Chris came over and asked, “Hey, Leonardo is it? Mind if I sit with you?”
“Oh, hi Chris! Sure, take a seat. I go by Leo. I was just working on calibrating this actuator for our robot. You probably noticed that the two weren’t balanced on the saw blade arm. It was making it tip a little. I thought I could just adjust it a little and bring it back in line.”
Chris knitted his brows and nodded as he watched the young man with curly black hair twisting a multitool on a little screw inside the complicated box. Chris was more of a big picture guy with the robots, he did not get into this level of detail. Still, he could appreciate somebody who took the time and effort, especially as a freshman.
Maybe if he let himself get distracted by everyday things, the end of the day and the meeting would get there all the sooner. Then, he would say what he had to say and get that over with. Somehow, it still felt like a betrayal of Jeremy. Maybe he should try to talk to him one more time before the meeting.
Leo looked over at Chris’s lunch tray and smiled. The younger boy had a bit that he had memorized. It had killed in middle school. Maybe it would help impress this generous junior who was deigning to sit with him today. “Pizza rectangle? Really? Surely you know that no natural pizza exists in the form of a rectangle! You are eating artificial pizza.”
Chris broke away from his dark, difficult thoughts and decided to play along. “Yeah, grown in a lab so they can fit more of it in the oven, no wasted space like between the natural circular pizzas.”
Leo recalibrated his approach. He had not expected a reply that went that direction. He would have to go down an auxiliary branch of the conversation. “Nah, I thought it was rectangular because the made it out of recycled cardboard boxes. Explains the shape and the taste!”
That managed to get a laugh out of both of them.
As their laughter was subsiding, Chris spotted Olivia, the senior he had a crush on, over Leo’s shoulder. She wore her long brown hair tied back in a long, sky blue ribbon everyday. Unlike her schoolmates, she was always in long skirts or even dresses. He had thought about teasing her about possibly being Amish, but he really liked the way she dressed and what he thought it said about her.
Leo noticed Chris staring and looked over his shoulder. “Oh, that’s the leader of the other robot team that you’ve got a crush on.”
“Does everybody know this?”
Leo shrugged. “I have four older sisters. They are all really smart about interpersonal relationships. They’ve explained to me how to spot that sort of thing. Though, I do think you’re rather obvious about it.”
“Kinda wish she’d get the hint actually,” Chris muttered under his breath. Aloud, he tried to change the subject. “Where’d your name Leonardo came from? It isn’t exactly common, especially in combination with Smith. Parents big Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans? Do they like DiCaprio?”
“Actually, both my parents liked Leonardo DiVinci. It’s a family name on my mom’s side and my dad is an engineer.”
Chris nodded and wished that topic had lasted longer. Talking to someone you did not know well was difficult and tiring. Maybe that was why Jeremy had preferred to just be alone. Still, that did not begin to explain the insanity that Jeremy had implied he was planning for Valentine’s Day. Chris’s face had sunk into a look of worry and concern.
Leo looked over at him. “Oh, did you notice that Olivia is sitting with your little sister over there?”
“What? No. What’s she doing talking to Abby?” Chris snapped out of his worries again.
“I just assumed that was why you were looking worried. I’m not sure, but one thing I know from my sisters, you don’t want someone you’re interested in talking to your sister. She’s gonna let some really embarrassing story ‘slip’ somewhere along the way and totally kill your chances. You ought to go over there and break that powwow up.” Leo flipped the actuator he was working on over and started working on something on the other side with his multitool.
Chris raised one eyebrow and looked over at the bold freshman who was giving him romantic advice.
“I’m just trying to help my robotics team leader. I know this stuff from my sisters. That’s all. It’s not like I’ve ever had a girlfriend.” Leo raised his hands, multitool still in one, as if to demonstrate his innocence of acquiring the knowledge through so shameful a channel as direct experience. “I don’t mess with girls cause they’re too messy.”
Uncertainty made Chris waver. “I’d go over, but I just haven’t managed to talk to Olivia that much. Just a couple times at youth group at church and in a couple of club meetings. I mean, she’s always being friends with everyone, but she doesn’t come to youth group that often and then always tries to turn the conversation to Bible stuff. Kind of awkward, but I actually appreciate it a little bit. I mean, why are we at a church for anyway? Just to talk about music and sports? I just wish it wasn’t so awkward.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” replied Leo. “That touchy feely stuff is all my youth group talks about.”
“Well, if you wanted, you could come to...”
Crackling to life, the PA system began blaring out the first chords of Pearl Jam’s song “Jeremy.” Chris’s eyes went wide as his stomach fell down into a bottomless pit. Everyone else in the cafeteria looked around in confusion. He knew exactly what was happening.
“It isn’t Valentine’s Day yet!”
Multiple tables around Chris turned to look at the crazy kid shouting.
The doors at the end of the cafeteria slammed open. Jeremy in his black trench coat from the park stalked into the room. Two other kids dressed to match followed him, trying to match his attitude.
Jeremy’s partners were a towering overweight boy with greasy long hair and a heavy set girl with short blue hair. The girl had glasses and a nose ring through her septum. The overweight boy smiled cruelly. The girl with the nose ring like a bull had a look of smug superiority with a tinge of pity. Jeremy had a sneer on his face.
Surprisingly level-headed, Leo asked Chris, “What’s going on? Is this what I think it is? What do you mean it isn’t Valentine’s Day?”
"Abby, get out of here!" Chris shouted to his sister where she was sitting with Olivia. Turning to Leo, he almost barked, “Come on, we’ve got to stop Jeremy!”
Christopher McKnight got up from the lunch table and started to dodge and weave through frightened kids. Most were still sitting, but more and more were realizing what was about to happen. Chris fought against the increasing torrent of panicked people to get to Jeremy.
Shocked, he caught sight of another head moving toward the attackers. It had light blue ribbon in its brown hair. Olivia was trying to force her way through the other students to get to the trench coat attackers just like Chris. As she struggled, she was praying loud enough that Chris could hear, “Jesus help us, please don’t let this happen to these people, Lord...”
Quickly assessing the situation, Leo got up on his long row of lunch tables. He shouted as he ran down the middle of the long row of tables toward the three attackers. "God, help me fix this mess..."
Leo's path was much easier than trying to make it through the crowds of screaming, panicking kids. Chris and Olivia were struggling to move, and Leo was catching up to them. It was a sane engineer’s solution to an insane situation.
Chris was pushing his way past the last few kids between himself and Jeremy. Even though he did not want to, even though he thought it might make no difference at all, he still prayed to God. “Lord, if you’re listening and you care, please...”
“Sorry, Chris.” Jeremy shouted over the sound of Eddie Vetter crooning ‘OOOoooOOOooo”. “We had a change of schedule. Why don’t you just get out of the way so I can do what has to be done?”
“You don’t have to do this, Jeremy. You can stop now, and it will be so much better for you, for all of you...”
Jeremy pulled a gun out from under his trench coat. “Dad’s girlfriend got it for me. At least she’s good for s
omething besides homewrecking.” He raised the gun and aimed it at Chris.
“Jeremy, you don’t have to...”
There was a flash. Chris closed his eyes tight. He was sure Jeremy had shot him. When he opened them, he was certain of it.
The first thing he saw was an angel.
It was beautiful and terrible, glorious and horrifying.
He closed his eyes again.
How had he known it was an angel? Wings, a white robe, and a bright light. Yet, some unseen, greater force radiated its identity into him.
Things did not make sense. He was still standing. How could he have been shot and killed and still be standing? He opened his eyes and looked around at his feet for his body. No body. He was still standing on the floor, not floating up toward the ceiling either. As a last check to make certain, he felt up and down his body. He did not find any holes or blood. His mind reeled.
Still, he was not dead. He needed to look at the angel. Chris tried to make himself look at the angel. He looked everywhere but at the angel. The... glory? ...of the being was just too great for him to face.
Everyone else in the school cafeteria seemed frozen in place. He could see his little sister in a group of students a few dozen feet away. Abby looked like she had started running later than most. Chris did not want to think about what that meant for her fate. She and Jack had been twins. Their parents would be beyond devastated.
Leo and Olivia were only a few feet away from Chris. The freshman boy was standing on the end of a table staring at the angel. He still had his now useless multitool in his hand. Olivia was pointing at the angel with a look of child-like wonder on her soft, feminine features. Chris thought she looked amazingly beautiful like that.
Despite the bright light and every fiber of his body wanting to resist, when the angel began to speak, Chris could not stop from looking. Now, his eyes were drawn to its perfectly sculpted face. Its voice was achingly melodious. “You have called upon the name of the Lord, and He is powerful to save.”
“What?” It was Olivia who had managed to speak.
The angel repeated what it had said, “You have called upon the name of the Lord, and He is powerful to save.”
Chris could not believe his ears. Frustration and anger at this declaration flooded his mind. Was God suddenly answering his prayers this time? All those prayers when his brother Jack had been sick. God had not answered those. Was that because Jack’s was the only life in the balance then? Was it because Chris had not been important enough back then to get an answer? Now, there were hundreds of kids in the cafeteria. Was that why? Was it all just a numbers game to the Big Man Upstairs?
Chris began in an angry whisper, “Why is He going to...”
He caught himself and pushed his raging emotions aside. He still had dreams about playing with his little brother, giving him piggy back rides, climbing trees. But those were all just imaginary fantasies. Here was an angel. He needed to pull himself together and deal with the way things were.
Finally choking back all of the chaos rising from his heart into his throat, Chris managed to ask, “Is He going to stop Jeremy and those other kids from shooting up the school?”
The angel looked over his statuesque shoulder toward where the others were. “If your challenge is accepted by the others, it will depend upon the three of you. That challenge is being issued to those three behind me by one of the Adversary’s emissaries.”
Chris blurted out, “What challenge?”
“When they entered here, did you not run toward them instead of away? Did you not pray to the Lord for help while doing so? You of these three the most, Christopher McKnight, for you knew.”
Olivia and Leo looked over at Chris in confusion and curiosity. What did the angel mean by that?
Chris was rattled again. Why would God let this happen? He was going to tell the dean after school. God would not intervene for his little brother, but all these people in the cafeteria, most of whom did not even go to church, these were worth saving? His mind was turning summersaults and bouncing around off the inside of his skull at a mile a minute.
It was Olivia who replied meekly to the angel. “Well, I did pray, and I would have loved to challenge them. I didn’t know what else to do. But, how am I going to stop them?”
The angel seemed disinclined to answer.
It was Leo’s turn to respond to the situation. His voice was cool and clear. “I couldn’t sit back and let them kill everybody. They needed to be stopped. I was going to try.”
Chris finally admitted quietly, “Yes, I prayed. I didn’t think it would do any good, but I did it anyway.”
Before the angel could address them again, a gravelly voice came from behind its white wings.
“They have accepted. It is to be the Game, Haliel! The brand new one!” The gravelly voice let out a hideous cackle.
Chris felt a wave of trepidation sweep up from his stomach. He swallowed it down and asked, “What kind of game is that thing talking about?”
Chris had seen Bergman’s The Seventh Sign. His dad was a film buff. The image of playing chess against Death was not appealing. Plus, Jeremy had been using strange new moves that last game in the park. Chris had no desire to stake his little sister’s life among hundreds of others on a chess match with an unpredictable opponent.
The angel tried to explain. “The Game is a mixture of others. It is to be played in a small world created for that sole purpose called The Divided Lands. You could call the game and the world by the same name if you so choose. I have been instructed to compare it to a combination of RPG and Civilization. I assume this is because you advance as individual heroes and also build up armies with which to do battle.”
Olivia smiled. “Ooo, I loved all the Civ games. Sid Meier is a boss! You know he plays organ at his church? He makes awesome games. Well, except Alpha Centauri, ugh.”
Leo looked at Olivia. “What was wrong with Alpha Centauri?”
“The mind worms gave me the creeps. No way those were Sid’s idea. Had to be some assistant or something.”
Leo actually laughed despite the situation. “What’s wrong with living spaghetti that could infiltrate your brain?”
Flabbergasted, Chris stared at the two other teenagers. How Olivia could be smiling in this situation. Was she really that optimistic? Were they going to risk the lives of a cafeteria full of people, including his little sister, on a video game? What kind of demented hallucination was he having?
Tension boiling over into anger, Chris growled, “Would you two cut it out! This is serious! That's my little sister over there..."
Seriousness settled onto Olivia's normally gentle face. She stared at Chris with intense, unyielding, dark brown eyes. "And this is us, all three closer to the guns than anybody else. I count most of the people in here as my friends, including your sister Abigail, and even one of those three in the horrid looking trench coats."
Desperate to make sense of what was happening, Chris raised more of a plea than a questions. "Are we really going to play a video game to save people?”
“As I tried to explain, it is not a video game as they are called,” said the angel. “It is a full world, though smaller than this one, with rules that govern what one can and cannot do. The rules system is similar to the two types of games I mentioned. Your victory condition is simply the elimination of all the players on the opposing side by conquest or capitulation. Conquest requires both capturing or killing the player and taking possession of their capital banner."
“Wait, killing the players?” asked Leo, all humor leaving his face.
“Unlike this world, death for the players is not permanent there. You are penalized and ‘respawned’ if that is the correct term.”
“OK, well whatever this game is like, we’ve got a better chance there where we get to respawn than here. I think we’re about to be shot here.” Leo looked at the other two to see if they agreed.
“We are at a huge disadvantage here on the wrong ends of the guns,
” admitted Olivia. “At least this game might give us a better chance than we could have otherwise. Maybe we can even save the people here, including your sister, Chris.”
Fighting off sudden rush of disconnected pleasure at hearing Olivia say his name like that, Chris gritted his teeth. He took a deep breath and managed to say, “It still seems awfully irreverent of God to have us play games for people’s lives.”
The angel Haliel looked a Chris sternly. “God cannot be irreverent. And I agree with what Olivia Jordan has said. You will have a better chance helping these people this way. Prepare yourselves, we must go. You will each be presented with choices, but there are limited options.” He raised his wings wide and held out his hands.
“Christopher McKnight, Olivia Jordan, and Leonardo Smith, your challenge has been accepted by Jeremy Rogers, Emma Wilson, and Kaiyden Karlston. You will go to the Divided Lands to play the Game. Those who survive will be returned to exactly this place and this moment in time.”
“Wait...” protested Chris. “What do you mean survive?”
The only answer was a brilliant flash of light.
There were now three swirling vortexes of light with doors in the middle of them, one in front of each of them. Next to each door stood a copy of the angel, Haliel. It almost looked like a funhouse to Chris if the angel copies had not been so overwhelmingly beautiful.
“Why are there three of you?”
“Time does not work the way you think it does,” answered the angel next to Chris’s door. The other angels appeared to each be doing something slightly different. Chris could not hear their conversations with Olivia and Leo.
“No, I mean why are there three separate yous and three separate doors?”
The door in front of Olivia turned a pretty light blue like her hair ribbon.
Chris’s version of Haliel answered, “You are each making certain decisions about how you will start the Game. These passageways will take each of you to the appropriate locations in the Divided Lands based upon those decisions.”
“We’re not all going to the same place? How am I supposed to protect that little freshman and that young lady you’re sending with me?”
Openings Page 2