by Robert Maxxe
"Forget about going inside," Lon said. "The place is locked, there's valuable property being stored. Break in and you've committed a felony."
Carrie said nothing. Bending over, she searched the ground for a rock—there was still just enough daylight to distinguish shapes. She saw no rocks, but came up with a large chunk of brick. She moved back to the window.
Lon caught her wrist as she raised her arm to strike. "Darling, I can't let you do this! If someone at that tile plant hears glass breaking, they'll call the cops—"
"They're too far away to hear anything," Carrie said, and wrenched her arm free.
Lon moved between her and the window. "Suppose there's an alarm system. Carrie, you can't expose yourself to—"
"I'll tell you what I can't do," Carrie broke in harshly. "I can't walk away from a chance to find out what the hell the truth is about that damn game. I'll take my own chances, Lon, before I'll stand by and watch another kid die. Now get out of my way. Leave if you don't want to be involved. But I'm going in there, and I'll take the consequences."
He faced her in the gloom. She couldn't see his expression, but the set of his shoulders told her he was angry. Then he moved aside.
Carrie brought her arm back and with all the strength she could muster swung the brick into the window. The glass shattered, leaving a mark like an enormous snowflake at the point of impact. But the lacing of metal wire held all the fragments together. She struck again and again, and small pieces began to fall away, though the opening remained blocked by the wire netting.
Lon watched for a minute, then walked off to the car. Carrie wouldn't give up. She'd tear that wire out if she had to. She put her fingers through it, felt the sharpness—
Then Lon was at her side again. He had brought the jack handle from the trunk of his car. "Let me try," he said.
Slipping the iron rod through the wire net, he twisted and snapped the filaments apart, repeating the process until he was able to peel back a large patch. Then he took off his overcoat and wadded it over the jagged glass at the bottom of the opening.
Grasping Carrie by the waist, he hoisted her until she could ease through the hole and jump down safely. Then Lon handed the flashlight and jack handle to her through the opening, and climbed inside himself.
At the nearest stack of crates, Carrie pressed the flashlight to a seam in the boards of the lowest one, then put her eye to the narrow opening.
"It's the game, all right. I see the screen."
"Let's find one of those crates standing free," Lon suggested. "It'll be easier to get it open."
Outside the windows the day was just shading to twilight, but in here the towers of bulky crates made it almost as dark as night. Carrie swept the flashlight around as she and Lon scouted the storage area. The crates were arranged in aisles, each one two stacks in width, nine crates to a stack, eighteen along the length of an aisle. Though some of the rows were short, or had gaps where games had apparently been removed and shipped, Carrie was able to estimate a total of between two and three thousand games still in the warehouse.
And how many had already been sent out, to how many places?
In a far corner, they found a group of single crates set on the floor. Against the wall nearby was a counter on which were several cans of black paint, a few brushes, and some cut-out stencils of the alphabet, seemingly used to mark the boxes with shipping destinations. One of the crates already bore a marking: ANN ARBOR, MICH.
"Anything special about Ann Arbor?" Carrie asked.
Lon shrugged. "University of Michigan's there. . . ." He went to one of the crates, grasped the corners, and tilted it on edge, grunting with the effort. "Heavy mother," he announced.
"No need to move it. We'll open it right here."
"I'm not moving. I'm weighing." He lowered the first crate, and tipped up another. "Just as heavy."
After a third and a fourth, he said, "Seems I was wrong."
"About what?"
"The interface. If most of the games were nothing more than a screen and controls—a shell driven by a memory in just one out of the nine—they wouldn't be this heavy. Hell, we make stuff now that holds half a million bytes and you can balance it on your fingertips. So these must be loaded. Every one jammed to the gills."
"But then why link them together? Each one should be complete in itself."
Lon shook his head and blew out a deep breath, as though the effort of providing an answer was no less exhausting than lifting the crates. "God knows. Connect these in series and you could be putting together enough memory to hold ten thousand encyclopedias. You wouldn't dent that capacity running a game. Only one reason I can think of," Lon concluded. "It allows the machines to communicate, talk to each other."
"Talk—?"
"Sorry, figure of speech. I mean they could exchange data. Each machine in the network could access anything stored in the others. Except that doesn't make sense either for these things. It would amount to games telling each other about what happened in a particular round, strategies they used—as if they were comparing notes on their performance."
"You make it sound like golfers in a locker room."
"It would be sort of like that," Lon agreed. "That's why it seems crazy. . . ."
Carrie shuddered at the image that humanized the machines. Suddenly she could imagine the thousands of crates towering around them each containing something alive, all of them listening.
Not content with partial evidence, Lon had moved to a fifth crate and was making an effort to lift it.
Carrie glanced over at the workbench on the wall and noticed a sheaf of papers on a clipboard near the stenciling equipment. She went over for a look.
The top sheet was a bill of lading for shipment of "nine video games" to a trucking terminal in Michigan. Flipping to the second sheet, Carrie saw a similar document for nine machines shipped to Klamath Falls, Oregon.
She called Lon over and they shuffled through the rest of the papers together.
The games were being sent all over the United States, some to large cities—Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis—but many more to small towns in Arkansas, Montana or North Dakota, towns Carrie had never heard of. Towns like Millport.
"You see any pattern?" she asked Lon.
"Could be they're just customers—wherever they can be found. That's the usual way of doing business."
"There's nothing usual about this. The people up the road think this place is empty, that Peale's moved on. But he's still here, apparently shipping stuff out in the dead of night—the same sneaky way he set up the arcade." Abruptly, Carrie grabbed the jack handle from Lon's hand and started attacking one of the crates. Jamming the metal shaft between two boards, she pried relentlessly until a chip of wood flew away. Then she shoved the rod in deeper, pried harder. The board creaked on its nails and—
Lights.
The sudden blaze was blinding after the darkness. For a moment, she thought that Lon had accidentally pointed the bright beam of his flashlight into her eyes. Then she realized it was all around her, coming from dazzling floods on the ceiling.
Lon grabbed the jack handle and pulled her down into a crouch behind the group of crates.
"Shouldn't we run?" she whispered.
"Let's see how much we're up against No use running if it's the police. My car's outside, they'll already have the plate number, And if it's—"
He stopped at the sound that came echoing across the storage area. A door scraping open, followed by the slow click of heels on the concrete floor. Lon tugged Carrie farther back behind the sheltering boxes.
The footsteps continued, the slow, deliberate tattoo of one person alone. Moving cautiously. Stalking.
Carrie had never been so scared. There had been nightmares after Mike's death—filthy men with wild, violent eyes breaking into her house, pursuing her and the children, intent on slaughtering them all. Waking in a sweat, she'd feel her heart pounding against her chest like a battering ram. But that terror, shattering as it
was, derived from a dream, could be dispelled by switching on the bedside lamp. Here the lights were already on. This pursuit was real. This threat of . . . murder? If this was Peale stalking them, where would he draw the line at protecting secrets he had already done so much to keep? (And could it be anyone else? The police would have come in numbers, two at least, announced themselves. . . . )
The footfalls clacked against the hard stone floor at the same slow, constant pace.
Then, occasionally, they paused. As if Peale (she could only think now that it was he) was probing a crevice, peering around a corner.
Oh yes, he would kill. Carrie was gripped by a growing certainty. From the start she had judged him as a man with a mission; he would do whatever was necessary to carry it out.
The click of heels was getting louder. Nearer.
There was thunder in her breast. With every beat it seemed her heart would burst. Small comfort to see Lon next to her, one hand holding up the jack handle, poised for defense.
Click clack. Click clack. Click clack.
And still nearer.
Through a cleft between two boxes, Carrie caught a flash of movement. Shifting her head, she found a better angle of vision through the crack, could see along a portion of the aisle nearest, could see the figure standing in the aisle, no more than twenty feet away.
She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her own cry.
It was him. The same stoic look on his face, the same chalky appearance, as though he were himself not warm flesh, but a messenger of death. He had paused to look directly toward the corner, at the crate Carrie had begun to pry open.
And in his hand he held a gun, which he raised slightly higher as he took his next step forward.
25
"Please come out."
There was nothing harsh in the tone, not the least hint of threat.
The threat was all in the gun.
He must know that he had the edge in weapons, Carrie thought. He had walked up unafraid, near enough to be an easy target.
Again he spoke. "Is that you, Mrs. Foster?" So calmly.
The clamp of terror closed around her heart. He knew it was she! Either he'd been here all along, watching—or he had been watching her for days, following her, since she had left her purse at the arcade.
"Be sensible," Peale tried once more, quietly. "Let's talk. You'll come to no harm. I promise."
Carrie glanced to Lon, who had been peering through a crack between the boxes. He shook his head: they would surrender all advantage by exposing themselves.
But what point was there in running? Peale knew where to find her. "I can't talk to someone pointing a gun at me!" Carrie shouted.
"Yes, yes, of course," Peale called back. "This neighborhood, you see . . . and I wasn't positive it was you. . . . I'm putting it away now. . . ."
She watched through the crack as he slipped the pistol into a jacket pocket.
"Keep him close," Lon whispered. "If he goes for the gun, I'll clip him with this." He waggled the tire iron, then dropped it close against his side to hide it.
They stood up together. Carrie felt oddly chagrined, like a child popping out of someplace where she'd been forbidden to play.
Peale gave her a long look. "Why, Mrs. Foster?" he said, and swept a glance over Lon. "Why do you and your friend find it necessary to break into my place of business?" He actually managed to sound unfairly persecuted.
The pretense tripped the switch on Carrie's temper. "To find out what the hell you're hiding, Mr. Peale—what you're doing to my child, all the children in Millport." Her eyes switched for a second to the piles of crates. "And in a lot of other places, from the look of things."
"Doing to them . . .?" It was a second before the comprehension crept into his eyes, and he added in a hushed, wounded tone, "You think I'm hurting them?"
"I've seen it," Carrie declared. "Or don't you think it's proof enough that one of your . . . your recruits was found dead last night?"
Peale's lips moved as if in shocked, soundless repetition: dead.
A fair imitation, Carrie mused, of a man who was genuinely shaken and befuddled. The sham should have fueled her outrage even more.
Yet there was that strange quality about Peale that blunted the will to attack. With the bleached paleness of his eyes, the chalky skin, it was as though a mist clung to him, as if he were a hybrid supernatural creature—half man, half cloud. Carrie felt that her anger could touch him no more than a sword could scar the air.
"This may not be the right way to get answers," Lon contributed, "but there are things about your business, sir, that call for explanations—and it seems you've been trying to avoid giving them."
Peale turned to Lon. "May I ask who you are?"
"Lon Evans. I'm a friend of—"
"As if he had to ask," Carrie broke in hotly. It irked her to hear Lon being so diplomatic, calling Peale sir. "You think he doesn't know? He's been spying on us, Lon, because he's afraid I'll stop him."
"I haven't spied on you," Peale said earnestly.
"You knew I was here even before you'd seen me."
"Two and two, Mrs. Foster. When I arrived here and saw the place had been broken into, I hesitated to enter. I went up to ask Mr. D'Armetta at the tileworks if he'd seen anyone suspicious, and he mentioned a woman, gave me a description." Peale's gray lips twitched, almost a smile. "It sounded like you, Mrs. Foster. And finding your purse in the arcade did give me the notion you might be . . . concerned." He added solicitously, "I do hope you got it back all right. Your assistant was so busy, I just left it where I thought you'd see it."
Carrie was tempted to challenge him about the missing snapshots of Nick and Emily. But she wondered: could she have mislaid them herself?
Damn. She was being disarmed and confused by his placid excuses.
"Listen, Mr. Peale," she declared. "I don't care how many clever lies you've got to cover the way you've sneaked around. A boy died last night—and he's dead because that game of yours didn't want him anymore. Because he was torped, Mr. Peale! You know what that means, don't you?" She dared a step forward. "Now I don't have any more time to be patient, reasonable. You're going to tell me: what are you doing to those children?" She lurched forward, seized by a sudden urge to grab him, prove that he was more than an untouchable specter, a wisp of cloud.
Lon caught her arm and yanked her back. "Easy, easy," he murmured. And she remembered the gun in Peale's pocket.
But he didn't reach for it, just shied away slightly. After a moment he said, "I understand why you're upset, and I'll answer all your questions. But could we go to my office and sit down? Frankly, all this has upset me, too. . . ."
Carrie was reluctant. If Peale was shaken, that was how she wanted him. But Lon took the initiative. "Lead the way."
He conducted them through a door at the front of the warehouse area and along a narrow hallway lit by cheap fluorescent fixtures.
They were halfway along the corridor, when she felt her body enveloped in a chill. It came on so unexpectedly that her first association was with the sort of "cold zone" she had read about in ghost stories, or reports of occult phenomena. Haunted houses were supposed to have cold spots like this.
But a few steps farther on, they came to a doorway from which frigid air was emanating. Looking in as she passed, Carrie saw a small antechamber and, beyond that, past an open threshold, walls striped by horizontal rows of pipes, white with frosted ice. No ghosts, no poltergeists. Only some kind of freezer locker.
At the head of the corridor, Peale paused outside a darkened room and reached around the door frame to turn on an overhead light by the wall switch. He seemed anxious to reassure Lon and Carrie he would not try to escape by preceding them into darkness.
It was the room they had seen dimly when they looked through the first window. Visible now were a chair behind the desk, and a second chair stuck in a corner.
As Peale sat behind the desk, Lon brought the chair from the corner for Carrie, the
n took up a place by the wall. Lon was no longer bothering to conceal the jack handle, and Peale registered the object with a distressed glance before beginning.
"Would you mind just telling me first," he said, "about this awful incident—the boy who died?"
Carrie balked, frustrated at being put so quickly in a position where she, not Peale, was the one answering questions.
"Go ahead, Carrie," Lon said. "He has a right to know."
As soon as she was talking about it, she couldn't help getting worked up. It wasn't enough to report the bare facts. She had to recount the poignant appeal Alan had made to her to be reinstated into the game. Telling it, Carrie could almost see the child alive in front of her again, feel his despair.
Peale listened intently, making sympathetic noises, little groans and clicks of his tongue.
At the end, Carrie succeeded in restraining her emotions. But there was no hiding her bitterness when she concluded:
"There. Does that satisfy your right to know?"
Peale bowed his head. "I'm sorry," he said very quietly. "I wish you could believe that it's no less horrible for me to face the possibility that I . . . the thing I make played even a small part in this tragedy." His eyes came up to meet Carrie's. "But even if it were fair to say that the Pomfrey boy might be living right now if he had never played Spacescape . . . I just cannot see what I have done to justify your conviction that I deliberately set out to harm him, or anyone else. Yes, I know, children who play these games often get caught up in the fantasy in ways that have unfortunate results. I remember in my own youth the hue and cry against comic books because there were children who tried flying out windows to imitate fantastic heroes. Later the villain was television. Now it's these games. But I swear to you, Mrs. Foster, no harm was ever meant. No harm, really, no harm . . ." He sank back into his chair, shaking his head.