Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Sorry’s stepmother gives you a kindly smile.

  “You have to understand how hard it is to have a sick son and not be able to do anything to help him. I think he thought it was easier to concentrate on his work.”

  >|

  No real information there.

  I go through the options again and ask about the diabetes.

  Sorry’s stepmother looks surprised.

  “Is this about all the insulin I ordered from Canada? That was for my cat! What cat? Oh, she’s around here somewhere.”

  >|

  Disturbing.

  My next question is about what happened three weeks ago, although I am not sure I can bear knowing.

  Sorry’s stepmother actually looks troubled.

  “You should have seen the expression on his face when I came into the hospital room. He’d been feeling better that day and I guess he’d seen me inject something into the bag attached to his drip. It was just vitamins, but I think he—well, never mind. I was bringing him green Jell-O. He looked at me and it was like he was seeing me for the first time.”

  >|

  I go through the options one more time and choose the only one left, the question about her credit card.

  Sorry’s stepmother looks surprised.

  “Do you know something about those fraudulent charges? I swear I never ordered tetrodotoxin. I don’t even know what that is.”

  >|

  “What’s with the tetro-whatever?” Decker eats a piece of the strawberry cake Toad procured and takes another sip of his latte. “Is that what she killed him with?”

  I open up my browser, log in to the Internet, and search for “tetrodotoxin.” I frown at the screen. “It’s some kind of toad neurotoxin. Poisonous.”

  “But what about the insulin?” Toad asks. “I don’t get this. Which one did she use? Does he not know? Are we supposed to figure it out, like in a murder mystery? Doesn’t Sorry remember how dumb we are? He’s got to just spell shit out.”

  “Yeah,” I say, barely paying attention. Typing words in the game is enough like chatting to Sorry online that it allows me to—almost—pretend he’s not dead. And yet, the whole game is a reminder that he is.

  The Lazarus Game. I guess this is Sorry’s way of rising from the grave to name his murderer.

  Find proof, I type in, but the game doesn’t seem to know what I am looking for.

  Go to dining room, I type in. It still doesn’t know what I am looking for.

  Go to kitchen, I type. Still, nothing.

  Go to funeral home, I type, which seems morbid. I’m almost relieved when it doesn’t work.

  Exit house, I type. Finally, this time I get something else, a menu of options.

  You are standing outside on the patchy lawn in front of Sorry’s house. Cars are parked out front, like there’s a party going on inside, although you know it’s a pretty grim party. It’s afternoon and the Florida sun is beating down mercilessly. You’re starting to sweat.

  Where would you like to go? Type the number to travel or type “X” to stay where you are.

  1. The Police Station

  2. The Hospital

  3. The Graveyard

  4. The Hardware Store

  >|

  “What the hell?” I say. “The hardware store?”

  Toad and Decker were discussing something in low voices, but they stop abruptly when I speak. They both lean in to look at the screen.

  Toad whistles. “I can’t believe you think having the option of going to the hardware store is worse than going to the graveyard.”

  “Uh,” Decker says, blinking at the screen a few times. “Can you google that toad poison again?”

  “How come?” I ask.

  Instead of answering, he opens his bag and pulls out his own laptop. “Spell it?”

  I do and he starts clicking. After a few minutes, his face goes blank, then an expression of horror flashes across it. I can’t even fathom what he could have found. What’s worse than being poisoned by your own stepmother? In fairy tales, stepmothers are wicked, jealous, untrustworthy bitches with poisoned apples, but my mom remarried six years ago, so I am pretty sure not all stepparents are like that. My stepdad drops me off at school most mornings. Some days we get coffees and donuts and sit in the parking lot eating them until the bell rings, just talking. I couldn’t imagine him wanting to hurt me. But I guess Sorry’s stepmother seemed nice too, until she didn’t.

  “I think you better look at this,” Decker says, turning his computer and pointing to the screen. “Read that part.”

  I look where he’s pointing. There were cases of people being given tetrodotoxin and seeming to die, but actually being in a state of near-death, conscious the whole time. For a while, it was even alleged that tetrodotoxin was an essential ingredient to brainwash people into thinking they were zombies.

  “Now read this part,” he says, and pulls up another window. It has the amount of time a person can last with the air in a coffin. Five and a half hours.

  “Fuck you,” I say. “He’s dead. We saw him buried.”

  But I am thinking of the message he left for us on the back of the poster. The one with the time limit we didn’t understand.

  YOU HAVE FIVE HOURS TO WIN.

  THE CLOCK STARTED WHEN I WENT IN THE GROUND.

  And I think about the options of places to go—the police station, where we could report his stepmother (if we had proof) for making him sick; the hospital, where we could go to try to find that proof and might stumble on something else, something that would send us to the hardware store and then the graveyard.

  The graveyard.

  Decker snorts. “But if he faked his own death, then he’d have to seem—”

  “Whoa,” says Toad, interrupting him. “What? Faked his own death? Both of you need to stop communicating brain-to-brain and spell things out for me.”

  “No,” I say, standing up and jerking my power cord out of the wall. “We need to go. We need to go now!”

  —

  We get to the graveyard just as the sun is starting to set. The sky is shimmering with gold, gleaming on our Home Depot shovels in the backseat. I feel like we’re on a real adventure, the kind that people in real life don’t go on. This is the kind of thing that only happens in video games, and right now, I get why. No one in real life would ever want to feel like this.

  I am scared we’re going to be arrested, and I am terrified of what we’re going to find inside his casket. We get out. We get our brand-new shovels.

  The dirt is fresh, easy to scoop. My heart is hammering.

  We’re awkward at first, none of us used to this kind of physical work. We’re the kids who spend our free time in front of our computers. We’re the kids whose moms are always going on about “needing fresh air and vitamin D.” My arms hurt and I don’t know how to swing the dirt away in the right rhythm. Also, it spills back in if we don’t toss it far enough from the side. We smack our shovels into one another’s more often than not, sometimes hard enough to sting my hand. Still, we keep going.

  “What if he comes back as a zombie?” Toad asks.

  I give him a look.

  “It could happen! He’s using some kind of zombie drug and we don’t know what else is in his system. This is how outbreaks happen.”

  I just keep digging. Decker shakes his head.

  Sweat rolls down my neck. I keep hearing the noises of cars going by in the distance and nearly jumping out of my skin. We realize that we’re going to have to make the hole wider if we’re going to get down there and prize open the top, which spurs a round of groans.

  “Okay, well, what if he’s not awake yet?” Toad asks. I realize that he’s talking to talk, that it’s his way of managing his nerves. It’s funny, on the drive down he was quiet and I figured that was how he normally was. But robbing a graveyard turned him into a chatterbox. “Like, we know this stuff wears off, but how long does it take? And won’t he look dead until then? How are we going to get him out of
here if he looks dead? I don’t want to touch him if he’s like that.”

  “Let’s just try not to get arrested,” Decker says quietly. “I heard Florida jails are no joke.”

  “My mom will kill me if I get picked up by the cops for messing with a grave,” I say, and Decker laughs.

  For a moment, it occurs to me that this is crazy. That maybe my mother is right about friendship, because I do feel differently about Decker and Toad now that we’ve been together in real life. Now that we’ve heard the timbre of one another’s laughter. Now that we’ve learned one another’s Starbucks order and how we like our burritos at Chipotle and who can burp the loudest. Now that I learned how far they were willing to go for someone they never met. After all this, it makes me realize that we didn’t know Sorry at all.

  We’re putting ourselves in the way of a whole lot of trouble for someone we’ve never met.

  Then my shovel hits wood.

  “Sorry?” Toad calls softly. His voice shakes.

  But either Sorry can’t hear us or he can’t reply, because there’s no sound but traffic from the nearby road and wind ruffling the thick leaves of the nearby palms.

  Squatting down, we start to clear dirt so that we can open the casket itself. By now, I am one big ball of sweat and my mother’s dress is caked in dirt. My stockings ripped at the knee without my even noticing.

  As I move earth, I have these moments of total immersion in what I’m doing and these other moments where I am totally aware that this is a crazy thing to be doing and I must be crazy for doing it.

  Then the casket is cleared and there’s no way to avoid our real purpose. We’re going to open up a coffin and it’s possible we’re going to see a corpse. In fact, as we get ready to wedge open the wood with our Home Depot crowbar, even though I know exactly why we decided to do this, it seems inconceivable to me that we’re going to see anything but a corpse.

  “Stay back,” Toad says, hopping down into the hole, wedging the crowbar under the lid. Decker and I hover above him.

  And then, with a splintering sound, the lid is off and I am seeing Soren Carp in the flesh for the first time. His eyes are closed, long black lashes sweeping his cheeks. His hair is kind of a mess and he’s wrapped in linen. He looks pale, his lips tinted blue.

  “He sure doesn’t smell dead,” Toad says.

  And even though it sounds rude coming out of his mouth, it’s a relief that it’s true. There is no scent of rot blooming in the air.

  “We’ve got to call 911,” Decker says, looking down at Soren’s face. “He poisoned himself. He could still die.”

  I shake my head. “We can’t. If he’s in a hospital, his parents would get notified.”

  His stepmother was his guardian, the one who’d been making all his medical decisions. We have no legal right to make any decisions and, in fact, the police would probably take us away for questioning. They might not even really listen to what we were saying until it was too late.

  “We should have played the rest of the game,” Toad says. “I thought it was stupid that we could go to all those places, but we probably should have figured out what he wanted us to do.”

  Decker hops down, going on one knee next to Sorry’s body. “What do you want us to do, buddy?” he whispers.

  I almost expect Sorry to get up and tell us, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t move at all.

  Toad climbs out of the hole and indicates I should get down. “Say something to him.”

  “Me?” I edge over to the casket, stumbling a little. I look up. “What should I say?”

  Toad clears his throat. “He liked you.”

  I am too surprised to know how to respond.

  Toad waits for me to say something and when I don’t, goes on. “I’m not sure if he ever even went out with a girl. I mean, he’s fifteen and he’s been sick for three years. So unless he was making it with girls at twelve, probably not.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  Toad shrugs. “I don’t know. I just mean, he had good reasons for not telling you—one of those reasons being that he’s got no game. But I know he liked you…likes you, so he’d be more likely to listen if you were the one talking to him.”

  I glance toward Decker. He looks like he wants to ask me something, but he doesn’t. Instead, he climbs out of the hole too, sending a shower of dirt raining down on Soren’s face.

  I squat and put my hand on Sorry’s arm. His skin is cold from being deep in the ground. “Hey,” I say. “It’s Cat. We played the game, but now it’s your turn. Time to wake up.”

  He doesn’t move.

  “We’re risking our asses for you,” I say.

  “Nice,” Decker calls down. “How about saying we love him?”

  “How about saying you love him, Cat? How about ‘If you wake up, I will give you a big, fat, sloppy kiss,’ ” Toad says.

  “Shut up,” I tell him.

  “Soren,” Decker says. “Listen, if you wake up, one of us will give you a big, fat, sloppy kiss. I can’t guarantee it will be Cat, but one of us will definitely do it. I am ready.”

  “Soren,” Toad says. “Listen, how about this—if you don’t wake up, one of us will give you a big, fat, sloppy kiss and I can guarantee it won’t be Cat.”

  We can’t help it, we start laughing. We laugh helplessly, the relief like the release of a leg cramp.

  Then, abruptly, Soren starts to cough.

  I suck in my breath so sharply that I nearly choke. Toad yelps. Decker falls backward onto his ass.

  A moment later, Sorry is half sitting, turned on his side, puking his guts up. I have never been so happy to see someone vomit. I crawl over to smooth his hair out of his face. His skin feels cold and clammy and when he turns to look at me, his eyes are bright with something like fever.

  “You guys are insane,” he says, the words slurred, then flops down face-first in the dirt.

  It turns out that I do know him, even though we’ve never met before in person. It turns out that he knows us too. “You’re one to talk,” I tell him.

  And it turns out that sometimes, you really do get to start from your save point. You do get another life.

  You are standing in the graveyard with your friend, who until very recently, you thought was dead. Soon the police are going to come. Soon, he’s going to have to go to a hospital, even though he hates hospitals. Soon, he’s going to have to explain how he did it, how he knew he was going to die and why he decided to try to trick his way out of a locked bedroom in the most gruesome way possible. Soon he is going to have to thank you, even though there is no way to ever really thank you enough. But for right now, he just stands next to you and you all look up a little, into the middle distance. The wind blows your hair back from your faces and you strike a super badass pose.

  <>

  To play again from the beginning, press “X.”

  * * *

  Holly Black is the author of bestselling contemporary fantasy books for kids and teens. Some of her titles include the Spiderwick Chronicles (with Tony DiTerlizzi), the Modern Faerie Tale series, the Curse Workers series, Doll Bones, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, the Magisterium series (with Cassandra Clare), and The Darkest Part of the Forest. She has been a finalist for an Eisner Award and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and a Newbery Honor. She currently lives in New England with her husband and son in a house with a secret door.

  SURVIVAL HORROR

  Seanan McGuire

  SOME THINGS ARE MYSTERIES NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND, BUT BECAUSE WHEN THEY STOOD UP AND SAID “GET OUT,” THE SENSIBLE PEOPLE ALL DID AS THEY WERE TOLD. NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS SOLVING.

  —Alice Healy

  A COMFORTABLY RENOVATED BASEMENT IN PORTLAND, OREGON

  NOW

  Artie was burning scented candles again. It wasn’t the real eye-watering stuff that he sometimes used when he got desperate—strictly Yankee Candle, artificial fruit and cliché Hallo
ween all the way—but it was bad enough that I was breathing through my shirt as I tried to focus on the latest exploits of the X-Men, and not on the increasingly strong sensation of drowning in candied pumpkin and mango smoothies.

  I tried making some theatrical gagging noises. Artie, his attention focused entirely on his laptop, ignored me. He didn’t even turn around to find out whether something was actually wrong. He just kept typing. I wrinkled my nose at his oblivious back and returned to my comic book, where Emma Frost—telepath with no time for this shit—was not murdering Cyclops—energy manipulator who caused way too much shit. Fun for the whole family.

  If I was going to read comic books and marinate in the fumes from an entire scented-candle outlet, Artie’s room was the place to do it. Most of the guys from my comic book store would have happily stabbed one or more family members in the throat if it got them sole ownership of Artie’s basement lair, which had been converted for his use years before. Apart from the bed where I was reading and the desk where he was…well, whatever he was doing, there were shelves upon shelves loaded with comics, books, collectables, and his not-insubstantial DVD collection. If there was ever some sort of disaster that forced us to stay inside for six months, we might actually make a dent in his unwatched TV boxed sets. Until then, they lined the walls and helped keep the heating bills down.

  “Scott’s a tool,” I said, not really expecting a response. “I mean, why does he keep getting otherwise intelligent women interested in him? It can’t be the hair. He may be the only person in the entire Marvel Universe who’s never had a decent haircut.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Artie.

  That was something: that meant he at least was still aware that I was in the room. “And they’re all telepaths, have you noticed that? Maybe he could give you dating tips. Explain how you and Sarah can make things work.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Artie.

  “Not that you really need any help. You just need to stop denying your raw animal passions and allow yourselves to go at it like rabid weasels in a sack.”