Doomed (7 page)

He hasn’t, and I slow down as I reach the wooded area near the nature center. I turn in a circle, looking for some
clue as to what I’m supposed to do now. Nothing comes to me, and I start walking up the huge rock stairs to the center, getting a little more annoyed with each second that passes.

I turn to Theo with a frown. “I’m beginning to think that the whole ‘beat the game, save the world’ thing is nothing but a bunch of bull—”

I break off midword as two things happen simultaneously. First, Eli’s computer makes a loud beeping noise and he is dropped straight into the game. And second, a huge black monster jumps out from behind a tree and tackles my avatar, sending me flying.

Adrenaline surges through my system, making my heart pound heavily as blood thrums in my ears. “What do I do?” I yell. “What do I do?” In my head is the original warning, about having only one life. If this thing kills me now, I’m out for good and I’m not sure what that means for the fate of my computer. Or the rest of my little corner of the world.

“Run,” Eli says, ripping his eyes off his own avatar long enough to check out my predicament.

“Yeah. That’s so not going to happen. In case you haven’t noticed, I have a gigantic dragon lady on my chest!” I recoil in horror as I get my first good look at her. She’s huge, and while her top half is that of a woman—with snake hair—her bottom half is covered in black scales. She has huge claws, a long barbed tail, and her legs, while stationary, are moving. Undulating, really, and I realize they’re made up of snakes,
too. Snakes that are all looking at my avatar like they want to take a bite out of her. Me. Whatever.

“That’s Campe,” Theo says calmly, and I almost hate him for being such a know-it-all. He hits a couple of buttons on my keyboard. I buck and roll on-screen, but the huge, nightmarish beast doesn’t move. Big surprise. One of the claws rakes my shoulder, and I swear, I almost feel the pain. I know I’m sweating.

“She’s going to kill me!” I screech, just as Theo’s computer beeps and he’s finally thrust into the game, too. He takes off running in my direction, but I’m too busy thrashing around to pay much attention to what he and Eli are doing.

“Hold on,” Eli tells me. “I’m almost there.”

“I’m doing my best.” I hit the monster in her face, and it surprises her enough that I’m able to shove out from under her, but once she recovers, she’s enraged. She kicks me, the vipers that make up her legs hissing as they try to take a chunk out of me.

I kick back, catching the beast in her scaly stomach. She screams as she goes down on top of me.

My breath whooshes out, and I try to stay conscious as I shove at the thing. But I’m in bad shape. I’m bleeding from my left leg and right shoulder, and from the way my avatar is struggling to draw in air, I’m afraid I might have a broken rib or three. So much for boring—the game has gone from mundane to terrifying in the blink of an eye.

I look up just as she flexes her long, horrifying claws. They’re mostly black, but they’re tipped in deep red, and I’m praying that’s her normal look, not my blood. She leans
over me and her teeth elongate, growing until they’re huge and so close to me that I imagine the feel of her hot, stinky breath on my face. I turn my head, close my eyes, and prepare to die before I ever had a chance to live.

But the death blow—or bite, in this case—never comes. Instead, Eli’s avatar rushes onto the scene and grabs Campe by the shoulders. His avatar is as tall and well built as Eli is in real life, and with a mighty heave, he yanks the nightmarish monster off me and sends her spinning across the grass, where she lies dazed.

He reaches down and grabs my hand—the one attached to my uninjured arm—and helps me to my feet. “Are you all right?” Eli asks me.

“Just peachy,” I answer. “But you might want to look out.”

Campe is back on her feet, and she looks a million times angrier than she did before. And this time, all of that anger is directed straight at Eli. She pulls out two glistening knives, and I take a few steps to the right, feeling like a total coward as I do so. But that thing looks like it’s going to take Eli apart in a couple of well-placed slices, and I really don’t want to have any part of that.

Suddenly, Theo is there, shoving me behind him as he and Eli hold their ground. Campe crashes into them, and they stumble a little but manage to hang on. I guess there’s something to be said for being built like Greek Titans, especially in this game.

Campe comes at them again, and this time I know she’s going to take a few chunks off them. They’re both still a little unsteady on their feet, and the dragon is determined to tear them apart.

I look around, desperate for something to use as a weapon as the game maker hasn’t gifted me with anything yet. There’s nothing close to me except for some huge rocks, so I grab one, staggering under the weight of it.

As I work my way toward Theo, Eli, and the Mistress of Hell, I try to figure out where the best place to hit her is. Normally, I’d go for the head, but hers is about ten feet off the ground, and I’m pretty positive I can’t throw this thing that high. Besides, if I miss, all it’s going to do is piss her off more, and I’ve already learned from bitter experience what a bad idea
that
is.

But what else can I hit that would do any damage? Her body is huge, her skin like armor, and as I stand there, looking at her, I understand a little of what David must have felt when he took on Goliath. But unlike David, I’m fresh out of slingshots.

Theo catches sight of me and the giant rock in my hand. He shakes his head and shoots Eli a look. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was telling his brother that they need to protect me.

Before I can even imagine what they’re going to do, he launches himself at Campe, wrapping his arms around her thick right arm and squeezing until she drops the knife. Eli does the same to her left arm, and she roars in outrage, her long barbed tail swinging around and catching Theo in the back. He lets go, but he doesn’t fall, the barbs holding him in place.

I gasp in horror, my fingers tightening on the rock even as Eli scurries up her long arm to her neck. He wraps his hands around her throat and begins to squeeze. The
monster bucks, tries to rip him off with her crimson-tipped claws, but Theo’s grabbed one arm again and is holding so tightly she can’t move it.

She bats at Eli with the other, but he won’t let go. For the first time since this nightmare of a game began, I see panic in the crazed monster’s eyes and I know that this is my chance—probably my only chance. I step closer, doing my best to avoid the hissing snakes and wildly gyrating tail. Then I heave the rock at her as hard as I can.

By some miracle she bends at just the right moment, and I get her right between the eyes. She freezes for a second, before letting out a long, high-pitched scream that curdles my blood. Her entire body convulses and then she’s falling, trapping Eli beneath her.

I rush forward, but Theo’s already there, dodging around her barbed tail, which is twitching dangerously. She reaches out with a claw, tries to grab me, and I scramble backward, but even as I do I know that there’s no way I can escape her.

She wraps her hand around my ankle and yanks. I’m falling, and I brace myself for impact, my entire body going tense, though I know it’s the worst thing I can do. I tell myself it will be okay, that it’s just a game, that the person about to be torn apart isn’t really me, but I can’t help the fear and adrenaline that race through me from all directions.

And then it’s too late to think anymore because the snakes are crawling off her legs and toward me, their poisonous mouths yawning wide as they get ready to bite. I kick at a few of them, but it’s no use. I close my eyes—this is it—and wait for my avatar to die.

Theo yells at me to move, but I can’t. I’m completely
trapped. Then the strangest thing happens—fire shoots from Theo’s fingertips straight at the huge, furious monster. It hits her square in the center of her body, and she screams in rage and pain. He follows up the blast with another, more powerful blast to the arm that is holding me down. She screeches, lets go, and I roll away from her—and the snakes—as fast as possible. But Theo tosses a third fireball at the snakes, which writhe on the ground as they are completely engulfed in flames.

“Wicked!” Eli crows, and for a second I’m not sure if it’s game Eli or real Eli saying it. Here, in this strange new world, reality and gaming mix until they feel the same. Until they both feel real. “How’d you do that, dude?”

“I don’t know.” Theo is looking at his hands, puzzled. “It just happened.”

“I want to try.” Eli holds out his hands in the same gesture that Theo had used, but nothing happens. He tries again, hits nearly every key on the keyboard, but still nothing changes. He starts muttering to himself, determination to figure out what his stepbrother did written into every line of his body.

While he experiments, I check out the damage to my avatar. I’m limping pretty badly, and blood is dripping from the claw marks Campe left in my upper arm and calf, but other than that everything seems to be okay.

Theo comes over and kneels at my feet as he, too, examines my wounds. “If we find a bathroom or someplace with running water, we’ll get that cleaned up. You don’t want an infection.”

“Can avatars even get infections?” I ask.

“They can in MMOs. That’s why so many of the resources are medicine or healing herbs—even healing knowledge. Healers are highly prized.”

I look down at my leg with new eyes, wishing for the virtual-reality version of Neosporin. It would suck to survive an attack by a crazed dragon lady only to succumb to an infection in a few virtual days.

The thought has me looking at the sky, trying to judge how much time has passed. The sun has sunk behind the trees, and streams of red and orange and purple streak across the sky.

“Come on,” I say finally. “We need to keep going.”

“Yeah, sure. Of course.” But Eli looks totally disappointed as he drops his hands, giving up on bringing forth fireballs, and falls into step beside me. The three of us begin walking toward the huge clump of trees to our right.

We’ve only gone a few steps when Eli exclaims, “Hey, what did we win?”

“I don’t know.” And I don’t particularly care. If we haven’t won a chance to get out of this stupid game once and for all, then I’m just not interested. But when I remember that my real life demands Internet access, a cell phone, and television, I keep my mouth shut.

Barely.

“It’s over there,” Theo says, and I look to where he’s pointing. There’s a box sitting on a tree stump, one I know wasn’t there when I was frantically scanning for a weapon a few minutes before.

We run to it, and Theo reaches in, coming out with a huge handful of seed packets. Tomatoes, cucumbers,
strawberries, blackberries, various types of lettuce—nearly every kind of seed you can imagine.

“We’re supposed to plant a garden?” I ask, confused.

“What the hell?” demands Eli, looking annoyed. “How are these supposed to get us to the end of the game?”

I don’t answer. I mean, in the real world, I love to plant things—flowers, berries, trees—and watch as they grow. I spend hours in the spring and summer working on the flower beds around my house, as well as the small vegetable garden my mom let me create in the backyard. I have a hella green thumb, and nearly everything I plant flourishes beautifully.

But here? In a video game? What’s the point?

“I don’t know,” Theo says in answer to Eli’s question. “But take them, anyway.” He throws me a bunch of packets before reaching back into the box for more. “Put these in your pockets.”

I follow orders, watch as the two of them do the same. Then say, “Come on, maybe we can find some NPCs and trade them for something.”

“Have you seen any?” Eli demands, though he doesn’t pause in stuffing his pockets with seeds. “Besides that ugly hag, I mean?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

We start to walk again, and now that we’ve been playing for a while and Satan’s girlfriend is no longer after us, it seems to take forever to get anywhere. We find a place to clean up; then, as we continue on, a few more players join us—real people, not NPCs—following behind as if they expect the three of us to have the answers to all the
questions that must be winding through their heads right now. Which I guess proves Theo’s theory right. We’re not the only ones this is happening to.

Someone IMs me, his message popping up in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen. The user ID tells me he’s one of the first people to start following us—the guy who’s dressed in jeans and a navy-blue hoodie and looks like he’s in his early twenties. Jason47.

I point out the question to Eli and Theo.

“Ask him if he’s having the same issues we are,” Eli suggests.

So I do, and he comes back with:

“Shit. That’s North Austin,” Theo says.

Way north. Like forty minutes from here. How fast is this thing spreading? Theo’d commented earlier that it could have gone around the world several times already, but I don’t think I actually believed him before now.

More like I didn’t want to believe him.

I type in:

I glance at the clock. It’s been about twenty-five minutes since I opened the box. He must have been dropped in after, just like Theo and Eli.

Then he asks: