by Dustin Brady
“You can practice your skills any time at the firing range.”
“I don’t have time to explain! I just need your gun!”
After our failed ambush, the Hindenburg had learned about every weapon in the game. Every weapon, that is, except the one so basic that the game won’t even let you use it — the sergeant’s pea shooter.
“You can practice your skills any time at the firing range.”
Time had run out. An alien showed up in the portal.
I tried grabbing the gun from the sergeant. He had a vice grip, almost as if the gun were glued to his hands. Another alien appeared and then another and another and then the Hindenburg himself.
“You can practice your skills…”
Eric had been right. The sergeant was just a robot programmed to do one thing. The first alien through the door — a jumping lizard-looking thing — noticed us and started sprinting in our direction with windmill legs. I turned back to the sergeant and tried again to wrestle away the gun. When I turned around again, the alien was already in midair, just a few feet away. In one motion, I grabbed the sergeant and fell to the ground, using him as a shield.
As soon as the sergeant’s pea shooter was pointed at the alien, he shot.
PING!
And his weapon, which to this point had done nothing more than poke holes in cardboard, vaporized the alien in an instant.
SQUAWK!
I turned the sergeant around.
“That was great! How did you know to do that?”
“You can practice your skills…”
Whatever. I picked him up by the legs and spun him around to face the oncoming alien army.
PING! PING! PING!
SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SQUAWK!
It was working! Kind of! The aliens were pouring in so fast that for every one that the sergeant vaporized, four more would take its place. I kept retreating with the sergeant until we found ourselves behind a big rock. The aliens closed in, chirping louder and louder with every step they took.
Then, silence.
I peeked around the corner of the rock. The aliens had parted ways, and the Hindenburg was approaching.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
I weighed my options. They were not great.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
If I stayed put, I’d be toast in 10 seconds.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
If I tried to take a shot with the sergeant, I’d be toast in five.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
If I made a break for the portal, the army would close in before I’d be able to take two steps.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
Maybe I could come out with my hands up and take my chances with the Black Box? I peeked out again to see the Hindenburg only five steps away. Then, just as I was going to take my first step out of hiding, I heard a faint sound.
WHOOSH!
Eric had finally made it through the portal. As soon as he appeared at the beginning of the level, he started waving his arms like a maniac. It took me a second to understand what he was trying to communicate, but when I figured it out — wow. Eric, you big-boogered genius. I ducked back behind the rock. I wasn’t going to escape by going down in a blaze of glory or running away like a coward.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
I only had one option left.
BLAST!
I shot the sergeant.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Final Battle
It was the fastest boss battle ever.
I’ll try to describe everything slowly to make the battle seem longer than the 1.2 seconds it took. When I ducked behind the rock for the last time, the sergeant started talking again.
“You can practice your skills…”
I interrupted him. “I’m so sorry,” I said before raising my arm cannon.
The sergeant, bless his little robot heart, did not react one bit.
“…any time at the firing…”
BLAST!
He vaporized and did exactly what Eric and I had been doing all game when we got shot — he reappeared at the beginning of the level. In Eric’s waiting arms.
I peeked back around the rock. When he heard the blast, the Hindenburg looked this way, then that way then finally behind him at Eric. Eric smiled and waved “bye-bye.”
PEW!
The Hindenburg tried rolling out of the way, but he was too late — the sergeant landed a direct hit.
“wwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhaaaAAAAAAAAA…”
The Hindenburg looked up at the sky and let out an ear-piercing wail.
“…AAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW…”
The wail built and built until it caused everything in the level to vibrate. Until it caused my insides to vibrate.
“…WWWWWWWWRRRRRRRR…”
I covered my ears. The rock in front of me cracked. The alien to my right popped — just exploded in a flash of light. Then another and another and pretty soon I was blinded by a sea of flashbulbs. The only thing I could see was the Hindenburg in front of me. Melting. I closed my eyes.
“…RRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!”
The wailing reached its highest pitch, then faded away. I kept my eyes closed for a few seconds longer before daring to open them.
Carpet. Controller. Ratty, old couch. I was back in Eric’s basement.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mr. Gregory
I found Eric on the ground next to me curled up in a ball.
“Hey buddy,” I said. “We’re back!”
He slowly opened his eyes and looked around the basement. Then he looked down. In his arms was a small toy soldier — a small toy soldier that looked exactly like the sergeant from the video game.
“What just happened?”
We looked up at the TV. The screen was black except for a single message:
HINDENBURG PROTOCOL ABORTED.
Eric pressed all the buttons on the controller, but the screen wouldn’t go away. He restarted the game, but the message just came back. He even tried unplugging and replugging everything, but nothing worked. The game was fried.
Eric finally turned to me.
“Was that real?”
Of course it was real. Nothing had ever felt more real. And yet — the jetpacks, the grown-up Mark, the Statue of Liberty rocket ship — how could any of that have actually happened? We looked at the clock — 3:24 p.m. Not even one hour had passed since I’d entered the video game. The more Eric and I talked about all of our crazy experience, the more it felt like we had just woken up from a super weird nap.
We decided to visit the one person who could give us answers — Charlie’s dad. We hopped on our bikes (it felt really sad to ride a bike again instead of a hover tank) and rode to Charlie’s house. Charlie’s family lived in the nice part of town in a home that looked kind of like it had been sent back from the future. Eric rang the doorbell.
Charlie came to the door and lit up when he saw us. “Hey guys! What’s up!”
“Is your dad home?” I asked.
Charlie slouched. “Oh, uh, yeah. Sure. Wait here.” He seemed sad that people were only using him to get to his dad again.
After a few minutes, Charlie’s dad — Mr. Gregory — came to the door. He was a skinny man with big glasses and hair that looked like a porcupine with bed head.
“What can I do for you boys?” he said.
“You worked on Full Blast, right?” Eric asked.
“Sure did! How are you enjoying it?”
“Well,” Eric paused and looked at me before continuing. “It tried to kill us, but other than that it was cool.”
Mr. Gregory squinted at us and cocked his head. Eric went on to talk about everything that had happened to us that afternoon — Reality Mode and the Hindenburg and everything. At first Mr. Gregory looked genuinely puzzled. Then when we got to the part about Mark, he looked scared.
“That’s impossible,” he said when Eric finished. “You need to stop with these stories.” Mr. Gregory may have b
een acting like he didn’t believe us, but his pale face and shaky voice said otherwise.
“Please,” I said. “You’ve got to believe us.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“You’ve got to help us,” I continued. “For Mark.”
Mr. Gregory’s face softened. “I promise you, I don’t know anything. But,” he glanced down the street and lowered his voice, “I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much.”
That was two weeks ago. No one has seen Mr. Gregory since.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Are You Sure?
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
The Hindenburg got closer. I could feel his hot breath coming out of the gas mask. It reached one of its tentacle fingers out to touch me.
“Yessssssseeeeeeeeeeee.”
I popped out of bed. Another bad dream — the fourth in the last week. Why couldn’t I dream about flying around in a jetpack instead? Why did it have to only be the scary parts?
Eric and I had spent the two weeks since we escaped from the video game figuring out our next move. Where was Mr. Gregory? What could we do to save Mark? Who else could we tell? Did the whole thing even happen? In the meantime, Eric had sworn off video games — no need to take any chances. I, of course, did not need an excuse to stay away from video games for the rest of my life.
I lay down, closed my eyes and tried to fall back asleep.
“Jesse.”
My eyes popped open again. I looked around the room. Nothing. But somebody definitely whispered my name, right? Or was this another dream?
“Jesse.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement on the nightstand. I looked closer. Just my alarm clock, lamp, spelling bee trophy and sergeant action figure (I’d decided to keep the toy sergeant from the video game as a souvenir).
“Jesse.”
It was the sergeant. The room was dark, but I definitely saw his mouth move. I got closer.
The sergeant took a stiff step forward.
“You can save him,” he said.
“Save who?” I would usually be a little more hesitant about talking back to plastic toys, but I guess these things seem a little less weird after you’ve flown around Hawaii in a jetpack.
“Mark,” he said. “But you have to go back now.”
My head started spinning.
“Do you want to go back?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Are you sure?”
Sneak Peek
Continue Jesse and Eric’s story in Trapped in a Video Game Book Two, available now on Amazon!. You can get notified when the newest Trapped in a Video Game book comes out by signing up at dustinbradybooks.com.
Looking for another series to get into? Check out the first chapter of Superhero for a Day: The Magic Magic Eight Ball available on Amazon now.
“There’s nothing wrong with crying if it hurts.”
“It doesn’t hurt, so why would I cry?”
It did hurt. Very much. But Jared Foreman was determined not to show pain on video.
“Just a few more seconds. You can do it, buddy.”
Kodey Kline, the kid behind the camera, was not Jared’s buddy. Kodey was in sixth grade like Jared, but he had the chin hair of a high schooler. In James Ford Rhodes Middle School, that was enough to make him a man among boys. Kodey mostly used his power to get people to do dumb things that he could then record and post online. He was the one who had challenged Jared to this particular feat of strength — attempting the splits while people stacked books in his arms.
“Five! Four! Three! Two! One!” Kodey led the small crowd surrounding Jared in a countdown. “Woohoo! You did it buddy!” He tussled Jared’s hair and walked away.
“Hey!” Jared yelled. “Someone get these books!”
Although a few people stuck around to stare and snicker, nobody came to get the books. Finally, Jared had no choice but to tip over and let the books fall everywhere. He stood up, wiped himself off and started cleaning up. Another set of hands came to help him.
“Oh,” Jared said when he noticed who the hands belonged to. “Hey Bre.”
Breanna Burris was the coolest girl in sixth grade, or at least Jared thought so. She wasn’t a “cool” cool girl — she didn’t hang out with the popular crowd or take a million selfies or anything. But she was funny and athletic and always happy and, again, Jared just thought she was the coolest.
“You OK?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. Yeah for sure.” Jared said, trying to hide the fact that his face had started turning red. “Kodey just told me to — we thought it would be funny if I did the splits while holding a bunch of books. And it was funny! I mean, I haven’t seen the video yet, but I think he’s gonna put it up later…”
“Well I’m glad you’re OK,” Bre said with a smile as she picked up the last book. “Wouldn’t want your pants splitting in half.”
“Hahaha!” Jared overlaughed while she walked away. “No we wouldn’t!” He smiled stupidly in her direction.
“You done fooling around?”
Jared spun around. His cousin, Lenny Patterson, was standing behind him with an impatient look on his face. Jared walked home from school with Lenny every day, and every day Lenny was late for some dumb reason. One day he would be trying to clean a giant ink stain from his pants, another the nurse would be testing him for a concussion after he had hit himself in the head with his own locker, another he would — well, you get the idea. Lenny would be fine waiting this one time.
“I wasn’t fooling around.”
“Yeah, you were too busy looking stupid for the Internet,” Lenny said.
“No, it was funny.”
“For everyone else. I don’t know why you let him do that to you.”
“Do what?” Jared asked. Kodey’s a friend.”
“Whatever that guy is, he is not your friend. Would a friend leave you with all those books?”
“He didn’t hear me ask for help.”
“And that thing last week, would a real friend dare you to eat a booger? Someone else’s booger? And would a real friend trick you into calling the teacher “mom”? And would a real friend…”
Lenny spent the walk home recounting all the ways in the last month that Kodey had maybe not been a real friend. By the time they reached the park where they split off to their own houses, Jared had had enough.
“You’re just jealous that Bre was hanging out with me.”
Lenny squinted at him. “Just now? For like two seconds?”
“I would say ten to fifteen seconds.”
“Because she felt sorry for you?”
“What? No! Come on. She thought it was funny too.”
Lenny jumped and grabbed a branch above his head. He started swinging himself back and forth. “Whatever you’ve gotta tell yourself.”
Jared didn’t know why this conversation was making him so mad, but it was, so he did something to make himself feel better. He pushed Lenny. It wasn’t that hard of a push – it shouldn’t have done anything – but since Lenny was not the most coordinated of sixth graders and since Jared got him on the upswing, Lenny fell directly onto his back and got the wind knocked out of him. Since Lenny was on the tubbier side, the ground shook a little when he fell.
Jared crouched down to check on his cousin. “Are you OK? I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”
This would usually be the time for Lenny to retaliate with a punch to the stomach. Instead, he lay staring at the tree he had just fallen from. “What’s that?”
Jared followed his gaze to a small crevice in the base of the tree. Deep inside, tucked away so that it was only visible to someone lying on the ground, was something that looked round, black and plastic. Jared walked over and reached his hand in the hole until he felt it. Even though it was plastic, it gave him a small zap of static electricity when he touched it.
Jared pulled out the object and examined it. It was a black, oversized b
illiards eight ball with a small window on the back. Inside the window was a blue triangle that read, “DON’T COUNT ON IT.”
“What’s this?”
“You’ve never seen one of those before?” Lenny said as he sat up. “That’s a magic eight ball.”
“How does it work?”
“There’s a dice thingy inside with different answers on every side. You ask a yes-or-no question, shake the ball real good, and the dice floats up to the window with your answer.”
“Oh brother.”
“See if it works. Ask it if Bre just ‘hung out with you’ because she felt sorry for you.”
Jared rolled his eyes.
“Do it.”
Jared sighed, held the magic eight ball to his mouth and asked, “Was Bre just feeling sorry for me?” He shook the ball, waited a second and got his answer.
YES, DEFINITELY
Lenny laughed as he turned toward his house. “Told you. See you tomorrow.”
Jared stood glaring at the eight ball in his hands. “Why would she feel sorry for me? I don’t believe you.”
He sighed and started walking home. After a few seconds, he glanced back down and stopped dead in his tracks. The magic eight ball had a different message now. One that did not seem to answer a yes-or-no question. One that seemed very, very specific to his particular situation.
BECAUSE YOU LOOKED STUPID ON THE INTERNET
Want to find out what happens next? Superhero for a Day: The Magic Magic Eight Ball is available on Amazon now. You can order it here.
Thank You
Hey! Thanks for taking the time to read Trapped in a Video Game: Book One. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it. If you liked it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review on Amazon here. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and much appreciated.
If you want to get in touch with me for any reason, I’d love to hear from you! You can email me at [email protected], and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks again for reading my book!
