Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel (23 page)

I must’ve waited there for five minutes—
longer?
—and I was on the point of going to check what was going on, if maybe Yorbleson had managed to overpower Alan, or if he had somehow talked Alan around, that was when I felt everything around me crumble.

Felt the darkness gnawing at the cracks.

Eking its way into everything.

Bleeding
all around.

And, once again, that chill descended.

Over
everything
.

I was tumbling—tumbling
back
. . . falling into what seemed like a bottomless pit . . . nothing around me but darkness.

In the distance, something went
thump!

54

THE WORLD was sound to me before anything else.

Rustling clothing.

Babbling voices.

A high-pitched
squeal
at the fringes of my hearing.

It was like all those sounds pressed down on me, like a blanket,
smothering
me, refusing to allow me to get back up.

I felt somebody touch me on the shoulder.

Nothing more than one of those pokes kids give animals with sticks to check and see if they’re alive.

I cracked open an eye. Looked about me. All I saw were blurred shapes.

Then came the voices.

A little more steadily.

I made out one above the rest.

That strangely
booming
voice.

The voice that reminded me of
him
.

Of the Cloaked Figure when I’d first seen him.

When
Harold
had inhabited his body.

In all those
offline
versions of the game.

Yes, that was who it was,
Harold
. . . and he was asking me the same question he asked me the last time I found myself lying on my back on the hard ground of the convention centre.

“Zak? Are you okay, Zak?”

I blinked a few more times. That seemed to sharpen up the blurs just a touch. Then I reached about me, felt for the floor, waited for somebody to tell me
not
to get up . . . but nobody did.

I felt hands all around me, firm grips taking hold.

Lifting
me up.

Then I managed to look past the people all crowded around, and I realised where I was. Inside the plastic shell—still—that same little cubicle where we’d been ordered to play out the Final of the Grand Tournament, where we’d all disappeared—one by one—into the Sirocco.

“Zak?”

I looked around, backed away from Harold, and I saw Kate, James and Chung lurking just behind her. I managed to raise a smile though I felt an almost unbearable throbbing pain in the centre of my skull, almost like somebody had tried to split it open with a sledgehammer. I reached up and gave it a rub—felt the sizable welt there.

Then I remembered what had just happened, where I’d just returned from.

And, with that question on my lips, I jolted about, looked around me.

“Alan?” I said, and then, turning back to the others, “Our
parents?
”

They only met me with worried glances, and I knew that they were still missing.

I looked around, to Harold and Steve, standing close by. “What happens now?”

Neither of them seemed to have a clue.

I turned around, looked to the TV screen, saw that it was flickering away but that it had gone black—there was no sign of
Hall of Hallows
there.

“I guess maybe . . .” Harold began, but was soon cut off by a crackling sound which broke through the air and destroyed the tranquillity in the plastic shell which housed us from the spectators—ensured against ‘cheating’ at the Final of the Grand Tournament.

I turned on the spot, looked to the Sirocco, and, like white shadows forming out of thin air, I watched the bodies all appear before us.

It took a couple of moments but, soon enough, they became real before our eyes.

I looked to them, to Kate and James’s dads, and then to Chung’s mother.

As I scanned a little further along, I came to Alan, and his parents.

With about a thousand questions sitting there, plump, on my lips, I watched as the parents all came around, as they blinked away their sleep.

I saw them stretching, yawning their way awake.

Just like I surely had done, they blinked several times, becoming accustomed to the daylight which surrounded us, and then the invigilators helped them up to their feet.

There was no sign of my dad.

Not yet.

I looked around them, sure that I’d missed him, and then I turned to Alan, a look of alarm surely sketched all across my face. “Where is he?” I said, my voice sounding much shriller than I’d intended it.

Alan just gave me one of his apologetic stares as he looked up from helping his parents to their feet.

I knew how he must’ve been feeling right then, what with not having
seen
—
been with
—his parents for years. And yet, something within me, it felt like calling him selfish, calling him out for having
betrayed
me somehow.

“Did you . . .” I started, and then realised that there was another white glow—another of those shadows forming, being sourced from the back of the Sirocco.

I guessed that every time I’d travelled into a game it had looked something similar.

And then, right there, as had happened before, Dad popped up out of thin air.

Roused himself from his sleep and then, thinking to myself, I headed on over to give him a hand up onto his feet.

He rubbed at his eyes, his fingers reaching up beneath the lenses of his glasses, and then he glanced about, almost like a new-born baby trying to make sense of its surroundings. When his gaze fell onto me, he looked at me with a squinty stare. “What just happened?” he said.

55

IT WAS WEIRD.

After everything we’d gone through—all
five
of us . . . not even including our parents—I’d just completely forgotten about the Grand Tournament, that there was even such a thing going on.

We emerged from the plastic shell where we’d been kept covered from the spectators, and it was only then when I registered another time that there was a giant plasma screen which the spectators had been watching—that they’d seen the whole thing play out there.

I only felt sure that it was real—that what had actually
happened
to us had been real—when I looked about me, saw the others on my heels.

James.

Kate.

Chung.

And, of course, Alan.

All five of us walking together, across the floor of the convention centre.

The next thing that happened was the applause.

The spectators burst out into clapping, they rose to their feet.

Some of them even stamped along.

From what I recalled from watching—being a spectator myself—at previous Grand Finals, I couldn’t remember such a reception.

Or maybe it was just more extreme because I was part of it.

That could’ve been it . . .

Next up, following a nudge in the ribs from James, I turned and looked up at the plasma screen, saw that the rankings were posted up there.

Each of our names had a number of points assigned to it. Though I really had no idea of how they’d come to calculate the points, I guessed that it most likely had something to do with how long we’d actually managed to remain in the game.

That meant Chung took fifth place; James: fourth; Kate: third.

It left only me and Alan.

And it wasn’t
my
name posted at the top of the leader board.

It was
Alan’s
.

He’d been the
real
hero, after all.

I was pleased for him.

He
deserved
it.

As we followed along on Harold and Steve’s heels, up the platform which had—apparently—been hastily assembled at the centre of the area, I couldn’t help but snatch a few glances at my companions, see their expressions there, and think about all we’d
already
been through together.

And all this in only a couple of days.

I couldn’t help wondering just what we might get up to with
years
together.

Because, I was sure, our friendship would last longer than Gamers Con.

We all had an internet connection after all.

When the awards were dished out, Alan got the biggest cheer, what with him being the winner and all, and all four of us clapped along for him.

Who would’ve thought it only a few hours before—before we’d
really
known that
he
was the real hero?

Soon after the ceremony, when Alan had the trophy dangling down from his fingertips, at his side, all five of us broke away from our parents, and headed on off into the convention centre, to get ourselves lost in the crowd.

For once in the whole weekend, I noted that Dad wasn’t playing chess on his phone, and I guessed that—even if he didn’t quite realise what had happened to him, how he’d ended up slumped there in the plastic shell along with
us
: the gamers—he realised that there were others for him to talk to, other parents.

People who understood his pain at having a kid into video games.

And I hoped that him talking to the other parents would mean him not getting into trouble with any video-game nastiness either . . . not while I was busy with other stuff.

Like making friends.

The five of us all wandered around for a long while, not really talking at all.

What was there for us to say?

When we reached the end of the convention centre, which was to say the letter Z, all five of us clung to a railing on a raised platform and stared on out through the large windows, out into the enormous car park which circled around the place.

It was then that Alan told us that him dealing with Mr Yorbleson—nothing more than a video-game character—had meant the whole world around him tumbling down.

Simply being destroyed.

That had meant our parents being freed.

And to think that he never would’ve had the chance to take care of Mr Yorbleson if he hadn’t been able to sink down through that dark-purple pool.

There was a long silence after Alan’s potted explanation.

“So,” James said, not really addressing anybody in particular, “Whereabouts do you guys live?”

Another couple of moments later and we’d established that
none
of us lived close to one another. In fact, we were all pretty much settled in separate corners of the country.

Again, a good thing that we had the internet, all things considered.

We chatted on for hours and hours till, one by one, our parents called us back, you know, to go have
dinner
with them,
remind
them that we
were
still alive, stuff like that.

Before we split up, though, we all made an agreement.

That, first, we would all keep in touch.

Find a
good
way to keep in touch.

And, second, we wouldn’t enlighten our parents about this whole transporting-
into
-the-game stuff. It really was too much for them to handle, and there was also that thing about us kids wanting to keep
something
to ourselves.

Just a
little, tiny
secret.

That couldn’t hurt, could it?

Of course, Alan would have by far the most explaining to do—what with his parents no longer having a house, and them having to explain their absence to their relatives, but we agreed to help him out with a decent cover story.

Something which would mean that our parents wouldn’t have to know the secret.

And I headed back to go see Dad, too, since he was calling me up and wondering just where I’d got to.

The funny thing was, right as I was making my way through a stream of people near the entrance of the convention centre, the second-place cup casually hanging down by my side, I heard a pair of twins blabbing about the Final—which they’d apparently been watching.

I picked up on their conversation about halfway through.

“. . . Oh, I dunno, I thought it was pretty good, actually, pretty
realistic
.”

“Nah,” the other one said, “Rubbish, if you ask me. First of all, those avatars, looked absolutely
nothing
like the gamers, did they? The graphics were all blurred about the edges. Like watching a bunch of pixels wandering about a maze, if you ask me. We were better out of it. Getting knocked out early on.”

As the two of them wandered away, I couldn’t help smiling to myself.

Thinking that, really, they’d hit the nail on the head.

‘A bunch of pixels wandering about a maze.’

Wasn’t that a pretty good description for what a video game is?

ONE MONTH LATER

I LOBBED MY SCHOOLBAG on the floor, listened to all the books inside all sort of
thwack
together. Then I yanked my school jumper off over my head, dropped it in the same—growing—pile as my schoolbag, and then I listened hard.

Listened to check if Mum was home.

If she was still about the house.

When I’d called out her name when I’d come in through the front door, she hadn’t responded to me.

But I couldn’t be too careful.

She’d said she’d be out till seven o’clock, and that she’d left me some spaghetti bolognaise to stick in the microwave for dinner.

But I wasn’t hungry.

Not quite yet.

I checked my watch, saw that it had just gone four thirty.

I had a good amount of time to kill.

A good
long
while really.

Now that Dad wasn’t living with us anymore, Mum was the only one I’d have to watch for coming in and noticing that I was actually
in
the video games I was playing.

I fired up my Sirocco.

Watched it connect to the internet.

Sending information back and forth.

As I logged on, I saw that, already, Chung, James and Kate were online.