Game Over, Pete Watson

by Joe Schreiber

  “Pete.” Callie blinked at me slowly. “Would it bother you too much,” she asked, “if I told you that I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. But it wasn’t. My skull was starting to ache and throb again, worse than ever. “That’s actually good that you don’t understand, because if you knew, then it would mean that it was in your head too, and . . .”

  I stopped talking. Onscreen, the president’s advisors were leading him from the podium while reporters shouted questions at him from the crowd. He was still talking. I felt the words and numbers coming together in my brain, but they weren’t linking up quite right.

  “It’s a warning,” I said.

  “Of what?” Callie asked. “What’s going to happen?”

  “Some kind of attack.” I shut my eyes. The words scrolled by at the speed of light, phrases that I couldn’t understand. “Bird poop. In his hair. Uncle Steve. Banana Pants. Underwear . . . I don’t know; it’s all so blurry.”

  “Try,” Callie said.

  I just stood there. The details were like a slippery piece of soap that I couldn’t get a grip on, and the harder I tried, the faster it squirted out of my grasp. I hate that kind of soap. “I need to get back to the CommandRoid. It’s the only way of getting the facts out of my head.”

  “Too bad you broke it,” Callie said.

  “What, your head?” Wesley asked.

  “The CommandRoid,” I said.

  “Wait,” Wesley said. He stared at me. “So the secret codes are stuck in your brain?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” I said. “Yes.”

  Then Wesley said something that I’d never heard him say before:

  “I have a plan.”

  [CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN]

  Wesley’s Not-So-Awesome Plan of Not-So-Awesomeness

  Remember back in chapter 8 when Wesley said that Squid Mancini could hypnotize people?

  Well, neither do I.

  But apparently Wesley did, because that was all part of his plan. (In the digital version of this book, you’ll hear theme music playing here.)

  THE PLAN

  While Callie distracted Mrs. Midwood by telling her that she’d just noticed a weird stain on the living room carpet, Wesley and I snuck back down to the basement, where Squid, Nabeel, and Rashaad were still playing Brawl-A-Thon 3000 XL on the flat-screen plasma TV.

  In other words, not much had changed in that department.

  “Yo, Flab Apples,” Nabeel said, without taking his eyes off the screen, “you bring those Doritos down yet?”

  Wesley looked embarrassed, and I poked him with my elbow.

  “Guys,” Wesley said, “we need your help.”

  “What, you mean like help eating Doritos?” Rashaad asked. He was on some level that I’d never seen before, which wasn’t surprising because I’d hardly played this new version of the game. “Because I can definitely help you with that.”

  “Let me just finish this tarantula MechReature,” Squid said, his fingers flying frantically across the controller. “I’m almost there. Come to papa.”

  “Dude, look behind you!” Nabeel said.

  “Where?” Squid said.

  “Right behind you! Look out!”

  All at once the screen went blank. Squid looked behind him, where Callie was standing with the plug in her hand.

  “Now,” she said, “are you little dweebs ready to help?”

  “I can’t really hypnotize people, you know,” Squid muttered, when we explained the plan to him. “I just had to do a report on it last year for school.”

  “So you must know something about it then,” Callie said.

  Squid shrugged. “I kind of wrote it at the last minute,” he said.

  “Forget it,” I said. “This isn’t going to work.”

  “We have to try,” Wesley said.

  “I don’t even get how hypnotizing me is supposed to help.”

  “Okay, look.” Wesley gave me this exasperated look, which I didn’t appreciate, considering he was the one who still came to school with a Lorax lunchbox full of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. “You’ve got all this information in your head, right? Only it’s all, like, stuck up there where you can’t get to it—kind of like when I stuff too many pairs of underwear in my drawer and I can’t get it open.” He pointed at my skull. “If we hypnotize you, it might help get all that underwear out.”

  Right away I was pretty sure it was a bad idea. The only person I’d ever seen hypnotized was in a YouTube video where a guy volunteered to go onstage at a nightclub, and the hypnotist convinced him that he had a live chicken in his pants. Wesley and I had watched it and laughed our butts off, but all of a sudden it didn’t seem so funny.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then I saw Callie staring at me with a different look in her eyes.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” she said, “but my brother might be kind of right.”

  “Fine,” Squid said, “but if I’m going to do this, I’m going to need some kind of shiny object, like a coin or something. Anybody got anything like that?”

  “Here.” Callie took off her necklace and handed it to Squid. “Try this.”

  Squid looked at the pendant on Callie’s necklace. It was a gold locket on a chain. I wondered where she’d gotten it, if her boyfriend had given it to her or whatever, if she even had a boyfriend. Finally he shrugged. “This’ll work.”

  Meanwhile Nabeel was getting out his iPhone.

  “What are you doing?” Callie asked.

  “If you’re going to hypnotize Pete,” Nabeel said, “I want to record this, just in case he does something cool.”

  “Okay,” Squid said, turning to me. “I want you to relax and watch this necklace. Just watch it, and listen to my voice.” He held Callie’s locket in front of my face, swinging it back and forth. “I’m going to count backwards from twenty. Nineteen . . . eighteen . . . seventeen . . . sixteen . . .”

  “This is taking too long,” I said.

  “You have to give it a chance,” Wesley said.

  I glanced at Callie. “Just don’t let them convince me I’ve got a chicken in my pants, okay?”

  “Pete,” Wesley said, “trust us, okay?”

  “ . . . twelve . . . eleven . . . ten . . .”

  I shook my head. “This is so not going to work.”

  It was the last thing I remember saying.

  [CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT]

  The Great Awakening

  I woke up to the sound of people screaming. At least that’s what I thought. It turns out that when people are laughing hard enough, it sounds like screaming.

  I was standing in the middle of the basement. Something was wrong.

  I felt strangely cold.

  All around me Nabeel, Squid, and Rashaad were laughing so hard that they could hardly breathe. Wesley wasn’t looking at me—he was staring at the iPhone in his hand. Callie was nowhere to be seen.

  I spun around. My clothes were lying in a pile in the corner, next to the game console and an empty Doritos bag.

  I grabbed them and started trying to pull on my sweatpants, but my foot got caught and I fell against the back wall while I yanked the pant leg up. By the time I got my shirt on, Wesley was looking at me too. I couldn’t believe it.

  “How could you let them do this to me?” I shouted.

  “Pete, wait,” Wesley said. “I can explain!” He tried to say something else, but I didn’t hear it over the laughter.

  I ran upstairs out of the basement and out the front door.

  “Callie!” Mrs. Midwood said behind me. “I still don’t see that stain!”

  I slammed the door and ran.

  [CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE]

  The Crack-Up

  I was running so fast that I almost got hit by the car pulling into Wesley’s driveway. It was Wesley’s dad, Mr. Midwood. He was still wearing his company softball team uniform. Their team was the Health Solutions Inc. Badgers.

&
nbsp; “Afternoon, Pete,” he said, “is everything okay?”

  “No,” I said, and standing there in the driveway I let it all come spilling out—about my dad getting kidnapped and the Bug Man and the CommandRoid putting all those numbers and code words in my head. I didn’t tell him that I broke the joystick on his CommandRoid up in his study. Well, I sort of did. “And the worst part is, Mr. Midwood, Wesley broke your joystick.”

  Mr. Midwood listened to all of this quietly. He didn’t even get mad. When I was finished, he reached down and patted me on the shoulder. “It’s all right, Pete. Your dad’s fine.”

  “He is?”

  “Sure, he’s right in the car with me. I brought him back from the softball game just now. See?”

  I ran over to the guy in the baseball cap who was sitting in the passenger seat of Mr. Midwood’s car. “Dad?”

  The door opened, but the guy in the passenger seat wasn’t my father.

  It was the Bug Man.

  “Hey, kid,” the Bug Man said, unbuckling his seat belt and climbing out. “Wanna see what your friend’s dog did to my uniform?”

  It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen. I looked back at Mr. Midwood, but he didn’t look friendly anymore. He’d taken off his baseball cap, and he wasn’t smiling.

  “Get in the car, Pete.”

  “What . . . ?” I stared at him. “What about my dad?”

  “I said, get in the car.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You . . . you’re . . .”

  The Bug Man grabbed me and tossed me in the back. Then he jumped into the passenger seat next to Wesley’s dad. As Mr. Midwood pulled out of the driveway, I saw Wesley come flying out of the house, waving.

  “Dad!” he was shouting. “Did you remember to pick up the cake?” Then he stopped with a confused look on his face. “Wait, where are you going?”

  In the back seat, I tried to sit up and shout to Wesley that his dad was working with the Bug Man, but the Bug Man turned around and shoved me down, covering my mouth with a stinky old T-shirt. Up in the driver’s seat Mr. Midwood yelled, “I’m just going to pick up a couple quarts of ice cream, son. I’ll be right back!”

  “Cool!” Wesley shouted. “Get vanilla bean!”

  Wesley, no, I thought, but I couldn’t say anything as the car peeled out of the driveway and spun away.

  “What an idiot,” Mr. Midwood mumbled as he drove. That was when I knew he wasn’t a good dad. You’re not supposed to say that stuff out loud.

  “You can let him up now,” he told the Bug Man, and I saw Mr. Midwood’s eyes glaring back at me from the rearview mirror.

  “You know what irritates me, Pete?” he said. “I mean, more than the fact that you messed up three years of work trying to steal those codes from your father?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Those were my x-ray specs that you were selling at your garage sale. I’ve had them since I was a kid. Wesley borrowed them and then he left them at your house, and then you actually tried to sell them back to him.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You mean all of this is about a pair of x-ray specs?”

  “Don’t be a moron,” Mr. Midwood said. “It’s about the government codes on that CommandRoid that I’m going to use to humiliate the president and topple the government and eventually take over the world. But . . .” He paused. “The whole thing with the x-ray specs didn’t help. Fortunately for you . . .”

  I looked back at the rearview mirror.

  I almost screamed. It was pretty hideous.

  “Never mess with another man’s x-ray specs,” Mr. Midwood said.

  “Wait a second.” The Bug Man looked at me. “Is your T-shirt on backwards?”

  “At least I’m not the one with the hole in his pants,” I said.

  “Shut up, both of you,” Mr. Midwood snapped. He’d taken the x-ray specs off for now, at least. That was a relief. It helped me think clearly again.

  “If you don’t have my father, then where is he?” I asked.

  “Funny you should ask,” Mr. Midwood said. “We’re going to see him right now.”

  [CHAPTER THIRTY]

  In the Lair of the Bug Man

  Mr. Midwood pulled up in front of what looked like an abandoned warehouse with a big sign out in front that said BUGGED? CALL THE BUG MAN. Apparently this was his headquarters. There weren’t any other Bug Man cars in front of it, though.

  Just the Bug Man’s red van.

  “Get out,” Mr. Midwood said.

  “Hold on,” I said. “First explain to me what’s going on here. Aren’t you my dad’s boss at Health Solutions Inc.?”

  Mr. Midwood let out a big sigh.

  “Health Solutions Inc. is a fake business, Pete. Okay? You think I know anything about health care?”

  “But then—”

  “I started it for the same reason I bought a CommandRoid for myself—so I could steal the codes from your father. I always knew he was a data analyst for the CIA. Unfortunately, even since I had him kidnapped, he hasn’t done me any good sorting out those codes. I got some of them, which was why the president came on TV and started warning all the undercover agents around the world about what was happening. But that was only one percent of what’s stored on the CommandRoid. That’s why I had to insert your dipstick of a father into the program to get the rest of them.” He pointed to the Bug Man’s van. “Let’s see how he’s doing with it.”

  We opened the rear door of the van and climbed in. It was a pretty tight fit with me and the Bug Man and Mr. Midwood all squeezed in there without much fresh air, and I kind of started wishing that the Bug Man had changed into another pair of pants.

  Anyway, Dad’s CommandRoid was still there, but when I looked at the screen, all I saw were code words streaming across it. “Where’s my dad?” I asked.

  Mr. Midwood looked at the Bug Man, and the Bug Man shrugged.

  “He was in there last time I looked.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You shrank my dad down and inserted him into this lame video game to help you translate the codes, and now you lost him in there?”

  Mr. Midwood grinned. It was not the grin of a healthy man. “You know what?” he said. “I can think of at least one way to find him and get him back.” He turned to the Bug Man. “Go ahead.”

  The Bug Man picked up something from the floor of the van that I hadn’t seen before. It looked like a giant blow dryer with a bunch of wires and tubes attached to the sides and cords plugged into the machine in the back. But the weird thing was, it wasn’t scary.

  I couldn’t help it. I started laughing. Maybe it was just nerves, or everything I’d just been through, but he was threatening me with a hair dryer with the word BANG written on the side in black duct tape.

  “This isn’t funny,” Mr. Midwood said. “You think this is funny? Once I shoot you with the digitizer and you’re trapped inside the game with your father, then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

  “Digitizer?” I kept laughing. Tears were squirting from my eyes and trickling down my cheeks. “How long did it take you write the word ‘BANG’ on the side?” I asked.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Mr. Midwood said. He turned to the Bug Man and nodded at the digitizer. “Get him, Stanley.”

  “Stanley?” I looked at the Bug Man. “Your name’s Stanley?”

  “It’s a family name,” the Bug Man said, and pulled the trigger.

  [CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE]

  Bang!

  It wasn’t the sound of the digitizer shrinking me down and putting me into the CommandRoid 85. It was the sound of somebody crashing into the back of Stanley the Bug Man’s van.

  We all fell to the floor. Stanley the Bug Man landed with his butt sticking up in the air, and I don’t want to tell you where I landed. Let’s just say I didn’t stay there long. The crazy blow dryer of doom hit the floor. Mr. Midwood shouted, “What’s happening?”

  I pushed open the back door of the van and saw the purple car right behind us. Be
hind the wheel sat Callie Midwood. She was staring at me through the windshield. Wesley was in the passenger seat. He gaped, slack-jawed, at his father next to the Bug Man in the back of the van. The Bug Man was bent over trying to pick up the parts of the equipment that had fallen everywhere during the collision. You don’t really need to see a picture of that, do you? Good.

  Wesley and Callie looked like they wished they’d never come.

  “Dad?” Callie said.

  “You said you were going for vanilla bean!” Wesley shouted out the window. “You lied!”

  I jumped out of the van and climbed into the back of Callie’s car.

  Callie put it in reverse, swung around, and floored it.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Pete.” Wesley turned around and handed me Nabeel’s iPhone. “I think you better take a look at this,” he said.

  I looked down and saw my face looking back at me from the phone’s screen.

  “What is this?”

  “This is what happened when Squid hypnotized you,” Wesley said. “You don’t remember anything you said when you were hypnotized, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Show me.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  Wesley held up the iPhone and hit PLAY.

  [CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO]

  What the iPhone Said

  “Wow,” I said. “I guess Squid knew what he was doing after all.”

  My eyes were riveted to the screen. I didn’t remember saying any of the words that were coming out of my mouth. But I was still talking.