by Cameron Jace
“Yeah. For how long?” a fat boy yells from the audience, with a mouthful of junk food.
“But wait a minute,” says Timmy. “Someone didn’t say it.”
Immediately, I look at Leo. He looks back at me. I wonder what keeps him so tight-lipped. I reach for his face and try to force his lips open. He resists and pulls away. It’s like trying to squeeze juice from a stone.
“Come on, man,” a boy says from the Jeep. “You are the hero. Don’t give up on us. By the way, is Chuck Norris your uncle or something? Vin Diesel maybe?"
Leo is speechless. There is a glowing in the corner of his eyes, that golden shade I saw earlier. I want to tell them that he is not going to open up for whatever reason. Believe me. I have known him for about two hours, and it feels like we have known each other since middle school.
My heart sinks into my feet. Leo is going to explode, and I will have no time to survive because I am too near. I will blow up with him. The girls in the Jeep grab for the edges, ready to jump. What will they do then? Run on foot like those other fools?
The Hoverboardz gang starts slowing down. It is obvious that Leo is all muscle, and no brains.
“Well, you leave me no choice, mysterious hero.” Timmy is reaching for something, a button, most probably the one that will blow up Leo.
I grab Leo’s iAm and shout in it. “I am alive.”
This should work. We are treated as numbers, and we have no real identity, so his iAm is more important than he is. What difference does it make who says it?
“That’s cheating, you little Monster.” Timmy is looking at the screen, as if he is looking straight at me. He says the word Monster slowly and with pleasure. He knows who I am. He hates me. He would certainly enjoy blowing up Leo, a Nine. Timmy, the envious Trickster. What’s the difference between a Trickster and a so-called Monster?
“It doesn’t matter who says it,” a girl screams at Timmy from our Jeep. I look at the timer. We have wasted a minute with this conversation, and only Leo knows the rest of the plan. We need him.
Leo, you fool. You can’t die before I know what your story is.
“Sorry, Monsterina,” says Timmy, wearing a sad mask with plastic tears on it. “Goodbyeee.”
I have to do something, and I do. The craziest trick I would ever have imagined myself pulling. I don’t know if it will work, but I am counting on the viewers this time, not the Trickster.
I hold Leo’s face with both hands and kiss him on the mouth, not taking my lips off his.
Leo doesn’t do anything back with his sealed lips. Only manages to drive fifty-miles-per-hour, while we are about to die in sixty seconds.
“He is busy,” I claim in the iAm. “Can’t you see? He is my boyfriend,” I lie, and I get back to Leo’s lips. This boy is mine! “And if we die, we will die together. This is the kiss of death.” I know no one will believe that he is my boyfriend, but I can try. A Nine and a Seven? That’s never happened.
The viewers go crazy. They shout at Timmy not to push the button. “He is the hero,” some say. “You’re killing the game too fast,” others protest. “This is so romantic,” the girls say. Some girls actually scream Leo’s name from the Zeppelins outside the battlefields, wearing their ClairVos.
I don’t know if this is exactly what I have expected, or did I just want to kiss someone beautiful like Leo before I die? All I know is that this is TV, Faya's biggest hobby. And even though they will all want to watch monsters die, no one can resist romance. I remember my mother loving the blood in the previous game, and also crying when the slightest romantic thing happened. Blood and romance, the ultimate entertainment.
Timmy clears his throat in the microphone, feeling a little overruled by the audience.
“Sweet little Romeo and Juliet — I mean Leo and Monsteriette,” says Timmy, making a silly face with two black teardrops falling off his makeup. “May I pronounce you as Monster and wife — ah — I mean, the audience has voted for you, which rarely counts in the games. But why not, we are only in the beginning, and you will die either way.”
The audience celebrates the verdict. They even scream my name after Leo. They call me Pixie because I am small.
Audience tic. Audience tac. Audience toe.
I am not Pixie. I am Decca, goddammit! Decca Tenderstone.
I pull my lips away from Leo’s, which I secretly enjoyed, and his eyes look hypnotized. This strong boy, hypnotized by me? I am only wishing. “See,” I say to Him. “You’re not the only one famous here.”
The boys and girls in the Jeep let out a sigh. Down here, this is no lovey-dovey moment. Everyone knows it is a silly trick.
One minute left to termination.
I give Leo a slight slap on his face. “You better have a plan now.”
He gives me that angry look again. It’s like: How dare you kiss me while I am trying to save the world, driving fifty-miles-per-hour, with one hand on the wheel?
“I am afraid the love puppets and their friends have one minute left,” Timmy smiles again.
We are no love puppets. I hope you didn’t see this, Woo. It's not real. I'm coming for you.
“You should reset the timer,” a familiar voice from the audience requests.
It’s Ariadna.
13
I go crazy, looking in the iAm and the screens around us. There are plenty of the iScreens on the sides of the road inside the Playa. The camera doesn’t show her, but I know it is her voice. The audience supports her. “Don’t kill the game, you fool,” they tell Timmy again.
“Okay. Okay.” Timmy ruffles his hair with his hands, sounding like when I first met him, stripped of his Trickster confidence. “B-b-but…” He starts waving his hands around his ears and buzzing again. “Th-th-this is the only exception I’ll make today. Here we go. Three minutes and counting…”
Here we go again. Leo speeds up. With the wind against my face, my hair stretches back, and I think my cheeks look like they have been sucked in by a vacuum cleaner.
To the left and to the right, the other bus and the skateboarding teens catch up with us, waiting for Leo’s next move. I bite my lip. I am not used to following someone blindly. I am used to having a plan, but there is so much going on right now. I remind myself of the flashlight Leo picked up from the military bag. I remind myself that he has plans for making it until tomorrow morning. Every minute counts.
Leo grabs my hand and slams it against the wheel. It's as if I am his beer-drinking buddy. I wonder how an ex-rock star becomes like that. I cross over to the passenger seat and steer the wheel again, noticing he has started the Jeep’s engine by connecting two wires.
"If I live, I think I’m eligible for getting a driver's license already," I shout against the wind.
"Your driving sucks!" A voice says behind me. A voice I haven't heard for about ten minutes--which felt like a lifetime already. It's Mr. Pessimistic. "You're going to kill us all!"
"Wow. You're still alive." I watch him in the mirror.
"What's that supposed to mean?" he snaps at me.
"It means I will push you off my car if you don't stop talking." I say.
Before Mr. Pessimistic objects, Leo turns around and aims his rifle at him. Glad we're on the same page, I think.
Leo brings up an unfamiliar application on his iAm. The device rejects it at first, showing a window with an unauthorized symbol on it. Leo pushes a number of buttons with one hand. This time, it works. He gazes ahead at the rollercoaster, which starts moving and picks up speed.
Enthusiastically, the boys and girls raise their hands in the air. The rollercoaster is set to run faster than fifty-miles-per-hour, I think. Leo must have some hacker experience to do this.
But how are we going to catch up with the rollercoaster’s speed? If we walk to it, we will explode on our way. There is no way we can run fifty-miles-per-hour to it, without stopping. I look at Leo as he is adjusting the rollercoaster’s speed to meet the minimum speed allowed in the game. Still, that’s not enough.<
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“Boys and girls, we have a computer hacker here,” Timmy blasts out in the microphone. I am sure he is envious. Hacking computers should be his specialty. I hope he has no time to hack back into the system and stop Leo’s plan. But I still don’t know how we are going to get on to the rollercoaster.
Two minutes to the final explosion.
Awkwardly, Leo points his rifle at one of the boys on the flying Hoverboardz. The boy grins at Leo, speeding up, not wanting to stop. It makes sense. Those on their Hoverboardz, flying fifty-miles-per-hour, are the only ones who could make the transition from their Hoverboardz to the rollercoaster, still keeping the minimum speed limits. But I see them flying toward the rollercoaster, leaving us behind.
Leo urges me to speed up after them. I steer the wheel to the right, chasing the boys. They are our only way out. They have to let us on the Hoverboardz.
Closer, I see the boy has another tattoo underneath the surfing one. It is a Six.
Those skaters are military. At least, they were at some point in their lives. They look older than us, and younger than Leo. It makes sense. They were ranked a couple of years ago. I wonder what happened to them that made them have to get a newer tattoo over the older one. Are they banned? Rebels? Why are they in the game?
In less than an hour, my perspective on life has changed too many times. I don’t have a certain conclusion about anything. All I know is that I want to stay alive, and press the red button at the end of this round, screaming “I am alive,” until I find Woo.
Leo shoots the boy on the Hoverboard in the arm. The boy falls back cinematically. Leo jumps on the board in his place. The Hoverboardz are easy to drive. You just swing in the direction you want to go, and it swings with you. If you want to speed up, you ride with one leg in the air as if you are riding rollerblades. It’s actually cool.
“Can I try it once, please?” Roger This pleads to one of the skaters. “I can trade it for my super power D7500 joystick.”
The skater boy looks annoyed, and speeds up.
“It’s the best joystick in the world!” Roger This shouts. “It doesn’t make your thumbs hurt.”
Leo is the only one who has a rifle. He loads it deliberately, so the others can see he has bullets. I try not to think how harsh it was, shooting the boy off the Hoverboard. I try not to think at all.
One girl with pink hair gazes at the rollercoaster and back to Leo. Then, she hovers toward us, as if reminding him she is doing this in exchange for Leo coming up with the rollercoaster solution. Eventually, we all have to help each other.
Other skaters follow the girl with pink hair. She seems to be the leader, with all those tattoos on her arms. The Hoverboarderz approach us, and pull us up to ride along with them. They are strong and well-built.
The girl with pink hair picks me up.
Leo signals for the rest of the skaters to go save those in the remaining bus, while someone else drives the Jeep. They hesitate for a moment. He fires his rifle, missing on purpose just to scare them. They swing fast toward the bus.
It makes me wonder what Leo is capable of when he opens his mouth.
I am clinging to the pink girl from behind, as if riding a motorcycle. She is much stronger and taller than I am. She controls the speed of the Hoverboard from her iAm too.
We speed up. One minute to explosion.
I can’t see Leo anymore. He is left behind. But I hear a bang. An explosion. Did someone fall to the ground, trying to run? Did someone mess up the speed?
It crosses my mind that it could be Leo, but it is unlikely.
What surprises me is that I tell myself that I don’t care if it is him. Little by little, explosion by explosion, I am starting to learn that everyone’s priority in this game is saving him or herself. Although we are seeking alliance at the moment, it doesn’t mean the pink girl won’t push me off the Hoverboard at any second, if it is her survival against mine. That’s why Leo shot the boy. I cling harder to the girl with pink hair, my short fingernails almost ripping through her jacket.
If I hadn’t switched the iAms, I would have never known about this world down here in the battlefields. I would’ve never known the truth about the evil Summit. I would have been preparing myself to become a good girl, looking for a boy to go to the prom with, then marry him, have children, and grow old without affecting the world. What a bore. I prefer the deadly adventure I am living now…and I will find you, Woo.
“Attention, please.” Timmy is standing behind a counter in a hotel, dressed as a receptionist, pushing the bell repeatedly. “Attention, you skater-haters-monkey-flying-slayers.” He is manicuring his fingernails, blowing air bubbles. “Since we don’t know where you got your machines, don’t think they will not explode when the time is up.” He gulps a piña colada and burps.
Almost twenty seconds left to the next explosion.
“Hang on,” the girl with pink hair shouts against the wind. Almost all of the skaters arrive. Every Hoverboard has two or three teenagers on it. We are circling around, keeping up with the minimum speed, and waiting for the rollercoaster to arrive at the lowest point of its route, so we can all jump down. Which is an extremely hard thing to do.
“Your Hoverboardz will explode in about…” Timmy looks at his oversized, loud-ticking watch. “Fourteen seconds.”
I hear the rollercoaster coming. My heart is racing. I feel something in my throat. I can feel the heat from the girl’s back against my belly. The top of my spine is heating up. Will I be able to survive the jump?
“Ten seconds.”
The rollercoaster is coming. The safety bars and shoulder harnesses are already open. Leo must have controlled it from his iAm. But Leo is not around.
“Now!” the girl with pink hair yells. We jump in the air like fools diving out of a plane without parachutes. What the hell am I doing? Dying on a rollercoaster? It feels like my heart is jumping with me, almost bursting out of my rib cage and throat. On the way down, it falls like a heavy bowling ball, down into my feet. I land upside down in the rollercoaster. The girl with pink hair lands straight in her seat next to me. I am glad I didn’t break my back or neck. I hear people thudding against the seats everywhere, dropping like flies with no wings, and I hear a couple of explosions as well. Not everyone survives.
I have to admit that if this is an actual and legal game in the world out there, people will pay tenfold for it. The owner of the deadly amusement park will have to mention that the price of the tickets don't cover death certificates and burial fees.
Everyone for himself. Some people won’t make it until tomorrow morning. Sadly, Leo might be one of them.
“Five,” Timmy announces. “S.E.C.O.N.D.S.”
Suddenly, a boy falls from the sky, into the seat in front of me.
“Four.”
It is not Leo.
“Three.”
It’s the boy Leo shot. He is still alive, but in pain. Someone saved him and brought him along.
“Two.”
I look up, and to the side. Leo is flying in the air, landing down like a wrestler doing a five-finger frog splash.
“One.”
Leo is in the seat in front of me, next to the boy he shot, then saved.
A feast of exploding Hoverboardz surrounds us like the worst fireworks you could think of. The rollercoaster runs closer to the point where it takes the slope upward again.
“This Trickster is mean,” the girl with pink hair says.
“No kidding,” I mock her.
“I mean really,” she explains. “According to the rules, those of you who were in the Jeep should not have their Hoverboardz exploded. You changed vehicles with the same speed when you jumped from the Jeep to the Hoverboardz. To you, the board was a new vehicle, just like the rollercoaster.”
“But it wasn’t just us on the Hoverboardz,” I say. “So it is a confusing situation. Not that you expect this loony Trickster to be fair.”
“Thank you,” Timmy cheers. “For calling me loony and unfa
ir. Me flattered.”
The audience cheers too. The viewers love Timmy. They don’t call my name like last time. When the audience is entertained, they forget about you so fast. It’s always about what’s next. Their thirst is unquenchable.
I see a boy screaming from the crowd that all these rules about the School Exploding Speed Bus game weren’t fair. The camera zooms in on him instantly, and Timmy announces that the boy is a Monster who has managed to forge his results.
“Traitor,” The crowd screams, pointing the finger at the boy. “Monster!”
Of course the boy isn’t a Monster. It’s the Summit’s way to play us all. If you object or question the rules, the easiest thing would be turning you into a Monster.
Leo, panting in the seat in front of us, raises his iAm up high, showing us a message without turning his head back to us.
The message says: SHUT UP, LADIES.
The girl with pink hair laughs. My mouth is wide open.
Leo scrolls down. IT’S BEEN A ROUGH DAY.
“I never thought he had any sense of humor,” the girl with pink hair tells me. “I am Bellona, by the way.” She has to shout against the speed of the rollercoaster.
“I am Decca,” I say.
“I thought you were Pixie three minutes ago,” she muses.
“No. I am Decca.” I insist.
“The rules, people!” Timmy shouts in the microphone. “Or me will blow me up some Monsters.”
The rollercoaster reaches the slope upward, and Leo manipulates it from his iAm and speeds it up more.
We are rolling high, with blood rushing from my face and the sun shining straight into my eyes. We push the red button and scream:
“I AM ALIVE.”
I guess Leo doesn’t have to say it anymore. The audience pardoned him, thinking of him as mute or something. Will I ever know why he never utters a word?
I let out a big scream and repeat the phrase, since it makes me feel much better:
“I AM ALIVE, WOO.”
The question is… for how long?