Rick Sanchez's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The stain from the dissolved figure still marked the far side of the closed portal. Rick pulled on his coat and grabbed the portal gun. He needed the alloy that could shield it. The seller kept a crate of it, but a guarded checkpoint stood between Rick and the door. Empty-handed, he couldn't lift the crate past the guard. And empty-handed, his portal gun stayed a killing machine. He needed a way in. "We can't just walk up there," Morty said. He wrung his hands by the workbench. "They check everyone going through." Rick stared at the corner where the rotted hero figure had once stood. It was gone now, smoke and stain. But the idea it gave him wasn't. "They check people," Rick said. "They don't check bodies." He left the lab and came back an hour later behind the wheel of a battered sedan he'd hotwired two streets over. In the trunk lay a second thing he'd dragged from a props dump: a life-sized model of a caped man in a torn blue suit, one hand ending in bare bone, half its face rotted to skull. Man-shaped. Heavy. Perfect. "You're gonna hide the alloy inside it," Morty guessed. "Smart, Morty." Rick split the figure's chest open along a seam. Hollow. "We drive up. I tell them we're hauling a busted display to the scrap line past the checkpoint. Nobody searches a corpse-shaped hunk of plastic." They parked near the seller's lot. Rick paid a runner for the crate and loaded the alloy sheets into the hollow figure. Then he propped it upright in the passenger seat like a slumped drunk. He drove toward the guard. The guard leaned into the window. His eyes moved to the figure. "What's that?" "Broken prop. Taking it to scrap." Rick kept his voice flat. The guard reached in and rapped the figure's chest. It thumped, solid, not hollow-sounding. He waved them through. Rick drove past the checkpoint, turned a corner, and let out a breath. "Got it." But the sedan's mirror showed a shape stepping into the lot behind them. A small figure in a dark cape and pointed cowl, moving fast. Bruce Bones, the district's enforcer, the one who'd sworn to return and arrest Rick. He'd tracked the stolen car. "Rick," Morty whispered. "He followed us." Rick gunned the engine. The sedan roared away with the alloy hidden in the chest of the rotted hero. He had the shield now. He'd beaten the checkpoint. But Bruce had seen the car, seen the theft, and knew exactly where the lab was. "He's not waiting anymore," Rick said. His knuckles went white on the wheel. "He's coming now." Behind them, Bruce climbed into a low, dark car and pulled out. The chase had started, and Rick had a stolen crate and a killer portal to finish.