by Dustin Brady
This time there was no bravery, even the fake kind. There was lots of screaming. The robot spider in front of us was the size of an elephant and furious. So very furious. Also, it had a glowing hourglass on its back, which is the one poisonous spider symbol I know.
The THUD it made when it dropped to the ground caused a metal slab to fall behind us. “Get on that!” Sam shouted. We all obeyed.
The spider looked us up and down with all of its creepy robot spider eyes and jumped onto the wall to our right. It tapped on the wall a few times, then wound up and pierced right through it, causing water to start gushing out. Then the spider jumped across the room and did the same thing on the other side. Water quickly covered the floor and lifted our piece of metal. The spider worked its way around the room, poking holes in the wall and causing more water to flood the room. Soon, robot piranhas began shooting out of the holes too. One flopped onto our metal slab, and Sam smashed it with her fist. Others landed in the water and poked their heads out to watch us.
“I’ll take care of anything that lands on here!” Sam shouted. “Mark, use your boots to run onto the water and jump on the piranhas!”
“What do I do?” I asked. At that moment, Roger started beeping and squawking.
Sam looked up. The spider was resting on the ceiling, its hourglass glowing brighter than ever. “Use the boomerang! Now!”
“What, you want me to boomerang the spider?”
“Yes!” A piranha jumped onto our platform. BOOF! Sam clocked it. “Of course!” BOOF! “What else would you do?” BOOF!
I looked back at the ceiling, but it was too late — the spider had moved on.
“UNG!” Sam said. “NO DAWDLING!”
The spider continued poking more holes in the wall, which let in more water, which caused us to rise faster. After half a minute of poking, it jumped to the ceiling again. I closed one eye, squinted with the other and aimed the best I could. Finally, I threw the boomerang. Not even close.
“JESSE!” Sam yelled.
“I’m not good at aiming!”
More holes. More water. More piranhas. The spider jumped back to the ceiling. I aimed again, knowing that I was basically guessing. Then, just before I threw the boomerang, Sam took a quick break from smashing piranhas to throw me closer to my target with her robot hand. At the height of my arc, I let the boomerang fly. Direct hit! The spider beat on the ceiling a few times and jumped back on the wall.
“Good on you!” Sam shouted.
The piranhas had begun coming so fast that Sam didn’t even have time to look at me during her congratulations. Also, we were now about two-thirds of the way up the room and picking up speed. This time when the spider jumped to the ceiling, Sam didn’t need to throw me because I was close enough to hit it easily for the second time.
The spider got more mad. It jumped on the wall and started banging huge holes with its head. Water and piranhas gushed into the room. “I can’t keep up with all of them!” Mark yelled from the water.
“It’s fine, just take off your boots!” Sam shouted.
“What?! No way!”
“Just do it!”
With all the new water pouring in, we had begun rocketing toward the ceiling. We were moments away from death by either squishing or drowning. As the spider finished its last head bashing, Mark ran to the metal slab and tore off his boots. The spider jumped to the ceiling right above our heads.
“Into the water!” Sam shouted.
Mark looked down at the piranha-infested water, then up at the fast-approaching ceiling.
“I don’t…”
SPLASH!
Sam pushed him. She followed him into the water; then Roger followed her. I waited as long as I could for the spider’s hourglass to light up, but I’d run out of time. I jumped off of the slab a half second before my head hit the spider. While I was in midair, the hourglass lit up. I threw the boomerang and splashed into the water before I could tell if I’d hit it or not. Underwater, I could see that Sam, Mark and Roger were swimming straight down, so I joined them. One-two-three strokes down and —
BOOM!
A shockwave rippled through the water. I looked up to see that the spider had exploded, ripping a hole in the ceiling. Suddenly, I got sucked upward.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Impossible Mode
For the second time in one day (and, coincidentally, also the second time in my life), I got pushed out of a pit by sewer water. I flopped onto the ground next to a fountain of filthy sewage and looked around to see that we’d been spit out in the middle of the woods, under a moonlit sky.
“Is everyone OK?” I asked after coughing out a mouthful of water.
“Ung,” Sam said.
“Ung,” Mark said.
Blooooooooorg, Roger said.
We all tried our best to wring out our clothes before giving up and resigning ourselves to sloshing all evening. Mark noticed the bulldozer tracks first.
“What are those?” he asked.
Several sets of tracks cleared a path through the forest. Sam sighed. “They go to the next level I’m sure.” She got up. “Coming?”
“Wait,” I said. “So these tracks probably lead to a horrible place…”
“It’s a factory,” Sam interrupted.
“They lead to a horrible factory filled with death bots, while the robots that have Eric will probably be long gone.”
Sam shrugged. “Probably.”
“So wouldn’t it be smarter to skip the factory and catch up to Eric a few levels ahead?”
Sam shrugged again. “Probably.”
I stopped for a second, stunned that Sam had finally agreed with me about something. “So, uh, why don’t we just do that?”
“Because I don’t know what comes next.”
“Excuse me?”
“I. Don’t. Know. What. Comes. Next.” Sam exaggerated each word in the sentence.
“I thought you were in this game for a week!” I said.
“I was,” Sam replied. “And I only made it to the third level, OK?”
Suddenly, I had a lot less faith in the person who was supposed to guide us. I gave Mark an “uh oh” glance.
Sam saw the look. “Hey, I’m good at this stuff, OK? I love video games, so I always play on ‘impossible’ difficulty to make them last longer. It just turns out that Super Bot World 3 has a really impossible ‘impossible’ mode.”
“So not only are we going to be fighting blind after this level, but we’ll also face impossible robots?” Mark asked.
Sam shrugged a third time.
I suddenly felt overwhelmed and guilty. “Hey guys,” I said. “Thanks for coming, but you two need to leave now. This is my thing, and I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to either of you.”
“And you think we’d be fine if something happened to you?” Mark asked.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “We stick together now, remember?” She said that sentence in her bad American accent, I guess doing an impression of me.
Before I could argue, we reached a clearing that revealed our town’s old paper mill. The mill was a rusty, old factory that had been dark and spooky ever since it was abandoned 20 years ago, but not tonight. Tonight, lights blazed through the broken windows, and smoke poured from the stacks.
“Looks like we found our factory,” Sam said.
bling-bling!
Roger pointed his flashlight down a hole in the woods.
“And it looks like Roger found our way in,” Mark said as he followed Roger down the hole.
“But…”
Sam spun around and held her metal fist in my face. I shut up and followed Mark down the tunnel. After a few minutes of tense silence, we got to a door. “Now what?” I asked, looking all over for a button or handle.
BOOF!
Sam punched a hole through the thin metal and walked inside. Mark and I took two steps through the door, before gasping together once we saw inside. In a matter of hours, the robots had transformed an ol
d, rusty paper mill into a state-of-the-art factory. Through a long window, we could see assembly lines that hadn’t moved in decades whir away, spitting out part after part. Then there were these big claw arms putting parts together to make some of the robots we’d seen earlier in the game. Finally, all the way to the right, hung an army of the walking robot suits that looked like the one Sam had been using at Bionosoft.
Sam pointed at the robot suits. “That’s where we’re headed.”
We ducked into a tunnel at the far end of the window and crawled through. When Sam reached the end of the tunnel, she turned to us. “During this next part, it’s VERY important that you do just as I say. Do you understand?”
We both nodded. Sam took a deep breath, looked up like she was rehearsing something in her head and rolled out of the tunnel. Mark and I immediately followed. We emerged onto a moving assembly line surrounded by tight walls and a low ceiling. “Here! Now!” Sam yelled from up ahead. We ran to join her.
STAMP!
A metal part shook the assembly line as it stamped down right where Mark and I had been standing. Sam now had our full attention. “Three, two, one, JUMP!” she said.
We jumped. A saw blade came out of the wall, buzzing right where our feet had been. We didn’t have time to rest, though, because Sam was already calling out the next command. “Roll!” We rolled under a metal beam. “Stay down!” Another buzz saw came out of the wall where our heads had been.
We continued the world’s most dangerous game of Simon Says for the next few minutes until Sam shouted her last command, and we rolled off the assembly line. “Whew!” Sam looked exhilarated. “That was the first time I made it all the way through on one try!”
“WHAT?!”
Sam ignored me. “So there are the bot suits,” she pointed across the room at the suits hanging a few feet off the ground, “And there are the guards,” she pointed to a squadron of ninja-looking, knife-wielding robots standing in front of the suits.
“How do we get past them?” Mark asked.
“If you’re really good with the boomerang, you can pick them off one by one as they run at you,” Sam said.
I shook my head violently.
“The other way is sneaking through the ceiling.”
After agreeing that the fewer boomerangs I needed to throw, the better, we all worked together to push boxes against the wall and use them as a staircase. Once we made it to the rafters, Sam turned, shushed us, then carefully started picking a path toward the armored suits.
About halfway there, Mark lifted his helmet visor and mouthed something to me. I am maybe the world’s worst lip reader, so, of course, I had no idea what he said. If I had to guess, maybe “Smelly watermelon baskets”? I nodded like I understood what he was talking about, which is what I usually do when I have no idea what the person is talking about. He kept staring at me for a response, which meant my tactic didn’t work. Finally, I gave up and mouthed, “What?” He cupped his hand to his ear to signal for me to listen.
I stopped. It sounded like — a faint beeping? Is that what Mark was worried about? I shrugged and kept walking. With an army of knife-wielding death bots below us, a little beeping was the least of my worries.
But pretty soon, the beeping became one of those noises that you can’t ignore once you hear it. I tried to focus on my next steps, but all I could concentrate on was the beep-beep-beep. I looked around again to try to locate it. It seemed to get louder the closer we got to our destination.
Beep-beep-beep
I put my hand on a rafter to steady myself and felt a wire. I looked up to see that the wire led to a black box with a blinking red light. The box was stuck to the ceiling with Silly Putty or something. More wire connected that box to another box, which was strung to another one, which was connected to a… oh no!
Beep-beep-beep
A quick look around the room revealed dozens of blinking black box all wired to a digital alarm clock near the bot suits. An alarm clock that was counting down from 37. I had seen enough movies to know what that looked like.
Beep-beep-beep
Sam didn’t seem concerned about the ticking, but I decided to ask her about it anyway just to make sure it wasn’t what it looked like. I quickly got Sam’s attention. When she turned around, I mouthed, “Bomb?”
She nodded like she understood, but I could tell that she was doing the same thing I’d just done to Mark. I tried again. “Bomb!”
Beep-beep-beep
She cocked her head and mouthed, “Mom?”
I looked back at the screen — 28. 27. 26. No more fooling around. “BOMB!” I yelled while pointing at the clock.
The robots all looked up. Sam looked at the bomb, then back at me with panicked eyes. Yup. Definitely a bomb. “RUN!” she shouted. We bounded through the rafters as the knifebots followed below. Some of the robots worked together to climb to the rafters. I boomeranged one right before he could slice Mark from behind. We made it to the robot suits hanging from the ceiling and swung down into them.
“Green button to start, pedals to move!” Sam shouted right before she closed a visor over her head. Her suit lit up, broke free from the rafters and started sprinting away. Mark’s robot joined her. I looked down at my control panel. Green button? What green button?! I peeked back up at the clock.
9. 8. 7.
Knifebots grabbed onto my robot skeleton’s legs and started climbing. One dropped from the ceiling onto my robot’s back.
6. 5.
I finally found the button.
4. 3.
While the visor lowered over my head, I desperately tried to find the pedals Sam had mentioned. Knifebots swarmed all over my suit. I could no longer see the timer, so I had to keep track in my head.
2.
The weight of all the robots broke the straps holding my suit, and we collapsed to the ground.
1.
Maybe if I —
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Scrambled Eggs
I awoke to the feeling of an elephant standing on my chest. After trying and failing to move my arm a few times, I squinted to see that not an elephant, but a stocky man in a suit had stepped on top of my robot armor. He was surveying the wreckage but didn’t seem to notice me — probably because of all the debris covering my face. I quickly closed my eyes again.
“Nothing moving over here,” he said in a deep, tough guy voice.
Another voice joined him. This one had a hint of a Southern accent. “That’s it then? Think that’s the last of ‘em?”
“Better be all the robots,” Tough Guy said. “I’ve never seen command so worked up about anything in my life.”
“What do you think is going on?”
“You know they don’t tell us anything.”
“Of course they don’t tell us anything. I asked what you think.”
Tough Guy paused for a second. Then his voice got low. “They had us doing memory resets on kids in the basement back there. Kids! Did you know that’s the first time they’ve tried that on humans?”
“I—I had no idea.”
“My hands were shaking the whole time. Thank goodness they all seemed to come through it fine, but if the agency is willing to risk turning kids’ brains into scrambled eggs just to keep some secret — well, must be a pretty big secret.”
“But what’s the secret?”
“Don’t you get it? With stuff like this, you don’t ask questions, or YOUR brain gets turned into scrambled eggs. For real.”
Southern Guy remained silent for a few seconds after that. Then he let out a soft, “Ohhhhh no.”
“What?”
“Look.”
I could feel a flashlight shining on my face. I held my breath and tried to keep perfectly still.
“That’s one of the three that escaped, right?”
Tough Guy sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “Hate to see that.”
“Should we move the body, or…”
“Radio for ba
ckup and have the clean-up crew handle it,” Tough Guy said. “They’ll figure out a way to make it look like an accident or something. If this one is here, that means we’ve got to go through the rest of this mess to search for the others.”
This time it was Southern Guy’s turn to sigh. “I really hate this job sometimes,” he said. Then they walked away.
I waited until I could no longer hear footsteps before daring to open my eyes again. The suits were gone. For that matter, so was the ceiling. I stared up at the moon through smoke and haze. I found that I couldn’t move my head much at all in the suit, but I could move my eyes enough to see that I was surrounded by mountains of rubble, twisted metal and robot parts.
I tried to wriggle out of my suit. Not only was I 100 percent stuck, but a bolt of pain shot through my leg whenever I tried moving. I stopped to catch my breath before trying again. Nothing. I was hungry and tired and hurting and wanted nothing more than to fall asleep right there. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I closed my eyes for just a few secondssszzzzz…
NO.
I snapped my eyes back open and refocused. I was Eric’s last chance. If I couldn’t get out before the suits came back, he was gone for good. I took a few quick breaths, then sucked in my stomach and squirmed with all my might. My hip moved half an inch. I tried again. This time, my hip moved a whole inch! Progress! I squirmed some more until I was able to rock the suit back and forth with my hips. Back and forth, back and forth, and eventually, my body started moving inside the suit just a little on every “forth.” For the next few minutes, I concentrated all my energy on rocking, then squirming, then finally a little bit of wriggling until — POP! — I freed my left hand from the robot. I flexed my fingers and rolled my hand a few times. Everything worked! I used that hand to pull out my other arm, and from there I used both hands to push my body out of the robot armor.
After I’d freed myself, I lay on the ground panting and sweating for a few seconds. Faraway flashlights cut through the smoke and darkness, but for now, I was alone. After I had a moment to catch my breath, I rolled over, pushed myself to my feet and immediately fell back down.
