Game Over, Pete Watson

by Joe Schreiber

  “Pete,” she said, “what is all this? Are you having a garage sale?”

  Well, I thought that was kind of obvious. I mean, she had the sign right in her hand. “Mom, I have to tell you something really important!”

  “I came home to check on you and saw all this stuff out in our driveway! What were you thinking?”

  Before I could answer, Mrs. Wertley came over with Mr. Yappers. She was holding a toaster oven and asked Mom how much she would take for it. Mom told her the toaster wasn’t for sale and Mrs. Wertley said that it definitely was, there was a price on it, right here. Mom turned her back on Mrs. Wertley and looked at me.

  “What’s all over your pants, Pete?” she asked. “Did you have an accident?”

  “Mom,” I said, “this is really important! Dad’s been kidnapped!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Your father’s playing softball all day.”

  She picked up a stack of old clothes that I had draped over the rocking chair in our front yard. “This coat still fits you. Who told you that you could sell any of this?”

  “Mom, just listen to me, all right?” I was practically shouting now. “Two guys grabbed Dad and shoved him into the back of a car right out in front of Ready Player One. I just saw it happen!”

  “What were you doing at Ready Player One?” Then she looked down and saw that I had Brawl-A-Thon 3000 XL in my hand. “Is that why you were selling all of this? To get money to buy a new game?”

  It occurred to me that I wouldn’t have had to do any of this if she hadn’t borrowed money from my jar, but that probably wasn’t the right thing to say right now.

  “Mom, please, listen to me, okay?”

  But she just told me to go to my room.

  “We can talk about this when you’ve got dry pants on,” she said, and at least three people turned and looked up when she said that.

  I went inside and headed upstairs to my room.

  [CHAPTER FOURTEEN]

  The Bug Man Returns

  It went something like this:

  Okay, that wasn’t exactly what happened.

  This part is true: I was upstairs in my bedroom watching as the Bug Man parked and got out of his van and walked over to my mom. I started taking off my pants, but it took forever to get my legs out. It’s hard when your pants are wet.

  I opened my pants drawer. It was almost empty. All my pants were dirty, and the only ones left were sweatpants that didn’t fit me around the waist. After I managed to get them around my ankles, I looked back out the window for Mom and the Bug Man.

  They were both gone.

  “Mom!” I ran downstairs, still pulling up my sweatpants, kind of holding them up as I ran, to tell you the truth.

  “Pete?” When I got to the entryway, Mom and the Bug Man were in the front hallway. “I thought I asked you to stay in your room.”

  “Mom,” I said, “this is the guy that bought Dad’s CommandRoid!” I looked at the Bug Man. “Tell her.”

  The Bug Man was down on his knees, shining his flashlight into the air vent in the corner. He stood up and stared at me with a funny smile on his face. “Afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, sport.”

  “You were just here an hour ago! You paid me twenty dollars for the CommandRoid game, right before my dad got kidnapped!”

  “Kidnapped?” The Bug Man grinned again and turned to my mom with a look like Kids, can you believe it? “I like the imagination. I bet you make your own comic books, don’t you?”

  “What are you doing back here?” I asked him.

  “He was just showing me some of the most common areas for termite infestation in our home,” my mom said. She had a pamphlet that the Bug Man had given her.

  Mom shivered. “Just the thought of those little horrors crawling around inside these walls is enough to give me nightmares.”

  “You’re not alone, believe you me,” the Bug Man said. “I bet you’ve got a crawlspace in the basement, don’t you?”

  Mom nodded. “Yes.”

  The Bug Man turned and pointed his flashlight. “Let’s go.”

  “Mom, wait!”

  “Pete, go back to your room.”

  “But—”

  She pointed. “Now.”

  They started to go down into the basement.

  Things were desperate. I don’t know why I said what I said next. It just slipped out. I yelled:

  “MOMMY, NO!”

  Mom stopped and stared at me for a second. I felt my face getting really red. But it was too late to take back now. Mom had a really weird look on her face, like she didn’t know whether to laugh or take my temperature to see if I had a fever or something.

  “‘Mommy’?” she said.

  “Just . . . call Dad’s cell phone, okay?”

  Mom must have felt sorry for me a little, because she glanced at the Bug Man. “Excuse me for just a second. This shouldn’t take long.”

  “You take your time,” the Bug Man said.

  Mom started digging around in her purse for her cell phone. While she was doing that, the Bug Man turned and winked at me and mouthed the word Mommy and I felt my whole face getting red all over again. Like that guy hadn’t ever accidentally called his mother “Mommy” before.

  Meanwhile, Mom was still excavating in her purse, pulling things out and putting them on the little table in the entryway, when her phone started ringing.

  “Hello?” Mom said, and smiled. “Oh, hello. How are you? I’m fine, thank you. You know, I’ve been meaning to call you. I know. I know. Well, funny you should mention that, because . . . right. Pete’s right here.”

  I heard a noise behind me and looked around. The Bug Man was gone, but the basement door was open and I could hear him clanking around. The thought of him down there poking around our basement didn’t make me feel any better. I turned back to Mom. She was still on the phone, but she was looking at me.

  “Really,” she said. “No, I didn’t know that. Thank you. I will. Oh, he is. Well then, I appreciate that. I will. Okay. Goodbye.”

  She hung up.

  “That was Mrs. Midwood,” she said. “Apparently Wesley invited you to a birthday sleepover tonight?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “When were you planning on telling me about that?”

  “Mom, I don’t care about the stupid—”

  “Pete, Wesley is your only friend. If you don’t treat him with respect, you’re not going to have any friends. Is that what you want?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Oh, and your father is fine, by the way. Mrs. Midwood said that she just saw him and her husband at the softball game.”

  “That’s not true!” I said. “I saw him get pulled into a car!”

  Mom just shook her head. “That’s enough. You can finish bringing all those things on the driveway back into the house while I go down to the basement.”

  “But—”

  “Now, mister.”

  And before I could argue, she went downstairs to meet the Bug Man.

  [CHAPTER FIFTEEN]

  More Bad News

  I went back outside. Most of the stuff I’d put out for the garage sale was still sitting where I’d left it. I guess Mom hadn’t had much of a chance to put it away before the Bug Man had showed up.

  The TV was still plugged in, and somebody must have found a channel that worked, because now there were a bunch of people standing around watching it, but it was just some news broadcast.

  The guy on TV was saying that the president had called a special press conference and was going to be coming on in a few minutes. I tried to tell everybody that the garage sale was over, but Mrs. Wertley was there too and she looked pretty interested.

  I don’t pay very much attention to the news unless it’s something really important, like a comet that’s about to hit Earth or a snow day at school, so I started picking up the other stuff from the tables.

  That was when the president came on. In the digital version of this book, it’ll be the actual president,
automatically updated to show whoever’s in office at the time. But for now this is a guy whose picture I found online.

  Then the president did something that I’d never seen him do before:

  It was really disturbing.

  Nobody knew what to say. I don’t think anybody had ever seen anything like that before, even Mrs. Wertley, because she had just stood there while the president was making different noises and bugging out his eyes. After a minute the press conference ended.

  Mrs. Wertley and everybody else kind of stared at the screen while the reporters tried to figure out what had just happened. I had never watched a press conference before, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

  “This is bad,” Mrs. Wertley said, “this is really, really bad.” Then she turned and hurried away.

  Onscreen, the reporters were all trying to figure out what happened. Meanwhile I was trying to put everything together in my mind. Maybe I was going crazy, but it seemed to me that it was all connected somehow.

  Anyway, I didn’t know what I was going to do about it, even if it was all somehow my fault. Not that I’m saying it was. Crazy things happen all the time with absolutely no explanation except that the world makes no sense. Sometimes I think it would be great if there were one guy who could take responsibility for everything: global warming, soggy french fries, getting picked last at basketball, whatever. It would certainly make things easier—as long as you weren’t that guy. Or if you were, they would have to pay you a lot of money. I wouldn’t settle for less than twenty million dollars, which is about what Bill Gates made last year. Not a bad deal, considering everyone would blame you for everything.

  Then I looked down the driveway at the Bug Man’s van.

  I realized what I had to do.

  [CHAPTER SIXTEEN]

  Things Get Stupid

  Okay. You know that part of the movie where the main character does something incredibly stupid that you would never do in real life, like when the guy says to everybody else that he’s going down to find out what that noise was in the basement, and you start yelling at the TV, “Don’t go in the basement, you idiot!”?

  That’s this part.

  Except I just have to say that if this ever actually happened to you, you might be surprised by the stupid stuff you’d do.

  I walked over to the Bug Man’s van. I told myself that it was probably going to be locked, and then I wouldn’t even have to worry about it. But when I reached out to the door handle and pulled on it, the door opened right up, and I was staring straight into the passenger seat of the van.

  I looked around. There was one of those two-way radios on the dashboard, squawking out static. I saw a cup of coffee and a candy wrapper along with a stack of termite brochures like the one the Bug Man had given Mom, but that was about it.

  Then I looked in the back.

  The back of the van was a different story. It was full of all kinds of stuff I’d never seen before, like wires and electronic equipment and video screens all hooked up together. It looked like a giant robot had thrown up back there. Or a lot like one of the levels from Brawl-A-Thon 3000, actually.

  Not like the stuff you’d use to kill bugs.

  I crawled in back. My heart was beating really hard, and I could feel it in my fingertips. I knew this was a bad idea because the Bug Man could come out at any time, and there weren’t any windows in the back for me to see him coming. But if there was any chance of finding out what had happened to my dad and the president, I had to at least try.

  I started looking around at all the wires and circuit boards and stuff.

  Then I saw it, looking dumber and more boring than ever.

  The CommandRoid 85.

  [CHAPTER SEVENTEEN]

  Things Get Stupider

  Yes, it’s possible.

  In fact, when I publish this book and get famous and go out to school visits, that’s going to be the wisdom that I share with America’s youth.

  The screen the CommandRoid was attached to was blinking at me. I looked down and saw that there were two joysticks hooked up and everything. The Bug Man knew what he was doing.

  I looked at the screen again. In chunky pixelated letters, it said:

  I didn’t, really, but there didn’t seem to be much of a choice. I picked up a joystick and tried to aim the cursor at the box marked YES. The joystick didn’t move very well. I didn’t get how Dad ever could have used it in the first place, let alone have had fun with it. Finally I got the cursor to where it was supposed to be. Then I pushed the red button.

  The screen went black. Then it started filling up with two columns of words that didn’t make any sense together. It looked like this:

  It went on like that for pages and pages, scrolling faster than I could read, but I kept trying to follow it with my eyes anyway. Then something else started happening at the same time. I felt myself getting dizzy, like the whole inside of the Bug Man’s van was spinning past me as fast as the words on the screen.

  There was something moving back and forth between the two columns. I looked closer and saw that it was a little eight-bit figure.

  I stared at the screen until my nose was almost touching it. A voice said:

  I would have recognized that voice anywhere.

  “Dad?”

  [CHAPTER EIGHTEEN]

  My Eight-Bit Dad

  I just stared at my eight-bit dad. He kept running back and forth between the columns of words. He kept going faster and faster.

  “This is awful,” he said in a weird digital version of his voice. “This is beyond awful.”

  “I know,” I said. “These graphics stink.” My dad’s hair looked like a brown brick. His arms and legs seemed to have been built by a kid with a handful of Legos and a short attention span. If it hadn’t been for his voice screaming at me for help, I never would have known it was supposed to be him. Then again, what do you expect from an eighties video game?

  Meanwhile the columns of words kept scrolling up past him on both sides, faster and faster. From what I could tell, Dad was trying to match up the words on one side of the screen with the different words on the other, but the columns were moving too fast. He was like a guy trying to dodge traffic.

  “Help me!” Dad kept saying. “Help me help me helpmehelpmehelpme . . .”

  “What do you want me to do?” I shouted, but I didn’t think he could hear me. I guess once you’ve been sucked into a video game or whatever, you can’t hear as well, so I tried shouting louder.

  “Dad! These joysticks are really hard to use! What do you want me to do?”

  Dad didn’t answer. I stared at the words again. They were blurring now, but I got the weirdest feeling that I was somehow still reading them, trying to put them together in my head, absorbing them faster than I could even realize. I thought of Charlie Chicken. Where had I heard that phrase before? And what about Uncle Steve? My head started pounding and I tried to stop, but my eyes were glued to the screen.

  When I looked back at my eight-bit dad, he was staring straight up at the big pile of numbers and words falling down on top of him.

  He was screaming.

  “Thanks for telling me now,” I mumbled, and felt myself fall forward to the floor of the Bug Man’s van, into total blackness.

  [CHAPTER NINETEEN]

  I Go for a Little Spin

  When I opened my eyes, I heard somebody getting into the van.

  I sat up fast and instantly regretted it. My skull felt like that level of Brawl-A-Thon 3000 where you have to use your head to punch through a wall of exploding armadillo MechReatures. I glanced at the CommandRoid. The screen in front of me had gone blank.

  Up front I could hear the Bug Man climbing into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. He wasn’t whistling to himself anymore. In fact, from the way he slammed his door, jerked the key in the ignition, and revved the engine, he seemed a lot grouchier than he had earlier. Sometimes in life, I guess, it’s not enough to whistle a lot, drive
around in a cool van with an insect on top, and call people “sport.”

  He picked up the two-way radio on the dashboard and clicked it on. “Hey,” he growled, in a voice that didn’t sound anything like the one he’d used before. “It’s me. The kid’s mom let me down into the basement. There’s nothing else down there. I think we’ve got the whole thing.”

  He twisted his head around and looked back. I ducked my head and froze.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got it here. I hooked it all up. It’s running now.”

  I tried not to move. He hadn’t seemed to notice me yet, and I thought if I stayed perfectly still and didn’t make a noise, I might have a chance of jumping out the back.

  “Okay,” the Bug Man said. “I’m headed over now.”

  Suddenly the van lurched into motion, tires squealing. I grabbed hold of a cabinet on the wall of the van, hoping to keep myself from falling over backwards, but only managed to pull a bunch of loose electronic parts off the shelf next to me. They all fell down with a loud clattering noise, burying me under spools of wire, old circuit boards, and boxes of keyboards and printer cartridges.

  “Ow!” I shouted.

  The Bug Man slammed on the brakes. He turned around and looked back a second time. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me, but he didn’t say anything. My heart was pounding harder than ever, and I could feel drops of sweat running down my back.