Scavenger Read online

  A haze filled the cavern. Despite it, Balenger saw that the tableaus had been blown apart. A chaos of rags and wood chunks littered the floor. Mummies had turned into scattered bones. He and Amanda ran over them, again holding their breath, as the flashlight revealed an opening beyond the rubble. Balenger expected to see a sophisticated device heating the arsenic, but it was only a charcoal grill that was now overturned, remnants of glowing coals scattered across the floor. A yellow chunk of what Balenger assumed was arsenic lay next to them. He kicked it out of the way.

  Reeling from the garlic smell, he found a door that the rubble had hidden. The explosion had blown it open, exposing a tunnel. A light glowed at its end. Taking Amanda’s arm, he lurched along it, desperate to get away from the nauseating, lethal smell.

  They reached a door, above which a light bulb shone. But the door wasn’t wooden and gray with age. It was shiny metal.

  Balenger reached for the knob, only to find that now it was Amanda who grabbed his hand.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  She pulled a rubber glove from her jumpsuit, explaining, “Where I woke up yesterday, the doors were electrified.”

  She put on the glove and turned the knob, which moved freely. After pushing the door open, she dodged to the side so that Balenger could aim the rifle.

  What they saw made them gape.

  4

  A huge, glowing area extended before them, giving off an electrical hum. The roof was vaulted stone while to the left, numerous levels of metal shelves supported long rows of computer monitors. Every screen was illuminated. They showed the valley, the drained reservoir, the mine entrance, the tunnel, the demolished Sepulcher, and the glowing area in which Balenger and Amanda stood. As Balenger walked along the monitors, he saw one that displayed the viewpoint of the camera on his headset. Another monitor displayed the viewpoint from Amanda’s headset. He saw an image of Balenger standing in profile twenty feet from her while the image he looked at on the monitor showed him in profile. The multiple levels of perception made him dizzy.

  But what shocked him more than the expanse of the monitors and the ambitious scope of the surveillance was that none of the images on any of the countless screens had a conventional appearance. The valley, the reservoir, the mine entrance, the tunnel, the Sepulcher, the glowing control room, Balenger and Amanda—nothing was depicted in a so-called realistic way. Everything resembled a brightly colored cartoon.

  “My God, we look like we’re in a video game,” Amanda said.

  “Welcome to Scavenger.” The voice’s deep resonance filled their earphones.

  Balenger turned to the right. There, numerous shelves supported a complex array of computer equipment that stretched for what might have been fifty yards. Above them, a glass wall provided a view of the monitors.

  “You survived the final test,” the Game Master said. “You proved yourself worthy.”

  “For what, you lying piece of shit?” Balenger shouted. Bathed in the glow of the cartoon colors, he had a partial view of the area behind the glass wall above him. A raised chair was near the glass. Its arms were equipped with numerous buttons and levers. Its occupant was short and slight with wispy, yellow hair and a tiny, wrinkled face that made Balenger think of a boy who had suddenly aged. Goggles reinforced the impression that he was a child.

  “Frank!” Amanda yelled. “This monitor! Look how he sees us!”

  Balenger turned toward where she pointed. On a screen, he saw the image that the Game Master received through his goggles. It was from a high angle, from the glassed-in observation area. It showed Balenger and Amanda staring toward the monitor, on which was an image of them staring toward the monitor. Again, Balenger’s mind reeled. His lightheadedness was intensified because on this monitor, too, he and Amanda were cartoons. It wasn’t just the surveillance cameras that depicted everything as a graphic in a video game. The goggles the Game Master wore turned everything he saw into a scene from a video game. Worse, Amanda’s swollen purple cheek and Balenger’s broken nose looked inconsequential in the cartoon. The blood on his clawed chest and duct-taped knee appeared merely colorful.

  “We’re not cartoons!” Balenger screamed toward the boy-man in the control chair behind the glass wall.

  He raised the Mini-14 and centered the holographic red dot on the tiny wrinkled face that wore goggles. When he fired, feeling the shock of the noise in the cavern, the bullet whacked against the glass but sent only a few specks flying. Balenger knew that most bullet-resistant glass could be defeated by placing five bullets in a five-inch circle. Again and again, he pulled the trigger, shell cases arcing, bullets fragmenting against the glass, but except for minor starring, the shots had no effect.

  Furious, he spun toward the monitors that showed cartoon graphics of him and Amanda. He shot those monitors, destroying the video-game images that depicted him shooting the monitors. Sparks flew, chunks of plastic erupting.

  His rifle stopped firing. “Amanda, there’s another magazine in the outside flap of my knapsack!” Amanda handed it to him. He shoved it into place, released the bolt that slid a round into the firing chamber, and blew five more screens into pieces.

  Monitors can be easily replaced, Balenger thought. He swung toward the shelves of computer equipment to inflict greater damage. As bullet after bullet blasted them apart, sparks turned into smoke and flames. In a cascading reaction, numerous monitors stopped glowing.

  He stalked toward metal stairs that led up to the observation room.

  “Stop!” a voice pleaded.

  But it didn’t belong to the Game Master. The voice was a woman’s. Balenger stopped in surprise. Karen Bailey.

  She appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Cartoon colors still radiated from some monitors. They contrasted with her drab clothes, similar to those Balenger had seen at the time-capsule lecture. Her face looked plainer, her hair pulled back more severely.

  “You won! Now get out of here! Leave!” she yelled.

  “After everything you did to us?” Amanda shouted back. “You expect us just to walk away?”

  “I’m begging you, take your chance! Go! Through there!” Karen pointed urgently toward a metal door behind her. “It’ll lead you out!”

  “Another trap!”

  “No! You’ll find an SUV!” Karen hurled car keys toward the door. They clattered on the stone floor.

  “The vehicle’s rigged with a bomb, is that it?” Balenger demanded.

  “I’ll prove there isn’t! I’ll get in first! I’ll start it for you!”

  “When we finish, we might let you do that!” Amanda yelled. “At the moment, we’ve got business to take care of!”

  “Leave now! Let him be!”

  “Let him be? Hell, I’m going to kill him!” Balenger stepped forward.

  “No!” Karen blocked the stairs. “This is wrong! You weren’t supposed to win!”

  “We got that impression. Sorry to ruin your fun.”

  “I never dreamed he’d allow anybody in here.”

  “He didn’t allow anything!” Amanda shouted. “We got here on our own!”

  The Game Master’s booming voice filled the cavern. “That’s true. Their survival skills are better than I expected. They honestly surprised me. At the start, I told Amanda that’s all it took for salvation—to surprise me.”

  “You want a surprise?” Balenger asked. “Wait till I get up there.”

  “If you kill him, he’ll win!” Karen sounded desperate.

  “What?”

  “He’ll win. How can it satisfy you to give him what he wants? He tricked you the same as he tricked me.”

  “Tricked you?”

  “If I’d known the truth about the game, I’d never have helped him! I only discovered its real purpose a while ago!”

  “The truth about the game? That he’s God and we exist only in his mind? That’s not the truth! This is the truth!” Balenger fired three rounds. They blasted through several consoles, throwing up sparks and smoke.
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  He stormed in her direction.

  “Stop!” Karen shouted, blocking the stairs.

  “It’s okay if he kills people, but it’s not okay if he gets punished?”

  “Not this way! He’s insane! He belongs in a hospital!”

  “Then why didn’t you put him there earlier? You could have stopped this, but instead you helped! People died! I don’t care what your stepfather did to the two of you! I don’t care about the cubbyhole he sealed you in for three days!”

  “You know about that?” Karen asked in shock.

  “And how your mother abandoned you to a drunken pervert. That doesn’t give you the right to—”

  “His mother didn’t abandon him.”

  “What?”

  “I’m his mother. I never abandoned him! I won’t do it now!” Karen shouted.

  The depth of her delusion almost made Balenger pity her. But what he and Amanda had endured shut out every emotion except rage.

  “The cubbyhole was so small that we couldn’t stretch out,” Karen said. “In the dark, we heard him hammering nails, sealing the hatch. We shoved at the hatch, but it wouldn’t move. We pounded our fists against it, but that didn’t work, either. There wasn’t enough room for us to kick. The only air came from holes around the hatch’s edge. We begged him to let us out, but he wouldn’t do it. Three days without water or food. We sat in our shit and piss. The smell made me vomit. I was sure we were going to die, but I couldn’t allow Jonathan to know how afraid I was. He started hyperventilating, and I warned him there was only enough air coming in for us to breathe slowly and calmly. I stroked his head. I told him how much I loved him. I put his hand on my chest so he could feel how slowly I breathed. He whispered stories to me in the dark—about an imaginary world called Peregrine, where birds could think and talk and perform magic. We put ourselves in the minds of falcons and flew toward the clouds. We swooped and soared and glided over waterfalls. The cubbyhole disappeared. Later, I realized how delirious I must have been. The first game Jonathan created was about that world.”

  Karen’s eyes changed focus, as if she came back from another place. “I took care of him from when he was born. The woman who abandoned him wasn’t his mother. I’m the only mother he ever knew, the only person he ever loved. He’s the only person I ever loved.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  Karen reached for something behind her. “I won’t let you hurt him. I won’t let you hurt my son.”

  “He’s your brother.”

  “No!” Karen screamed.

  “Frank!” Amanda warned behind him.

  Karen raised a weapon. Despite the failing light, Balenger recognized the shape of an assault rifle. He and Amanda dove to the side as bullets tore stones from the wall next to the door they’d come through. Karen wasn’t able to control the weapon. Its barrel tugged upward, shooting above the door. Balenger stood, lined up the dot on his rifle’s sight, and put two bullets into her head. She collapsed, the rifle clattering.

  Balenger hurried along the smoking consoles. He reached the stairs, stepped over Karen’s body, and charged up. A metal door was partially open, light glowing behind it. He kicked the door all the way open and faced the observation room, where the tiny Game Master sat in his spaceship-like chair, surrounded by controls. His goggles hid the expression in his eyes, but his wrinkled, child-shaped face made him look pathetic.

  “Well, what do you know? It’s the damned Wizard of Oz,” Balenger said. “The guy behind the curtain.”

  “Does that mean you identify with Dorothy?” After the damage Balenger inflicted on the computer array downstairs, the Game Master’s voice-strengthening devices no longer functioned. He didn’t sound like a news announcer anymore. His voice was now a puny squeak. “Perhaps that indicates sexual confusion. In games set on virtual worlds, half the male players choose roles that are female.”

  Balenger raised the Mini-14.

  “Dorothy’s a disappointment,” the frail figure said. “After the countless colorful wonders she finds in Oz, she can’t wait to go back to her drab home in Kansas. She rejects the splendors of alternate reality. What a fool.”

  Thinking of the blood that burst from Ortega’s mouth after the wheel barrow crushed him, Balenger aimed. “Is that where you want me to send you—Oz? Or how about Sirius, where the Solar Temple bunch thought it was going? Or maybe you want to reach a flying saucer on the other side of a comet?”

  “Any place is better than this. ‘The most painful state of being is remembering the future,’” the squeaky voice said.

  Balenger paraphrased the rest of the quotation. “Especially your future, which you’re never going to have. Who’s the guy who said Plato was wrong about everything being an illusion?”

  “Aristotle.”

  “Well, say hello to Aristotle.” Balenger put his finger on the rifle’s trigger.

  “It won’t mean anything unless you know what you won.”

  Thinking of how grievously Amanda had suffered and how near he’d come to losing her, Balenger yelled, “We won our lives!”

  “Not merely that,” the Game Master told him. “After all the obstacles you overcame, you proved yourself worthy.”

  “For what?”

  “The right to kill God.”

  “Kill God? What are you talking about?”

  “Kill me.”

  Balenger was stunned by the enormity of the concept.

  “This is the only way it can happen,” the Game Master explained. “With massive effort, a character needs to take control of the game when, in theory, only the creator has the power to control it. The character becomes so heroic, he defeats God.”

  “You want me to kill you?” Balenger asked in disgust. “Is that what your sister meant when she said she finally understood the real purpose of the game?”

  “I need someone worthy,” the frail figure repeated. “The Doomsday Vault.”

  “What about it?”

  “If conventional reality exists, the threats that make the Doomsday Vault necessary show how badly the universe was conceived. Nuclear annihilation. Global warming. All the other possible nightmares. Better that the creator never invented anything. Even God despairs.”

  “A suicide game,” Balenger said, appalled.

  “Now I’ll swoop and soar through infinity.”

  Balenger remembered that Karen Bailey had used similar words. “Like a falcon?”

  The boy-man nodded. “I heard Karen tell you about the cubbyhole.” He shuddered. “Is she dead?”

  “Yes.”

  The Game Master was silent for a moment. When he resumed speaking, his puny voice shook. “It was inevitable. When she learned how the game was designed to end, she refused to allow it. You needed to stop her. But she still exists in my mind. Now she, too, can soar and swoop through infinity.” Tears trickled from beneath the Game Master’s goggles. “She stayed with me during my entire six months in the hospital.”

  Balenger remembered Professor Graham telling him about Jonathan Creed’s breakdown.

  “I was so determined to take games to their ultimate perfection, I concentrated so hard that I went longer and longer without sleep, four days, five days, six days, and on the seventh day, my mind took me somewhere else.” He cringed. “For half a year, I was catatonic. I didn’t know it, but Karen sat next to me all that time, whispering my name, trying to bring me back. I never told her where I went.”

  “Professor Graham said you called it the Bad Place.”

  The puny figure nodded. “It was unspeakable. For those six months, my mind was trapped in the cubbyhole.”

  Balenger realized that he was holding his breath. The nightmare implied in the reference to the cubbyhole struck him dumb.

  “I sat scrunched in the dark, terrified, no food or water, the stench of my shit suffocating me. But this time, I was alone. I didn’t have Karen to stroke my head and tell me she loved me. I tried to convince myself that the cubbyhole wasn’t real. But how could I k
now the difference? My cramped body and the darkness and the hunger and thirst felt real. My fear was real. The shit was real. I told myself that I could concentrate on anything I wanted, and if I did it hard enough, that would become real. So I concentrated on Karen. I imagined her whispering my name. Soon, far away in the darkness, I heard her faint voice pleading ‘Jonathan.’ I yelled. Her voice got stronger, calling my name, and my mind went to her. I woke up in the hospital with her holding me.” More tears trickled under his goggles. “But, of course, that wasn’t real, either. I never left that cubbyhole. All this is another game in my mind. I never left that cubbyhole the first time. I’m still a boy sealed in that cubbyhole, trapped in my mind in that cubbyhole. Pull the trigger.”

  The anguish in what Balenger had just heard overwhelmed him.

  “Think of how much Amanda suffered because of me,” the Game Master said. “Punish me. Punish God. ‘I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.’ Where’s that quotation from, Amanda?”

  “Moby Dick,” she answered. “Ahab chases the white whale around the world. But Ahab thinks everything’s an illusion created by God. Basically, Ahab’s chasing God himself.”

  “You don’t disappoint me. Go ahead,” the frail figure told Balenger. “You have my permission. Destroy your creator. Strike the sun.”

  Balenger couldn’t move.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  Balenger became conscious of his paralyzed finger on the trigger.

  “‘Myself am hell.’ Where’s that from, Amanda?” the Game Master asked, his features impossible to read because of his goggles.

  “Paradise Lost. Lucifer describes what it feels like to be banished from God.”

  “Suppose God’s in his own hell. Do it!” he ordered Balenger.

  “And reward you?”

  “Kill me!”

  “You identified with me in the game. You told me I’m your substitute. Your avatar. I’m you.”

  “Tall and strong. God in bodily form.”

  “If I shoot you, it’ll be like you’re shooting yourself. I won’t do it.”

  The Game Master tried to sit straighter, to seem larger. “You defy me?”