Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel

by Dave Bakers

  I waited out the seconds, for the first sign that I saw of his mouth twitching, of his smile threatening to dial itself down a couple of notches.

  That was when I made my move.

  I rocked over onto my side. Got up onto my feet.

  Mr Yorbleson rushed me.

  I sidestepped him, surprising even myself with my nimble footwork.

  Then I ran.

  Hard and fast.

  Knowing where I had to go.

  Where Alan had headed.

  The dark-purple pool.

  I hung back, at the edge, for a couple of moments.

  And then, down there, seemingly just below the surface, I saw all their faces.

  Our parents.

  Staring out at us.

  Apparently trapped.

  When I glanced back over my shoulder, I saw Mr Yorbleson darkening the archway, growing larger and larger, appearing to consume the hall.

  I didn’t think.

  I just jumped.

  49

  EVERYTHING turned a dark purple.

  All around me.

  It was like a sweaty goo up against my skin.

  Smothering me till I couldn’t help but breathe it in.

  I took the stuff down my throat.

  Tasted its synthetic taste in my mouth.

  Filling me from the inside.

  My heart seemed to stop for a long while.

  I floated about there, apparently stuck between life and death, for several seconds—long seconds in which I was sure that, at any moment, all my thoughts would drift away from me.

  And I would die.

  I felt a strong-armed tug at the leg of my trousers.

  I forced my eyes back open.

  Looked downwards.

  Saw someone there.

  Below me.

  They tugged harder.

  I felt myself dropping again.

  When I tried to exhale, I found that I couldn’t.

  That I simply didn’t have the space.

  I kept on sinking and, finally, I felt my foot freeing up, leaving the goo behind, the dark-purple pool of gunk. Then the other foot got free. All of a sudden, I slipped right downwards, felt myself landing on firm ground, and only thought to bend my knees as a kind of final resort. But I still fell over. Landed with a thump on my bottom.

  I sat there for a couple of moments—dazed—a sharp flash of pain rushed up my spine, and caused my muscles to crumple up. I felt a slight tinge in my left wrist, and I brought my hand to my chest so that I could clutch hold of it.

  Give it some warmth.

  I looked up—above me.

  To the purple pool I’d just sunk through.

  Maybe I’d expected to see our parents there, forever stuck in that goo.

  They weren’t there.

  Then I looked about me, to the person who’d dragged me downwards, from the goo.

  I saw the blazing head of red hair, the freckled cheeks.

  Alan.

  He looked just about as surprised as I felt.

  I thought he had cut and run . . . headed off someplace else.

  He reached out to me, offering his hand.

  I took it with my good right hand, and he hauled me up.

  A couple of seconds of swaying about on my feet later, and I recovered my balance, managed to keep myself in an upright position.

  I know that I should’ve felt angry—that I should’ve wanted to strangle Alan, and yet I thought on the words that Yorbleson had dispensed to me, how he’d said that he’d . . . he’d trapped Alan . . . that he’d forced him into doing what he’d done, into bringing the four of us in here, to the Grand Tournament, so that Yorbleson could use us as pawns.

  But it was because Yorbleson had captured Alan’s own parents.

  Alan looked me up and down, then said, “Are you okay?”

  I gave him a sort of nod.

  He gave me the hint of a smile, but it soon slipped right off his lips, almost as soon as it had appeared there. “Our parents,” he said, “they’re a little further along.”

  I gazed upwards and pointed. “But I saw them,” I said, “Up there when I gazed down into the pool.”

  Alan gave me a firm nod. “Yeah, I saw my own parents there too.”

  I took a couple of steps, only now taking in my surroundings properly, realising that this place—beneath the dark-purple pool—was wall-to-wall steel, and that it clanged with every one of my footsteps. Everything down here was grey.

  As Alan took off along the corridor, another thought struck me.

  So I said it out loud.

  “Will, uh, Yorbleson be coming after us?”

  Alan didn’t turn around to reply.

  But I heard him just fine.

  “Yes,” Alan said, “We’ve got to hurry.”

  50

  THAT GOT MY HEART HAMMERING all over again.

  And I couldn’t help but glance back over my shoulder for every few steps that we took.

  But I forced myself to go as fast as I could—keeping pace with Alan as much as possible.

  As we went along, I thought back to what Yorbleson had said, and I wondered just how much of it had been true. “Your parents,” I said, “is it true that he took them from you—that he trapped them, just like he’s done with ours?”

  “Yes,” Alan said, still hurrying along.

  Back on our heels, I was almost certain that I heard footsteps—even a gentle thump!—perhaps Yorbleson making his way down through that dark-purple pool, arriving to give chase to us.

  I hurried on faster.

  Tried to put it out of my mind.

  “And what sort of things did you have to do?” I said.

  At first I thought that Alan hadn’t heard my question, that he was too focussed on barrelling along this corridor, not wanting to mention anything at all.

  Not to get himself tied up in explanations.

  But, right when I was certain he was putting on a silent show, he said, “When I first came across the game—when I tried out Halls of Hallow a couple of years back—I couldn’t help but step into the game . . . you know, using the infrared strip around the back?”

  Yeah, I knew about that infrared strip almost too well.

  “And that was how it started—at first it wasn’t threats, nothing like that, it was just, I dunno, interesting?”

  I thought back to the first time that I’d stuck Halls of Hallow into my Sirocco—I have to admit that I’d been stifling a yawn through that entire slow-paced cut scene.

  If it hadn’t been for the red-haired kid—if it hadn’t been for Alan—then most likely I wouldn’t have been able to recall anything about it.

  “It was open-ended,” Alan continued, “the game, I mean.”

  As he replied, we rounded a corner and came to a steel door.

  I thought that this might be the end of the line, but, as it happened, Alan moved over confidently to the digital keypad there and began tapping away a code.

  From somewhere there was a beep-beep and then the lock disengaged.

  Alan continued to speak as he held the door open for me. “Yorbleson, he started asking lots of questions about the outside world, about things that happened outside of Halls of Hallow, and, well, that was probably where I should’ve put a stop to the thing . . . where I should’ve told him that it was enough.”

  I let the door slip shut behind me with an almighty clang!

  My heart leaped up to my throat as I wondered if—maybe—Yorbleson might be about to round the corner, to recapture me.

  I knew that James, Chung and Kate were all outside of the game now . . . that their parents were still here . . . trapped till they did whatever it was that Yorbleson wanted.

  “But,” Alan continued, “I just didn’t see anything wrong with it—maybe I was just caught up in the excitement, something like that, you know? I mean, I’m not gonna lie, I’m a pretty solitary kid, don’t have many friends or anything, my games console is pretty much the centre of my life
.”

  I thought that I could sympathise with that point of view, but I didn’t break in to comment, not wanting to break the flow which Alan had going here.

  “Anyway, when I told him about the internet that was when he got all interested—when he really wanted to learn a whole lot about it . . . we tried, a few times, for him to follow me out of the game, to jump into the pool with me since that was how he got out before.” Alan threw up his hands. “Before he built all this down here—this prison.”

  I felt a tingle pass through my nerves. “And how do you get out now?”

  “Oh,” Alan said, this time stopping, standing before me square on, “there’s no way out now—the only way is if you die, if Yorbleson decides you can go.”

  My heart missed several dozen beats right then, but, at that point, Alan brought us sailing around the next corner and there, sitting behind a whole bunch of bars, were our parents.

  All of them seemed to be knocked out.

  51

  “SO, UH,” I began, looking over our parents, all of them snoozing away in their various jail cells, “you haven’t given any thought to how you’re actually going to get out of Halls of Hallow again?”

  Alan sidled up to the bars. I saw that his expression was frozen into something between pleasant surprise and all-over shock. He was padding towards a cell which contained a couple of red-haired, middle-aged people. His mother and father, I assumed.

  I continued to speak, though I was more or less certain that now I was pretty much only talking to myself. “What did you do . . . I mean, since your parents have been here for . . .”

  “Two years, seven months, six days,” he said, cutting me off, though he seemed totally focussed on the bars, and how he was going to get into them.

  “Yeah,” I said. “What did you do?”

  Alan gave a shrug. “Well, when I introduced the internet to Halls of Hallow it took Yorbleson only a couple of months to figure it out—to find a way out for himself. But it turned out, pretty soon, that he really couldn’t stand to be outside of the game for too long—he wasn’t strong enough.” He turned to me with his blazing blue eyes. “You know that feeling when you’ve spent the entire summer inside playing video games, and then you go to your first PE session in September?”

  I nodded in reply.

  God, I knew what that was like.

  “Yeah, he was that kind of weak,” Alan said with a sigh.

  I looked to the other cells—caught my sleeping father inside one of them.

  I didn’t venture on over there.

  Didn’t see a point yet.

  If Alan couldn’t find a way to spring his parents’ jail cell open then I wouldn’t have much of a chance of opening my own.

  Alan was still looking over the bars of his parents’ cell, apparently trying to divine his way inside. As he looked about the bars, occasionally settling on one thing or another, he continued, “Once he’d got out, though, that was the beginning. He built up his strength till he could walk about in our world.”

  Alan paused his scrabbling about the bars for several seconds, having finally settled on something—what looked to be a notch in one of the bars. He reached out for it, seemed to scuff the notch with his fingernails. Nothing happened.

  “Damn!” he said.

  “What?” I said. “Can’t you find a way in?”

  Alan shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it—there’s just no way that I can see . . .” As his voice drifted away I was certain that I heard the thud of footsteps coming along the corridor.

  Though I wanted to bring Alan’s attention to the sound, I also wanted to hear the rest of his story.

  “One day, I dunno,” Alan continued, “I got back from school and my parents . . . they were just . . . just . . .” his voice wavered a little “. . . gone,” he finally finished. “Yorbleson tricked them into touching the infrared panel . . . instructions, on the TV screen . . . something about avoiding an electrical discharge by making contact with the infrared strip on the back of the console—you know, stuff that parents would believe?”

  Yeah, I was sure that I did know that.

  Alan went on, “When I went back into the game, into Halls of Hallow, Yorbleson told me that I would work for him in the real world . . . that I would be his eyes and ears while he gained his strength, and that was where I lived . . . in there . . . in the game . . . at Alive Action Games . . . they took away my parents’ house when they didn’t pay the mortgage any longer.”

  He turned square onto me, and I saw that his eyes had gone glassy from the tears threatening to burst out. “My life ended,” he said. “I wasn’t much more than a character in a video game . . . till Gamers Con rolled around, and I had a chance to get them back.”

  Somehow he managed to muster a smile.

  “A chance to have a family again.”

  I did think about pointing out the irony—that to get back his one family it would mean tearing apart another four . . . but, then again, I guessed that it was impossible to think rationally in that situation.

  I knew that I wouldn’t have been able to think rationally.

  Over at the steel door to the jail cells—the door we’d passed through ourselves—I heard several metallic thunks.

  Alan gasped and spun around.

  Looked in the direction of the sound.

  Then back to me.

  His eyes were wide with fear. “He’s back,” Alan said. “He’s here.”

  “What do we do now?” I said, feeling my heart humming in my chest.

  Alan shook his head. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  52

  I HEARD the beep-beep from before, and I knew that Yorbleson had plugged the code into the security interface. Sure enough, a couple of heartbeats later, he emerged before us, still dressed in the cloak, with the hood folded down over his shoulders.

  When he cast a glare over us, he smiled wryly. “So,” he said, “Come to visit Mum and Dad, have you?”

  I bunched my fists down at sides, but, at the same time, I knew that I had to play by his rules—this was his game after all.

  He could toss me out easily.

  Without expending any extra energy.

  I couldn’t think straight—all that flashed into my mind was how unjust this whole thing was, how Yorbleson was messing with our lives. Before I could stop it, my words just floated right out of me. “Why’re you doing this?” I said.

  Yorbleson kept up his smile. “I like power,” he said.

  “Yeah, but you’ve got power now—real power, in the real world . . . you’re the administrator for the Grand Tournament of Gamers Con, surely that’s enough?”

  He held my gaze for a long while, his smile never dropping in its intensity. “It’s never enough, I can always do with more leverage in the real world.”

  “But why?” I said. “We’re just kids.”

  Yorbleson smiled even wider. “And kids grow up to be adults—and adults, well, let’s just say that they can be very useful indeed . . . four little puppets, just for me.”

  That word ‘puppet’ sent a nauseous wave right to the pit of my stomach.

  I tried to resist the horrible sensation but couldn’t and I felt the sting of bile at the back of my throat—I tasted the vomit in my mouth . . . but I swallowed it back, told myself to be stronger—if I was to keep my promise to the others, bring all our parents back, then I needed to be strong now.

  Needed to stand my ground.

  Yorbleson’s tone got even more jubilant, and the skin around his eyes creased up as he smiled even wider still. “And you, Zak Steepleman, are you ready to be named the champion of the Grand Tournament? First place, nothing to sniff at.” He lowered his voice a little. “And it only cost you your father.”

  I felt my insides all collapse in on themselves.

  But somehow I managed to hold myself together.

  I gritted my teeth.

  Knew that I had to bide my time.

  Not make any rash,
snap judgements.

  From then on, Yorbleson seemed to lose his interest in me, and he turned to look at Alan. His smile dropped a few degrees and I wondered if he was going to lurch forwards, toss Alan out of the game once and for all—turn him back out to the convention centre.

  But, instead, Yorbleson said, “A deal’s a deal, Alan.”

  I watched on as he snapped his bony fingers.

  The bars to the cell which held Alan’s parents swung open with an unoiled creak of the hinges. Neither of Alan’s parents made any sort of a movement to suggest that they’d heard they were now free—or that they’d realised at all that they were even anywhere else other than their own home.

  From years ago.

  The home that had now gone.

  Been replaced by this game.

  I thought that Alan would surge forwards, that he would rush into the cell, embrace his parents, maybe even try to wake them up, to tell them that they could leave now.

  But, as it was, he hung back.

  Appeared not to want to move from his spot.

  “Go on,” Yorbleson said, his patience clearly waning.

  “I . . . I . . .” Alan said.

  “What? What is it?” Yorbleson said. “I’ve told you to go—so go!”

  I studied Alan’s face, watched on as his skin wrinkled, then unwrinkled, and how his eyes seemed to constantly twitch from me to Yorbleson as if he was making a choice between the two of us, then he said, “No, I won’t leave—not till you’ve freed all the other parents, no kid should have to go through what I’ve gone through . . . growing up in a prison.”

  Yorbleson’s smile—for the first time since I’d known him—now completely disintegrated. His lips warped into a sneer, and I thought that he might try to catch Alan off guard, attempt to send him back out of the game—his parents in tow—without him being able to defend himself.

  Alan looked to me.