Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel (12 page)

Steve and Harold explained the next day’s organisation to us, telling us that we would start bright and early at around eight o’clock in the morning, with the other six gamers who had managed to make it through to the quarter finals.

When I asked for the names, I heard James and Kate among them.

Though I knew they were the competition, I couldn’t help but feel a slight warmth way down deep in my gut.

Once Steve and Harold had us sorted out, I decided to push the boat out, and actually attempt conversation with Chung.

Since he had just about turned away as soon as Steven and Harold had wrapped up their spiel, I physically had to reach out and take hold of his shirt in my good, right fist.

That got his attention.

He looked back over his shoulder, that same neutral expression on his face.

Seeing that his mother was glowering at me from where she was standing with her arms tightly folded across her chest, I decided I needed to act quickly.

“In that first round,” I said, “did someone tell you about that button sequence—your opponent, I mean?”

Chung just kept his expression firmly neutral, as if my voice was nothing more than a troublesome draught. Then he shook his head.

It was then that I realised I was still holding tight to his shirt—that I still had a hold of it in my right fist. I gave him some slack, not wanting it to seem, to the casual observer, that I was thinking of taking care of my competition tomorrow with physical violence . . . anyway, if I’d
really
wanted to deal him some damage then I would’ve done something way easier—like
sat
on him.

“Please,” I said, actually feeling my voice strain just a little, “someone
told
me too.”

Chung blinked several times over, then, finally, he relented, giving me a firm, unmistakable nod.

I decided that I was on a roll, so saw no reason to stop there. “Look, we both used to have a relationship with Alive Action Games, right?”

Again Chung nodded.

“And we both had to come through that Ignition Tournament because Alive Action revoked our passes.”

He just kept up his same stony glare.

“So . . . doesn’t
some
of this seem
strange
to you? Don’t you think that we should
maybe
be a touch suspicious about just what’s going on here?”

He didn’t react at all.

Not so much as the twitch of an eyelid.

But I knew I had to keep going.

“From what I heard”—I flapped my arm in Steve and Harold’s direction—“the others, the others who were with Alive Action, they managed to get through too, to the quarter finals. Doesn’t
that
seem like something of a coincidence to you?”

Chung pouted long and hard, just about the most extreme reaction he’d given me in the whole time I’d known him . . . which, granted, wasn’t all that long.

“Look,” I continued, “it seems to me that Gamers Con are doing everything they can—within reason—to keep us, the
four
of us who worked with Alive Action—”

And that was when Chung spoke for the first time.

Actually
cutting me off
.

“
Five
,” Chung said, “the other one, he also qualified for the quarter finals.”

I blinked a few times, just as taken aback that this was the first time he’d spoken as by the actual content of what he’d said.

It appeared that Chung wasn’t finished, either. “His name is Alan.”

“Oh?” I said, not really sure what else to say.

Chung nodded. “I heard his name”—he pointed off in the direction of Steve and Harold, the two of them still conferring with one another—“when they read out the list.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Chung said, with a shrug, and then added, “Weird kid, that guy, I mean, I know that everyone here at the Grand Tournament wants to win but that kid,
wow
, he was like a whole different level of
intense
. . . back at the Winners’ Breakfast I spoke with him and he wouldn’t give me more than one-word answers. Then, when I made a joke about something he gave me this scowl—like this
really
mean
scowl
like I’d just killed his cat or something.”

I stood back, still a little amazed at how much Chung had opened up, and how he was doing an impression of Alan, making his eyes all narrow, and holding his fingers as if they were claws or something.

I guess you can get people wrong so easily.

I knew that I’d got
Chung
wrong, for one.

I looked beyond him again, to his waiting mother. “I guess your mum’s waiting,” I said.

He gave another shrug, then slipped me a conspiratorial smile—kind of a
secret
grin. “Yeah,” he said, “she was a child champion herself, and so she wants me to do the same—win the competition, I mean.” Another shrug later, he added, “I don’t even like video games all that much.”

Well, that got my eyeballs near enough leaving my sockets.

I couldn’t
quite
believe what I was hearing.

That there even
existed
someone who didn’t like video games all that much.

Oh, sure, there was my mum . . . but, I mean, she was my mum.

She was
old
.

But, I have to admit, that it didn’t change my opinion of Chung at all. In fact, I had warmed to him a great deal, and we swapped mobile numbers.

Before we parted ways, headed up to our respective hotel rooms—with our respective parents—I
had
to ask him something . . .
urgently
.

“Uh, Chung,” I said, just as he was turning back to his mum—I saw that he’d put back on that same mean expression of his and I guessed that it was some sort of a mechanism he used with his mum to show her that he was one-hundred-per-cent serious about the competition. “You, uh,” I continued, “didn’t see that kid, uh,
Alan
in a video game that Alive Action Games sent along a few days before the convention, did you?”

Chung looked at me long and hard, that serious expression of his making me feel a little uneasy—even though I knew the truth that he only used it in the presence of his mother. I wondered if he was going to answer at all, and his mother called out to him soon after.

But, right before he turned to go, to head up to his hotel room, he gave me a stiff nod.

That made
four
of us that’d seen that red-haired kid—
Alan
—in
Halls of Hallow
.

What did it
mean?

26

BACK IN OUR HOTEL ROOM, I couldn’t sleep.

My dad, though, oh he was
snoring
away.

But, seriously, how could I
sleep
with all the stuff that’d gone on today.

The fact that I’d managed to get into the quarter finals of the Grand Tournament had almost got lost in the revelation first that Chung was a cool guy, and second that, just like me and James and Kate, he’d seen the red-haired kid, Alan, in
Halls of Hallow
.

And I felt the weight heavy on my shoulders because I was the only one who knew just the right tools to get to the bottom of the mystery . . . that was unless James, Kate and Chung had all figured out that they could snap off that panel from the back of the Sirocco and get themselves into their video games too.

But that might just be too much to share.

Especially since we would all be competing against one another from early tomorrow—Sunday—morning.

So I just lay there in the darkness knowing that it must be sometime around midnight—usually the time I go to sleep on a
school night
—and thinking that there was
surely
something I could do to push a little further along the trail to solving this mystery.

I leaned over, reached out to my bedside table, swept up my mobile, checked the time there and saw that it was half twelve.

I sighed out long and hard, thought about what I was doing.

Then, after turning over and checking that my dad was still sleeping—you know, not
like
, pretending to snore—I fired off a message to Chung, James and Kate

Guys, I know this is weird, but I’ve got to show you all something.

It’s important.

And with that done, I sat back and waited, eyeing my mobile screen, waiting to see if I would get any sort of response at all.

I wondered if those three were like me, if they were all night owls too, accustomed to staying up late practising their gaming skills.

After five minutes, and no messages, I was pretty sure that it’d been a mistake.

It would’ve been better just to forget it.

After all, if there really
was
some sort of a mystery going on surrounding those who’d been involved with Alive Action Games what did
I
really care?

I mean, it all seemed to be benefitting me so far, what with the Ignition Tournament, and then that weird guy giving me tips for how to smash right through
Hardened Voyage
.

And I already knew that Chung had got the same tips—and I guessed that it was a reasonable jump of logic to think that James and Kate had got those tips too . . . after all, they’d managed to make it through to the quarter finals.

I’d just about given up on the others, turned on my side and started to think about chess—as a method to send me off to sleep—when I heard a couple of vibrations of my phone.

There were messages there from James, and from Kate.

Right as I was reading through Kate’s message, another came in, this time from Chung.

All of them wanted to meet right away.

Kate said that we should meet in
her
room since she was alone there—her dad had taken another room.

Room 719 . . . seventh floor.

There was just one thing that I had to ask, though I was certain what the answer would be. All the same, I sent off one final message to Kate:

You brought along your Sirocco, right?

I got the reply a fraction of a second later:

Of course.

27

GETTING OUT OF MY ROOM without waking Dad wasn’t hard.

Did I mention that he’s a sound sleeper?

Once I’d managed to get myself out into the hallway, key card in hand, I took the stairs—figuring that maybe I could use the exercise—and headed on up to Kate’s room.

One knock later and I was surprised to find that James and Chung were already there.

Both of them were grinning away, neither looked like they’d been to sleep yet.

Kate was wearing a pyjama top and baggy bottoms. I noticed that on her pyjama top she had a design of Godzilla—or something
like
Godzilla—and it was crushing a seaside town, kicking ice-cream vans out the way, and munching on some tourists.

It had rivers of
blood
running between its teeth, and down its chin.

I wondered what sorts of things Kate considered relaxing, you know, actually
conducive
to sleep . . .

She gave a slight yawn as she let me in.

Her hotel room was a carbon copy of my own.

I noticed her own Sirocco sitting up on the desk beside the TV, all plugged in and ready to go.

Only when Chung and James turned to me, both of them grinning, and Kate shut the door behind me, rolling her shoulders and grinning also, did I worry that maybe it was only my
own
games console which had the ability to travel
into
the game, or that I’d simply made it all up in my mind in the first place.

Maybe my imagination was more active than I’d imagined.

Only one way to find out and now I’d come too far to disappoint all of these guys.

They had got themselves up out of their bed to hear this ‘important’ thing I had to say.

I showed the disk I’d brought along with me:

Halls of Hallow
.

I sprang the disk loose from its case and handed it to Kate, who duly stuck the disk into the tray of her Sirocco 3000.

I looked about them, saw that James had furrowed his brow. “Hey,” he said, “I’ve seen this already—did you really need to bring
me
here to see this?”

I shook my head. “It’s not that, not just
seeing
the game again.”

I felt like I should hold my breath for the next part, or tell them all to hold onto something . . . but, instead, I settled on just getting it out into the open.

Getting myself shot of the ridiculous notion so that they could get their laughter out of the way.

“I’m going to show you,” I said, “how to
actually
step into
Halls of Hallow
.”

28

“UH, WHAT?” James said.

I guess he was speaking for everybody in the room.

Next he flashed a smile. “Is this a joke?”

I looked to Kate and Chung.

Neither of them were smiling.

I was sort of half hoping that one of them might chirp up, might tell James that I was
telling the truth
. . . but, no.

It was going to have to be the hard way.

“Look,” I said, getting up, shifting on over to the Sirocco 3000.

I shot Kate a glance when I got there, asking her with my eyes whether or not I could risk damaging her pride and joy.

She gave me a nod.

I wondered if—maybe—she was just a touch worried about what this nutcase who she’d asked to her hotel room in the middle of the night was about to do.

I looked down the back of the Sirocco, glanced across all the wires snaking out from it, and then I saw the panel. The infrared panel there, still snug beneath its snap-off plastic casing. I snuck my fingernails down beneath the panel and, with a slight
snap
, it came away and pinged off down into the snaking cables behind the desk.

I swallowed hard, looked up to the TV screen, saw that the same cut scene was playing out for
Halls of Hallow
, which meant that it was very dark there.