And so I got the necessary materials and spent the next several days taking off all the old paint, sanding down the wooden boards, then painting it again. Next I did the farmhouse itself, all the interior rooms, the downstairs and the upstairs. Neither Carver nor Graham had asked me to do this, and for all I knew they would have preferred I didn’t, but by that point I had just started my training, going down to the shooting range, beginning the early morning runs and then Carver’s intermediate instructions of tae kwon do and jujutsu, and still I was scared. I was scared of going back into the game, or at least going back as some walk-on character in someone else’s game.
The first person Carver and Ronny and Drew saved two months after me was Maya, then Jesse three months after that, and by then I had finished painting the farmhouse, had finished sanding down the floors, the tables and chairs. I had no more excuses, no more reason to stall the inevitable, and so the next time the Kid called saying he’d come across a game—ever since our surprise attack on the Paradise Motel there had been fewer games—I volunteered.
The person who’d been thrown into Simon’s game then was Vanessa Martin, who in less than a year would be raped and murdered by someone else we had saved from Simon’s game.
I don’t know why, but as I made my way up the stairs to the second floor, I found myself scrutinizing the paint job I’d done two years earlier, noticing a few wayward brushstrokes near the wainscoting that never should have escaped my attention.
Carver’s bedroom was at the end of the hall. Its door was open.
I heard voices from within, murmuring voices that belonged to Ronny and the Kid. I approached that opened door slowly, passing by the other bedrooms where the majority of us slept when we were here, always bunking up with someone else. Then my slow steps had brought me to the end of my journey, and I was standing in the doorway, staring inside.
It was a small room—all of the bedrooms on the second floor of the farmhouse were small—but Carver had kept it neat and clean. The bed in the corner, two bookcases stacked with books, a desk on the other side of the room with his computer on top. Carver was the only one besides Graham who had his own bedroom, who had a computer in his room so that he could work at anytime, unlike the rest of us who were forced to use the computers in the basement when we wanted to visit the Internet.
Right now the Kid sat in front of Carver’s computer, typing at the keyboard, Ronny standing behind him and staring over his shoulder, and there was something about the image of the two of them right then that struck me as particular, like something out of a Hopper painting.
“How about that one?” Ronny asked, pointing at something on the screen.
The Kid typed, moved the mouse, typed some more. “Nope.”
Ronny sighed and closed his eyes, placed a hand to his face and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
The Kid leaned back in his chair—Carver’s chair, a simple metal folding chair—and tilted his neck back and forth, squeezed his hands to crack the knuckles and each finger.
Neither of them had noticed me and for an instant I entertained the possibility of backing out of the room, maybe heading to the bedroom I shared with Drew. I could lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and try to forget the past several days. I could try to forget the past two years. I could try to forget my entire life, go back to the period where I was just one jittery microscopic sperm among a million vying for the egg and let another sperm win the race, become a completely different person, someone who might have a better chance at life, who wouldn’t have the pleasure of meeting a woman named Jennifer Abele and eventually producing a child as wonderful as Casey Anderson, who wouldn’t one day wake up to the faint and distant sound of a ringing motel telephone.
I cleared my throat.
First Ronny looked at me, his fingers still to the bridge of his nose, his eyes glassy and his face fatigued.
The Kid tilted his head next, stared at me a moment, and said, “Hey, Ben, what’s up?”
I stepped into the room. Noticed Carver’s bed, which Beverly had made earlier, two books now spread out on top of the dark blue comforter. Both were collections of Lewis Carroll’s work. Each contained The Hunting of the Snark.
“You told him?” I asked.
The Kid nodded. “I did.”
“I thought we discussed this.”
“We did. But I thought it was important to let Ronny know about it now.”
I walked over to Carver’s bed. I picked up The Complete Stories and Poems of Lewis Carroll, began thumbing through the pages.
“So what do you think, Ronny? Is there any significance to this boojum nonsense?”
“You don’t have to use that tone.”
“What tone?”
“The sarcastic one.”
The place where The Hunting of the Snark was located in the book was already bookmarked, but I paged through anyway. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Look, I know you’re not happy with my decision. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think there could be some importance in Carver’s last word.”
“So you don’t think his utterance was nothing more than dying brain cells burning out, sending some kind of screwy signal from his mind to his mouth?”
Ronny’s face reddened. He glared hard at me for a long moment and I returned the stare, just waiting for him to say something. He didn’t, though, instead shaking his head and clapping the Kid on the back.
“I think I’m going to take a break,” he said.
“Wait,” the Kid said. “Don’t go.”
“I’ll see you later at dinner.”
He turned and left without looking at me. I should know—I was staring him down the entire time.
Once Ronny had left, the Kid said, “Jesus fucking Christ, Ben, have some fucking manners.”
I looked around the room.
“Now what are you doing?”
“Trying to find that swear jar.”
“Would you stop being an asshole? I know you’re pissed off at Ronny, but the truth is he wants to help.”
“He wants to split us up.”
The Kid said nothing.
“What, now you agree with him?”
“Does it really matter what I think?”
“Of course it does.”
“Really? Because right now I’m starting to think nobody’s opinion matters much to you but your own.”
I snapped the book shut, tossed it back onto the bed. Stood there silent for a long moment, then said, “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I was being an asshole. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me, dude.”
“I’ll talk to Ronny later. What are you doing now, anyway?”
The Kid turned back to the computer. “Carver had asked me to set him up with a special email program, so he could send and receive emails that couldn’t be traced.”
“When was this?”
“About a year ago. It was that one weekend I came by last year, right after ... you know, all that shit went down.”
Yes, all that shit. That shit concerning a man named Christian Kane being put into Simon’s game. That shit concerning Carver and the rest of us saving him and bringing him back to the farmhouse, explaining to him what had happened, what all of this meant. And three days later, the rest of us all naïve, believing the only true evil was Simon and Caesar and their people, Christian Kane showed us just how dark the human soul can become.
“So let me guess,” I said. “You don’t know the password.”
“Nope.”
“Have you tried boojum?”
“Don’t be a dick.” The Kid paused, then leaned forward and quickly tapped the keyboard. He shook his head. “Yep, that wasn’t it either.”
“How do we even know there’s anything important in the program to begin with?”
He gave me a blank look. “Dude, it was Carver.”
“I thought he wasn’t going to keep secrets from
the rest of us anymore.”
This made the Kid pause. He nodded, his eyes drifting. “Yeah, me too.”
“If you created this thing, why didn’t you give yourself a backdoor?”
“I did. But I can’t do it from here. I’ll have to take the hard drive back home with me.”
“Do you think it’s worth it?”
“I don’t know. Depends what he has in here. Could be nothing. Could be something. But to be honest, I highly doubt he’ll have an address or something titled boojum. Carver”—the Kid still staring at the screen, his arms crossed—“he just started getting real paranoid there near the end.”
“You mean even more paranoid than you?”
“He didn’t want anybody getting into his shit, Ben. Not even those people he really trusted, like you and me. I mean, you know what he started thinking after that whole Gravedigger shit went down. He told me he couldn’t be too careful anymore.”
The Gravedigger was what Christian Kane’s game had been listed as. A thirty-seven-year-old man standing six feet four inches tall, weighing close to two hundred eighty pounds, a good majority of it muscle.
He’d been a maintenance worker at a large city cemetery, in charge of keeping the grass constantly mowed, the bushes trimmed, the tombstones clean and unmarked by graffiti. And he was in charge of digging the graves. So it made sense that when he woke up in Simon’s game, he woke up in a closed coffin.
I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have felt like, opening your eyes and seeing only darkness, your breath shallow, hardly any room to move your arms and legs.
One of the things listed on his game—a fun fact for its viewers—was that the Gravedigger partook in necrophilia. A bit macabre, sure, and even a bit overdone, but we’d guessed it was most likely an outlandish claim to gain more and more viewers. When we finally tracked down Christian and saved him and brought him back, this little ditty was brought up and he confirmed it was a lie, that he’d never performed in that kind of intercourse. And the kicker was, we’d believed him, all of us, even Carver, trying to find good in all things, believing that there was more white than black in a person’s soul.
But then Vanessa was forever gone, Drew’s face was forever scarred, and Carver went about creating a safe house. A place to put the new players we saved, a kind of jail where we could keep them for at least a few days, until we got to know them, until we understood just what kind of people they truly were.
“Again,” I said to the Kid. “Do you think it’s worth it?”
“I told you already. I don’t know.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I’m not sure. I guess that all depends on what happens during the meeting tonight.”
“What do you think the outcome will be?”
“That really isn’t the question you should be asking right now.”
“What question should I be asking?”
“Simple,” the Kid said. “Even if Carver was still alive, what chance do any of us really have at stopping Caesar?”
27
Even before Jesse Bowman became a part of Simon’s game, life had not treated him well.
Born the youngest of five children, his mother already fed up after the second, it didn’t help Jesse much that he’d unfairly been given a genetic defect. The harelip itself wasn’t really that bad—hardly noticeable unless you were standing right in front of him—but still it caused him to carry a lisp.
Jesse was ugly, too—a small and angular face, buck teeth, wide eyes, round ears. Taken separately they might not mean much, but together they gave the kids in grade school more than enough verbal ammunition to scale a full-out assault.
He was teased relentlessly. First about the lisp, and then, when he stopped talking altogether, the fact that he was just plain ugly.
This was what Jesse had to deal with in the first dozen years or so of his life—the kids constantly picking on him at school, his mom or his siblings hardly paying any attention to him at home. So it almost made sense that when he turned thirteen he’d packed some of his clothes and the little money he had in a plastic grocery store bag, waited until it was the middle of the night, and ran away from home.
And where did he run away to? Not the circus. This was Wyoming, after all, so after a couple days of walking, after begging for food, after sleeping in fields, he crossed paths with a traveling rodeo.
They were on their way from Buffalo to Casper, taking the straight shot down I-25, and it took Jesse a very long time to convince one of the cowhands that his folks were dead, that he was orphaned and had nobody else and please please please would they take him along?
The cowhand must have figured Jesse’s story was complete bullshit, but he relented anyway, found him some work, and that was how Jesse got his start with the rodeo, how he worked his way up until he had become a semi-professional bull rider at the age of eighteen. He was pretty good too, could usually stay on for the full eight seconds and sometimes even longer. But the fact that he was ugly, that he had a lisp, kept him from going any further. Bull riding was just like every other sport—no matter how good you might be, you had to have a face that the public could appreciate, trust, come to love. And his just wasn’t that face.
So Jesse never did make the pros. He did get married, though, to a woman who didn’t seem to mind the fact he was ugly. A woman who had first gotten pregnant and then came to Jesse later, claiming the child was his. Only when the child was born it was quite clear the baby’s biological father was a man of African descent. But Jesse didn’t mind. Sure, he knew he had been lied to, but he remembered how he’d been brought up, and he wanted something better for this child—for his child.
But it was difficult. Jesse had quit school when he was twelve, and even then he hadn’t been doing well. Not that he hadn’t wanted to learn, but learning didn’t come as easy for him as it did the other kids. And his teachers had done him the disservice of passing him every year, not wanting to deal with him, and he floated by, so that by the time he eventually woke up in Simon’s game he was twenty-eight years old and had the reading capacity of a third grader.
He wasn’t stupid, though. Far from it. He was actually very intelligent, was a strong worker, and completely honest. He rarely talked because of his lisp, and this was the first thing Simon had used to taunt him with, claiming that if Jesse could recite the alphabet clearly, without lisping once, his wife and mulatto son would be released and Simon would give Jesse one million dollars cash.
Jesse couldn’t even get past the letter C.
Can’t say I blame him. Not for a man so hapless he had been cursed with a name he couldn’t even pronounce without revealing his lisp. Not after waking up naked, tied to a mechanical bull, fresh dung spread out all around him on the mats.
His first thought was like everyone else’s: where was he? His second thought: where was his family? And when Simon contacted him, told him about the game and the stakes, it became difficult to think, to breathe, to even move, so attempting to say the alphabet without trouble?
Give me a break.
Anyway, just because Jesse couldn’t read very well didn’t mean he didn’t want to. He tried reading books, even attempted to teach himself over the years, but he was always made fun of, usually by the woman who had conned him into marrying her, the one he would later try to save.
So what became Jesse’s main source of entertainment? Comic books. Superman, Batman, X-Men—anything with superheroes. He loved superheroes. His favorite was Spiderman. Out of all the comics he’d come to own in the past year since being taken out of Simon’s game and coming to live here with us, his Spiderman comics eclipsed them all.
So it was no surprise that when I knocked on his door he was reclining on his bed, the lamp tilted at an angle behind his head to provide enough light to clearly see each panel of Peter Parker’s latest adventure.
When he looked up, he closed the comic book with a finger to save his page. He must have sensed my real purpose for k
nocking, because he sat up and said, “Hey, Ben. You lookin’ for Ian?”
I started to shake my head but then stopped. “Yeah,” I said. “You have any idea where he is?”
“I think he’th downthairth. Wathin the new guy.”
I thanked him and started to back out of the room.
Jesse said my name.
“Yeah?”
“I wanted to ax you thomethin.”
He set the comic book aside, taking his finger from between the glossy pages. This I knew was serious. Jesse never welcomed interruptions when he was in the middle of a new Spiderman.
I entered the room and sat down on Ian’s bed. The cheap twin mattress squeaked beneath me.
I sat there for a moment, looking about the room. This had actually been my room two years ago. Back then we had been able to have our own separate rooms. But once we started pulling more players out of the games, bringing them here, space became an issue. We started bunking up. Started switching rooms. Carver had liked the idea of us trading rooms every couple of months. Getting to know each other. It was his form of musical bedrooms. Not like it was a huge deal anyway, because besides clothes and a few books or DVDs, we didn’t really have any possessions we needed to move from one room to the next. Only the girls had always kept their own room, Carver figuring it was best he didn’t make the sleeping arrangements completely coed.
Jesse was sitting on the edge of his bed, the comic book beside him. He was staring down at his dry and calloused hands, massaging the palms, the tips of his fingers.
I waited. Just sat there watching him. When it became apparent he wasn’t going to speak, I said, “So what’s up?”
He looked at me sharply, as if surprised to find me sitting there. He tried smiling, his buck teeth flashing for a moment, but the smile was forced, awkward, almost pained.
“Tho what ... what do you think ith gonna happen to uth?”
“How so?”
“You know. Now that Carver ... now that he’th gone.”
The Inner Circle (Man of Wax Trilogy) Page 12
