Brainboy and the Deathmaster

“D
arryl? Are you awake?”

He was, more or less. He was lying on his back in the bed nearer the window, his eyes closed, but not quite all the way. His focus kept switching back and forth between his crisscrossing eyelashes and a spiderweb in a corner of the ceiling. They looked kind of alike.

“Try and be quiet, Boris,” Ms. Grimsley said, lowering her voice. “Darryl’s been through a very traumatic experience. He needs his sleep.”

“Aw, he’s faking it,” said a gruff-sounding voice.

Darryl lifted his head slightly and, opening his eyes a bit wider, saw the boy who’d come into the room with Ms. Grimsley. He didn’t look so gruff. He was even scrawnier than Darryl, though perhaps a year or two older—thirteen, maybe fourteen. He had a greasy blond ponytail, a tattoo on his arm, and a beat-up backpack over his shoulder.

“Boris is going to be sharing the room with you, Darryl,” Ms. Grimsley said. “Do try and make it down to dinner this evening. It’s been over a week—time to mix with the others.”

Ms. Grimsley left, shutting the door behind her, and Darryl’s head sank back onto his pillow. Another fly had gotten caught in the spiderweb, the eighth or ninth new victim since he’d arrived at this place. The spider lurked in the center of the web, biding his time. Once the fly got tired of struggling, the spider would crawl over and wrap him up for future use.

“Hey, fleabrain. Get off my bed.”

Darryl heard the words but didn’t really put them together.

“Hey! You deaf?”

Something jabbed Darryl in his side: a smelly running shoe. After a third jab, Darryl got up and flopped down on the other bed, the one farther from the window. He couldn’t have cared less which bed he was in.

“Got any money?”

The most recently caught fly had quit fluttering around so much on the edge of the web, and the spider had moved half an inch closer.

“Hey, I’m talking to you, dipwad. You got any money? Or a candy bar or something? I could eat a friggin’ horse.”

A bell rang, far away: two floors down. Bringing him to this room, Ms. Grimsley had led him up two flights of stairs.

“So what’s the food like in this joint?”

In a quick dart, the spider was on the fly.

“Hey, mush-for-brains! I asked you … aw, forget it. Touch my stuff and you’re dog meat.”

The boy dumped his backpack on the bed nearer the window and went off to eat, slamming the door so hard, the spiderweb quivered. This didn’t seem to bother the spider, who was methodically turning the fly into another mummy. As the spider spun his silk, rays of the sinking sun bounced off the leaves of the madrona tree just outside the window, sending gold spangles across the room’s faded, flower-patterned wallpaper.

After a while the daylight began to die out. Somebody knocked on the door. The plump, swarthy woman in the yellow uniform padded in. She set a tray covered with a cloth on the desk.

“Don’t let it go
frío
again. Eat while it’s nice and
caliente.
”

As soon as she left, Darryl jumped up and opened the window, then flopped back down and pulled the pillow over his head and lay there breathing his own breath. Though it was July, the night air was brisk, and once the room turned cool, he pulled his head out from under the pillow to find that the disturbing chicken-pot-pie smell had dissipated.

Eventually another faraway bell rang. A few minutes later a shaft of light fell into the darkened room.

“Darryl?”

Turning his head slightly, he saw Ms. Grimsley’s narrow silhouette in the doorway.

“Do try and be quiet, Boris,” she whispered. “Can you get to bed without a light?”

“No problem.”

The door closed softly. After about fifteen seconds the fluorescent ceiling light flickered on. Boris whipped the cloth off the tray on the desk.

“Hey, dipwad, don’t you want your dessert?”

Boris grabbed the eclair and wolfed it down. Then he sat on the sill of the open window and pulled half a cigarette and a pack of matches out of his sock and lit up, blowing the smoke out into the madrona. When he finished, he flicked the cigarette out into the leaves and fixed his eyes on Darryl.

“You never said if you got any money.”

He went over to Darryl’s jacket, draped over the back of the desk chair, and dug a pack of chewing gum and the stub of a ferry ticket out of the right-hand pocket. From the left pocket he pulled a small paperback book called
The Expanding Universe.

“Sounds like a real winner,” he said, tossing it on the night table. “You a nerd or something?”

Darryl felt a pinch deep in the center of his chest.

“Hey, this is more like it.”

The boy had pulled something from the inside pocket of the jacket. Darryl sprang up and snatched it away.

“Jeez, I wasn’t going to kipe it,” Boris said resentfully.

Darryl sat back down on his new bed, gripping his GameMaster in both hands.

“You must have dough if you got one of them things. I priced them one time for Nina.” Boris’s eyes were locked on the GameMaster. “I could unload it for you. They’re a cinch to unload. Or if you want it all up front, we could do a swap. You don’t dig chocolate? … How about red licorice? I’ll give you a big bag of Twisters for it.”

Darryl stared at the darkened screen above the GameMaster’s small keyboard.

“No? Then how about some smokes?”

Smoke.
Darryl’s throat tightened, and so did his grip on the GameMaster.

“Smokes? Okay, I’ll be back by wake-up.” Boris stuffed his backpack and his pillow under the covers of his bed so it looked as if a body was lying there; then he flicked off the light. “If you don’t say nothing, it’s a deal. A carton of smokes.”

As the boy climbed out the window into the madrona tree, Darryl squeezed his eyes shut, but the image of smoke just became more vivid: smoke rising
from the charred skeleton of a house. Panicking, he flicked on the lamp on the table between the beds, and the sudden brightness washed the dark image away. But a faded alpine scene of rugged mountains painted on the lampshade ripped at his insides like fangs. His palms turned oily, and one of his hands slipped, hitting the GameMaster’s On button.

As the game list appeared on the screen, his breathing instantly grew calmer. CastleMaster, MasterTrek, StarMaster, StarMaster 2, CyberMaster, MasterJinx … His right index finger moved to the roller ball below the little keyboard. He clicked on MasterTrek, and the Rules of the Game started scrolling across the screen:

Darryl had no need to read the rules. He’d played the game hundreds of times. MasterTrek, like all GameMaster games, required manual dexterity, but brainpower was far more crucial, and after his first few attempts he’d always made it home to Earth with minutes to spare. In fact, his secret objective these days was to make it in
half
an hour.

Tonight his starting point was a steamy swamp that turned out to be on the planet Venus. Amazingly near Earth. But even so, he hadn’t even reached Earth’s moon in his space shuttle when the strange words TIME’S
UP!
flashed onto the screen, accompanied by an ominous
clunk.

Darryl jabbed the restart button in disgust.

I
t was eight-thirty in the morning when he heard a swear word and peered up from a bell-shaped nebula in the Vulpecula galaxy to see his new roommate tumble in the open window and sink down on the other bed, which was scattered with buttery pads of sunlight.

“What a freakin’ night! The joker at the 7-Eleven wouldn’t sell to me, then this pinhead cop hangs out in the parking lot for like a year and a half. Then I had to bribe this bum who smelled like the back end of a garbage truck.” Boris pulled a carton of Marlboros out from under his sleeveless sweatshirt. “But I scored ‘em.” He tossed the carton onto Darryl’s bed and went around behind him. “StarMaster, eh. Jeez, level seventeen! You’re like Nina.”

Darryl concentrated on negotiating a meteor shower on the outskirts of the distant galaxy. It had been a humiliating night. He’d needed four tries to get home in MasterTrek, and in his first two attempts at StarMaster 2, mental lapses had led to ignominious defeat. It was as if the charge in his brain battery was low. But in this third attempt, he was doing halfway
decently, having led his rebel troops in a tricky slingshot maneuver around the black hole in M87.

He was trying to secure an all-important star gate when the boy snatched the GameMaster out of his hands. Darryl grabbed it back—but too late. It let out a sickening splintering sound as a meteorite shattered his lead troopship.

“Look what you did!”

“So he talks. I thought maybe you was one of them finger geeks. That’s mine, you know.”

As Darryl shoved the GameMaster under his belt like a gun, Boris’s eyes narrowed to almost nothing, sizing Darryl up. Then he turned and opened a laptop computer on the desk.

“Ought to try this one.”

His first day there Ms. Grimsley had encouraged Darryl to use the laptop, telling him it worked between eight-thirty in the morning and four in the afternoon. But he’d hardly given it a glance.

“Trouble is, they bolt ‘em into the desk, and the desk’s bolted to the floor. You’d need a freakin’ chain saw to get it loose.” Boris flicked on the computer and stepped aside to give Darryl a view. The word MondoGameMaster, each letter a different color, flashed onto a screen ten times the size of the one on his GameMaster. Drawn irresistibly to the desk chair,
Darryl hit the enter key. Instead of the game list, a maze appeared on the screen. He’d seen such mazes in puzzle books, with an entrance on one side and an exit on the other, but never one this intricate.

“That’s the trouble,” said Boris. “You got to get through that thing. And they don’t give you no time.”

A countdown of seconds was underway in the upper right-hand corner of the screen: 120, 119, 118 … All you got were two minutes to pilot the little figure through the maze. But instead of grabbing the mouse, Darryl simply stared at the screen. There were choices at every turning, and there must have been a hundred turnings.