Sorry, it's been a while since I last updated. But here. Have a bite sized chapter.
Chapter 80
13:00
The sligs didn’t hear me coming. I came up behind the nearest slig and launched a fist into the back of his head. The slig went down into the dirt, dazed.
The other sligs turned to me abruptly. One looked a little surprised, but the other one clearly had his wits about him. He began to swing his gun as he turned. Luckily I saw this and stepped to the side to avoid it, and, as I did so, I swung my leg down under the third slig’s pants, knocking him over.
I turned back to the gun-swinging slig, and caught the gun butt in my face as he swung it back. After everything I had been through, it wasn’t enough to knock me out, only enough to stall me for a second. I dropped to my hands and knees and rolled over to the slig I tripped, who was struggling to stand. I groped at him and … bingo! The catch on his pants came undone, and the slig was ejected from the machine. The other mudokons hurried over and began kicking at it, laughing, and keeping it away from its weapon.
Its weapon! I reached for it and raised it at the standing slig, who was also raising his gun.
I was faster.
He was knocked back and out of his pants. One slig disposed of. But the first slig, the one I had punched, was quickly coming around. His pants were trying to right themselves. I didn’t give him a chance - boom.
By now the last slig had been beaten to death by the other mudokons … my old “co-workers.”
At the commotion, the other mudokons in the area had turned to see my spectacle. Cheers and applause arose.
Nod, Flex, Adonis, and Starch, along with a mudokon I didn’t recognize (my replacement, no doubt), surrounded me, and whistled questions shrilled into my ears.
“We heard you’d been shot trying to escape!”
“What’s it like on the outside?”
“How did you learn to fight like that?”
“Are you going to get us out of here?”
“Cool earrings!”
“Check out those tattoos on his hands!”
I hushed them all, then whistled at the surrounding crowd to gather round. After a brief consideration, I decided that the friets would have to come too. “I need you guys to go and take the friets out of their pits. Hurry!”
We all hurried and lifted the friets out. Small and heavy, friets are leather-skinned blobs with floppy ears and two large eyes.
It was done. Without a sign, I began chanting, and a portal tore open. Several muds tossed the friets through, then everyone began to leap out.
Cutting it close now. The alarm that had been going off for the past fifteen minutes or so stepped up a notch as I happened to look at a clock.
09:57, it read.
I hurried as fast as I could to the nearest lift. The only lifts in the factory went between mudokon living quarters and the three stockyards areas.
I reached the lift and operated it, getting very anxious.
