Booming Business

With his heart thumping in his ears, Abe was fearfully shivering behind the barrel that provided his cover, bristling to the sounds of three pairs of Slig Pants menacingly gritting around him. His chasers were now searching through the area within just a few dozen feet away from where he lay snug, and with a hiding place as poor as his, it wouldn't take them long to finally spy him out. All that was left for the blue Mudokon to do was to sit as quiet as the grave and pray that by some miraculously lucky chance the Sligs would somehow miss to look for him behind this particular barrel he was now sheltering himself with.

The longer Abe waited, the more agitation kept growing within him, which, unfortunately, couldn't have failed to affect his organism. Mudokons had very delicate intestinal tracts, and excessive stress could sometimes exert a very undesirable influence on their digestive systems. This proved to be true in Abe's case as well when to his own surprise and shock he just inadvertently farted under his cover.

The blue Mudokon's eyes instantly bugged out in utter dread when he realized what kind of mischief he'd just done. The sound he had made might not have been too loud itself, but in the almost perfect stillness of this place it was probably heard like a gong. This embarrassing slip-up was followed by a few more moments of complete silence, which, however, seemed to have lasted like an eternity to Abe, until one of the Sligs finally voiced its reaction by asking,

"Wha-?"

Abe's heart sunk in his chest at that phrase as he realized that his goof really didn't go unnoticed. In the meantime, the Sligs continued to process what they had detected.

"Came from over there, I'm sure of it!" another one squeaked.

"What the heck with this pungent smell?" the third one lamented.

It wasn't long before the gnashing noises of the Sligs' robotic legs began to draw closer, bringing Abe's trepidation to an entirely new level. This was no longer about if the Sligs were going to find him here – now it was about when they were going to do it, and the instant the blue Mudokon fathomed that, he almost fainted with overwhelming fright. Abe realized that time was running out for him, and the rashness of this heated moment only added to his already panicking state of mind. Once again the former employee of the month couldn't think straight and was only able to obey his instinct for self preservation, even though what it suggested might have seemed far from rational.

No longer able to tolerate the overfilling pressure, Abe finally snapped and broke his cover by bolting to his feet right out of his hiding place and then tailing to his heels into the unknown depths of the Packaging Area before him. This so sudden move of his came as a surprise even to the Sligs stalking him that couldn't help but stagger at the abrupt emergence of a bluish dystrophic husk right out of one of the barrels in front of them. However, the warders of RuptureFarms were quick to come to their senses, and when they did, one of them hurriedly pointed its machine gun at the fleeing slave and shouted after him,

"Stay put, you stinkbag!"

Abe nervously twisted his head around at that call, only to see the black muzzle of a machine gun already aimed at him. This caused the blue Mudokon to immediately lose his direction and clumsily barge straight into one of the rows of barrels heaped on his way. The collision made Abe helplessly collapse to the ground back-first with the expanse of the seemingly infinite upper space of the factory's hub appearing before his eyes. In the following second, the slave saw how the towering pile of barrels he had just rammed into reeled from the shock, and then the wooden containers forming it began to fall from above one by one. The first one landed just a couple of feet away from where the blue Mudokon was lying, shattering into splinters and exposing the large piece of ribbed beef it used to keep. A few moments latter, more barrels came crashing down like shells of an air bombardment, forcing Abe to quickly return to his feet and start hopping left and right in order to avoid being squashed flat. The Sligs who were watching all this from a distance got really confused by the disarray Abe's awkwardness had resulted in and just started indiscriminately shooting ahead of them, hoping that some of their barrages would manage to graze the fugitive Mudokon through all this mess. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for Abe, the discharged bullets would either meet the falling barrels with meat on their way or simply fly into empty air.

Abe kept leaping from spot to spot almost ceaselessly until the barrels stopped falling at last. As soon as the blue Mudokon noticed that, he briefly glanced behind him and, to his pleasant surprise, found out that the havoc he'd created allowed him to distance himself quite far away from his pursuers. The Sligs were forced to temporarily suspend firing and start trudging their way over the broken barrels and smashed pieces of meat now scattered all over the floor in order for them to be able to come closer for a precise shot. Of course, that couldn't go without some words of discontent addressed by them to Abe.

"Stupid fartknocker, you'll pay for that!" one of them exhorted.

"Somebody, stop that little crippler, he's running away!" another screeched out.

Abe realized that even though he managed to escape what at first seemed like a sure death and even break away from his chasers, the race itself was far from over yet. Therefore, he stopped standing still and resumed running.

Passing by all the rows of barrels stacked around him, the blue Mudokon kept hectically winking his eyes in almost every possible direction, looking for anything that could offer him any means of escaping from this place. By mischance, a location such as a Packaging Area couldn't have been less unhelpful in this regard. A premise that was used only for the finished production to be packed and stored in it until coming on stream must have been the endpoint of the factory's processor chain, which gave a reason to doubt whether this place admitted to any other areas of the enterprise at all.

Soon the trek brought the blue Mudokon to a tall scuffed grey wall with three ventilation shafts in its fundament emerging on its path. At the sight of this, Abe gruffly skidded to a stop and just gaped at the obstacle before him with some helpless stupefaction. He certainly knew that the Packaging Area would sooner or later find its end, but he'd still been naively hoping to the utmost that it would rather happen later than sooner.

Befuddled by this discovery, the former employee of the month squinted behind him only to learn that the three Sligs he was trying to run away from had already overcome the hurdles in their way and were now about to catch up with him, the springing noise of their mechanical pants drawing closer with every second. The perception of this sent a stinging wave of chill down Abe's spine and he nervously returned his gaze to the wall in front of him, his fear-stricken mind trying to figure out the way of surmounting this hindrance.

In a matter of a moment, though, Abe noticed that one of the three shafts in the wall in front of him was missing a ventilator, thus having only an empty vent-hole left of it. Whereas the hole itself might have seemed too narrow for any normal-sized living being to squash into, Mudokon bodies had the exact build and flexibility required for performing such seemingly impossible moves. Thence, Abe hurried to snatch at this chance and jumped straight into the shaft.

Pressing his knees to his bony chest and nursing them with his long, thin arms, Abe curled himself up into a ball to fit into the aperture and then rolled his way into the very depth of the shaft. Behind him, he could hear the shaft's metal frame drumming with impact from volleys of gunfire that had probably been sent after him by the desperate Sligs. But then, quite unexpectedly, Abe found out that the shaft that he was sure either had horizontal direction or was going up turned out to be sharply sliding downwards instead, causing his roll to turn into a harsh descent.

The next few seconds reminded the blue Mudokon of that ride he had taken in a barrel after falling off a conveyor line above the Packaging Area. Only this time it was not the barrel he was sitting inside that was rapidly bowling, but his very own body. For some reason, though, this felt more comfortable and natural than whirling inside some cramped tight wooden vessel which movement you couldn't even control, and even despite all relentless swirling taking place both before Abe's eyes and inside his head, his vestibular system still took much kindlier to it.

Eventually, the ventilation shaft found its end too, meeting Abe with a set of steel grill cresting its opposite side. Luckily, the grill wasn't tightly affixed to the shaft's frame, and the acceleration the blue Mudokon had gained allowed him to break all the way through the partition, causing the latter to give way with a loud tinkle. However, this didn't make the contact with the hard metal any less painful, and the fugitive slave couldn't help but be stunned from the forceful collision when he finally spilled out of the shaft on the ground.

It took the blue Mudokon a minute or two to recover himself from another ride he'd just taken. When he was finally able to straighten up and look around, he found himself in a completely new environment. The place was just as vast and immense as the hub he'd just fled from, but unlike the preceding dark and lurid premises that were only occasionally brightened by the red light of ringing alarms, this entire area turned out to be evenly illumed by some mild yellow irradiation. The surrounding broad space was also pervaded by a large number of long-ranged production lines, but this time those were not conveyors, but instead some pitched cableways with infinite number of meat-hooks running up and down their length, each carrying a huge piece of dressed beef hanging spindled on it. Apparently, it was from here that all the meat got onto the conveyors in the central hub where the pieces got pounded and then placed inside barrels to be stored in the Packaging Area. As Abe took in this impressive vista, he found himself surprised how even after so many years of working and living within this industrial complex, he still kept finding some places here he'd never seen before. This was a sad reminder of how terribly limited was Mudokons' freedom of movement within the borders of RuptureFarms.

While the upper field of the area was all spangled with those moving meat-hook lines, the lower field happened to abound with means of traversing through its extensive space. Those means were the many isolated metal platforms hanging above the place's bottom ground like suspension bridges, one of which Abe was standing on right now. The platforms were connected with each other with high tech transportation gizmos known as portals. These ingenious devices could warp the very fabric of time and space, allowing theirs users to travel for short distances within a blink of an eye. The majority of portals spread across RuptureFarms had an even longer range, permitting transit not just within a solitary premise, but from one part of the enterprise to another. Such portals, though, could only be used by Glukkons and Sligs as they were deliberately programmed to be activated by voices of either the factory's managers or the guards. It was another preventive measure from undesirable excessive migration of slaves across the complex. The portals Abe was beholding now, however, belonged to the less important and less secured type, thus being accessible even to his 'unworthy' kin. All that it took to activate them was to pull the only lever that was usually placed adjacent to a gateway, which was exactly the case with the portals Abe was staring at now. As soon as the blue Mudokon picked on that detail, he knew where his path lay from here. So, with this goal in mind, he made his way toward the nearest teleporting machine.

However, before Abe was able to make even half a step, all of a sudden he heard some distant intermittent clanging noise coming from behind. The former employee of the month sharply twisted around as the noise continued to approach, getting louder with every moment. The distinct echoing metal ringing to its tone quickly gave Abe to understand that the sound was coming from the ventilation shaft he'd just emerged from.

Then, in a couple of seconds, the source of the noise became clear as a small dark oval object came out of the shaft's hole and thudded on the ground right at the blue Mudokon's feet, making him stagger. Abe wonderingly glimpsed at the thing to have dropped in front of him until he also heard it beeping like an alarm clock. Even despite his hazy state of mind, Abe figured out that the thing he was looking at now was a grenade being seconds away from blowing off. He had almost forgotten that aside from machine guns, some Sligs also carried clusters of grenades with them, and the one he was looking at now must have been desperately thrown after him by those three guards he had just escaped from. The instant this idea took form within Abe's mind, he felt another wave of consternation crush against his already stressed heart.

Once again overcome with shock and fear, the former floor-waxer did what he had become quite accustomed to lately and took it to his heels. Unfortunately, even those few seconds he had spent on deducing that it was a grenade to have been dropped on him cost him dearly. When Abe was about half way to the opposite end of the platform where the portal was placed, the bomb behind him finally exploded, blowing the platform off one set of fasteners it was attached to. The blue Mudokon was immediately knocked off his feet as the high ground underneath him curtly lurched down, causing Abe to slither down head first.

At the nick of time before tumbling down off the platform completely, Abe managed to grab the platform's edge and hang loose from it with his skinny husk reeling left and right after the slide like a reed in the wind. The bottom ground beneath was not that much distanced from the platform he was holding onto and falling down there might not have even necessarily led to him crushing against it. Still, the blue Mudokon was hell-bent upon retaining his current position as it offered the only means of traversing through this area that was known to him so far.

Alas, Abe's plans for continuing to stay on an elevated ground were not to come to fruition as in the following moment, the yellow light illuminating this area drastically changed to a blinking red one. Then the alarms began to wildly go off all over the place, just like in the central hub earlier before. Apparently, the explosion was so loud and forceful it even stirred the local security system, and now it would most certainly attract more guardian squadrons to this zone. The prospect was not very encouraging, especially, in Abe's current position when he couldn't even find sure footing for himself yet.

The slave's concerns about his presence here getting disclosed quickly proved true when a Security Orb flew to his hanging husk from the right and focused its red lens on him. For a few seconds, the drone just hovered over Abe, glaring him with its red 'eye' and processing the recorded image of the blue Mudokon. Abe was staring at the Orb almost transfixed, wondering with horror what kind of forces were now being beaconed here by it to take him down. He knew that at a location like this, just a small squadron of Sligs would not suffice to handle the task, so the lineup of the troops to be assembled here still represented a surprise.

The intrigue was disrobed when the Security Orb got joined by three more flying black round-shaped objects. But those objects were no Security Orbs. They were about two times larger and had long spikes all over them with tiny red lights flickering on their tips. Again, it was another element of RuptureFarms diverse security system that Abe was already familiar with. However, the familiarity of this kind did him little consolation. Those things to have gathered around the Orb were known as 'Sponge Bombs' – mobile mines built to be able to chase a specific target and then detonate upon the very first contact with it. Normally, due to their vast bursting radius and unpredictable trajectory, Sponge Bombs were mostly used outside RuptureFarms buildings in areas like the Free-fire Zone where they posed less harm to the company's property and workers. This time, however, was an exception. Molluck was clearly ready to put some extra effort into ensuring the unsuccessfulness of Abe's escape bid even notwithstanding the cost that effort might have required. Evidently, the Glukkon Management believed that preservation of their stigmatic secret about the 'New 'n' Tasty' product was worth having some additional casualties or collateral damage.

Still holding onto the half-destroyed lopsided platform and being unable to pull himself up, Abe started to conceive that his options had just become evermore limited. Traversing through this area via high ground was already rendered an unlikely alternative the instant that grenade went off. And now, with those Sponge Bombs also present in the picture, this possibility seemed to have become totally void. Abe realized that his only chance for survival now was to drop to the bottom ground that he had been trying to avoid falling to all along. He had no faintest idea what kind of traps could have been waiting for him there and if that part of the area would not even cause him more problems than help. But right now he had no other choice. So once the three flying mines began to impend on the blue Mudokon, he lastly quit hold of the platform's edge and swooped down.

The bottom ground turned out to be really not that far from the platform Abe had jumped off as he firmly landed on its grated metal surface with his feet without even losing balance. But before he was able to take at least a rapid glance at the surroundings he got into, he saw that the Sponge Bombs he was trying to flee from were already on cue, having repeated the trail of his fall almost to a hair breadth. Comprehending that time was precious now, Abe dartingly dashed away from the three ominous explosive devices into wherever his new path would bring him to.

And so another pursuit race had begun, and just like all the previous races Abe had already participated in, this one also had no finish line at the end. Again the blue Mudokon was forced to run for dear life from chasers that literally followed him in his every step. Only this time, the chasers were beyond such things as weariness or tediousness that could give him a head start. This time they were inanimate machines that could be hunting their target practically eternally if needed until finally running it down and blowing it to pieces. And as Abe kept glancing over his shoulder at them to see how close they were getting, he also noticed that they were making quite a good job keeping pace with him. Those Sponge Bombs moved much faster than any Slig on its robotic legs ever could, and at the rate things were going, they would very soon catch up with the fugitive slave. This comprehension caused Abe to feel a hard lump rise in his throat, and he instantly started nervously moving his scrawny legs with even greater frequency in an attempt to increase his speed.

Slowly this stand-off of two velocities was starting to exhaust the blue Mudokon, draining the last residues of energy from his already malnourished and emaciated body. Abe realized he couldn't keep running like this for much longer, and if he didn't find some way of evading those Sponge Bombs anytime soon, he would be done for good. By hard adventure, though, so far the bottom ground he was sprinting along had been completely bare and devoid of any twists and turns that could at least help him maneuver his way from his pursuers. It appeared that the lower part of this hub really wasn't used for conducting any operations, and everything of importance was located somewhere higher, like those meat-hook lines he had seen before.

However, at some point when Abe was almost ready to throw his hands up, his sight was suddenly greeted with a fragment of a large pipeline emerging out of the shadows right on his path. The pipe was fractured and indented in some places as if having been dropped from some considerable height. There seemed that it was supposed to be a spare part for some of the factory's internal mechanisms, which got discarded on the bottom ground while being transported to the place of its installation. In any case, this pipe was now lying right in Abe's way, its hollow section looking directly onto him almost like an entrance to a tunnel. The diameter of its frame was no bigger than that of the ventilation shaft he had jumped into to get into this area, so the wisest way of clearing this hurdle appeared to be simply bypassing it. But then, as Abe continued to peer at the pipe's orifice he was approaching, he suddenly caught himself grasping that he knew a better variant of progressing past this obstacle and at the same time getting rid of the Sponge Bombs chasing him. With that in mind, the blue Mudokon resolutely continued to head straight for the pipe.

When the last couple of feet remained between the fleeing Mudokon and the hollow object before him, he starkly somersaulted on the run and rolled straight into its orifice. The pipe was no longer than twenty feet and wheeling all the way through it represented no great challenge to the lithe and agile slave. But that was only the first part of the game-plan the former employee of the month had so suddenly come up with. Just as he tumbled his way into the pipe, the Sponge Bombs immediately followed his trail, looking to fly into it right after him. The only thing that was off about this was that the diameter of the mines was much larger than the diameter of the orifice they were trying to enter. And even as advanced as the artificial intellect of those programmed weapons was, the peculiarity of this kind happened to be beyond their calculation. Therefore, as the first mine in the row attempted to squeeze itself into the pipe, its spiked corpus just bumped against the pipe's metal surface, causing its detonation mechanism to become activated.

In the following second, an ear-splitting sound of explosion filled the space of the hub. The three Sponge Bombs disappeared in the most candescent flash of yellow and red fire as the white-hot pieces of their former metal shells burst every which way like fragments of shrapnel. The impact sent the pipe fly high into the air even despite its imposing size, its frame getting half-ruptured in the process. Abe, who had already rolled out of the pipe by this moment, still got knocked off its feet by the force of the detonation. This caused him to fall on his back and hit his head against some valve that happened to be on the floor right behind him, resulting in the blue Mudokon getting temporarily stunned.

Once again, it took the fugitive slave quite some time to come to himself from his daze. When he was finally able to align on his feet, there was only the blur of dimout in his eyes at first, and for a moment of two he could barely see anything around him. It was only after a few shakes of his head that the blanket of dizziness dissipated from his eyes and he was able to descry the traces explosion he had caused. The floor and the walls were all charred black from the blast, pieces of ruptured metal and debris lying all around. The Sponge Bombs he had tricked into following him into that pipe were clearly gone for good, which gave the former employee of the month the long-awaited sense of relief. The pipe itself, though, was nowhere to be seen. This made Abe turn his glance around, and when he did, he saw that the pipe he'd just believed to be missing for a moment was actually lying a couple dozen yards behind him. Obviously, the constructional element had taken quite a ride after having been tossed by the vast impact. Then the blue Mudokon lowered his eyes to study what he had just hit his head so hard against and discovered it to be a round-shaped steel door with a valve handle. Ironically, it looked almost like a door to a bomb shelter, only located in the very middle of an industrial premise. Abe had no idea where such entrance could possibly lead to, but so far it had been the only alternative direction he had come across in this area. Thus, he decided to continue scrutinizing it further.

Abe scrouched down and grabbed the valve with his hands, looking to open the heavy door blocking his way. However, the instant he started trying to turn the valve, he realized that even such seemingly easy task was not really that easy. Either his dystrophic arms were too weak or the valve was jammed, but the blue Mudokon could barely make it move even for an inch. Frustrated over this, he began trying to put more strain into his pitiful efforts, moaning and howling with every tug he made. At some point, Abe even thought that perhaps he was turning the valve the wrong way and started turning it to the other side. But this all was slowly proving to be nothing but a waste of strength and patience…

Soon the fugitive slave quit his attempts and wearily fell back from the door, already breathing hard and sweating from excessive effort. For a moment, he thought that maybe he should have sought his opportunities in some other place. But that was when more unplanned circumstances crept into the picture. Just as Abe was about to fetch some wind and walk away from here, the Security Orb that had detected him earlier when he was hanging from that platform high above emerged again, apparently attracted by the explosion. At first, it hovered over the blasting area for a few seconds as if recording the scene of the desolation left here, but then it flew to Abe again and projected its red eye at him. The blue Mudokon flinched at this as he already knew what that action entailed. The Orb, however, didn't take too long to do its work and was finished before the frightened slave could start moving out of its way. Then, in a matter of moments, alarms began to ring around with renewed vigor, once more giving away Abe's current location. With heart aflutter, the former employee of the month began to anticipate the arrival of another pack of Sponge Bombs to hound him, but then his ears became filled with the already familiar, but still terrifying noise of marching Slig Pants. The sounds were coming from afore, and if their frequency was any measure, the ones they belonged to were now running to this place pretty fast. Apparently, now that the scene of action shifted to the bottom ground, RuptureFarms security system decided to bring more ordinary forces afloat. This, however, didn't make it feel any less appalling to Abe who once again found himself forced into a corner by his enemies with very little room for any counter moves on his part.