembled an old fashioned lever like those in a News Room.  The cylindrical tube shifts in a circular motion as a green liquid fills it.  Rising to fill the grey brick room, which already contained an old fashioned stove used for heating purposes.  The arms of the rose with the clanking of steam, and began alternating as the machine began swinging hectically around like helicopter rotors caught in a palm tree.

Don stood back.  A flash of light enveloped the room in a pink glow.  The others were still on the other side of the door, if this machine exploded this time they would be fine.  The gamma beams might eat through his own cells, and he wasn’t sure what this would do to him.  His face shone with a large vertical scar where a shattered piece of metal extension still protruded from his face.  His arms were also tenderized and scraped, with the skin taking on a dark red hue.  Still, he stood upright and bent forward, shielding his face from the light of the furnace.

          He touched the skin on the back sides of his hands, it felt softer than it had after the motorcycle accident.  Stooping down over The Bodyguard, he could see the snakebite holes slowly recede back into his neckline.  The snake itself had vanished, although this species of snake were more like leaches, latching on and pulling themselves in.    The Bodyguard propped his upper half into a sitting position, rubbing his eyes with the inside of his thumb and index finger.

            The shouting and banging on the outside of the door had stopped, as well. The Kripdoff robot could no longer be hear whirring, emitting its high pitched wind as it spun itself recklessly from wall to wall.  The sound of its thunderbolts were also a distant memory.  He glanced at The Bodyguard, who shrugged and tightened the gauze wrapped around his hands

            “Don,”  The bodyguard noticed the scientists presence.  “I thought you were dead.”  At the rattle of a turbine in the distance, he pullled himself up one knee at a time. 

            Don had seen when the bodyguard was thrown through this door, splayed out before him like a sardine on a cutting board.  The giant man had jumped onto the neck of the Kripdoff robot like a child on the shoulders of an adult, to be tossed off with brain rattling supremecy in the completion of the metaphor.

            Don pawed through his wallet, which was dwarfed by the size of his hands, and boomed:  “Fuckin robot took my cash.”  He looked behind the cash and saw that his pictures of his children were missing as well.  His credit cards were still there, as well as the number of Mitsy, a little blonde number he met a week before getting lunch while his car was in the shop. 

            The door opened easily from the inside.  It revealed the fact it was bent on its frame when Don pushed through, an eye extended from his head and attempting to survey the area behind the door.  He heard a sudden call from his right side, a voice that sounded familiar called out “Don!” And he turned and pushed the door on a ninety degree angle to the outside brick wall.  The basement looked larger in the darkness, in the low light the shadows were off limits.

            Don broke for the freight elevator ignoring the churning and sputtering hiding behind the dark.  The Bodyguard grabbed hold of the swinging elevator door and pulled it down behind him as they dove into the booth.  The machine in the boilerroom started its initial countdown stages.  Moments of silnce were intermittently interrupted by the cracks of woods, and the sound of batteries melting.

            The elevator let them off on floor level, where they entered a flat, tall but narrow hotel lobby hallway.  The Bodyguard hastily grabbed a dixie cup from the dispenser attached to the water cooler and refreshed himself by throwing cup after cup of the gurgling solution.  Don’s arms were turning a darker shade of red, some purple mixed into his pigment with bumps popping out like miniature anthills.  He held his Popeye forearms in front of him like a cat lying down.

            It wasn’t a suitable second for a break, as the conference room doors swung open and a birdlike automaton with reverse jointed legs bolted through.  Don and the bodyguard knew better than to look behind him as they crashed through the gift job.  Don wrapped souvenir T-shirts over his arms as the bird came crashing through the windows of the shop, the entrance a concave apex of a shell.

            The Bodyguard swung a stantion at the nearby bird thing, and it sprayed electricity from its shaking neck as its legs thrashed wildly.  The sound of a chopper sounded outside and they knew it had to be Dungent, the crippled engineer of the hotel.  He had rigged a pulley system that allowed him to fly when he operated the main piloting equipment with his hands.

            Don thought about the nuke back at headquarters.  He knew there had to be a way to harness the energy from inside the inactive bomb to get the time machine going again.  He had built the prototype before and was inclined to do it right this time.  The memory loss mechanism in the current time machine only provided lateral jumps through gaps in time, which would fuzzy Don’s memory.  The Body Guard may have been unphased, but he would switch into a primal mode in any extreme circumstances and he’d be as good as an animal. 

            They both hung from the lower rungs of the helicopter.  The Bodyguard dropped into a graceful roll and reached up to help Don, who’s arms were still in extreme pain from the second degree burns.  Luckily, the bodyguard was a gentle assistant with a keen understanding of empathy.  Don shook his head to acknowledge the copter pilot, and the coast seemed to be clear.