by Dustin Brady
I looked down to see Jevvrey’s phone at my feet. I picked it up and turned it on. Oh no. No, no, no. Please no. “Mr. Gregory?”
Mr. Gregory wasn’t paying attention. “I’m just hacking security — there we go.”
“Mr. Gregory?”
“Opening doors, disabling locks, shutting off cameras…”
“Mr. Gregory, I think you should see this.”
“Now I’m going to have to put you two into Go Wild one more time, just long enough to get you safely to the basement…”
“Mr. Gregory!” I shouted with tears in my eyes.
He finally turned. I showed him the live video of Mark on Jevvrey’s phone. It was totally black. “He’s gone.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For Real This Time
“We’ve got to get down there now,” Mr. Gregory said.
Eric looked sad and confused. “But he’s…”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Mr. Gregory interrupted. He rummaged through the room until he found two more plasma guns. He dialed them in and then grabbed two armfuls of glowing green cannisters. “Here,” he said as he handed them to me and Eric. “If you see any security guards, blast them into a black box.”
“So, just like a real-life video game?” Eric asked, trying to hide his excitement.
“Except we can die for real this time,” I chimed in.
Mr. Gregory threw his laptop bag over his shoulder and loaded his plasma gun. “Right, so be careful,” he said as he opened the door and walked right into two security guards.
“Whoa!” one of them said while fumbling with his gun.
ZIIIIIIING!
Eric blasted him.
The other one went for his radio while ducking and rolling for cover.
ZIIIIIIING!
I missed.
“We need backup on Floor Four,” he said. “The two…”
ZIIIIIIING!
Mr. Gregory zapped him. “Let’s move!” he yelled.
We sprinted for the stairs at the far end of the hallway. “What do you guys think of maybe taking the elevator?” Eric asked, huffing and puffing as we neared the stairs. Mr. Geoffrey shook his head, reached for the stairwell doorknob, then changed his mind in a hurry when he looked through the window.
“I think that’s a great idea,” Mr. Gregory said, wedging a stop under the door. I peeked through the window myself to see five security guys running toward us. I raced across the hall and pressed the elevator button.
BAM! BAM!
The security guys put their weight into the door as the elevator arrived.
DING!
We piled in, pressed “B3” for the lowest basement level and clicked the “door close” button over and over again.
CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK
The doors weren’t closing. “WHY DO THEY PUT THESE BUTTONS IN ELEVATORS IF THEY DON’T WORK?!” I yelled.
CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK BAM!
The security guys broke through as the elevator doors started to close. One of them got a shot off.
CRACK!
The bullet hit the back of the elevator right between me and Eric. The doors finally shut before anyone else could fire. Our rest lasted for just a moment though, because two floors down —
DING!
The doors reopened to reveal two security guards with their weapons drawn.
ZIIIIIIING! ZIIIIIIING!
We zapped them straight to video game jail. The doors closed again, we went down one more floor and —
DING!
— Went through the whole process again.
“Can you do something about this, Mr. Gregory?” I asked.
“Well,” Mr. Gregory said as he pulled his laptop out of the bag. “There is one thing I can…”
DING!
This time, we all moved to the side of the elevator before the doors opened. Three security guys ran in without seeing all of us pressed up against the wall.
ZIIIIIIING!
Eric hit his guy.
ZIIIIIIING!
Mr. Gregory hit his guy.
ZIIIIIIING!
I missed my guy. Again.
“YOU!” he yelled. It was the big-bearded pirate guard from earlier. This time, in addition to his eye gauze patch, he also sported a bandage covering his whole head from the taser incident. He’d apparently learned his lesson, because he was no longer messing around with a taser. His gun was drawn.
CRACK!
With no time to reload his plasma gun, Mr. Gregory threw it at the guy’s head. The gun hit him square in the face, causing him to stumble backward, whack his head against the elevator railing and get knocked out cold.
“OK,” Mr. Gregory pulled out his laptop as if nothing had happened. “Let’s see what we can do about this elevator.” After a few clicks, the elevator speaker made a chime sound. “That should do it,” he said. Sure enough, we made it all the way to B3 without the doors opening again.
“Let’s get Mark!” Eric yelled when we stopped moving.
“Wait,” Mr. Gregory said. “Let me check one thing first.” He typed on his laptop for a few seconds and sighed. He turned the screen around to show us. It was the B3 security camera, showing a hallway packed full of security officers. “They figured out where we were going.”
“We can just zap them all, right?!” Eric asked.
Mr. Gregory looked at the three remaining plasma cannisters. “Nope.”
“Well then we can sneak past them in Go Wild!”
Mr. Gregory pointed out security officers wearing Go Wild goggles. “Nope. Also, if they knew enough to send all this security, they knew enough to send a horde. We’d be toast in two seconds.”
“Well we can, uh, we can…” Eric tried to come up with something that would work.
“There’s nothing we can do.” Mr. Gregory slumped against the wall.
I looked around the elevator, which had become our own black box. Mr. Gregory buried his head in his hands. Eric tried to climb up to the elevator ceiling. Then there was the security guard pirate, who’d be waking up any minute now. I kept staring at the pirate. Wait. Maybe we did have a way out after all.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Cook the CPU
Ten minutes later, the elevator doors opened and we stepped onto floor B3.
“I don’t think your plan’s going to work,” Eric whispered.
Back in the elevator, I’d remembered my time in Stu’s phone. What if all three of us didn’t have to sneak past the guards? What if we only had to get one person through the door? I explained my idea to Mr. Gregory and Eric. If Mr. Gregory captured me and Eric into his phone and took our pirate friend’s clothes, he might be able to get us to Mark.
We got to work disguising Mr. Gregory. Once we put on the uniform, fitted him with the guard’s Go Wild goggles and covered his porcupine hair with the bandages, he could have been anyone. After we’d finished, Mr. Gregory took a deep breath and zapped the unconscious guard into a black box, then used his last two cannisters to zap me and Eric into Go Wild. He immediately captured us into his phone, brushed himself off and pressed the “door open” button.
DING!
Eric and I held our breath through the steady CLUNK-CLUNK-CLUNK of Mr. Gregory’s feet on the ground. Finally, we stopped.
“No one is allowed in this room,” a voice said.
“Is that so?” Mr. Gregory replied, trying to sound tough.
“It is.”
Without missing a beat, Mr. Gregory responded with the most ridiculous paragraph of nonsense I’d ever heard. “If no one’s allowed in, then who’s going to cook the CPU? Who’s going to parse the haptic system? Maybe you can tell me how the neural ADP array is supposed to generate all by itself!”
“Sir, I need you to…”
“ARE YOU GOING TO TRANSCODE THE DHCP MATRIX? ARE YOU?!”
“Listen,” the security guard tried before getting interrupted again.
“Should I go back to Jevvrey P. Delfino — the man who signs your checks — a
nd tell him that his server farm won’t get indexed today because someone was playing Barney Fife in the basement? In fact, why don’t you tell him yourself?” Mr. Gregory pulled his phone out of his pocket, causing me and Eric to fall over.
“What is he doing?!” Eric yelled.
We crouched in silence waiting for the security guard to make up his mind. “That won’t be necessary,” he finally grumbled. “Go ahead.”
We heard the WHOOSH of a door open in front of us, the HUM of a million computers running at once and finally the CLICK of a vault door sealing us in. When we were safely inside, Mr. Gregory teleported us out of the phone and onto the ground. “Whoa,” I said once I got a chance to see where we were.
“Double whoa!” Eric said.
Eric and I found ourselves in the single biggest room either of us had ever seen. Giant black boxes like the one in Mr. Gregory’s lab stretched past the horizon. Also the room had a horizon! Like an ocean! It was cold too — a freezer fog covered the ground. “Where’s Mark?” Eric asked, shivering.
Mr. Gregory couldn’t hear the question because he was using his phone for a call. “115 Future Way,” he was saying to someone. “They’re holding children as hostages in the basement. Yes, I know it’s a video game company, just trust me!” He hung up and looked at us through his phone. “The police are on their way.”
“Wait, shouldn’t we have started out by calling the police?!” Eric asked.
“We couldn’t risk Bionosoft cutting the power to this room before we got here,” Mr. Gregory said.
“OK, so where’s Mark?” I asked. “Also, uh, you know he disappeared, right?”
Mr. Gregory pulled out his laptop and started walking. “We’ll get to that when the time comes.” We wandered in silence for the length of a football field before Mr. Gregory stopped in front of a big, black tower that looked exactly like every other tower. “This is it,” he said.
Mr. Gregory connected the tower to his laptop with a cord and started typing. Lights on the black box began blinking. A screen on the side of the tower powered up. “Check in there,” Mr. Gregory motioned to the screen.
I walked over and put my head in the screen. “Mark?” I was greeted by blackness and silence.
Mr. Gregory typed a few things. “Try again.”
“Mark? Can you hear me?!” I stuck my head in farther. “MARK!” My voice bounced around.
Mr. Gregory got back to work on the laptop. “I’m dialing back the computer’s clock, but that can cause problems, so I’m trying to be careful.” The black box started whirring louder.
I put my hand on black box to lean farther into the screen, but quickly pulled it away. The tower was burning hot.
“Hurry up!” Mr. Gregory shouted. “It’s becoming unstable!”
“Mark! MARK!” My face got hot like I was leaning way too close to a bonfire. I couldn’t give up though. “MAAAAAARK!” I thought I saw something. Not a person or anything. Maybe just a pin of light. “MAAAARRGGRGRGRGRG!” My voice started garbling like I was talking through a bad internet connection.
“Jesse! JESSSSsshhhhsss…” Mr. Gregory yelled something behind me, but he too was garbled and fading. The pin of light started growing into a something — a finger? No, two fingers. Three fingers! In a few seconds, a full hand appeared right in front of my face. A beautiful, wrinkly old hand. I reached for it.
That’s when my whole body got sucked into the machine.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Chain Reaction
I tumbled through the darkness like I was skydiving, all while Mark’s hand taunted me just inches from my face. Whenever I tried reaching for the hand, I just spun faster out of control. I panicked and screamed until —
SNAP!
I stopped, hanging upside down in midair. A hand had grabbed my foot — a hand attached to my best friend, Eric. At least I think it was Eric. His face looked really pixelated, and his mouth and nose kept switching places on his face. I turned back and grabbed for Mark’s hand. It had started fading again. “GIVE ME A FEW MORE INCHES!” I tried to shout to Eric. Unfortunately, it came out as “GLBLRMF A FMWMFLSO NNCHZ!”
Eric either understood what I was trying to say or started losing his grip, because he let me slide down just far enough to reach Mark’s hand. As soon as I touched it, I felt a rush of heat sweep through my body. I grabbed on with all my might.
“PPPLRLRPRLBGR!” I yelled. (That was supposed to be, “Pull!”)
We moved a couple inches. “PPLLRPGRL HRRRDGRR!” (”Pull harder!”)
Eric’s grip loosened again. At the same time, Mark’s hand started fading faster. It slipped through my grip until I was only holding onto one of his fingers. Then, just a half second before I was going to lose my grip for good, I felt one final yank. I squeezed the finger harder than I’ve squeezed anything in my life as I tumbled out of the computer.
I landed on the ground with a THUD and opened my eyes. The black box towered above me, lights blinking and fans whirring like it was ready to launch into space. Mr. Gregory’s face appeared. “Mark?” He whipped off his goggles. “Is that you?”
I sat up and looked next to me. There was Mark with all his fingers and toes and not looking one bit wrinkly.
“What… what happened?” he asked.
“You’re back!” I shouted.
Mark looked around. The server room, with its giant black towers and scary fog, probably seemed more alien than the world he’d just come from. “Back where?” he asked as he got up. “Hey!” He bent his leg again. “My knee’s not popping! Why isn’t my knee popping?”
“That’s cuz you’re 12!” Eric shouted.
“What do you mean I’m 12?” Mark asked as he sat back down. “Are you telling me…” His voice trailed off, and he started to shake.
Mr. Gregory took a picture of Mark on his phone and turned it around to show him his own face. Mark stared at the picture for a few seconds, then touched his cheek. “I’m 12 years old,” he whispered to himself. “I’m 12.” He stood up, flexed his foot a few times, then jumped in place. “I’m 12!” He ran around the black box, then leapt on Eric’s back. “I’m 12, I’m 12, I’m 12!”
Eric promptly fell over because he is not great at piggy-back rides.
“I can’t believe you guys came back for me!” Mark said.
“It was all Mr. Gregory!” I said.
“Yeah, I was the Hulk and Jesse was Elsa, and there were all these furballs, and you should see the plasma gun!” Eric shouted.
Mark smiled and nodded, even though he had no idea what even one word of that meant. Then a tear formed in his eye. “Are my parents still around?” he asked.
Mr. Gregory put his hand on Mark’s shoulder and nodded. “Are you ready to go see them?”
Mark just hugged Mr. Gregory in response.
We heard a commotion in the hallway. “I think it’s the police!” Eric yelled.
He led the way back to the vault door. “You ever playing another video game again?” I asked Mark as we walked.
“No way!” he shouted. “What about you guys?”
“Mobile games only,” Eric said.
Mark gave him a weird look. “What’s the difference?” Before Eric could answer, the black box interrupted with a high-pitched whine.
I turned around. “Mr. Gregory?”
The whine turned into a scream.
“Is it supposed to do that?”
All the lights started glowing bright red.
“It should be fine,” Mr. Gregory said. “It’s a little unstable, but as long as it doesn’t…”
Mr. Gregory stopped midsentence when the box next to Mark’s lit up red too.
“Oh no.”
“Oh no what?”
Mr. Gregory ran back to his laptop. The second box started screaming louder and louder until its screen lit up and something tumbled out of it. It was a kid.
We all stood with our mouths hanging open as the kid felt his body and face. “How old am I?” he asked. “
How old am I?!”
We all looked at each other. At that moment, two more boxes lit up.
“Mr. Gregory, what’s going on?”
Those two boxes started screaming.
“I think we just caused a chain reaction,” he said without looking up from his computer.
Two more kids popped out of the screaming boxes, and four more boxes lit up.
“That’s good, right?” Eric asked.
Eight new black boxes started screaming. The sound got so loud that I could feel a vibration in my chest.
Mr. Gregory looked up. His face was white. “Everything Bionosoft has ever written into a video game is coming out,” he said.
Something started to appear out of the black box behind Mr. Gregory. Something big.
“Everything?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
ZAP!
The thing snapped into focus, giving me my answer. Suddenly a few security guards and invisible furballs felt like beginner mode. If we had trouble getting into Bionosoft, I couldn’t begin to imagine how we’d survive long enough to make it back out.
Eric backed up. “Is that a…”
Yes. Yes it was. There in front of us, as real as the ground under our feet, stood an eight-foot-tall praying mantis. The creature took a moment to look at all of us, then reared up on its back legs as seven of its friends snapped into focus behind it.
“SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH!”
Hey! Thanks for taking the time to read Trapped in a Video Game: Book Two. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing it. I’m currently working on Book Three, and I plan on releasing it December, 2016. To get updates on the book, a heads up as soon as it’s available on Amazon and other cool stuff, enter your email address at dustinbradybooks.com.
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If you want to get in touch with me for any reason, I’d love to hear from you! You can email me any time at [email protected].