Trapped in a Video Game (Book 4)

by Dustin Brady

  Trapped in a Video Game: Return to Doom Island copyright © 2018 Dustin Brady.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

  Andrews McMeel Publishing

  a division of Andrews McMeel Universal

  1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

  www.andrewsmcmeel.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4494-9875-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932210

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Jesse Brady for the cover and

  interior illustrations. You can check out more of

  Jesse’s sweet artwork at jessebradyart.com.

  Other Books

  by Dustin Brady

  Trapped in a Video Game: Robots Revolt

  Trapped in a Video Game: The Invisible Invasion

  Trapped in a Video Game

  Superhero for a Day: The Magic Magic Eight Ball

  Who Stole Mr. T?: Leila and Nugget Mystery #1

  The Case with No Clues: Leila and Nugget Mystery #2

  Bark at the Park: Leila and Nugget Mystery #3

  Contents

  Preface

  1.The Zipper

  2.Hide and Sneak

  3.Raul Ludbar

  4.Dead Drop

  5.Reactovision

  6.Blink and You’ll Miss It

  7.Doom Island

  8.BUM-BUM

  9.They’re Here

  10.Pee Butter Poopies

  11.Lions’ Den

  12.Marshy Mallow’s

  13.The Safe

  14.Spiky Dungeon

  15.Glitchquake

  16.Mr. Nice Guy

  17.No More Mr. Nice Guy

  18.Planet Bottomless Pit

  19.The White House

  20.Dodo Doody

  21.Sparky the Squirrel Saves the Day

  22.Escape

  23.Code Black

  About the Author

  More to Explore

  PREFACE

  In Case You Missed It

  The only series anyone should ever start with the fourth entry is Star Wars. In fact, Star Wars: Episode IV is so good that you don’t even need to go back to Episodes I through III unless you really want to find out why everyone hates Jar Jar Binks so much. Trapped in a Video Game is not Star Wars. If you start Trapped in a Video Game with Book 4, you will be angry and confused and leave hurtful Amazon reviews. If it’s been a while since you’ve read the first three books, you can catch up by reading the following words scrolling through space:

  A short time ago in this very galaxy, 12-year-old Jesse Rigsby got sucked into a video game. This was bad news for Jesse because he hated video games. Inside the video game, Jesse met up with his friend, Eric Conrad, and battled giant praying mantises, house-sized sand monsters, and a super-powered alien known as the Hindenburg. Eric and Jesse finally escaped, but only because another kid from their class, Mark Whitman, chose to take their place.

  In Trapped in a Video Game: The Invisible Invasion, Jesse and Eric mounted a rescue mission by sneaking into the video game company Bionosoft through Go Wild, a mobile game kind of like Pokémon Go. After surviving attacks by a Bigfoot, a velociraptor, and Bionosoft president Jevvry Delfino, Jesse, Eric, and former Bionosoft employee Mr. Gregory pulled Mark out of his computer prison. Unfortunately, the rescue broke Bionosoft’s system, which released everything else from their computers into the real world.

  In Trapped in a Video Game: Robots Revolt, robots from one of Bionosoft’s games started causing major damage in the real world after escaping their computers. In addition to transforming sewers, factories, and amusement parks around town into deadly levels from their game, they also kidnapped Eric. Jesse teamed up with Mark, a friendly drone named Roger, and an Australian girl named Sam to save Eric before the robots could blast him into outer space. After rescuing Eric, Mr. Gregory caught up to Jesse and asked if he’d said anything to anyone about men in suits working for “The Agency.” That was strange, but not as strange as the information that Jesse got later from Mr. Gregory’s son, Charlie. That wasn’t Mr. Gregory, Charlie claimed. That was a robot look-alike. The real Mr. Gregory was missing.

  chapter 1

  The Zipper

  “You want to see me throw up, don’t you?”

  “What? No! Come on, this is a fun ride!” I said as I pushed my friend, Eric, closer to the Zipper.

  “It’s definitely not fun, and it’s barely a ride!” Eric said as he fought me. “It’s a throw-up machine! A machine literally invented to make people throw up!”

  Eric was right. The Zipper, if you’re not familiar, is a carnival ride that tries to answer the question, “How many times will the human body handle being flipped upside down in a single minute?” Its two-person spinning coffins are rickety and unpredictable and full of hard metal to slam your face into on your flipping journey. It is not a fun ride.

  I smiled as I handed two tickets to the disinterested teenager in charge of the whirling death machine.

  “Jesse! Are you listening to me?! Roger, talk some sense into him!”

  Beep beep bwyooooooop.

  Roger is a drone from the video game Super Bot World 3. After he got sucked into the real world through a computer glitch, he helped me rescue my friend Eric from the clutches of an enormous robot called Goliatron. If this is the first you’re hearing of Roger, that sentence was probably the most confusing thing you’ve ever read, but I promise that it made sense at the time. Anyway, Roger got smashed to bits during the rescue, but our friend’s dad, Mr. Gregory, rebuilt him from spare parts. After that, Roger became our constant companion—always buzzing back and forth between my house and Eric’s, never letting either of us out of his sight for long. We became famous around the neighborhood for having a drone as a pet, and kids would travel from streets away to watch us do tricks with him. Roger was doing one of those tricks now: wobbling back and forth while making a scary sound.

  “See, Roger thinks it’s a bad idea, too,” Eric said, trying to turn around.

  “Roger, you hang out here. We’ll be right back!” I grabbed the back of Eric’s shirt and dragged him onto the Zipper. Eric tried to go limp, but it was too late. I’d wrangled him onto the ride.

  “Good luck,” the carnival worker said as he clicked our coffin door closed. Not “enjoy the ride,” “have fun,” or even “be safe.” Good luck. I took a deep breath. We were going to need it.

  The teenager returned to the control station and pushed the button to advance us upward and load the next coffin. Once we were in the air, I turned to Eric. “The reason I brought you on this ride is that I have something important to tell you, and I needed to do it in private.”

  “And you couldn’t have done it in my room or your room or literally anywhere else besides the puke machine?”

  “Listen, do you remember anything being off about Mr. Gregory after the whole robot thing?”

  Eric wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know, that was like two months ago. He’s kind of a weird guy anyway, right? Isn’t he always off?”

  “Remember the first thing he asked us after we got rescued? He didn’t ask if we were OK or what had happened or anything. He asked if we’d told anybody about ‘The Agency.’”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “We didn’t even know what The Agency was. Doesn’t that seem weird when you think about it?”

&nb
sp; “He was probably just trying to protect us from something.”

  “But what if he wasn’t?”

  Eric gave me a weird look. We creaked upward again as the teenager loaded another pod. I took a deep breath and told Eric about Charlie Gregory’s theory that his dad wasn’t really his dad, but instead, a robot made to look like his dad. I’d expected to spend most of the ride convincing Eric to believe this crazy idea, but he was on board after just three sentences. Eric loves conspiracy theories.

  “This is crazy!” Eric said. “Crazy!” His eyes widened while his mind worked overtime. The last pod finished loading, and the Zipper started spinning for real. “But, but why?”

  “I’m guessing the suit people kidnapped the real Mr. Gregory and sent the robot look-alike to make sure we didn’t say anything.”

  Eric tried to nod, but at this point, the Zipper had really kicked into gear, so his chin kind of just smooshed into his chest. Then he gasped. “Wait, so if Charlie’s dad is actually a spybot … ” Eric paused while we flipped four times in a row. “Then when he fixed Roger … ” We flipped twice more. I waited for him to put it together. “Do you think he turned Roger into a spybot, too?”

  “That’s what I think,” I said.

  Eric looked green. I couldn’t tell if it was from the news or the flipping. “Why?” he croaked. “Why … did … ”

  Eric was really struggling, so I finished his sentence for him. “I don’t know why they’re spying on us. I think they just want to make sure we don’t ruin whatever they have planned.”

  Eric grabbed my arm with one hand while clutching the bar with the other. “NO!” He looked at me with crazy eyes. “Why did you let me eat that elephant ear if you knew we were going on the Zipper?!”

  “Oh. I didn’t think about that. Sorry.”

  The Zipper finally, mercifully, slowed to a stop. “I assume you have some sort of a plan?” Eric mumbled with all the color drained from his face.

  Oh yeah, I had a plan. I’d been working on it for weeks. I grinned. “I call it ‘Operation: RMG’ for Rescue Mr. Gregory. We’re gonna get these guys. I’ll tell you the whole plan, but … ”

  “BUT WHAT?!”

  I looked out the door of our pod. Roger was staring back at us. He waved one of his little claws. “But we’ve gotta ride this again.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  chapter 2

  Hide and Sneak

  Two days later, Eric and I showed up at Charlie Gregory’s house to start Operation: RMG with Phase One—Hide and Sneak. I’d barely slept all night and was already sweating. Eric, on the other hand, was grinning like he’d just won a trip to Disney World. I also noticed that he had on the dumb spy watch I’d told him not to bring.

  When we got to the porch, Roger reached out his telescoping arm to ring the doorbell. A few seconds later, Mr. Gregory appeared. His face lit up when he saw us. “Jesse! Eric! It’s good to see you again! And you too, Roger!” Roger beeped and did a little flip.

  “Hey, Mr. Gregory!” Eric said. “Charlie invited us over to play hide-and-seek. Is he home?”

  “He sure is! I’ll grab him.” Mr. Gregory took a few steps into the house, then turned around. “Can I get you two ice cream?”

  “Yes! Please!” Eric said.

  Mr. Gregory gave a thumbs-up and a cheesy eyebrow wiggle, then disappeared into the house.

  Eric glanced over with a “You sure this guy’s a robot?” look. I stepped on his toe. Although this was Eric’s first time at the Gregory house after learning the news, it was my fourth. The first time I came, I had the same reaction as Eric. After my chat with Charlie in the school bathroom, all I could picture were the Disney World Hall of Presidents animatronic robots with herky-jerky movements. But that’s not what I got at all. On the surface, this new Mr. Gregory seemed just as normal as my own dad. He was warm and funny. He remembered things. One time, he even made a face like he got a brain freeze when he ate ice cream too fast.

  But the more time I spent over at Charlie’s, the more weird things I noticed. For instance, Mr. Gregory seemed to be blinking harder than normal—as if he were trying to squeeze his eyes shut, if that makes sense. And then I noticed the timing of his blinks. When I started paying closer attention, I found that I could time each one to five seconds exactly. Five-four-three-two-one-BLINK, five-four-three-two-one-BLINK. There were other things, too. Like, he said “presumably” a lot. And he licked his finger before turning the page in whatever he was reading. And he always spent an extra-long time in the bathroom.

  OK, OK, now that I write all those things down, they don’t seem like the robot giveaways I thought they were at first. I guess they could all be weird adult things. But that’s why we were here. Hide-and-seek is the best way to snoop through anyone’s house. If Charlie’s house held any evidence of robot activity, we’d find it and immediately bring it to the police.

  To work together under the noses of Mr. Gregory and Roger, we established a few code words. “Pickles” was “I’m fine.” “Tuna” was “I’m in trouble.” And “mousetrap” was “Get the robots out now because I found something big.”

  Charlie had a big, fake smile on his face when he came to the door. He seemed to be sweating just as hard as I was. “Hey, guys! Uh, pickles, huh?” (In retrospect, we probably should have come up with code words that’d be easier to use in normal conversation.) Charlie tried to do a complicated handshake with me, which failed miserably. I gave him the “play it cool” signal with my hands.

  “Hey, do you want to play hide-and-seek?” I asked in a reading-from-the-cue-cards voice.

  “Sure!” Charlie replied in an equally unnatural way.

  “You guys had better watch out,” Eric said. “I’m the hide-and-seek champion of the world.”

  Over the next half hour, Eric proved that statement to be maybe the least true thing he’s ever said. Not only was he bad at snooping for robot stuff, he was bad at pretending to do anything but snoop for robot stuff. The first time I was it, I “found” Eric in the kitchen—not hiding in a cabinet or anything, but fumbling through the junk drawer. We eventually decided to make Eric the all-time seeker before he could blow it for the rest of us. Eric and Roger would look for Charlie and me, while the two of us would inspect every corner of the house.

  Even with Eric out of the way, the investigation went poorly. It seemed like every time I got close to a possible clue, one of Charlie’s little brothers or sisters would ruin it.

  “HEY, WHATCHADOIN?!” little Cheyenne asked when she saw me picking through the wires behind the entertainment center.

  “Shar warsh?” Christian asked, trying to hand me a lightsaber under the bed. “Shar warsh, shar warsh, shar warsh!”

  “Ahhhhh ah ah ah AHHHHH!” the toddler screamed, blowing my cover inside the nursery.

  So it came as no surprise when I found myself with a buddy in the bathroom. I was “hiding” in the tub, trying to peek down the drain (I was really running out of ideas) when the door shut. I rolled my eyes and sat still. As embarrassing as it’d be to reveal myself now, it’d be ten times worse if the other person in the bathroom happened to be a little kid who’d announce my presence to the whole house. I waited quietly for the sound of the toilet lid, but it never came. Instead, I heard someone picking through the medicine cabinet. That couldn’t be a kid—the cabinet was too high. I silently peeked around the curtain.

  It was Mr. Gregory. My heart raced as I slinked back until only the tiniest sliver of my face peeked out. He took something out of the cabinet. This could be it! I strained to get a better look. It was …

  An electric shaver.

  I rolled my eyes. Here I was, feeling like this important spy, and my big break was watching my friend’s dad shave. I felt dumb.

  Wait. What was he doing?

  Mr. Gregory plugged in the razor, but
instead of turning it on, he detached it from the power cord. Then he did something I’ll never be able to erase from my mind.

  He plugged the power cord into his skin.

  Chapter 3

  Raul Ludbar

  “TUNA!” the voice in my head screamed. “TUNA, TUNA, TUNA TIMES INFINITY!”

  I wanted to run or throw up or both, but my body remained frozen as I watched Mr. Gregory pinch the skin of his left thumb and slowly pull it back from the nail to reveal a black socket underneath. Then he calmly plugged the cord into the socket. His mouth started moving. Slowly at first, then a million miles an hour. Right at the end, he did two things that I recognized—he jerked his hand into a thumbs-up and wiggled his eyebrows. Wait, was he replaying the entire day? Maybe sending all his memories somewhere?

  Immediately after the eyebrow wiggle, his eyes snapped super-duper wide open. I didn’t mean to, but I let out a small gasp. Mr. Gregory stared into the mirror for a second, then slowly turned his head around. I quickly ducked behind the curtain. The curtain was just thin enough that I could see the outline of Mr. Gregory’s head as he stared at the shower for a full ten seconds. I stopped breathing. If I could see him, did that mean he could see me? I prepared to scream “tuna” at the top of my lungs the second he opened the curtain. But he never did. Instead, he finally turned back around, put the cord back into the medicine cabinet, and walked out of the bathroom.

  As soon as he was gone, I gasped for air. We had what we needed. I waited a full minute, then snatched the cord from the medicine cabinet and sneaked out of the bathroom.

  “SHAR WARSH?!”

  I jumped a foot off the ground and spun around to see Christian standing there with his dumb lightsaber. “Not now!” I hissed. I ran down the stairs before any other little kids could blow this. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw Eric in the kitchen eating ice cream, not even looking for us.