by Dustin Brady
SNAP!
Just as I made my final push into the ceiling, the pole broke. I had enough momentum to roll into the ceiling, but my heart sank when I looked down to check out the damage. Eric stood there with two pieces of a broken pole in his hands.
“What now?” he asked.
Just then, we heard the security army storm into the hallway outside.
“THEY’RE ON THIS FLOOR!” someone shouted.
Eric started to panic. He looked around the room for something he could use to climb up to me, but it’d take an hour to build a tower of broken computers all the way to the ceiling.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The security team had begun throwing open doors as they worked their way down the hall. Eric wedged his sword against the door between two shelves on either side of the room, buying himself a few extra seconds with his little barricade.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Eric started throwing stuff everywhere as the bad guys got closer. I looked in the ceiling for some sort of rope or wire I could lower down to him.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
“Hey!” Eric whispered.
I looked down. He was holding a plasma gun. Or, more accurately, half a plasma gun. It looked unfinished, with wires sticking out of it and no touch screen on the back.
“Should I try to put myself in Go Wild?”
“No way!” I hissed. “You don’t even know how that works!”
BANG! BANG! BANG! CLUNKCLUNKCLUNK!
The bad guys had found our room, and they were now trying to break through Eric’s barricade.
Eric shook his head, grabbed a plasma cannister from the shelf and flipped a switch on the gun. It made a couple of beep-boop old computer sounds and came to life. He turned the dial on the back, screwed in the cannister and tossed me his phone.
“What’s this for?!”
“To see if I make it.”
CLUNKCLUNKCLUNK!
Eric pressed one more button, and the gun started glowing.
“Eric, wait!”
Eric didn’t wait. He pointed the business end of the plasma gun at his chest, squeezed his eyes closed and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Horde
“ERIC!”
I quickly brought up Go Wild on Eric’s phone and scanned the room. Nothing.
“ERIC!”
Then, a flicker. A hand making a thumbs up floated in the air where Eric used to be. Piece by piece, the rest of his body flickered onto the screen. “This is so cool!” he said as soon as he got a mouth. “I’m invisible, right? Oh man, I’m gonna capture so many…”
CLUNKCLUNKCLUNK — CRASH!
The security squad burst through the door. I crawled back far away from the hole in the ceiling, and Eric rolled through the wall.
“I just rolled through a wall!” I heard Eric shout through the phone. “THIS IS THE BEST…” Click. I turned off the phone before any of the bad guys could hear it.
“Where did they go?” one of them asked.
“Look.” I heard the sound of another one picking something metal off the ground. He got on the radio. “They ghosted. Lock it down and send in the horde.” Then I heard a bunch of boots stomp off.
After a few seconds, I dared to quietly crawl back to the hole in the ceiling and peek into the room. It was empty. I took out the phone. “Eric? Eric?”
Without warning, Eric burst through the floor. “Haha! This is sooooo cool! I’m still trying to figure out my power, but look at this!” He stuck his head through the floor, then tried to do a handstand without hands. He wobbled a little, then fell over after a few seconds. He popped his head back out. “I’m still working on it, but…”
“ERIC!”
“What?”
“What’s a horde?”
“How should I know?”
“Well, we should probably get out of here before we find out, right?”
“OK yeah, whatever you want,” Eric said distractedly as he karate kicked through the wall over and over. Suddenly, one of the furballs that had tried to eat my shoelace back on my porch appeared in the path of Eric’s kick.
PUNT!
Eric booted it through the wall. Then another furball dropped from the ceiling onto Eric’s head, and a third bit into his leg with a CHOMP!
“AHHH!”
A tower of five of them appeared right in front of his face, showed their fangs and chattered angrily.
“THE HORDE!” Eric screamed as two more chomped onto his leg.
“What do we do?”
“UPGRADE ME!”
“How do I do that?”
“JUST FIGURE IT OUT!” Eric screamed as he wildly tore furballs from his body.
I swiped and scrolled and finally found the upgrade menu. “Which one do you want me to do?”
“ALL OF THEM!”
I ran down the list, tapping every available upgrade. Five seconds and a hundred dollars of that guard’s money later, I looked up. “Did I do it?”
Eric glowed like a purple fireball and grew before my eyes. His body got to twice its normal size, but his hands kept getting bigger and bigger until they reached the size of overstuffed beanbag chairs.
“YES! HULK SMASH!” Eric yelled in a slightly deeper voice than normal. He balled up his fists and started punching furballs into next week. “WOOHOO!” With his supersized fists of fury, Eric plowed through furballs like a seventh-grader crashing the third-grade football game. But even as he joyously smashed balls of fur, I could see that he was outmatched. For every one furball that he squashed, three more would appear.
“Eric, there are too many!” He thumped the ground with his giant hands, causing a shockwave to ripple through the room and take out every furball in sight.
“See, I got it!” he said. But just during that four-word sentence, ten new furballs fell from the ceiling.
“I think they’re multiplying!”
Eric continued punching and swatting and thumping, but I noticed he’d started glowing a little less brightly. I looked down to see a meter on the screen nearing 25 percent.
“Give me a boost!” he yelled.
I found the “Boost Upgrade” button ($9.99) and clicked it. Eric glowed brighter and smashed harder, but the furball army had started multiplying so fast that even Eric realized that he needed a different strategy.
“Ouch! OUCH! Hey, I gotta get out of here!” he yelled as he started moving for the door.
“What about me?”
“Follow me so you can keep beaming me upgrades!”
“But I’m not invisible!”
Eric’s body was completely covered in fur. “OUCH! Stop it!” SMASH SMASH SMASH. He ran into the hallway.
Well I could either stay put and let my best friend get eaten alive by a horde of cute-but-deadly furballs, or follow along until I got tased by a horde of angry security guards. I chose the taser horde. “Wait up!” I yelled as I crawled through the ceiling.
When I got to the closet doorway, I removed a ceiling tile and looked down. Bingo. The door hung open, which meant I could roll through the ceiling hole, grab the top of the door and swing myself down until my feet touched the doorknob, allowing me to make it to the ground without breaking an ankle. I put Eric’s phone in my pocket, breathed once, twice, then rolled through the hole, missed the door completely and totally broke my ankle on the ground.
“MMMRMMPH!” I said as I writhed in pain, trying to stay as quiet as possible in case any of my security guard friends had hung around. Fortunately, I found the hallway completely empty, allowing me to let out a little whimper as I hobbled to my feet. “Eric, this was the worst plan,” I grumbled as I pulled his phone out of my pocket.
Uh oh. The screen had cracked into a bazillion pieces. By the looks of it, I’d landed directly on it. I tapped the screen and got about a third of it to work, which was enough to find a long line of fur chasing Eric down the hall. I limped toward him on my almost-but-probably-not-totally broken ankle and pressed the
upgrade button again.
WHOOSH! SMASH!
Eric punched the floor and wiped out the whole line in one shockwave. “Come on!” He waited for me to catch up until the furballs started multiplying again. If I wouldn’t have been limping in a blind panic, I might have noticed something unusual — the horde kept appearing behind Eric, never in front of him.
We reached the stairs and started climbing. When we made it to the first floor, Eric started to run through the door. He immediately turned around. “KEEP GOING!”
I looked through the door’s window with my phone. A sea of angry fur. Same thing on the next floor. It wasn’t until the fourth floor up that we got a clear hallway. “This one!” Eric yelled.
“Hold on,” I said as I powered him up again. He picked up the closest furball and used it as a bowling ball to knock down all the little monsters behind it. “Don’t you think it’s weird that we haven’t run into any security guys?” I asked. “They would have seen me on a camera by now, right?”
Eric shrugged. “Maybe nobody’s watching the cameras because they’re all chasing us.” Just then, the ceiling rained furballs. “Let’s go!”
I put my head down and followed him again. Something didn’t seem right about this whole thing. I didn’t have time to figure it out, because almost as soon as we started running down the hallway, a wall of fur appeared in front of us.
“AHHH!” Eric screamed and ducked into the nearest door. I followed him into the dark room. As soon as I stepped into the room, I knew it was the wrong move.
SLAM!
The door behind us shut all by itself. For a few seconds, there was nothing but darkness and squeaking. Oh no. I knew that squeaking. Then the lights clicked on one by one, revealing rows of caged rats. We were back in Mr. Gregory’s lab.
“Hello again, gentlemen.”
Sitting in front of us with hands folded in his lap and a calm smile on his face was Jevvrey Delfino.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Black Box
Eric immediately turned around and tried to run back out the door.
BONK!
He bounced off the door. He tried the wall. Same result.
“I’m sorry, but we’ve locked everything down,” Jevvrey said.
Eric spun around. Jevvrey was looking at him through the futuristic glasses. He waved to Eric. “Bluetooth Go Wild goggles. $99.99. Available soon for pre-order.”
I looked around the room. Jevvrey had added a few things since I’d last seen it. For one, he was sitting on a swivel chair in front of a six-foot-tall black rectangle in the middle of the room. It looked like one of those supercomputers from the movies with switches and buttons and blinking lights all over it. The other thing was Mr. Gregory, sitting at his desk in front of a laptop, looking miserable.
“I was hoping you’d make it in time,” Jevvrey said.
“In time for what?”
“We’re about to find out what happens at the end of the game!” Jevvrey took out his phone and tapped on the screen.
“Mark?” Eric asked.
Jevvrey nodded. “He’s fading fast now.” He turned the phone around so we could see it.
Mark was fading. Not like his health or anything — he was actually disappearing from the screen. We could see right through him, and he was becoming more transparent by the second.
Jevvrey smiled. “Isn’t this incredible?”
“Where is he?!” Eric yelled as he took a swing at Jevvrey. Of course the punch went right through him because Eric was invisible. “WHERE IS HE?!”
Jevvrey laughed. “That’s so cute that you still think you can rescue him. Isn’t it cute, Alistair?” He turned to Mr. Gregory behind him. “Would you like to tell them Alistair, or should I?” Mr. Gregory avoided eye contact.
“Tell us what?” Eric asked.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but there was never anything you could have done to save him.”
I’d had just about enough of Jevvrey. “You’re lying!” I yelled. “Mr. Gregory said…”
“Mr. Gregory said what? Did he ever give you a specific plan for rescuing Mark?”
“Well, he…”
“Mark is in a black box,” Jevvrey patted the machine behind him. “Black boxes cost millions of dollars because they don’t lose data. Nothing escapes a black box. But you already knew that.”
I remembered Mark saying the exact same thing during Full Blast.
“Alistair didn’t bring you here to rescue Mark. It’s impossible to rescue Mark. He brought you here because I told him to.”
Mr. Gregory continued looking away.
“Bionosoft was right on the edge of changing the world, and then you two escaped with our secret. We couldn’t have that, could we? I told Alistair that if he didn’t get you both into a black box, his son was going in instead. When he disappeared, I got a little worried that he was going to make a stupid decision, but then he showed up today with BOTH of you!” He turned to Mr. Gregory. “I never should have lost faith in you, Alistair.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I looked at Mr. Gregory for confirmation, but he wouldn’t look back at me. He continued staring to the side like he had something to say but didn’t want to say it. Jevvrey patted me on the shoulder. “I know it’s a lot to take in. I’m so sorry. It’s not your fault.”
I kept my eyes on Mr. Gregory. It wasn’t like he was avoiding eye contact — he was keeping his eyes on the exact same spot.
“Fire up the machine, Alistair.”
What was he looking at? I followed his gaze across the room to the computer screen just behind Jevvrey’s shoulder. The screen was showing the same thing I’d seen earlier — the rats on the deserted island. But they weren’t clumped together in a tangled mass any more. Instead, they seemed to form groups that made shapes. I stared at the screen a few seconds longer until I saw it. Not shapes! Letters! Three rows of rats formed three distinct words.
R-E-A-C-H
I-N
E-R-I-C
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Game Over
Reach in Eric? What does that even mean?
While Jevvrey screwed a plasma cannister into a gun, I looked at Eric through my phone and got his attention. I motioned toward the screen with my head. He didn’t understand. I motioned again, this time longer. He looked where I was pointing my head and nodded like he got it, even though he for sure still didn’t get it.
“Look at the screen,” I mouthed.
Eric squinted at me, squinted at the screen, squinted at me again, then suddenly whipped his head back at the screen. He stared at it for a while and then gave me a weird look. I shrugged and looked at Mr. Gregory. He glanced up from his computer and nodded ever so slightly.
“OK, I’m all set Alistair,” Jevvrey said after he’d finished connecting the plasma gun to the black box. “Start the software.” He turned his attention to me. “Anything you’d like us to tell your parents when you’re gone?”
“I’d say, ‘Just try it,’” I replied as I looked in Eric’s direction while making a little reaching motion.
“Try it?” Jevvrey tilted his head. “Try to find you, you mean? Hm. Wouldn’t be my choice for last words, but who am I to judge?”
WHIRRRRRRRRR
He fired up the plasma gun and pointed it at me.
“ERIC!” I yelled. “NOW!”
With nothing to lose, Eric ran for the computer screen. Jevvrey chuckled. “You’re stuck in this room,” he said. “So feel free to…”
He stopped midsentence when Eric reached his hand into the screen. Eric’s hand didn’t go through the screen like I’d expected — it actually went into the video game world. When Eric reached into the screen, a massive shadow fell over the tiny island.
“Whoaaaaaaaa!” Eric said.
“How are you doing that?” Jevvrey shouted as he adjusted his aim from me to Eric.
“Bring your hand down!” Mr. Gregory instructed.
As soon as Eric did, a gian
t hand appeared on screen. He brought his hand all the way down on top of the squirming mountain of rats. “GROSS!” He pulled his hand back out, which scooped about a thousand rodents from the island into the lab.
“What’s going on?!” Jevvrey shouted while backing up.
Mr. Gregory did a little whistle through his teeth and pointed at Jevvrey. In one big clump, the rats all turned and ran at the Bionosoft president. “AHHHHH!” Jevvrey tried to run away, but he couldn’t get two steps before the sandy rodents covered him from head to toe. He dropped the plasma gun as he tried to brush them off. “SO MUCH NIBBLING!”
As soon as Jevvrey dropped the gun, Mr. Gregory jumped from his desk and sprinted over. He scooped up the gun, aimed it at Jevvrey and pulled the trigger.
ZIIIIIIING!
In an instant, Jevvrey and every last rat disappeared. A small screen on the black box flickered on and revealed Jevvrey running around in darkness with a mass of rodents chasing him. The whole thing was over in less than five seconds. I stood staring with my mouth open.
“To the basement,” Mr. Gregory said as he ran back to the laptop on his desk. “We don’t have much time.”
“What just…” Eric was still standing by the computer screen, more baffled than ever. He tried to put his hand back into the video game, but clunked it on the screen. He patted his body. “Am I…”
“Yes, you’re back,” Mr. Gregory said without looking up from his laptop.
“But, but how? I don’t understand.”
Mr. Gregory was typing furiously now. “Yesterday, I discovered that someone already inside of a video game can use screens as portals into other games. But — this is the important thing — the portals only work one way. So if you go halfway in and pull yourself back out, you break everything and come back to real life. In theory, it’s the perfect way to rescue Mark.”
“In theory?” I asked.
“Yes, in theory. Also in theory — by the way — holograms act in a similar way, which is why I needed you out of that control room earlier.”
“So you were never trying to put us into a black box?” Eric asked.
Mr. Gregory shook his head. “I had no idea Bionosoft was testing on innocent people without permission. Once I found out what had happened, I felt it was my responsibility to fix things. No matter what.”
