Battlecraft VR

by Linden Storm

  “May I look for it?” Marina says.

  “Is this not your vehicle, sir?” the officer says.

  “No sir, this is not officially my vehicle. I am driving it with the permission of my friend, who is the registered owner.”

  “Is this young lady the owner?” he says, pointing his forehead at Marina.

  “She is not,” Harold says, grimacing. “You see, the owner is in the hospital, and she asked me to drive her van to a safe place.”

  “She’s in the hospital?”

  “Yes. She fell down.”

  The patrolman sighs. “She fell down? On the hike?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Harold says, nodding and staring at the van’s dash. He hates to lie, because he knows he’s a terrible liar and it seems extra wrong to lie to an officer of the law, but he doesn’t see a suitable alternative.

  “I see,” the patrolman says. “And where are you headed?”

  “We are going to the Nevada County Air Park, sir, to meet our airplane.”

  “Uh-huh, your airplane,” the patrolman says, raising one eyebrow. “At the private air terminal.”

  “Right,” Harold says. He can’t believe Rupert isn’t talking. He wants to turn around and see if someone has knocked him out.

  “I cannot seem to find the registration in here,” Marina says. She holds up a pack of cigarettes, some curled and discolored repair manuals, and a skimpy, see-through bra.

  “I can explain,” Rupert says from the back seat.

  The officer extends his long index finger. “I’m speaking to the driver right now, sir. And I have to say,” he says to Harold, “that I’m wondering about a number of things.”

  “I’m aware, sir,” Harold says, “but it’s an emergency.” Harold is getting desperate and decides to take the low road and play the fame card. “I’m driving Mr. Rupert Jones, here, to the airplane. He has important business in Seattle. You recognize him, don’t you, officer?”

  Rupert leans forward and waves. Looking at Rupert’s face in the rearview mirror, Harold is reminded of Charles Manson.

  “You know he’s the billionaire, right?” Belle says, thrusting her bruised face forward over Harold’s shoulder.

  “Does it matter who he is, ma’am?” the patrolman says. He cocks his head to the side. “Do I know you?”

  Belle says nothing.

  Harold sinks into despair and groans out loud.

  The office raises his hand and shows his teeth.

  Harold feels compelled to talk. “I know you don’t want to hear a bunch of excuses, but if you could just this one time let us go with a warning, we’ll exit this highway just up ahead and make our way to the Nevada Air Park, where Mr. Rupert Jones Jr.’s private plane is waiting, and within the hour we will be out of your jurisdiction and your hair.”

  There’s a long pause, and the patrolman shines his light into the van again, pointing it at the faces of each of the occupants.

  Harold’s stomach growls. He’s hungry, thirsty, filthy, and so, so tired.

  Finally, the patrolman stops his examination of the van and its ragtag passengers. Then he leans over, looks Harold in the eye, and smiles.

  “I believe you,” he says.

  Harold feels a lightness, the first sign of hope. “So, you do recognize Rupert Jones?”

  “Not really, but I do recognize the other people in your vehicle. They’re the Untouchables. Marina, Belle, Paul, Nick, and William.”

  Suddenly, the gruff patrolman sounds like a teenager naming the members of his favorite band.

  “Pardon me? You’re a fan?” Marina says.

  The officer grins, and his face transforms. He looks ten years younger. “I used to be ranked, but not anymore. I can’t play as much as I used to. But I watch a lot of matches, and you, ma’am, are my idol. The way you play that game, well, it’s amazing. I didn’t recognize you at first because you look a little different.”

  “Indeed,” Marina says, smoothing her hair back. “It was a difficult...hike. What’s your name, officer?”

  “Tyrone Wilson. Pleased to meet you,” he says, grinning.

  There’s a chorus of greetings from the van, and Harold feels a huge weight lift off his chest.

  “Look,” Wilson says, “I don’t know what the real story is, but I know you’ve been off social media and out of touch for several days, and frankly, the fans have been worried. I’m just glad you’re okay and you’re going to make it back in time for the finals.”

  He places his hand over his heart, just below his golden badge.

  He’s going to let us go, Harold thinks. He’s really going to let us go.

  Officer Wilson says, “And what’s your name, sir?”

  “Harold Mathis, Officer Wilson. I’m Nick’s grandfather and the president of the fan club.”

  “I see,” Wilson says. “Wait for me. I’ll escort you to the Nevada Air Park.”

  Wilson goes back to his cruiser, turns on the lights, and pulls out. Harold follows at a safe distance.

  ∆∆∆

  The first time Harold felt like the world was his, he’d been a teenage boy, and he’d won a contest. The contest had involved writing a story on a serious subject—pollution or war, he can’t remember exactly what—and he’d made his story serious but also clever, satirical, a little bit funny. He’d won one hundred dollars.

  One hundred dollars to a small-town boy back then was a fortune. It meant he could ask a girl to the school dance and afford both a new suit that fit him right and an orchid corsage. It meant that Meta Boone, one of the nicest, prettiest girls in school, would be his girlfriend. Eventually it meant that she would consent to become his wife. And it meant he could put gas in his car for a whole month.

  At 78, Harold had thought the time he could feel that type of excitement about the future was long over for him, but here he was, driving a vanload of celebrities, his grandson among them, escorted by a whooping police car to an airport, where he would board a billionaire’s private plane and fly home. He was part of an entourage.

  Him. Harold Mathis, retired grocery store manager and part-time sheep herder.

  Officer Wilson leaves them on the tarmac, and they file up the narrow stairs, where Rupert’s pilots greet them.

  They are too professional to show their shock at the condition of the group, but they do offer a first-aid kit along with their usual food, liquor, pillows, blankets, and scented toilet facilities.

  In minutes, they are taxiing.

  “Excuse me,” Harold says, and he heads for the toilet, where he washes his face.

  As he’s rubbing his face with a fluffy towel, he looks in the mirror and breaks down.

  He places the towel over his face and cries.

  It’s mostly relief that drives his weeping fit, but it’s also gratitude, fear, and rage.

  Those fucking assholes. Are they going to get away with what they did?

  There’s a knock at the door. Nick slides the door open. Harold looks up from the toilet seat, where he’s bawling into the towel.

  “Ignore the drama,” Harold says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Nick looks bereft. “Grandpa,” he says. “I’ve never seen you cry.”

  “I’ve never let you see me cry,” Harold says. “But what the hell. It’s a week of firsts. First experience as a conman, a prisoner, and an escapee.”

  By this time, the whole group is standing behind Nick, watching.

  “Language, Harold?’ Belle says, grinning. And she pushes past Nick and throws her arms around Harold, which makes him cry harder.

  “You’re scaring me now,” she says in his ear. “Suck it up, old man.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  They Always Give 110 Percent

  On the plane back to Seattle, Harold and the team had discussed calling in the law, but they decided to wait until after the finals, when Marina would be in a better position to fight deportation.

  If they won.

  Harold decides it won’t hu
rt to have the Elven Knights watching over them in the meantime.

  Harold messages the Elven Knights of Zobilla to apprise them in general terms about the threat to the Untouchables.

  Although he’s been a dues-paying member of the Elven Knights anti-harassment vigilantes for some time, Harold has never met in person with the leadership.

  The day before the tournament, he hears from Jack Bieker, the Grand Poo-Bah of the Elven Knights, and after some wary back and forth, Jack agrees to meet Harold at the Blue Moon Tavern in the University District.

  Harold spruces up as much as he can, but he’s aware his face has obvious cuts and bruises from the car wreck, and he looks tired and beat up from the subsequent imprisonment by the kidnappers. He fingers the lump on his forehead and winces. He doesn’t even remember how he got banged on the head, but he guesses it must have happened during the car wreck.

  Jack Bieker is anchoring a barstool near the door. He’s in his late 60s. Harold knows he’s an old-school Navy Chief, and he looks like one. He’s tall and wide and thick-necked. His hair is shaved close and it’s thin and iron gray, creating patches on his shiny pink skull that remind Harold of a camo pattern. He wears a red long-sleeved t-shirt in triple or quadruple extra-large that features a drawing of an Atari 2600 game console. The shirt is tucked into dark jeans held up under Jack’s substantial belly by a wide leather belt. The belt has a one-of-a-kind Zelda buckle custom-welded from chrome pipe fittings.

  Harold knows from Jack’s online bio that he’s been playing video games since the original Atari days, and he’s been an avid player of online RPGs since 2004’s vanilla World of Warcraft.

  After they shake hands, Harold tells him about Nick and asks him about his family.

  Jack smiles. “I taught my daughter Katie to play when she was five, so she could farm gold for me. I still remember her little fingers dancing over the keyboard.”

  “She was one of the reasons you started the Elven Knights, is that right?” Harold says, taking a gulp of his porter.

  “When she grew up, she got into PUBG, which is kind of a forerunner of Battlecraft VR, as you probably know. I was proud of her. And then some toxic bros went after her for an article she wrote in Gamasutra complaining about the online harassment of female gamers. That made me mad.”

  Harold nods. He could believe it. Jack’s face had flushed dark red as he recounted the story.

  “And now you’re really into the Knights, right? How much time do you spend on the organization?” Harold says.

  Jack shrugs. “See, I was a lifer in the Navy, and frankly I was at loose ends when I retired. One day those jerks doxed my little girl. They published her address and phone number, and then called in bogus a terrorism complaint against her. A SWAT team kicked down her door, which scared her and put her life in danger. I decided to make it my new purpose in life to make those jackasses pay.”

  “I get it,” Harold says. “My grandson and his friends have been through some stuff too.”

  “I know it,” Jack says, “and I’m real sorry.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Harold thinks, but he says nothing.

  “Anyhow,” Jack says, “after that happened to my daughter, I gathered up some other old-timers, members of my original WoW guild, and that’s how the Elven Knights got started.”

  The first thing Jack did was put his hacker buddy, a guy called Joe Johnson, to work looking around for information about his daughter’s tormentors. Joe was a recent retiree, too, from the NSA.

  “Joe could hack his way out of hell or into heaven, he liked to say, boasting being one of his favorite activities when he met with me and my friends David Mayer, a history professor, and C.V. Ramanujan, an honest-to-God rocket scientist. Both of those guys were members of my original WoW guild. We named ourselves the Elven Knights of Zobilla at our first meeting for no good reason. Maybe it was like choosing a band name—the whole point being that it was pointless.”

  “It was probably an effective way to weed out weak applicants, too,” Harold says.

  “Yeah,” Jack says, grinning. “Only noobs would think there was a point to it. Our vetting process has always been extensive. We do deep and wide background checks and kick anyone who has any history of sexual harassment, racist commentary, fundamentalist religiosity, or membership, however brief, in the Republican Party.”

  Harold laughs. “I’m going to leave my dark past out of this discussion, then. I’ve noticed that recently you are making appearances at tournaments and conventions. Kind of a show of force?”

  “We’ve never done anything violent, you understand,” Jack says, waggling his unruly eyebrows. “We’ve wiped data out, sometimes with the unofficial support of federal agents—although you never heard me say that—and we’ve exposed the guilty to friends and family.”

  “Still, that probably works,” Harold says, ordering another round of beers. He glances over in the corner, where two very tall, very wide young men in football jerseys, with no necks and long black hair, are playing pool. One of them looks Harold in the eye and nods. “Can I ask you something, Jack?” Harold says.

  “Sure,” Jack says, following Harold’s line of sight.

  “Do you know those fellows?”

  “I do, Harold. Those are my nephews. If all else fails, those two don’t.”

  “I believe it,” Harold says appreciatively.

  Jack drinks half of his summer ale, then continues his story. “My favorite action was finding the main harasser of my daughter and contacting the young man’s mother. I got him kicked out of her spare room and into the street. He had to get a job at a sandwich shop, and I would go in there and order complicated sandwiches, then change my order five or six times in a row, then complain to the manager that his employee didn’t smile enough.”

  “He certainly deserved worse than that. You must have held yourself back. Frankly, you look like the kind of fellow who could hold his own in a street fight,” Harold says.

  “In Shanghai,” Jack says gravely, “I punched a guy in the neck after he tried to take my passport out of my pocket. To this day, I don’t know if I contributed a statistic to that metropolis’s murder rate in 1998.”

  “Ah,” Harold says. “I was hoping you’d say something like that, because these fellas I’m going to tell you about are the type of idiots who think they’re tough and nobody else knows how to fight.”

  “I know how to fight,” Jack says. “And my nephews over there do too. But tell me something. What motivates you to get so involved with all this? You look like you’ve already seen a little action, if you don’t mind my noticing.”

  Harold feels his face heat up and touches his forehead. “I’m making up for something,” he says.

  “May I ask what?” Jack says.

  “I used to be apathetic at best about these kinds of things, Jack. When I found out that my grandson Nick is gay and that he’s gotten harassed for that, I am happy to say I changed my outlook. Now we fight side by side.”

  Jack lifted his glass and clinked it against Harold’s.

  “To the good fight,” they said, almost in unison.

  ∆∆∆

  The morning of the finals, Belle arrives at Rupert Jones’s penthouse, where the Untouchables are assembled for a last-minute planning session.

  Rupert’s place has a 360-degree view. A real one. Not some real-estate agent’s exaggeration. The condo takes up a whole floor, the 32nd floor, of a concrete and steel hilltop condominium building.

  Belle stands at the floor-to-ceiling window facing west. She can see Elliott Bay and the Olympic mountain range. She watches a ferry on Puget Sound, and the copters, planes, and delivery drones plying the skies. Paul and Marina are standing near the north-facing windows, which afford a panoramic view of Lake Union and city neighborhoods stretching north, west, and east. Harold, Nick, and William are gaping at the south-facing view of Mount Rainier.

  The only person that’s missing, Belle thinks, is Gemma, and she’s on her
way up to Seattle after her brief hospital stay.

  Rupert has laid in an enormous variety of croissants, donuts, coffee, and tea.

  “Come over here, people,” Rupert says. “We have decisions to make.”

  “What decisions?” Harold says.

  “Whether we’re going to go ahead with this tournament appearance,’ he says.

  “That’s not a question,” Belle says. “What did we just go through, if not to play?’

  “We’ve got to play,” William says.

  “I agree, of course,” Marina says.

  “You haven’t had much time to practice,” Rupert says. “I think you should reconsider.”

  “What happened to all your worries about your investment?” Belle says.

  “That’s not important to me anymore,” Rupert says. “Narrowly escaping death at the hands of violent criminals has given me a new perspective.”

  They all nod their agreement.

  “That’s right. We are not going to be intimidated now,” Belle says firmly

  “But!” Nick says. “I feel compelled to once again present the voice of reason, people. As far as we know, those criminals are still at large, and we don’t know what motivated them. For all we know, they’re more determined than ever to hurt us. Appearing in a public venue might not be the smartest strategy.”

  “That’s right. You could hide out,” Rupert says.

  “We are not going to hide out,” Belle says. “We’ve had several practice sessions, and I didn’t hear anyone say they wanted to hide out. Does anyone want to hide out?’”

  She looks around the room. Everyone is shaking their heads or raising their hands in gestures of surrender.

  “That’s what I thought,” she says.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Harold says, “the Elven Knights of Zobilla are aware.”

  “Aware of what?” Rupert says. “Of the kidnappers?”

  “Not exactly,” Harold says. “They’re aware that the Untouchables have experienced credible threats against their lives and safety.”

  “Why would that help?” Rupert says, rolling his eyes. “Aren’t the Elven Knights of Zobilla strictly an online group?”