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stoopbeckSarah, Happy Thanksgiving. For you-- a Burn Notice/MacGyver fic! Completed and everything!
Michael Weston hated elevators. As a small child, he’d had a recurring nightmare about being trapped in an elevator that was poised to plummet at his slightest movement; he’d wake up clinging to his bedsheets, terrified that if he got out of bed he’d fall to his death. He’d since been psychoanalyzed as part of his rigorous training and vetting for being a spy, and he understood now that his nightmare was only an expression of the helplessness he had felt in the home of his childhood, his inability to save his mom or brother or himself, his fear that one wrong move on his part could make things infinitely worse for all of them.
Just because he understood his elevator phobia didn’t make it any easier to deal with, but above everything else, Michael Weston was a spy. He could pretend and suppress with the best of them. Which was the only thing keeping him together on this unlucky Tuesday. He’d gotten into the elevator, pressed the button for the twelfth floor, exchanged an awkward smile with the man who had gotten on with him (a little over six feet, short-cropped graying hair, wearing a weather-beaten acid-washed jean jacket that had seen better days, going to floor fifteen). Michael had been fine, phobia-wise, until the car had jerked spasmodically. There had been a grinding noise around floor ten and the lights had flickered, and he had shared a worried glance with the other occupant, and then had told himself he was just being needlessly paranoid, that it was probably just a normal elevator noise, nothing to be afraid of, and what would Sam say if he knew tough guy Michael Weston was panicking like a small child lost in a department store, all because of some perfectly-normal elevator noises?
That was when the elevator had ground itself to a halt, paused, and dropped a floor.
And the only thing keeping Michael from curling up in the corner with his thumb in his mouth was the fact that he was stuck in this elevator with a civilian, one who probably had a whole lot more reason to go fetal than a super spy who had made his living getting himself into life-threatening situations on a daily basis. The civilian turned to Michael. “Hey, you okay?” He reached out a hand to help Michael up from the floor, where the sudden drop had knocked him down.
Michael accepted the hand and stood up, pasting Confidant Smile #11 on for the older man’s benefit. “A little shaken,” he said. “Don’t worry,” he patted the other man on the shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll get out of this.”
The civilian—but Michael was having doubts about that—if he was just a civilian, he’d be freaking out by now, wouldn’t he, which meant that either this old man had had a very active and adventurous life, or he had set this up, that this guy was the latest sent by Michael’s mysterious enemy or a rival government he’d managed to piss off. But if he was an assassin, he wasn’t armed. Michael knew all the hiding places, little signals that gave away whether a potential enemy was packing or not.
As far as he could tell, this man wasn’t using any of them. A tell-tale lump in the man’s jeans pocket seemed about right for some kind of knife, probably the deluxe Swiss army knife with various cool attachments. Michael had never particularly thought of it as an assassin’s weapon of choice.
“Something wrong?” The man was watching Michael, head tilted to the side, smiling. It was a reassuring smile that made Michael want to lay all his troubles on this complete stranger despite years of training, to just sit down for a few minutes while this guy made everything better. It was the kind of look fathers on television gave their television sons, and it irritated Michael. “No,” he said, smiling with more confidence than he really felt. “Well, nothing other than the fact that we’re stuck inside an elevator that could decide to plummet at any minute.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all.” The man laughed, and turned back to look at the elevator’s control panel.
“Let me see that,” Michael said, coming up to stand just slightly behind the older man, who gave Michael a decidedly skeptical look. “You know something about elevators?” he asked Michael.
“I know something about a lot of things. Now, if you’ll just let me have a look—” He tried to politely squeeze past his new elevator buddy, but the man blocked his way.
“I was here first,” the man said pleasantly enough. He reached into his pocket and Michael tensed, ready for a switchblade or a shuriken or a really really tiny gun—and the man pulled out his Swiss Army knife, flicked open the screwdriver and began to remove the screws from the faceplate of the elevator control panel.
“Do you know something about elevators?” Michael asked him.
The man paused, screwdriver in hand, to look back over his shoulder. “I could tell you I design and build elevators,” he said. “Would that make you feel better?”
“Do you?” Michael countered.
“No,” the man said, and removed the last screw on the faceplate.
“I don’t feel better,” Michael said.
The man shrugged, peering nearsightedly at the elevator innards. Michael pulled his penlight out of his jacket pocket, handing it to this stranger who had a passing familiarity with elevators, who carried a Swiss Army knife. “This might help,” he told him.
The man pursed his lips but took the penlight. While he fiddled with wires, Michael eyed the elevator’s ceiling. The last time he’d been in an elevator situation, he and Fiona had simply climbed out the top. He reached up, removed the panel protecting the elevator lights. It had been removed recently; there was scoring along the sides where someone had pried it off with something long and thin. He squinted up past the lights. There appeared to be more wires up there than were strictly necessary, which led him to an unhappy conclusion—the elevator’s escape hatch had been sabotaged.
“Whatcha doing?” Michael’s elevator friend never looked away from his panel scrutiny, but Michael could hear the irritation in his voice, read it in the set of the man’s shoulders as he hunched over the panel. “Maybe you should leave that stuff to the experts. Just sit back and I’ll get to it.”
“This isn’t my first elevator, friend.” Michael resented being treated like a newbie. He was a spy, dammit, not a child who could be relegated to the kid’s table while the grown-ups did important things. And if this old man expected him to just sit down and wait to be rescued by someone he’d never seen before in his life, he’d be sorely disappointed.
“It’s not my first, either,” the man said, finally turning around. “Mind if I ask who you are?”
“You can ask,” Michael said, smiling brightly. “And you are?”
The man sighed, rubbed a hand across his face. “You can call me Mac.”
Michael raised his eyebrows. “Mac?” The man shrugged. “Okay, Mac, I’m Michael. Nice to meet you.” He offered his hand; they shook. “Now, if you don’t mind, I don’t particularly feel like staying in this elevator any longer than I have to. May I take a look at that panel?” He could feel the walls pressing in, and his brain supplied him with images of the elevator cable slowly separating, getting ready to snap at any moment. Michael Weston needed out. Like now.
Mac stepped away from the open faceplate. “Be my guest.”
As Michael stepped forward, he pointed to the ceiling panel. “Be careful with that; it looks like it’s been sabotaged.”
As Mac squinted upward, hand raised to shield his eyes from the light, Michael looked at the control panel. It only took him a moment to realize that it, too, had been sabotaged. Someone had quite thoroughly made certain that this elevator would only take one more ride. His first thought was Mac, but some of the wires had been soldered together, and unless Mac’s Swiss Army knife had a soldering iron attachment, Michael really couldn’t see a way for him to have messed it up. And no self-respecting assassin would allow himself to be caught in the trap along with his prey. Someone else had to have done this.
When he looked up from the panel, Mac was watching him. “You see it too?” Mac asked. When Michael nodded, Mac grinned. “Not good,” he said, and sat down on the floor, proceeding to empty out all of his pockets. When he noticed Michael staring, he looked up, earnest. “Got anything useful on you?” He then proceeded to pull out a pack of gum, a paper clip, a wallet, a cell phone, a slightly battered packet of Captain’s Wafers, and a pen. He laid them out neatly on the floor.
Michael sighed. He crouched down, emptying his pockets—wallet, phone, sunglasses, the pieces of the FBI bug he’d just pulled out of his car (that made three this week alone), a folded-up advertisement for the diner down the street from his apartment. For good measure he pulled out his gun, setting it precisely in line with everything else.
When Mac saw the gun, he sighed and shook his head. Michael raised his eyebrows. “It’s necessary,” he said.
Mac looked resigned. “It’s never necessary, Michael. Guns are bad.”
So this was going to be one of those elevator rides. “I might as well just get this out in the open,” Michael said. “I used to be a spy. I make a living now by helping people with their problems, but most of those problems require the use of a gun, Mac.”
“It’s been my personal experience that guns complicate life. I don’t carry one.” Mac idly tapped the paper clip, seemingly lost in thought.
Michael resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Well, not to make assumptions, but you probably get shot at less than I do on a daily basis, Mac.”
Mac grinned. “You’d be surprised.”
Michael picked up his phone. The display read “No Service.” “Check your phone,” he told Mac. “Mine isn’t picking up a signal.
Mac picked up his, frowning at it. “Nope, not working.” He tilted his head to one side, looking bemusedly at Michael. “You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Murdoc, would you?”
Michael shook his head.
“Just, if that panel up there is wired to a bomb, which it seems to be, that’s kind of something he’d do.”
“Blow things up at random?”
Mac smiled humorlessly. “Blow me up at random.”
Michael eyed Mac, who seemed to be serious. Michael sighed. He’d been silly, assuming this was all about him. There were millions of people streaming in and out of Miami; it was definitely within the realm of possibility that he would get stuck in someone else’s trap. “What do you say we try to get the elevator doors open?”
The doors refused to open.
“Looks like we’re stuck,” Mac said, and sat back down to look at his materials.
“What are you doing?” Michael asked.
“In previous situations, when I’ve found myself stuck like this I can usually make something out of available material, something that will get me out of a jam. I’m just trying to figure out what the best combination would be.” Mac rested his chin on his fist, touching first the paper clip, then the wallet, then the Captain’s Wafers.
“A paper clip and a bag of crumbled-up crackers are going to get you out of this elevator?”
Mac looked up, irritated. “You got a better idea?”
Michael looked down at the contents of his pockets. “You think we could get a better look at whatever’s up there?” He gestured toward the opened ceiling panel. That was when the lights went out.
A few bruised shins later and Mac was sitting on Michael’s shoulders, poking about in the hole in the ceiling, shining Michael’s penlight into the workings.
“You’re really heavy,” Michael grunted.
“Yes, but your knees are younger than mine.”
Michael gritted his teeth. “Any luck up there?”
Mac shifted, and Michael nearly lost his balance. “It’s definitely a bomb,” he said. “Most of it is unreachable from here. If we could just get onto the outside, maybe we could fix it.” Mac sighed. “There’s something else wired into it. Looks like some kind of signal-jamming thing. Probably why the phones don’t work.”
“You think?” Sweat was beginning to run down Michael’s face into his eyes. The elevator did not have a cooling system; the air was getting close and hot and Michael’s head was filled with his childhood nightmare, the plummeting elevator. “Can you can disengage it?”
“I disengage nuclear bombs for fun, Michael.” Mac reached down for his knife, which Michael passed to him.
“Who doesn’t?” Michael asked the darkness. “My girlfriend, she makes C4 when she gets bored.”
“Sounds like an interesting relationship,” Mac said, and clipped a wire. “If you can reach it, check your phone. That might have done it.”
Michael carefully got his phone from his jacket pocket. It had found a signal; he could call Sam, who (in theory) would show up in a jiffy to get them both out of here. He pressed 3 on speed-dial; when Sam picked up, he sounded grumpy. His voice echoed in the otherwise-silent elevator; somehow the phone’s volume had gotten set to maximum while in Michael’s pocket, and it was too dark and cumbersome to fix right now. Michael quickly explained the situation.
“What?”
Michael explained again.
“Wait, you’re where? With who?”
“Whom,” Mac said, still embedded in the guts of the top of the elevator.
“I’m trapped in an elevator in the big office building on Twelfth and Vine. You and Fi need to get here quickly so you can defuse the bomb sitting right above us. Mac, is there a timer?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Mac can’t see a timer, but that doesn’t mean we’re not on a time limit. You’ll need to get on top of the elevator car. There may be more people involved, so come prepared.” Michael looked up at Mac. “Anything he should worry about if it is this Murdoc guy?”
Mac shifted again. “Someone carrying a flamethrower?”
Michael turned back to his phone. “Watch out for guys with big guns. This could be messy.”
Sam promised to be there in five with Fi, and he hung up. Mac got back down off of Michael’s shoulders, sliding down to the floor with a thump that shook the elevator. They both froze, listening, waiting for the explosion—which didn’t come.
“So, what now?” Mac settled down in the corner.
Michael sighed. This was always the part he’d hated the most, the one where he was powerless, relying completely upon his backup for salvation. “Now we wait. Know any good stories?”
Mac told a funny one about how he’d defused a bomb with a stick of celery and a Chia pet (which Michael was almost certain wasn’t true), and Michael shared a funny experience in a foreign embassy which was only slightly embellished, mostly the bit about the exploding shrimp.
In the promised five minutes, there was a noise from above and the elevator shifted slightly to the right.
“Sounds like your friends are here,” Mac said. Michael could feel his grin, even in the complete darkness.
Michael’s phone rang. “We’re here,” Sam said. “Fi’s on the bomb.”
A few minutes later, and light was streaming through the top of the elevator. Fiona and Sam shone their flashlights down, blinding Michael and Mac. “Miss us?” Fi said, smiling. “Who’s your friend?”
Sam hauled the two men up and out of the elevator; he and Fiona had rigged a complex rope system to keep any additional weight from the top of the elevator, just in case it had decided to fall. Mac and Michael climbed up to where the elevator doors opened onto an office lobby; no one seemed to particularly care or notice four people crawling out of the open elevator shaft. They staggered over to the stairs and proceeded to trudge down the ten flights to the ground floor.
On the bend in the stairs just before the third floor, a man stood blocking their path. He was thin and wiry, with reddish-grey hair and a thick mustache. He was wielding a bazooka. “I have you now, MacGyver!” he shrieked, waving the bazooka frantically and managing to shoot the wall just to the left of Michael, showering the group with wall fragments.
Before Mac could speak, Sam pulled out a handgun and shot the man. As he and his weapon fell down the stairs, the stranger shook his fist in the air and shouted, “MACGYVER!”
Michael looked over the railing. “Was that the guy?”
Sam leaned to look, too. “What guy?”
Mac sighed. “Murdoc. He just never quits.”
Michael flicked the dust from his shoulders. “He’s the bomb guy. The one who got us stuck in that elevator.”
“Oh,” Sam said, and continued walking. By the time they reached the ground floor, there was no one in sight, just the abandoned bazooka. “That’s funny, I didn’t think I missed,” he said.
Mac shook his head. “It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Sorry you guys got mixed up in this.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said. “I think you helped me with my elevator phobia.” They stepped out into the bright Miami sun.
“Boy, am I thirsty,” Mac said, shaking dust and debris from his graying hair.
Michael hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but now his throat seemed as parched as a desert, his lips cracked and peeling. He needed something to drink, now.
“Tell you what,” Sam said. “Snow cones. For all of us. My treat.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Mac said.
And then the world blew up. The end!!!
*huggles Sarah*
Michael Weston hated elevators. As a small child, he’d had a recurring nightmare about being trapped in an elevator that was poised to plummet at his slightest movement; he’d wake up clinging to his bedsheets, terrified that if he got out of bed he’d fall to his death. He’d since been psychoanalyzed as part of his rigorous training and vetting for being a spy, and he understood now that his nightmare was only an expression of the helplessness he had felt in the home of his childhood, his inability to save his mom or brother or himself, his fear that one wrong move on his part could make things infinitely worse for all of them.
Just because he understood his elevator phobia didn’t make it any easier to deal with, but above everything else, Michael Weston was a spy. He could pretend and suppress with the best of them. Which was the only thing keeping him together on this unlucky Tuesday. He’d gotten into the elevator, pressed the button for the twelfth floor, exchanged an awkward smile with the man who had gotten on with him (a little over six feet, short-cropped graying hair, wearing a weather-beaten acid-washed jean jacket that had seen better days, going to floor fifteen). Michael had been fine, phobia-wise, until the car had jerked spasmodically. There had been a grinding noise around floor ten and the lights had flickered, and he had shared a worried glance with the other occupant, and then had told himself he was just being needlessly paranoid, that it was probably just a normal elevator noise, nothing to be afraid of, and what would Sam say if he knew tough guy Michael Weston was panicking like a small child lost in a department store, all because of some perfectly-normal elevator noises?
That was when the elevator had ground itself to a halt, paused, and dropped a floor.
And the only thing keeping Michael from curling up in the corner with his thumb in his mouth was the fact that he was stuck in this elevator with a civilian, one who probably had a whole lot more reason to go fetal than a super spy who had made his living getting himself into life-threatening situations on a daily basis. The civilian turned to Michael. “Hey, you okay?” He reached out a hand to help Michael up from the floor, where the sudden drop had knocked him down.
Michael accepted the hand and stood up, pasting Confidant Smile #11 on for the older man’s benefit. “A little shaken,” he said. “Don’t worry,” he patted the other man on the shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll get out of this.”
The civilian—but Michael was having doubts about that—if he was just a civilian, he’d be freaking out by now, wouldn’t he, which meant that either this old man had had a very active and adventurous life, or he had set this up, that this guy was the latest sent by Michael’s mysterious enemy or a rival government he’d managed to piss off. But if he was an assassin, he wasn’t armed. Michael knew all the hiding places, little signals that gave away whether a potential enemy was packing or not.
As far as he could tell, this man wasn’t using any of them. A tell-tale lump in the man’s jeans pocket seemed about right for some kind of knife, probably the deluxe Swiss army knife with various cool attachments. Michael had never particularly thought of it as an assassin’s weapon of choice.
“Something wrong?” The man was watching Michael, head tilted to the side, smiling. It was a reassuring smile that made Michael want to lay all his troubles on this complete stranger despite years of training, to just sit down for a few minutes while this guy made everything better. It was the kind of look fathers on television gave their television sons, and it irritated Michael. “No,” he said, smiling with more confidence than he really felt. “Well, nothing other than the fact that we’re stuck inside an elevator that could decide to plummet at any minute.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all.” The man laughed, and turned back to look at the elevator’s control panel.
“Let me see that,” Michael said, coming up to stand just slightly behind the older man, who gave Michael a decidedly skeptical look. “You know something about elevators?” he asked Michael.
“I know something about a lot of things. Now, if you’ll just let me have a look—” He tried to politely squeeze past his new elevator buddy, but the man blocked his way.
“I was here first,” the man said pleasantly enough. He reached into his pocket and Michael tensed, ready for a switchblade or a shuriken or a really really tiny gun—and the man pulled out his Swiss Army knife, flicked open the screwdriver and began to remove the screws from the faceplate of the elevator control panel.
“Do you know something about elevators?” Michael asked him.
The man paused, screwdriver in hand, to look back over his shoulder. “I could tell you I design and build elevators,” he said. “Would that make you feel better?”
“Do you?” Michael countered.
“No,” the man said, and removed the last screw on the faceplate.
“I don’t feel better,” Michael said.
The man shrugged, peering nearsightedly at the elevator innards. Michael pulled his penlight out of his jacket pocket, handing it to this stranger who had a passing familiarity with elevators, who carried a Swiss Army knife. “This might help,” he told him.
The man pursed his lips but took the penlight. While he fiddled with wires, Michael eyed the elevator’s ceiling. The last time he’d been in an elevator situation, he and Fiona had simply climbed out the top. He reached up, removed the panel protecting the elevator lights. It had been removed recently; there was scoring along the sides where someone had pried it off with something long and thin. He squinted up past the lights. There appeared to be more wires up there than were strictly necessary, which led him to an unhappy conclusion—the elevator’s escape hatch had been sabotaged.
“Whatcha doing?” Michael’s elevator friend never looked away from his panel scrutiny, but Michael could hear the irritation in his voice, read it in the set of the man’s shoulders as he hunched over the panel. “Maybe you should leave that stuff to the experts. Just sit back and I’ll get to it.”
“This isn’t my first elevator, friend.” Michael resented being treated like a newbie. He was a spy, dammit, not a child who could be relegated to the kid’s table while the grown-ups did important things. And if this old man expected him to just sit down and wait to be rescued by someone he’d never seen before in his life, he’d be sorely disappointed.
“It’s not my first, either,” the man said, finally turning around. “Mind if I ask who you are?”
“You can ask,” Michael said, smiling brightly. “And you are?”
The man sighed, rubbed a hand across his face. “You can call me Mac.”
Michael raised his eyebrows. “Mac?” The man shrugged. “Okay, Mac, I’m Michael. Nice to meet you.” He offered his hand; they shook. “Now, if you don’t mind, I don’t particularly feel like staying in this elevator any longer than I have to. May I take a look at that panel?” He could feel the walls pressing in, and his brain supplied him with images of the elevator cable slowly separating, getting ready to snap at any moment. Michael Weston needed out. Like now.
Mac stepped away from the open faceplate. “Be my guest.”
As Michael stepped forward, he pointed to the ceiling panel. “Be careful with that; it looks like it’s been sabotaged.”
As Mac squinted upward, hand raised to shield his eyes from the light, Michael looked at the control panel. It only took him a moment to realize that it, too, had been sabotaged. Someone had quite thoroughly made certain that this elevator would only take one more ride. His first thought was Mac, but some of the wires had been soldered together, and unless Mac’s Swiss Army knife had a soldering iron attachment, Michael really couldn’t see a way for him to have messed it up. And no self-respecting assassin would allow himself to be caught in the trap along with his prey. Someone else had to have done this.
When he looked up from the panel, Mac was watching him. “You see it too?” Mac asked. When Michael nodded, Mac grinned. “Not good,” he said, and sat down on the floor, proceeding to empty out all of his pockets. When he noticed Michael staring, he looked up, earnest. “Got anything useful on you?” He then proceeded to pull out a pack of gum, a paper clip, a wallet, a cell phone, a slightly battered packet of Captain’s Wafers, and a pen. He laid them out neatly on the floor.
Michael sighed. He crouched down, emptying his pockets—wallet, phone, sunglasses, the pieces of the FBI bug he’d just pulled out of his car (that made three this week alone), a folded-up advertisement for the diner down the street from his apartment. For good measure he pulled out his gun, setting it precisely in line with everything else.
When Mac saw the gun, he sighed and shook his head. Michael raised his eyebrows. “It’s necessary,” he said.
Mac looked resigned. “It’s never necessary, Michael. Guns are bad.”
So this was going to be one of those elevator rides. “I might as well just get this out in the open,” Michael said. “I used to be a spy. I make a living now by helping people with their problems, but most of those problems require the use of a gun, Mac.”
“It’s been my personal experience that guns complicate life. I don’t carry one.” Mac idly tapped the paper clip, seemingly lost in thought.
Michael resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Well, not to make assumptions, but you probably get shot at less than I do on a daily basis, Mac.”
Mac grinned. “You’d be surprised.”
Michael picked up his phone. The display read “No Service.” “Check your phone,” he told Mac. “Mine isn’t picking up a signal.
Mac picked up his, frowning at it. “Nope, not working.” He tilted his head to one side, looking bemusedly at Michael. “You wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Murdoc, would you?”
Michael shook his head.
“Just, if that panel up there is wired to a bomb, which it seems to be, that’s kind of something he’d do.”
“Blow things up at random?”
Mac smiled humorlessly. “Blow me up at random.”
Michael eyed Mac, who seemed to be serious. Michael sighed. He’d been silly, assuming this was all about him. There were millions of people streaming in and out of Miami; it was definitely within the realm of possibility that he would get stuck in someone else’s trap. “What do you say we try to get the elevator doors open?”
The doors refused to open.
“Looks like we’re stuck,” Mac said, and sat back down to look at his materials.
“What are you doing?” Michael asked.
“In previous situations, when I’ve found myself stuck like this I can usually make something out of available material, something that will get me out of a jam. I’m just trying to figure out what the best combination would be.” Mac rested his chin on his fist, touching first the paper clip, then the wallet, then the Captain’s Wafers.
“A paper clip and a bag of crumbled-up crackers are going to get you out of this elevator?”
Mac looked up, irritated. “You got a better idea?”
Michael looked down at the contents of his pockets. “You think we could get a better look at whatever’s up there?” He gestured toward the opened ceiling panel. That was when the lights went out.
A few bruised shins later and Mac was sitting on Michael’s shoulders, poking about in the hole in the ceiling, shining Michael’s penlight into the workings.
“You’re really heavy,” Michael grunted.
“Yes, but your knees are younger than mine.”
Michael gritted his teeth. “Any luck up there?”
Mac shifted, and Michael nearly lost his balance. “It’s definitely a bomb,” he said. “Most of it is unreachable from here. If we could just get onto the outside, maybe we could fix it.” Mac sighed. “There’s something else wired into it. Looks like some kind of signal-jamming thing. Probably why the phones don’t work.”
“You think?” Sweat was beginning to run down Michael’s face into his eyes. The elevator did not have a cooling system; the air was getting close and hot and Michael’s head was filled with his childhood nightmare, the plummeting elevator. “Can you can disengage it?”
“I disengage nuclear bombs for fun, Michael.” Mac reached down for his knife, which Michael passed to him.
“Who doesn’t?” Michael asked the darkness. “My girlfriend, she makes C4 when she gets bored.”
“Sounds like an interesting relationship,” Mac said, and clipped a wire. “If you can reach it, check your phone. That might have done it.”
Michael carefully got his phone from his jacket pocket. It had found a signal; he could call Sam, who (in theory) would show up in a jiffy to get them both out of here. He pressed 3 on speed-dial; when Sam picked up, he sounded grumpy. His voice echoed in the otherwise-silent elevator; somehow the phone’s volume had gotten set to maximum while in Michael’s pocket, and it was too dark and cumbersome to fix right now. Michael quickly explained the situation.
“What?”
Michael explained again.
“Wait, you’re where? With who?”
“Whom,” Mac said, still embedded in the guts of the top of the elevator.
“I’m trapped in an elevator in the big office building on Twelfth and Vine. You and Fi need to get here quickly so you can defuse the bomb sitting right above us. Mac, is there a timer?”
“Not that I can see.”
“Mac can’t see a timer, but that doesn’t mean we’re not on a time limit. You’ll need to get on top of the elevator car. There may be more people involved, so come prepared.” Michael looked up at Mac. “Anything he should worry about if it is this Murdoc guy?”
Mac shifted again. “Someone carrying a flamethrower?”
Michael turned back to his phone. “Watch out for guys with big guns. This could be messy.”
Sam promised to be there in five with Fi, and he hung up. Mac got back down off of Michael’s shoulders, sliding down to the floor with a thump that shook the elevator. They both froze, listening, waiting for the explosion—which didn’t come.
“So, what now?” Mac settled down in the corner.
Michael sighed. This was always the part he’d hated the most, the one where he was powerless, relying completely upon his backup for salvation. “Now we wait. Know any good stories?”
Mac told a funny one about how he’d defused a bomb with a stick of celery and a Chia pet (which Michael was almost certain wasn’t true), and Michael shared a funny experience in a foreign embassy which was only slightly embellished, mostly the bit about the exploding shrimp.
In the promised five minutes, there was a noise from above and the elevator shifted slightly to the right.
“Sounds like your friends are here,” Mac said. Michael could feel his grin, even in the complete darkness.
Michael’s phone rang. “We’re here,” Sam said. “Fi’s on the bomb.”
A few minutes later, and light was streaming through the top of the elevator. Fiona and Sam shone their flashlights down, blinding Michael and Mac. “Miss us?” Fi said, smiling. “Who’s your friend?”
Sam hauled the two men up and out of the elevator; he and Fiona had rigged a complex rope system to keep any additional weight from the top of the elevator, just in case it had decided to fall. Mac and Michael climbed up to where the elevator doors opened onto an office lobby; no one seemed to particularly care or notice four people crawling out of the open elevator shaft. They staggered over to the stairs and proceeded to trudge down the ten flights to the ground floor.
On the bend in the stairs just before the third floor, a man stood blocking their path. He was thin and wiry, with reddish-grey hair and a thick mustache. He was wielding a bazooka. “I have you now, MacGyver!” he shrieked, waving the bazooka frantically and managing to shoot the wall just to the left of Michael, showering the group with wall fragments.
Before Mac could speak, Sam pulled out a handgun and shot the man. As he and his weapon fell down the stairs, the stranger shook his fist in the air and shouted, “MACGYVER!”
Michael looked over the railing. “Was that the guy?”
Sam leaned to look, too. “What guy?”
Mac sighed. “Murdoc. He just never quits.”
Michael flicked the dust from his shoulders. “He’s the bomb guy. The one who got us stuck in that elevator.”
“Oh,” Sam said, and continued walking. By the time they reached the ground floor, there was no one in sight, just the abandoned bazooka. “That’s funny, I didn’t think I missed,” he said.
Mac shook his head. “It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Sorry you guys got mixed up in this.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said. “I think you helped me with my elevator phobia.” They stepped out into the bright Miami sun.
“Boy, am I thirsty,” Mac said, shaking dust and debris from his graying hair.
Michael hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but now his throat seemed as parched as a desert, his lips cracked and peeling. He needed something to drink, now.
“Tell you what,” Sam said. “Snow cones. For all of us. My treat.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Mac said.
And then the world blew up. The end!!!
*huggles Sarah*
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Date: 2007-11-25 04:44 am (UTC)How was Thanksgiving?