by Dustin Brady
I sneaked a peek inside the green room. The Hindenburg was slowly walking around, inspecting the walls with its tentacles.
Scraaaaaaaaaape.
Eric started using his foot to scoot a lightsaber closer to him. I held a finger up to my mouth. Shhhhhh! We held our breath and listened. Suddenly, a loud voice broke the silence. Max’s voice.
“You thought you were d-d-d-done!”
I jumped a mile.
“I h-h-h-ave ooooooooooooone more . . . ”
I looked at Eric. He looked at me. Suddenly, a third head appeared in the hole between us. The Hindenburg.
“AHHHHH!” In a blind panic, I picked up the nearest object and swung as hard as I could.
POW!
Fortunately, the nearest object happened to be the rocket-powered sledgehammer. I connected with the Hindenburg’s face and sent it flying back into the green room.
“GO! GO! GO!”
Eric and I ran down the hall toward the forking paths. With five different paths, we had an 80 percent chance of picking a different one from the Hindenburg.
Squishsquishsquishsquish.
I looked down to see that our chances of picking a different path had shrunk to zero. We were leaving a footprint trail that would lead the Hindenburg directly to us. Suddenly, I had an idea. I grabbed the Reubenverse flag from the ground and kept running.
Squishsquishsquishsquish.
“He’s gonna know where we are!” Eric panicked.
“No, he’s gonna know where our footprints are,” I corrected as I turned down the left hallway.
“THAT’S THE SAME THING!”
Squishsquishsquishsquish.
I stopped Eric after we rounded the first corner, and I spread the flag on the ground like a blanket. “Hop on.”
“Ohhhhhhh.”
We shuffled as fast as we could. If we could get to another hallway without leaving tracks, we’d buy ourselves a few extra minutes. I kept nervously glancing at the green room hole, waiting for the Hindenburg to reemerge. We weren’t shuffling fast enough. I finally pulled up the flag’s corners. “Potato sack!”
Eric followed my lead, and we potato-sack-hopped to the far-right hallway before the Hindenburg returned.
“Now what?” Eric mouthed after we’d made it safely around the corner.
I pointed back toward the green room. Eric shook his head violently. I nodded. Running for the green room might expose us to the Hindenburg, but at least it’d give us a little hope. I peeked to make sure the Hindenburg had followed our tracks down the left hallway, then ran.
Squishsquishsquishsquishsssssssssssssss.
I choked back a yelp. My shoe sole had finally melted all the way through, and I was now basically running on hot coals. I tried to picture myself running over ice cubes instead.
“YOWWWWWWW!”
I turned to see Eric holding his left foot. Apparently, he had not used my ice cube trick. Behind Eric, the Hindenburg emerged from the left hallway with its blaster aimed at us.
“Hurry up!” I yelled. Eric ran around me, and I picked up a shield from our pile of junk.
BLAST!
My shield disintegrated. I picked up another one and kept running.
BLAST!
My second shield disintegrated too. I picked up one last shield before diving into the green room.
BLAST!
The third shot passed right through the shield. Fortunately, it also went over my head.
“I loooooooook fffffffffffforward,” the Max video said behind me, still struggling to finish the speech.
“Move over!” Eric yelled.
I looked up to see Eric standing in the middle of the room with his T-shirt tied around his foot, spinning our rocket sledgehammer faster and faster. I rolled out of the way just as the Hindenburg burst through the wall and Eric let the hammer fly. This time, the alien was ready for it. The Hindenburg simply reached out a tentacle, caught the hammer, and crunched it into rubble.
Eric, to his credit, was not fazed at all. He charged his fist while staring down the Hindenburg.
“Find it qu-qu-quite enliiiiiiiiiightening,” Max continued.
I quietly charged my fist too. If we timed things right—
GACK!
Without shifting its gaze from Eric for even a second, the Hindenburg shot out its left tentacle and grabbed my throat. I gulped for air, but the grip was too tight.
“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere,” Max said.
My fist finished charging. If I could just keep it clenched, maybe we could still try the combo punch. Eric took a step forward, and the Hindenburg tightened its grip even more. My head felt like it was going to pop off my shoulders.
“Issssszzzzzzzzzzzzz,” Max continued, his voice breaking up.
Eric raised his fist. The Hindenburg wrapped even more of its tentacle around my head. Blackness took over my vision.
“Your re-re-re-rewarrrrrrrrrrrrrrd,” Max finished.
DING!
In one last effort before losing consciousness, I limply swung my fist back and forth.
POWOWOWOWOW!
Eric jump-punched and connected with my fist. Black hole. Crawling skin. I waited for the Hindenburg to loosen its grip. White energy burst. Thunderclap. The Hindenburg barely flinched.
The key word in that sentence is “barely.”
Because the Hindenburg did flinch. Just a little. And that little flinch was all I needed to gulp a lungful of air and regain my vision.
When I could see again, I found two trophies just out of reach to my right. Eric grabbed one and disappeared. Before the Hindenburg could retighten its grip around my neck, I put everything I had into swinging and squirming and shimmying toward the trophy. That effort, combined with the slippery sweat covering my body, gave me the final few inches I needed to touch the trophy with my bare toe.
It felt cold. Then, it disappeared.
Chapter 17
Trust Nothing
GAAAAASP!
I grabbed at the tentacle around my throat while trying to fill my lungs with air.
“Jesse!”
GAAAAASP!
I kicked and thrashed harder. If I could just get the Hindenburg to let up a little . . .
“Jesse! Snap out of it!”
I opened my eyes to see Eric standing over me.
“I’m . . . choking,” I wheezed.
“No, you’re not. We teleported.”
I felt my neck again. Eric was right—the tentacle was gone, but my windpipe still felt like it was getting crushed. I tried a test swallow, then took a few deep breaths. Everything seemed normal. Finally, I squinted at Eric. Whoa. Not normal. “What in the world are you wearing?”
Eric tugged on his black jumpsuit. “You’re wearing the same thing. Apparently, it’s our uniform here.”
I sat up to see where “here” was and gasped when I saw an enormous castle from the future stretching into the sky. It looked like someone couldn’t decide whether they wanted to build a castle or a skyscraper, so they settled on Frankensteining together this 1,000-foot glass-and-metal monstrosity.
“Welcome to Planet Max!” Max’s voice boomed from the sky. “I have one final test for you. Actually, it’s more of a lesson.”
I stood up to get a better look at our surroundings. Max’s castle of doom was situated on top of an island floating over a bottomless pit. Red clouds swirled overhead. And though the temperature wasn’t quite oven-level like the maze, it was still really hot.
“You’ve proven yourselves worthy warriors through tests of strength, courage, and endurance,” Max continued. “But to get the most out of your ability, you need one final skill. It wasn’t until I learned this skill myself that I became an Ultimate Warrior. Today, you, too, will become an Ultimate Warrior because today, you will learn wisdo
m.”
If Eric and I could roll our eyes any farther, we’d be looking at our brains. We just wanted to find Max, not listen to some weird lecture on the art of war. Unfortunately, all Max wanted to do was deliver weird lectures on the art of war.
“Lesson number one: Trust nothing,” he said. “The system was built to keep you down. A true warrior doesn’t take the path marked for him. He doesn’t trust it. He makes his own path. He opens his own doors.”
We waited for more pearls of wisdom, but Max seemed to be done for now. “Thanks, Confucius,” Eric grumbled as he reached for the handle of the 20-foot castle door.
HISSSSS!
Without warning, an angry black eel shot out of the door’s keyhole and latched on to Eric’s hand.
“HELP!” Eric screamed as he flailed.
I tried helping from a distance by yelling at the eel. When that didn’t work, I edged closer and karate-chopped the eel’s back. The creature finally let go when Eric landed a roundhouse kick.
“You OK?” I asked.
Eric grimaced as he rubbed a growing black welt on his hand. “It really burns.”
I stared at the door. What were we supposed to do? I certainly wasn’t going to get near that keyhole again. Then I remembered Max’s words. “There’s another way in,” I said.
“Huh?” Eric asked, still annoyed about the eel.
“A true warrior opens his own doors. There’s a secret way in.”
Eric looked at the sky as he continued to rub his hand. “This is my least favorite video game of all time.”
I looked around. How does one find a secret passage, anyway? Maybe there was a fake bush we had to pull? A misshaped brick to push? A shovel for tunneling?
Eric had a different idea. He stood in front of the door (far out of range of the keyhole eel) and kicked as hard as he could.
“HIYAAAOWWWWW!” Eric’s karate scream turned into a yelp of pain when his foot passed through the door, dropping him straight onto his butt.
I stepped over Eric and through the totally fake door. “Amazing,” I whispered.
Just inside the door was an umbrella stand filled with swords. “TAKE ONE,” a sign read. I grabbed a curved sword that looked like one of my favorites from Planet Pirate. Eric went for the biggest sword he could find. It immediately turned into an eel that bit his hand.
“I HATE EELS SO MUCH!”
I cut the eel in half, then helped Eric pick a sword that wouldn’t bite him. We stepped through the welcome foyer into the main tower.
“Unnnnnnng,” I groaned.
As tall as Max’s castle looked from the outside, it felt even bigger inside. Never-ending flights of stairs wound around the tower and crossed overhead at impossible optical-illusion angles. There were doors too. Lots of doors. Doors at the top of stairs, doors at the bottom of stairs, doors hung crooked halfway up the wall like one of those Dr. Seuss illustrations where he draws ridiculous buildings no one could ever use.
We took a second to gather ourselves. “Shall we?” Eric asked, as he grabbed the handle of the nearest door.
You’ll never guess what the handle did.
“WHY IS EVERYTHING AN EEL?!”
I sliced the eel, then Eric kicked down the door. “I’m getting awfully sick of—AHHHHH!”
A gorilla-sized reptile with bony arms lunged at the door. Eric jumped backward into me, which caused us both to fall. The creature moved so fast that we didn’t have time to do anything but lie on our backs and kick our legs. Not like that could possibly protect us against such a humongous . . .
“RAAAAAWWWWWWwwwwwwwrrrr.”
Eric landed a kick to the creature’s stomach, causing it to fly around like an untied balloon. It did three laps around the room, then popped in a cloud of yellow smoke near the ceiling.
We stared in disbelief for a moment before Eric rolled off of me. “Trust nothing, I guess.”
That would have been a good lesson for us to carry into the next room, where a small Furby-looking critter waited. “Hey, buddy,” I said as we walked by. “We’re just—AHHHHH!”
The Furby pulled a samurai sword out of nowhere and nearly sliced off my head. When Eric tried to help me, the creature whipped out a second sword and battled both of us at once. After 20 minutes of sword fighting (which feels like 20 hours of any other activity), we finally escaped.
As you might imagine, our nerves were beyond frayed when we opened the next door. No monsters in this room. Everything was just upside down.
I lost track of time as we slowly—ever so slowly—worked our way up Max’s nightmare castle. It was like . . . have you ever been to a haunted house? I’ve only been once, and that wasn’t even on purpose. At our town’s Fall Fest a few years ago, an older kid named Oscar showed Eric and me a door that he claimed would lead to a trick-or-treating fun house. Turns out, Oscar was a jerk. The door actually led to a haunted mansion that seemed to stretch for miles. Every step was the new most terrifying step of our lives because we didn’t know what new creature was going to jump from the shadows and scream in our faces. By the time we stumbled through the exit, we were wet noodles of emotion. Imagine our surprise, then, when we turned around to see that the “mansion” we’d conquered was actually just three dinky trailers strung together.
My point is: The human brain can handle only so much suspense and surprise. When you’re constantly peeking around corners for bogeymen or waiting for the next trap to spring or testing doorknobs for eels, your mind starts to break down. So when we finally heard Max’s voice again, we welcomed it like the return of an old friend.
“Congratulations, warriors,” Max said after we’d crossed a piranha pool on a rickety invisible bridge. “You’re ready for your final lesson. Follow me.”
A blue line appeared on the ground. It snaked around the room and led to a glowing door that had appeared on the opposite wall. I breathed a sigh of relief. Would I usually just waltz into the lair of a psychopath? Certainly not. But Eric and I were so glad to finally step through a door without testing it for eels that we threw it open with glee. Past the door, the blue line took us up a staircase, through a secret passage, and into a large, round room with a domed ceiling. The line ended at two folded papers lying on the ground.
I picked up the first paper. “Lesson number two,” I read aloud. “Trust no one.”
Eric unfolded the second paper. “Even me.”
CREEEAAAK!
I looked up just in time to see the ceiling begin to crumble. We made it two steps back toward the door before the ceiling collapsed on top of us.
Chapter 18
Trust No One
“So close.”
I rubbed my head in confusion. One second, Eric and I had been getting crushed under a pile of rubble. The next, we were sitting across a conference table from Max. Max shook his head like he was disappointed. “So, so close.”
I rolled my chair back from the table and spun slowly. We seemed to have gone back in time. The room was filled with hundreds of those six-foot-tall punch card computers from the 1970s. There was also orange carpet, old-timey desks, and the smell of cigarette smoke. The only thing telling me we were still in the Reubenverse was the sweat that continued to drip down my forehead.
“Trust nothing,” Max said. “‘No one’ is included in ‘nothing.’ I hoped you would have figured that out
on your own.” He sighed. “But since you didn’t, I’m going to have to teach you.”
Eric reached across the table and tried to slap Max. His hand went right through Max’s face. He sighed and plopped back down.
“I’ve re-created, down to the last carpet stain, the room where I finally became a warrior.” Max leaned back and spread his arms. “Today, this is a floor in my San Francisco skyscraper, but back in 1978, I didn’t own the whole building. I didn’t even own the whole floor. My best friend and I
rented just a small corner of this room to start our first business together.”
“UHHHHHHGGGGG.” Eric let out a long sigh that lasted for Max’s last two sentences.
“We didn’t have fancy equipment, we didn’t have much education, and we certainly didn’t have a lot of money. But we had each other. More important, we had an idea. A great idea. Do you want to hear it?” He paused for dramatic effect. “Pizza Boy.”
“UHHHHHHGGGGG,” Eric repeated and he stood up. “I’m leaving. Let me know when he’s done.”
“We were video game developers before that was even a job. And our big game was Pizza Boy. Pizza Boy was brilliant. It was about a kid who loved pizza so much that he’d sneak into a haunted pizzeria at night to eat all their pies before the Italian ghost chefs could catch him. We worked so hard on that game. I stayed up through the final three nights to finish the animation. It was a masterpiece.” Max looked sad. “It was our masterpiece.”
I wanted to tell Max that he didn’t need to be so sad because Pizza Boy definitely didn’t sound like a masterpiece, but I saved my breath. He couldn’t hear me anyway.
“After that third all-nighter, we threw a little party for ourselves. Dr Pepper got us through those long nights, so we toasted with those glasses of Dr Pepper you see on the table.” Max pointed to the two half-full glasses in front of me. “That morning, my partner hopped on a plane to sell the game to an arcade manufacturer in Japan. He promised that he’d call as soon as the sale went through. I waited next to the phone all day. It never rang. Of course it takes longer than a day to sell a game, right? I gave him a week. Nothing. Maybe a month? No call. In fact, I never spoke to or saw him again. Do you know what I did see again?”
This was the most emotional I’d ever seen Max. I could tell this story still really meant something to him.
“Pizza Boy. I saw Pizza Boy at the arcade. Mind you, it wasn’t called Pizza Boy. The pizza theme was totally gone. But the main character looked the same, the ghosts acted the same, and the levels played almost identical. The biggest thing that had changed was the name. The new name was Pac-Man.”