(Vegetables) Chapter Forty Eight: Of Film Crews and Industrial Orange

The chickens were the only ones who were happy to see Richard when he showed up the next morning. Granted, it was at a respectable hour¹⁴¹, but after the late night the others had the night before, it was a very bleary Morwen who got up to open the front door for him.

Rosa and Felindre were refusing to come out of their room until supplied with coffee.

All three women were mollified by Richard, who produced a full cooked breakfast for them, complete with lots of coffee. And orange juice.

Richard drove fast down the country lanes to the Agency building. Morwen was in the front passenger seat, Rosa and Felindre on either side of the Mrs K shell in the back seat.

They overtook two tractors, five other cars, two white vans, a flatbed truck with something large and industrial and orange tied to it, and a large groups of bikers on old fashioned motor trikes.

“Oh, look” said Rosa, about the bikers. “Didn’t we see some of those at the vintage rally?”

“Not the pentacycle,” said Felindre. “That thing is seriously weird.”

They dropped¹⁴² the Mrs K shell down in Richard’s lab, next to the wire cage containing the golden dragons.

Felindre eyed the cage suspiciously.

“How secure is that place?” she asked.

“Well, they haven’t escaped yet,” said Richard. “Granted, that’s because they haven’t moved yet, or at all, since we brought them in. I’m wondering if they’re deactivated or something.”

“Why is there a stuffed alligator wearing a party hat hanging from the ceiling?” asked Rosa.

“Because if it was wearing a top hat it’d be overdressed,” replied Richard.

It took twenty seven minutes before Felindre got bored of Rosa poking around the lab and dragged her off outside to “walk around the grounds”.

As soon as they’d gone, Richard breathed a sigh of relief.

“You’re not comfortable with other people in your lab, are you?” observed Morwen.

“What gave it away?”

“The only slightly obsessive way that you were following Rosa around, straightening everything she touched.”

Richard grinned, self deprecatingly.

“It’s ok,” continued Morwen. “I know how you feel. I’m the same about my gardening stuff. And my plants.”

They wittered on for another forty two minutes. Richard even showed Morwen his monkey¹⁴³. She was charmed.

Their glittering and witty conversation was abruptly interrupted by an alarm going off on Richard’s computer.

“Proximity alarm,” said Richard. “Let’s see what’s going on.”

A few swift keystrokes, and he brought up some CCTV images on his widescreen computer monitor.

Morwen hung over his shoulder, watching. The screen showed the grounds outside the Agency building, various bits of lawn, the occasional tree, the surrounding walls, the drive and the garden pond¹⁴⁴.

“I can’t see anything,” she said. “No – wait, there! Did you see?”

“Yes,” said Richard grimly. “Rabbits.”

Sure enough, as they watched a flood of rabbits swarmed over the walls and down onto the lawn.

The sirens took on a more urgent note. From upstairs came the sound of clanging and heavy thuds.

“We’re in lockdown,” said Richard, in response to Morwen’s look. “That noise is the blast shutters coming down over the windows.”

“But Rosa and Felindre are out in the grounds!” said Morwen. “They could be in danger!”

“Let’s have a look,” said Richard, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

The CCTV pictures changed as the cameras moved to pan over the grounds. The ducks in the pond, taken by surprise, jumped into the air as a cadre of rabbits shot at them with supersoakers. A nasty, oily film spread over the water.

“Who on Earth is that?” asked Morwen. “Are they film cameras?”

Sure enough, a white van was parked outside the Agency gates, and a group of people with a camera on a tripod stood next to it. Richard brought up the pictures from another camera to show that next to the white van was the flatbed truck with the industrial orange thing on it. Some other people were busying themselves around it, untying the heavy straps that tied it to the truck.

“The resolution’s not as good as I’d like,” said Richard, tapping away. “I keep putting a request in for higher spec cameras, but it keeps getting killed in the budget allocations committee.”

“Where’s Rosa and Felindre?”

“Ah, there they are,” said Richard, finding them in another CCTV window. “Um…”

“Er, yes,” said Morwen. “I hope they spot the rabbits before things get anymore, um… yeah.”

“Bloody hell!” yelled Richard, looking at another CCTV feed. “The pond’s caught fire!”

“Do the rabbits have flamethrowers?” asked Morwen.

Almost as if they were answering her question, a group of rabbits aimed their supersoakers at a nearby tree and set it on fire.

The people next to the industrial orange machine finished unstrapping it, and stood back. It jerked, and twitched, and fell off the flatbed truck, making a thud that could be heard even in the lab, despite the CCTV cameras not having any audio.

Morwen and Richard watched in horror as the machine twitched again, and then pushed itself up from the ground, revealing itself as a large, bipedal, robot-like form. With large, white, furry bunny ears on top of its head.

It stomped slowly over to the main gate, and reached out one hand¹⁴⁵, and casually ripped the gate off its hinges.

Morwen and Richard exchanged a look.

“This is so not good, right?” said Morwen.

“You could say that,” said the Mrs K shell, in Barbra Allen’s voice, from right behind them.

Morwen and Richard spun to look behind them, but not quickly enough. The Mrs K-bot back-handed Richard across the room, sending him crashing into a bookcase on the far wall, where he slid to the ground, stunned, and surrounded by falling books.

Morwen grabbed a heavy looking spanner from the workbench and swung it at the Mrs K-bot. Quick as a flash, the Mrs K-bot raised her arm and blocked the spanner with a metallic clank. The impact juddered up Morwen’s arm, and she nearly dropped the spanner.

There was a hum from Morwen’s pocket, and the Mrs K-bot ripped the pocket, and the mobile phone in it, from Morwen’s jeans.

“Don’t even think about it,” she said to the phone. “I can crush you like a bug before you build up enough charge to do anything.”

“Oh yeah?” said SISE.

There was a flash, and a smell of ozone, and some smoke.

The Mrs K-bot froze for a moment.

Morwen swung the spanner again, right at the Mrs K-bot’s head. It clanged off the top of her head without causing any damage at all.

Morwen hefted the spanner again, this time aiming for the Mrs K-bot’s elbow. She didn’t have the time to connect – the Mrs K-bot flung the mobile phone into Morwen’s face. It hit her hard across the bridge of the nose, and she fell over, tears streaming out of her eyes, and her nose bleeding.

With all her foes vanquished, the Mrs K-bot calmly walked over to Richard, picked him up by his shirt and hit him hard on the back. He convulsed, and a small, white disk flew out of his mouth. She dropped him again, picked up the disk, and strode over to the cage containing her dragons. It only took her a moment to rip the cage door off its hinges.

She whistled¹⁴⁶, and the dragons all woke up. They swarmed around her, climbing on her. Without a backward glance at Morwen or Richard, they all left the lab.

As soon as Morwen’s eyes had cleared enough so that she could see, she staggered over to Richard. He wasn’t moving, or breathing. She frantically shook him, screaming his name, to no avail.

The monkey came out from where it had been hiding behind a stack of papers, and picked up Morwen’s mobile and chattered into it.

“Morwen!” Sissy yelled.

Morwen ignored her, despite repeated yelling, up until the point where the monkey carried the phone over to her, and the phone zapped her in the leg.

“Ow! What did you do that for?” asked Morwen.

“It got your attention,” retorted Sissy. “You can’t hang around here wailing.”

“But… Richard…” wailed Morwen.

“He’s not dead!” yelled Sissy, before Morwen could start falling apart again. “But we need to get that disk!”

Morwen looked confused. And messy¹⁴⁷.

“Just trust me! And pick me up!” snapped Sissy.

Bewildered, Morwen picked up the phone, and staggered out of the lab.

___

¹⁴¹ i.e. past 9am
¹⁴² Literally – there was a moment when it fell off the sack truck. Left a nasty dent in one of the walls.
¹⁴³ No, not a euphemism. The clockwork monkey, with the fez. Oh, nevermind.
¹⁴⁴ Currently occupied by half a dozen ducks.
¹⁴⁵ Or possibly a claw, or a paw?
¹⁴⁶ A trilling downward five note motif in A minor.
¹⁴⁷ I’m sure tears mixed with snot and nose bleed are an interesting mixture from a biologist’s viewpoint. From mine though – eurgh.