Multiplayer

by John C. Brewer

  “I got no signal, either,” said Deion, staring at his phone. In the pale light, Hector could see tiny cuts all over his face.

  “I told you, there’s no signal here,” came Helen’s voice from inside the inverted SUV. “Go. Get away from here. Now.”

  Hector knelt next to the wreckage, his gut sick at the thought of what was about to happen. “I’m not leaving you, Helen.” He reached through the window and groped until his hand linked in hers.

  “Get out of here,” she ordered him. “It’s okay.”

  Shah groaned in the darkness. “Get out of here, you idiot.”

  “Helen…” Hector said, when he suddenly had an idea. His spirit leapt as the thought formed in his mind. “We’ll draw them off. They’ll follow us. Toward those lights.”

  “What are they?” asked Deion, doing a fair job of trying to sound brave.

  “It’s a concrete plant,” answered Sanjar. “We pass it on the way to our mosque.”

  “Maybe there’s a telephone. Or a caretaker or something.” Hector squeezed his sister’s hand. “Everything’s going to be okay. They don’t know there’s five of us. Just lay here and be very quiet.”

  The first few steps were the most painful Hector had ever taken. Every joint in his body, every muscle, cried out in pain. Beside him, his friends moved just as woodenly, groaning with each step across the slick, uneven ground. “Come on,” Hector grimaced, through clenched teeth, and forced his body to move. He stopped some hundred feet away and turned, seeing that their pursuers had almost reached the Hummer. “Hey Mal-X!” he yelled through hands formed into a bullhorn. He forced himself to sound nonchalant “We’re going to bury your butt, dude. We got all the names. I’m going straight to the cops.”

  “You know nothing,” came a voice from the night. The same stilted American voice that had mocked Izaak after he stole Vera. The same person he’d talked to just moments ago in Omega Wars. Hector’s head swam at the sudden merging of real and virtual. “You are mere children.” They had stopped at the Hummer, their flashlights examining the wreck.

  “Wanna bet, you Muslim dork,” Sanjar hollered beside him. “We know you’re trying to kidnap the President at the summit. We know everything. And in a few minutes, so will the FBI!”

  They heard swearing and three flashlight beams bathed them in the darkness. “Soon as I get to that light, I’m calling the cops,” Hector added.

  “Try to stop us, you Muslim dork!” said Sanjar.

  “You already called him that,” said Deion, as they backed away.

  “They’re not coming,” said Hector.

  Sanjar turned back to the terrorists and blurted something in what sounded to Hector like Arabic. Suddenly, the flashlight beams were dancing wildly in the darkness as the three men barreled wildly toward them through the darkness, snarling and cursing. “Your stomach roast in hell, you miserable infidel!” one of them snarled.

  “What did you say?” Hector asked, as they turned and fled.

  “A thousand dicks in your religion,” gasped Sanjar, stumbling over a log.

  “You people really need to learn to swear,” Deion added.

  “No,” replied Sanjar. “We know how to swear.”

  They ran across a short space of muddy ground, then plunged into a sparse forest, dodging trees by instinct more than anything else. Just behind them three flashlight beams chopped the night air. Sanjar kept babbling about his father finding them with their phones, to which Deion reminded him that there was no cell signal here.

  Then the ground gave way and they were stumbling down a steep, wooded slope choked with weeds, sticks snapping under foot. Hector heard running water and a second later splashed through a creek. They ran up the other side, slipping on deep leaves, feet sinking into soft earth beneath.

  At the top of the creek bed, the ground evened out again and they went back to dodging trees until they fought their way through a heavy barrier of brush. Their hands and faces stung from the scratches of thorns as they stumbled out into the open at last. Across a short, grassy field lay the concrete plant surrounded by a chain-link fence. A slowly blinking red light beckoned them from high atop a tower. There were gantries and walkways, chutes, ladders, and big steel buildings, piles of dirt and rock, and empty vehicles. Security lights turned the place into a mix of searing brightness and coal-black shadow. Behind it all rose a naked plug of stone. Like something straight out of Omega Wars, Hector thought.

  “Still nothing,” said Sanjar, checking his cell phone. Deion confirmed the same.

  “If we can get up there,” said Hector, pointing to a slowly blinking red light high up on a tower. “We might have better luck.”

  Behind them, the flashlights finally penetrated the dense wall of brush. “Come on!” Sanjar hissed, taking the lead with a burst of speed. “Do you want to get caught?”

  They crossed the weedy field, stumbled over a gravel road, and found themselves at the fence where it took only moments to find a way under. The fence jangled as they slipped through and they raced between two dark, conical mounds of earth or rocks, and kept moving deeper into the industrial complex. They jogged into a jumble of flat-sided, windowless buildings and shacks connected by catwalks and piping.

  “Feels like Omega Wars,” panted Deion. “But I don’t remember Darxhan ever getting this tired.”

  “Except when you’d run him out of power,” Hector added, and they all tried to laugh. It didn’t work.

  Footsteps sounded not far behind them as they ducked behind the rusted, steel panels of a building that might have been used to store equipment. Close at hand was the concrete mixing plant. At one end, big conveyer belts lead to huge hoppers supported some twenty feet above the ground by giant steel beams. A tall silo stood at the center of the plant, near what looked like a huge mixing drum. All the machinery was supported on girders and connected by catwalks so the concrete could be poured into trucks that would move along below it. The red light, glaring down on them like the eye of Sauron, topped the silo a hundred feet high. Security lights on some of the gantries and catwalks turned the area into a maze of shadows.

  “There’s nowhere to go now, Hector,” came Mal-X’s voice, not close but too close. “You’ve led your friends to a dead end. Very dead. I know you don’t have a cell signal. And there’s no one here but us. Give it up now boy, and I’ll kill you quick. Otherwise… well, you can use your imagination, but I can promise you it will be far worse than anything you can think of.”

  “I doubt it,” Deion yelled back. “I’ve seen Saw. All of them.”

  “What are we going to do?” whispered Sanjar.

  Hector glanced at his friends. They were terrified and he was too. But they’d made it this far. “You know what’s at stake here,” he told them quickly. “We go down and it’s World War Three. We can’t let that happen.”

  “We’re with you, man,” said Deion, his eyes shining in the darkness. “Whatever it takes.”

  Sanjar nodded with steely resolve. “Me too. We have to stop them.”

  “I bet we can get a signal up there,” said Hector, pointing up at the red beacon. “I bet Pappous and your dad are out –”

  Sanjar took a step backward. “I’m not going up there. I hate heights.”

  Deion shook his head as well. “You’re the parkour master. Didn’t you and Chaz used to do this kind of stuff?”

  Hector’s stomach dropped, sending a tingling shock though this entire body. “I’ve never done anything like this! That’s a hundred feet high. All we did was mess around up at the school.”

  “Well, I’m not going!” Deion shot back.

  “So much for whatever it takes,” snapped Hector.

  “Children…” sang Mal-X, now closer. “Where are you? Am I getting warm?”

  “What are we going to do?” squeaked Sanjar. Deion and Sanjar were both staring at Hector, waiting for him to make a decision. “I don’t want to die.”

  “What would we do in Omega?” Hector hissed, wo
ndering why they were staring at him. He waved his arms about. “I mean, this is Omega Wars.”

  “Mow those choads down with a chain gun?” Deion answered.

  “Yeah, you probably would, wouldn’t you?” snapped Hector. “Come on Deion! Be helpful!”

  “Sorry,” said his friend, then grew thoughtful. “Tell you what, Hector. If this was Omega, Izaak would climb that tower and get us a signal.”

  Hector slumped over with his hands on his knees. “I know,” he groaned, fighting a sudden sick feeling. “I was thinking the same thing. And Alkindi would start one of those dump trucks.” Hector pointed to a parking area, about a hundred yards away, where a dozen or so trucks sat in the searing white of a security light. “We could use that to smash through the fence and get away. Do you think you could do that, Sanjar?”

  The terrified look on Sanjar’s face suddenly relaxed. “Maybe. If it’s an older one without a chip.”

  Hector turned to Deion. “You’re in the best shape from all that soccer. Do you think you could run to the far side of that thing?” he pointed to the jumble of gantries, catwalks, and massive containers that made up the ten-story concrete mixer. “Make some noise? Draw them off and keep drawing them off?”

  He nodded in the darkness. “Yeah, I can do that, Hector. I can do that.”

  Hector gazed skyward toward the ruby beacon, flexing his hands with his stomach doing little flips. “We could hide until morning and hope they don’t find us.”

  Flashlight beams stabbed out of the darkness and they heard something fall over on the far side of the small building behind which they were cowering. A string of foreign swearing defiled the clean night air.

  “Shut up, you idiot!” hissed a voice that had to be Mal-X.

  “Bad plan,” said Deion.

  Sanjar stuck his hand into his pocket and fished out his phone. He pressed it into Hector’s trembling hand. “Good luck. May Allah be with you.”

  Deion headed out first, crouched over, shuffling quickly across the dark, open ground between their hiding place and the concrete mixer only a few dozen yards away. Seconds later, they heard a pipe clatter on concrete and Deion swearing, exactly as planned. And exactly as expected, three figures ran toward the noise. Hector had to remind himself to breathe. More noises followed from deeper within the girders.

  “Go!” Hector blurted and Sanjar took off toward the motor pool. Hector followed a short distance then broke off at the edge of the plant where a ladder hung some seven feet above the ground. He jumped and missed. On his second leap, his fingers curled around the cool, damp metal and he pulled himself up. The ladder seemed to disappear into darkness, though high above, the red light glinted in the night. He swallowed hard and started to climb.

  If Hector could get a signal, he’d report their location. Sanjar would get a concrete truck ready to start. He’d mumbled something about glow plugs needing to warm up on a diesel. Meanwhile Deion would draw the terrorists after him, toward the low mountain behind the plant, then double back to the motor pool where he would meet Hector. Sanjar would start the concrete truck and bust through the gate – hopefully as the cops arrived to arrest Mal-X and his comrades. The whole plan shouldn’t take more than about five minutes. The only real difficulty was the cell signal. If they didn’t get a signal, the whole exercise was moot. Mal-X would get away. Hector and his friends might get away in the concrete truck but who would believe them?

  The ladder Hector was climbing terminated at a steel-floored platform some twenty feet above the ground. Hector emerged, dizzily clutching the rail, a stiff breeze now sweeping across him. He listened intently for sounds from below, but heard nothing. With any luck Deion had already lured them into the darkness toward the blasted plug of rock. Leaning over the rail, Hector scanned the darkened ground between the concrete mixing facility and the motor pool, looking for Sanjar but did not see him. Given the time Hector had been on the ladder, Sanjar should already be in the parking lot, if he hadn’t been captured.

  A sudden fear welled up inside Hector. This was no game. These were the people who’d murdered Chaz. People with whom he should have never come into contact. The kind of people who had killed his father. People from a far away, thousand year-old war, now being played out in the streets of his hometown. His friends were counting on him. He was counting on them.

  Hector took out Sanjar’s cell phone. Still no signal. He’d have to go higher, but would it be high enough?

  He found the next ladder, this one bolted to the side of the cement silo, looming a hundred feet above him, at least. Pushing down the butterflies in his stomach, he began the second, much longer climb.

  With each rung, Hector’s dread multiplied. The ladder was cold and the rungs damp and slippery from the rain and space widely. The higher he ascended, the stronger the wind blew. Glancing down at the slowly shrinking world only made his palms sweat until he clutched the ladder so tightly his knuckles turned white. Real life was nothing like a video game, but somehow the video game had sprung to life and he was trapped inside.

  Every dozen rungs or so Hector stopped and wrapped his arms and legs around the ladder to stop himself from shaking. When he felt secure, he carefully brought out Sanjar’s phone and checked for a signal, taking care not to drop it. And each time it came up with no bars. Then he’d scan below him for any signs of his friends or of Mal-X but saw only motionless darkness.

  But as Hector climbed the last dozen rungs, a smile slowly grew on his lips and he climbed more quickly, forgetting about the growing chasm beneath his feet. From behind the top of the naked stone hill emerged a flashing, white beacon. A cell tower, hidden behind the shrinking mountain!

  He hurtled over the top and stood erect, clutching the heavy rail that encircled the top. The wind hissed through his hair as he surveyed the site from above. He could see everything from here: the lights of town twinkling in the distance, neighborhoods sprinkled among the dark vales, and nearer at hand, pools of light down below. Closest was the truck parking area beyond the far end of the mixing plant. Had Sanjar made any progress? Beyond that was a small building just inside the fence at the entrance to the plant from the road. A little farther away was another parking area stuffed with excavators, loaders, and other heavy equipment. Everywhere lay squat cones of dirt and rock with snake-like roads threading between them. And somewhere down there, Deion was leading their foes on a merry chase. He watched in silence as a car drove past on the main road, its headlights extended before it like twin lances. That could have been Mr. Zahedi and Pappous.

  Hector scanned carefully, looking for any sign of movement when his breath caught with a hitch. Down at the parking area, two figures moved stealthily through the trucks lined up side by side. Was it Deion and Sanjar, or two terrorists looking for them?

  His heart froze and he pulled out the cell phone. As he expected, the signal strength was now at maximum. He kept one eye on the parking lot and another on the phone as he navigated Sanjar’s menus, hoping that Mr. Zahedi had already caught the GPS signal. But Hector thought that probably wouldn’t really work anyway. It was just something parents told their kids. The sound of a phone ringing came through the tiny speaker and he crouched down to shield it from the wind.

  Down below, the tiny, dark figures stopped at one of the trucks. Hector watched in horror as they struck the cab with something heavy. By the time the metallic clunk reached his ears, they had jerked the door open and dragged someone out. Then another tumbled to the ground.

  “Hello! Sanjar?” came a frantic voice over the phone.

  Hector had to force himself to speak, watching the two terrorists stand over Deion and Sanjar who were now lying on the ground. “Mr. Zahedi?”

  “Sanjar? Who is this?”

  “It’s Hector,” he stammered, barely able to form words, his lips strangely numb and tongue suddenly like putty. “Uh, West. Sanjar and Deion,” he stumbled, and followed it with an unintelligible string of nothing.

  “Slow down, Hector
,” came a suddenly calm voice. “Where are you and what is happening?”

  “At a concrete plant,” he said more slowly, concentrating on each word. “On that road to your mosque.”

  “I know the place,” came Mr. Zahedi. “We’re not far.”

  Hector watched in paralyzed horror as one of the terrorists raised a… club or stick or something over his head. It hovered for an instant and then flashed down on one of the prone figures. An instant later, the ghost of a scream found his ears. “Oh my God, no…” he whispered.

  “Hector! Hector!” cried Mr. Zahedi into the phone. “What’s happening?”

  Hector swiped tears from his eyes. “I… Don’t… They’re…” On the other end of the line Mr. Zahedi yelled aloud. A cry of infinite anguish and frustration. The very evil from which he’d fled had followed him here, Hector suddenly realized, and was now being visited upon his very son. His own flesh and blood. The thought steeled Hector. He could either stand here in safety and watch his friends be beaten to death, or go try to stop it. At the very least, he would be killed with them. Not a bad way to die all in all. And to think, just a few hours ago he’d been fighting Sanjar in the ditch near their school. How quickly things could change when you realized what was important. And what wasn’t. Now he understood; dying wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to you. It wasn’t even close.

  “Mr. Zahedi, I got to go,” said Hector. His voice still shook but for an altogether different reason. “I’m going to leave Sanjar’s phone here, turned on, so I won’t be able to talk to you. Just home in on the signal.” He lay down the phone, and when he mounted the ladder he could hear Mr. Zahedi calling his name through the tiny speaker.

  It had taken forever to climb the ladder. A torturous, frightened eternity. But now his friends needed him and he moved like Chaz doing backflips. In less than a minute, his feet rang on the steel platform. Seconds later, he let go of the bottom ladder ten feet off the ground. He hit the dirt and rolled smoothly to his feet. He found a three-foot section of two-by-four, and hefted the wooden club in his hand. “Whatever it takes,” Hector whispered to himself.