Double H, Sara, and Maria burst from the service corridor as if they had been shot from a cannon, so great was their momentum, so determined their purpose. They had climbed the ladder at such high speeds, their hands and feet had barely seemed to make contact with the rungs.
At the top of the ascent, there was an access panel that opened into the auditorium, and the three of them exploded outward. They spilled onto the hardwood surface of the stage with much scrambling of limbs and heaving of breath.
Once they were in the clear, Double H slammed the panel door closed, pressing her weight against it. From below, they could hear the scraping of claws and the whirring of saws.
“I don’t know how long that will hold them,” Double H gasped, nodding toward the solid wood access panel.
No sooner had she voiced this concern than one of the blades burst through the stage, buzzing and cutting in a ragged pattern, sending a plume of sawdust flying into the air. Maria was forced to leap backward, as the saw blade came precariously close to penetrating the toe of her sneaker.
“Gobstoppers!” she cried. “These things are relentless!”
“I don’t suppose Jasper built these things with an off switch, did he?” Sara asked, panting as she attempted to regain her breath.
“Uh, I don’t think so,” Double H said with a nervous chuckle. “Not that they ever seem to be sitting still long enough for you to check for one.”
“Wonderful,” Sara muttered.
The mecha-monkeys wouldn’t have to work their way through the access panel. With their resourcefulness, they could simply go around it and cut through the floor of the stage, and there were surely many other ways the small, nimble creatures could gain entry to the auditorium.
The sisters had emerged in the area of the stage that lay behind the curtain, and the air was infinitely cooler here than it had been in the service corridor. The feel of it against their skin, after having been trapped below, was of great comfort to Sara and Maria. They felt their breaths coming easier, though they were still winded from the exertion of fending off the siege of mecha-monkeys.
They had escaped that immediate peril, but there was no time to waste, and not a moment that could be spared for rest. Their father was in desperate need of rescuing, and the way things were going, it looked like it wouldn’t be long before the mechanical gremlins overtook their current position.
The sisters turned this way and that, looking the stage over, becoming increasingly confused and anxious. They knew this was the place they had seen on the security footage that was relayed to Double H’s tablet. Clearly, they had seen their father held captive on this very stage, bound to a chair and unable to move.
It had been only moments ago when they had watched the footage, yet there was now no sign whatsoever of their dad, or even the chair he had been bound to. How was that possible, they wondered? Where had he been taken, and how had the mecha-monkeys moved him so quickly?
“Where is he?” Sara asked, growing frantic.
“Dad!” Maria called. “Dad, can you hear us?”
“Uh-oh,” Double H said, her voice quiet and troubled.
The sisters turned toward the illusionist and saw that she was looking up, her eyes directed toward the rafters of the auditorium. Stunned by what she was seeing and unable to articulate her thoughts, Double H simply pointed, her jaw hanging slack and her eyes as wide as saucers.
The girls turned their heads upward, and what they saw made their hearts skip a beat.
“Dad!” they shouted as one.
Still bound tightly to his chair, Chief Fresco hung suspended in the air, high above the stage. A rope had been fastened to the back of the chair, positioned over a beam, and then used to hoist him high above. A quick examination revealed that the rope was connected to a spool with a crank handle, nestled among the rafters and secured with heavy-duty lag bolts.
Chief Fresco now dangled near the ceiling of the auditorium, nearly fifty feet above the stage. His chair slowly twisted as he hung, suspended in a state of utter helplessness.
With his mouth gagged, there was little the chief could do to voice his concerns, but the gestures he was making with his head seemed to imply he was ordering his daughters to flee – a suggestion that was downright ridiculous, as far as they were concerned.
“Hang on, Dad!” Sara shouted up to him.
“We’ll have you out in a jiffy!” Maria promised.
“Behind you!” Double H cried in warning.
Having directed their attention toward the ceiling and their father, the girls had taken their eyes from their immediate surroundings. As they lowered their line of sight, they saw the mecha-monkeys were already upon them.
There was a circular hole that had been cut into the stage, which the sisters had previously observed when they had begun their investigation. Now, mecha-monkeys were pouring out from it, scrambling onto the stage. After the first of them emerged, a second followed on its tail, and a third quickly came behind that one.
Maria and Sara braced themselves, preparing to wallop the gremlins with wrench and hammer. But to their surprise, the creatures did not immediately attack, as they had done in the service corridor. Instead, they scrambled away from the sisters, toward the edge of the stage.
“What are they up to?” Maria wondered aloud. “What’s their strategy?”
“There’s no telling with these things. Be ready for anything,” Sara advised, her eyes following the movement of the mecha-monkeys.
The buzzing of saw blades filled the air, and numerous holes were being cut into the wood, all around the girls. As they watched in horror, the mecha-monkeys continued to emerge, pouring from beneath the stage.
And that wasn’t the only place they were appearing – others were slinking from the shadows near the curtains, and there were many in the rafters, howling and warbling above the sisters’ heads.
Maria and Sara were flabbergasted by their numbers. There were just so many of them. Yet, the gremlins did not aggressively pounce forward in attack, as they previously had. Instead, they seemed to be organizing themselves, establishing a perimeter.
With dread falling upon them, the girls realized they had been quickly - and completely - surrounded.
Chapter Twenty-Five
An Uncanny Horde