“I can tell you’re here,” Hans muttered, not wanting the other kids to think that he was any weirder than they already thought he was.
How? Marlo thought-texted as her shadow grazed his InfoSwank multimedia belt-buckle phone.
“Because when you’re here, I miss you,” he whispered. “It’s weird. It’s like eating a sandwich and getting hungrier.”
He sighed miserably as he pulled out his textbooks and slammed the door of his locker.
“Though I could just be down because, instead of studying for my precalculus exam yesterday, I was digging through a garbage heap on some sentimental archaeological dig.”
Did you bring them? The letters?
Hans nodded as he glanced down at the stained papers poking out of his Pee Chee folder.
“Yeah, I—”
A jock splashed water on Hans’s head from his water bottle.
“Sorry, man.” The square-jawed boy smirked, his sincerity as fake as a three-dollar bill. “I thought your hair was on fire!”
The boy joined his braying friends as they traded shoulder punches.
Hans mechanically pulled out a handkerchief from his jeans pocket and patted down his hair. Marlo had a feeling that the handkerchief was used expressly for the purpose of cleaning up after jock-related acts of humiliation.
“Brought them,” he continued, undeterred.
Marlo felt a strange sense of protectiveness for Hans. A connection. It wasn’t like they had fallen in love or anything, at least not from Marlo’s perspective. It was more like they had fallen into a snug mutual weirdness. She skittered along the fluorescent-lit floor and threw herself in the jock’s path. The glint of merry malice in the boy’s blue eyes was instantly doused.
“I feel … lame about that,” the boy murmured with a haunted sadness. “He’s just a kid like me, trying to get through his day. Maybe I’m the loser.”
Marlo skittered back to Hans across a shuddering band of fluorescent light.
Meet me after school at my house … 33 Paradiso Crescent.
“Yeah, I know where you live,” Hans muttered. “I used to hang out there all the time … you know, with Milton. You probably don’t remember.”
Right. Of course. Sorry. I’m brain dead. Everything dead, actually. Get it?
Hans swallowed nervously.
“I, um, was supposed to meet … uh … someone at Fragopolis.”
Yeah, yeah. Aubrey. Try to squeeze me in, you double-timing Romeo. Heck hath no fury like a dead woman scorned. I’m going to wander around town—leaving gloom in my wake, I guess—then head to the arcade, one of the spots I’m supposed to haunt.
The class bell rang like a nuclear migraine down the hall.
“Okay, I’ll meet you then,” he said as he looped the strap of his backpack over his skinny shoulder and trotted down the hall. “Bye … um, Marlo.”
Marlo relaxed beneath the shadow of an overflowing garbage can.
It’s all so complicated, she thought from her patch of cool darkness. Here I am, running around like the shadow of a chicken with its head cut off, and Milton’s probably just kicking back in some lame class, trying to keep his geeky eyes open.…
Milton fell to the ground, slowly, as if he were deep-sea diving. Beside him lay a wriggling tentacle. The Tactagon retreated back into the murk.
Milton crawled on his hands and knees toward his fallen friends.
“Are you guys okay?”
The Sunshine Sneezer nodded.
“If it wasn’t for the simulated water environment breaking our fall,” he replied, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Sam/Sara pushed themselves off the floor.
“The full-body numbness helps, too,” Sara said, brushing the hair from her almond eyes. “Though I can feel the pain jabbing through.”
Milton peered off into the murk. The Tactagon’s massive silhouette rippled in the distance like a thorny undersea leviathan.
“Maybe we can hack off another tentacle,” Milton said while the creature bleated unnervingly from the other side of the arena.
Sara pointed at the Tactagon. “Look!” she said.
Milton tried but could barely make out more than its bristling outline.
“It’s growing back,” Sara continued with horror. “Its tentacle. It looks like it’s growing two.”
“You’re kidding,” Milton replied, appalled.
“There’s no way we can win,” Sam said with weak certainty. “The more we hurt it, the stronger it’ll get.”
Milton drew in a deep breath of fetid fish air and stood, gripping his trident.
“Then we’ll just have to hit it as fast and as furious as we can. Not all of us will make it, but maybe some of us will.”
The Terawatts glanced at one another gravely. The Sunshine Sneezer sighed with resignation as he rose to his feet.
“Might as well get it over with,” he said with a sniffle as he prepared for a ludicrously one-sided battle.
“Wait!” Caterwaul yelled. The other children turned. There, crouched on the muddy ground, was Caterwaul, her long face quavering and her right arm thrust up to her elbow inside the Tactagon’s dismembered pink tentacle.
“She must be in shock,” Sara whispered to Milton before turning to the girl. “That’s a very nice arm you have there, Caterwaul,” she added slowly and deliberately, as if talking to a crazy person. “Very pretty.”
Caterwaul slid her arm out of the tentacle and wiped the slime off on her armor.
“No, you don’t get it,” she replied. “I can feel what the Tactagon feels, and it feels scared.”
“What?” Milton asked, giving a sideways glance to the behemoth at the other end of the arena. “That massive spiky mountain of death, scared?”
Caterwaul rose. Her wide eyes were shiny, not with her usual gleam of fear and unease but with conviction.
“I used to see this counselor who was always telling me to ‘get in touch with my feelings,’ ” she explained. “I’d always been afraid to do it, thinking it would hurt, even though she kept saying it would help me to get over my fears. So, here in this awful place, I just freaked out. Total panic attack. And that’s when I put my hand in the tentacle—”
“Which begs the question why,” Sam interjected.
“Because I … I don’t know … felt like it,” she replied. “Doing something—anything—was better than just being scared. And when I put the tentacle on, I could feel all of these weird sensations fresh and strong. A blend of fear and anger. It—the Tactagon—really can’t stand the whistling sound the tridents make. Sends it into this furious, terrified rage. It just lashes out, because it doesn’t know what else to do.”
The Sunshine Sneezer brushed sweat-matted strands of hair from his eyes.
“The Shriek-Spears actually cause the fighting?”
Milton stared out across the dark ooze and muck. The Tactagon’s mountainous barbed body blocked all passage to the next level.
“So what are we supposed to do?” Sam said with a bitter laugh. “Just wait here until the kids upstairs run out of quarters?”
“No,” Caterwaul replied. “We pet it.”
“Pet it?!” the other children gasped in unison.
“And maybe a tickle or two,” Caterwaul continued. “See, I got the sense that it actually feeds on touch … and it is starving. If we pat and stroke it nicely, maybe it will get docile and let us pass.”
A shiver of electricity shot up Milton’s spine and out to his arms. He fought the urge to run at the Tactagon and lance it with his trident.
“The players are getting restless,” he said. “They want some action.”
“Brock, brock, brock,” the fake Principal Bubb taunted from the shadows. “Chicken cleanup on aisle four …”
Milton set his trident down.
“Let’s give that thing the scritch of its life.”
Howler Monkey, the Sunshine Sneezer, Sara, and—lastly—her brother set down their weapons and ma
de their way across the swampy floor of the coliseum, each taking turns dragging Ariel behind them.
Glorm-foddle!
The Tactagon reared back, extending its fore-tentacles like gigantic slimy sabers. The Terawatts twitched violently as the players above tried to pitch them into bloody battle. Milton stepped beneath what appeared to be the beast’s head.
The Tactagon raised two of its tentacle spines above Milton. The creature’s limbs tensed into points at the ends, curving into trembling hooks poised to pierce Milton clean through. Milton found bare areas between the Tactagon’s barbed appendages and gently caressed the creature’s spongy, vaguely electric flesh.
Squickle!
Caterwaul pressed her hands into the Tactagon’s squishy skin.
“It’s working!” she said with a wide toothy grin.
As the creature’s spines relaxed, Milton could see a vague, circular outline in the mud, with a dark blob at the edge.
“It’s another Zetawatt!” Sara said, her keen vision slicing through the shadowy murk. “Wyatt, I think.”
“Take Ariel to the portal,” Milton said to Sam/Sara as he scratched the Tactagon around the rim of a tentacle. “We’ll keep petting this thing until you’re there, then make a run for it.”
Sara nodded. Sam just rolled his eyes, not liking to be ordered around, but he worked in tandem with his sister regardless.
“Excellent teamwork, Terawatts,” Provost Marshal Tesla’s voice boomed from the arena’s hidden speakers.
“What is going on?!” Milton cried.
Tesla laughed, a sputtering, hyena giggle that hissed like static.
“That’s right,” he replied. “I promised you information for every Sense-o-Round you survive!”
He paused, his silence an audible hum filling the arena.
“Zhe players above are thoroughly immersed,” he continued. “Brilliantly done. Zhe Zetawatts dropped out too soon, one by one, giving zhe game fewer variables.”
“Why are we here?” Milton asked.
“Answer number one: Every trap needs bait,” Tesla explained. “And you’re it. All of you.”
“Bait? For what?”
“Answer number two: You didn’t think this—zhe most extraordinary gaming experience of all time—was created merely to bring joy to zhe world’s joystick jockeys?” He twittered like a delirious European bird. “Why, Mr. Fauster, it is zhe crown jewel of an elaborate stratagem to snatch zhe souls of children straight from their living bodies … straight from zhe Surface!”
Milton swallowed, a hard, cold lump of dread that traveled down his throat, slow and painful, like a jagged, bitter pill.
“But how? Why?” Milton managed as Sam/Sara made it to the circular portal etched on the Sense-o-Rama floor.
“Zhat, my unwitting colleague, is an answer you have yet to earn—down in Sense-o-Round Three!”
“THREE … TWO … ONE. Begin Auralla: Sense-o-Round Three …”
The Terawatts were submerged in humid darkness. Milton’s right ear had, almost immediately, become so sensitive that it throbbed with pain. He could hear his heart pounding in his chest, the blood surging volcanically through his veins, his breath a creaking bellows, and his stomach doing gastric somersaults. Even his footsteps tread like a tap-dancing elephant.
“Something is out there. I can feel it,” Caterwaul whispered.
“Of course something’s out there, crybaby,” Sam grumbled. “This isn’t solitaire.”
“Could you guys stop fighting?” the Sunshine Sneezer pleaded. “It’s hurting my ears. At least one of them.”
“Mine too,” Milton replied.
“My ears are all, like, plugged up,” Howler Monkey said.
“What?” Sara asked. “I can’t hear you because my ears are all—”
“Shhh!” Milton scolded, his voice tearing the air like an amplified paper shredder. “I hear something.…”
Eeeeeeekakaeeeeeeee!
There was a steady, ceaseless trill hovering in the uppermost belfry of Milton’s ability to hear. Like a field full of crickets, only with no pause in between the high-pitched chirps.
“I hear it, too,” the Sunshine Sneezer whispered, trying not to hurt his own suddenly superpowered ear.
“And I feel this odd heat,” Caterwaul murmured. “But as soon as I zero in on it, it seems to … hop away.”
“Look, there’s a three-headed blob!” Sara said, pointing ahead in the darkness. “Wait … it’s gone.”
Sproing!
After a moment of high-pressure silence, Caterwaul whispered in the dark. “Do you think this game is really stealing souls?” she asked sadly. “Like Tesla said? And that we’re, by even being here, somehow helping him?”
“Maybe we should just, like, throw the game,” Howler Monkey offered.
“And end up like those zombie Zetawatts Milton has us dragging around?” Sam replied. “Not me.”
“Sam’s right,” Milton replied. He never thought that those particular words would pass his lips. “If we make it through all the levels, we might find a way to stop Tesla. If we give up, he’ll just send in the next batch of Arcadia kids to replace us.”
Schwaaa … clang!
A metallic clank, horrific at least to Milton’s sensitive ear, reverberated several yards away.
“New weapons,” Sara said. Milton could hear her and her brother’s footsteps. “Some kind of hoop with—oww—spikes.”
Fiery red letters blazed above.
WEAPON: BARBA-HOOP
Milton felt around on the floor until he found his weapon: two metal hoops bound together, one on top of the other, with spikes along the rim.
“They’re like hula hoops,” Sara said. “So maybe we just—”
A blinding shower of sparks stripped away the darkness. Sam/Sara’s spiked hoop weapon swiveled on their hips, sending forth a gleaming cascade of light. The glow, unfortunately, illuminated what awaited beyond.
A twenty-foot-tall creature, like a nightmarish cross between a one-eared vampire bat and a furry orchid, loomed ahead. Its gargantuan ear—like a pointed cobra’s hood, minus the cobra—faced outward, apparently serving as the creature’s face, with a small hole at the center fringed with teeth.
Eeeeeeekakaeeeeeeee!
Sprouting on either side of the creature’s yellow-brown midsection were three tiny arms with silver claws at the ends that spun like deadly pinwheels. It didn’t seem to have legs. Instead, it bobbed softly on a coiled, springlike tail. The monster lurched forward, hissing—as did the two other, identical creatures behind it.
Caterwaul screamed as Sam/Sara’s Barba-Hoop fell to the ground. Everything went dark.
“Food, meet the Oscithrauds,” the game version of Principal Bubb announced from the other end of the arena. “Oscithrauds, meet your food. I’m sure you have a lot to talk about … though, it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.”
Dale E. Basye walked out onto the dock overlooking his gated community’s simulated bay—the corporately sponsored Gulf of Texaco. Light jazz music drifted across the lagoon as the Avalawns at the United Estates of Nevada hosted its nightly small-scale regatta. Dale lifted up the chain barring access to the dock’s edge—carefully looking out for Mrs. Fitzgerald, head of the estate’s Synthetic Recreational Waterways Safety Board—and sat down, legs dangling over the shamelessly blue water in brazen contradiction of estate policy.
Twilight slathered the Las Vegas sky in reckless oranges and decadent magentas as tiny sailboats skimmed across the miniature gulf course.
It would be beautiful if it wasn’t so perfect, Dale thought as he redialed Phelps Better’s number yet again on his iSlab.
“Hello?” the man’s smug voice replied on the other end of the line.
“Yes, this is Dale. Look, I’ve been having second thoughts—”
“Ha! Gotcha! Leave a message after the beep and I’ll get back to you if I don’t have anything better to do. Get it? Better. Because of my last—”
D
ale jabbed off his phone app and brooded, watching several children across the glitter-infused water glide on skate-shoes to an inflatable castle. He typed a note on his iSlab.
Irrational Fears #6,072 and #6,073:
kids on skate-shoes and large bouncy castles.
Dale wished his surroundings were more in line with his internal turmoil. Pouring rain would be more fitting for the sense of haunted melancholy, the emotional dusk he felt inside. All he wanted was what anyone wanted these days: to realize the American Dream. But in a city with a case of neon-agitated insomnia, who could even sleep, much less dream? And as he considered the supposed victims of the game that was to make both his name and fortune, even the pursuit of sudden, unearned riches and fleeting fame seemed somehow … hollow.
Still, it takes two to make an accident, Dale rationalized. Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go was only his idea—well, that kid Damian’s, if you wanted to get technical. It was that creep Phelps Better and the engineers at Virtual Prayground who made it something potentially dangerous.
A mysterious green light, feathery and far away, rippled in the water at the end of the dock. It had a hopeful quality to it, pure and sincere, that was at odds with the vulgar, gaudy neon glow of the casinos framing it.
It was in that moment that Dale E. Basye—the “E” typically standing for “Easy Way Out”—knew what he had to do. Something difficult. Something awkward. Something potentially damaging, career-wise. He would call a press conference and nip the festering outrage his game had aroused among parents in the proverbial bud. Dale would appear before the angry mob of his detractors and turn their fury into opportunity: an opportunity for redemption, to clear his name and perhaps even embolden it in the process. And if the American Dream was about anything, it was about the opportunity for a second chance. Even in the arid soul desert of Las Vegas.
He smiled at the green light that, for an instant, seemed to understand him as he wanted to be understood, believe in him as he would like to believe in himself.
Dale caught the wizened, judgmental form of Mrs. Fitzgerald cutting across the obsessively manicured golf course—her act in itself worthy of report—toward the dock. He quickly ducked beneath the chain. So this is what it feels like to do the right thing, Dale thought while jogging toward the vulgar sanctuary of his McMansion.
Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck Page 19
