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  “Uh, hi! Like, I’m Daniel. Who are you?”

  “I’m Kildare Gygax. Nice to meet you, Daniel. Want to do me a favor and see if you can help me down from here? There should be a stepladder in the janitor’s closet down the hall over there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Let’s just say this isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me.”

  “Those bullies have stuck you up there in a garbage can before?”

  “Actually, last time they hung me by my underpants on a climbing peg halfway up the gymnasium wall. But the stepladder was helpful then too.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said, grimacing at the thought. “Shouldn’t I go get a teacher?”

  “And then have said teacher ask me what happened, and have to implicate Ichi or one of his thugs—or pin the blame on somebody innocent—and deal with all the repercussions of that? No, thank you.”

  “But if you don’t, you’re just giving in to those bullies!” I blurted.

  He looked at me with a mixture of pity and impatience.

  “As I’m sure you know, Daniel, there’s a long history of bullying in high schools. And Japan’s no exception. In fact, some statistics say we’ve got the worst juvenile bullying culture on earth.”

  I found that hard to believe. The population seemed so… mild mannered. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “Now, seriously, I’m losing feeling in my feet.”

  “I’ll go get that ladder,” I said, and went to retrieve it.

  “So,” he said after I came back, as I climbed up and somehow managed to help him out of the can without killing us both. “What’s another gaijin doing in this place?”

  “Umm, I just transferred. Parents moved here for work.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Um,” I said, suddenly realizing there was a danger in seeming too stupid. “They, um, handle personnel training for a nongovernmental organization.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, I didn’t think I’d seen you before.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “it’s not like I tend to make a big impression on people anyway.”

  “Just the fact that you’re talking to me is all the impression I need,” Kildare said, fishing his book bag out of the bottom of the trash barrel. He put it on his back and made the weirdest noise—it was a like a cross between a sneeze and a cat’s purr.

  “Odaiji ni,” I said.

  “What?!”

  “It means ‘bless you’—you know, what you say when somebody sneezes.”

  “I didn’t sneeze,” he said, starting to turn red.

  “Oh,” I said, not quite sure how to respond.

  “Anyhow, thanks for the help.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, meaning it quite sincerely. Other than making weird sneezing noises and then denying them, he seemed like a nice, grounded kid. I mean, I wasn’t exactly going to let my guard down to a child of two top-ten List aliens, but…

  “Say, what class do you have next?” I asked.

  “Introductory zoology,” he said.

  “Really?” I said, whipping out a class schedule and pretending to read the same course. “Me, too. Can you show me where it is?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I suggest you not walk in with me. Ichi’s in that class. In fact, that’s kind of why he and his friends stuck me in the garbage can. They wanted to borrow my homework.”

  “ ‘Borrow,’ huh?” I said.

  “Yeah, well, there are worse things,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, if you’re still intent on coming to class with me, I’m sure you’ll see them do something worse than that. They’re especially rough on new kids.”

  Chapter 26

  “CELASTRINA ARGIOLUS, GLAUCOPSYCHE alexis, Vanessa atalanta, Gonepteryx cleopatra, Hesperia comma, Inachis io, Lysandra bellargus, Quercusia quercus, and Danaus plexippus.”

  “Very good, Mr. Gygax,” said Professor Kuniyoshi, beaming with pride at his star pupil’s recitation.

  You know how some kids get geeky about computers or writing or drama or history or music? Well, for Kildare, science class seemed to be his thing. Big time.

  When old Professor Kuniyoshi unstacked and displayed his enormous butterfly collection—after telling a long rambling story about how he’d been all over the world to obtain it—most of the students looked bored and on the verge of unconsciousness. But Kildare looked like a little kid on Christmas morning. And, when asked to identify the specimens, he recited their scientific names with something close to bliss.

  Which was a pretty bold move, since we all know that if there’s one truth about bullies the world over, it’s that nothing sets them off like other people’s happiness. So, as Kildare boiled over with geeky enthusiasm, Ichi began to boil over with malignant intent.

  Ichi was a compact, muscle-bound kid with a face that seemed to know only two expressions: snarling resentment (which he wore when adults were looking), and belligerent disdain (which he wore when kids were looking). Right then, safely in the back of the room and sitting behind a tall kid so that Professor Kuniyoshi couldn’t see him, he was wearing the latter. And he was drawing back a very thick rubber band to which he’d fastened a metal paper clip.

  Thwak!

  Professor Kuniyoshi stopped talking and turned around at the noise but—not noticing the paper-clipped rubber band on the floor behind Kildare, or the tear trickling out of Kildare’s eye, or Ichi’s friends’ barely suppressed laughter—turned back to the board and continued to draw the common elements of moth wings.

  Kildare looked like he was just going to suck up the pain. I, however, had reached my breaking point. I was going to teach this bully a lesson about entomology.

  I turned my attention to the hundreds of butterflies and moths on their display mounts on the table in front of Professor Kuniyoshi. Then with my mind I popped the pins from their wings and brought them back from the dead.

  First one, then another, then every single specimen in the collection twitched, quivered, fluttered, and flew up into the air.

  The entire class sat up and watched, openmouthed, as the butterflies gathered in an enormous colorful cloud in the middle of the room.

  And then, en masse, they streaked to the back of the class and began to dive-bomb Ichi’s spiky-haired head.

  “Ah-ah-ah-ah!” screamed Ichi in a voice so piercing and panicked he sounded more like a seven-year-old girl than a fourteen-year-old thug. “Get them off!!”

  He leaped from his chair, swatting wildly about his head.

  This time when poor Professor Kuniyoshi turned around, he didn’t fail to notice what was happening. But he didn’t quite know what to do about it.

  “My collection?” He gasped. “My butterflies? Ichi, what are you doing to my butterflies?! Don’t you dare harm my specimens, young man!”

  “Get them off me!” shrieked Ichi, running laps around the room now. They weren’t really hurting him, of course, but Ichi was apparently scared enough to fear the worst.

  The rest of the class, including Ichi’s so-called friends, were roaring with laughter. Everybody, that is, except for Kildare, who had turned around in his seat and was staring right at me.

  Chapter 27

  SCHOOL IS EXHAUSTING. I don’t know how human kids do it. By the time I got back to the suite, I could barely stand up. I wasn’t even going to change out of my dorky sailor-boy seifuku. I was just going to let myself in, unsling my book bag, and sleep on the nearest soft object I could find—a couch, a bed, an area rug, a pile of clothes…

  But no sooner had I opened the door and stepped inside than—WHAM!—I was facedown on the bamboo floor with my arm twisted behind my back and the whining sound of a fully charged Opus 24/24 in my ear.

  My powerful assailant’s weight shifted, driving a knee into the small of my back.

  “You could be dead right now, Daniel,” whispered a voice I knew all too well, a voice I should have known to
expect at just a moment such as this.

  “Dad, I’ve had a rough day. Can you please let me up?”

  “You expect to take on Number 7, Number 8, and Number 1, and you walk blindly into your hotel room without running a security sweep? Have you forgotten everything you’ve been taught?”

  “Dad,” I pleaded, “my arm, my—”

  Dad let go of my wrist and got up, but he didn’t power down the Opus 24/24.

  Opus 24/24s have only one setting—eternal damnation. They contain an illegal molecular resonator that fires a gigawatt pulse that vibrates at the precise frequency of its victim’s neurotransmissions. In the simplest terms, it causes its victims to expire from pure pain. Which is kind of why they’re banned across most of the civilized universe.

  Seeing one in my father’s hands was a little jarring to say the least. It was the very same weapon The Prayer had used to kill him and my mother.

  “Dad, put that thing down already, okay?”

  “Make me,” he commanded in a voice that sent chills down my spine. He was challenging me as part of our ongoing training exercises, but I don’t think he realized how truly exhausted I was.

  Just as I was about to tell him he was seconds away from being dematerialized—stored in the lower levels of my consciousness until I needed him again—he grabbed me with one hand and flung me across the room into a Noguchi glass coffee table, which promptly shattered.

  “Ouch. What the heck?!”

  I struggled to my feet, anger boiling inside me. It was one thing to keep me on my toes, but it was another to take advantage of a tired kid who’d already had a pretty rough day.

  “Look, Dad. That wasn’t funny, and—”

  “You might want to dive through, Daniel,” he suggested.

  “Dive through? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  By way of reply, he deftly aimed the Opus 24/24 at me and squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 28

  WAIT A SECOND, I thought. Actually, wait a whole bunch of seconds.

  Though my recollection is hazy at best, when I was just two—and he was still alive—my father had taught me how it’s possible to dive through the surface of time.

  It’s something I recently pulled off while in the grips of a man-eating space anemone that had disguised itself as a van. And of course there was that time I managed to put myself back quite a few centuries, all the way to the time of King Arthur…

  Anyhow, I’m not good at explaining the physics of the time-travel process, but suffice it to say it’s pretty taxing. The power to dive through the current, the fabric of the here and now, comes straight out of your emotions. So you’ve got to be really riled up when you do it. Freaked out about something like, oh, say, your father firing the cruelest weapon ever created right at your head.

  Even as the Opus 24/24 discharged—a plasma pulse of pure pain erupting from its wicked, sawtooth muzzle—I dove through the space-time continuum and put the entire situation on standby.

  It’s pretty intense, really, to have everything in the world suddenly stop and hang in the air like you’re walking around in a museum diorama. Intense, but also a little lonely, and quiet like you wouldn’t believe.

  “Very good, Daniel,” my father said stepping back from the still-frozen Opus 24/24. “But what do you do if your opponent is also able to manipulate time?” He walked around the floating weapon, as if to emphasize his point.

  “Look, Dad. It’s one thing to give me fighting tips and keep me on my guard and all that, but I need some rest right now. I’ll have you over after I’ve taken a nap, okay?”

  “You’re not answering my question, Daniel. Do you know for certain that Number 7 or Number 8 can’t stop time?”

  “No. I mean, we know almost nothing about them, but I don’t think—”

  “Oh, you don’t think?” he said mockingly, waving his arms and somehow casting us both backward in time, slowly at first, and then faster, faster, faster.

  In a blink, we were watching my arrival at the hotel, and then the guest before me, a businessman of some sort, and then back to the one before that, and the one before that and then—bam!—there were soldiers around. American soldiers. And there was some military dude I recognized in khakis smoking a corncob pipe. General Douglas MacArthur? The man who’d been entrusted with Japan’s recovery after World War II and had helped start the nation on one of the world’s most remarkable comebacks of all time.

  I could have yelled hello, but then—bam!—the hotel was being built, and we were hovering in the air over the horses and carts of the nineteenth-century construction crew, and then—bam!—we were hovering over the previous building on the site, maybe a hotel too but shorter? and then—bam!—we were back back to when the site was occupied by a small, curved-roof house and there was a big stone castle not far away. Just then the earth started to shake. I looked off in the distance and saw a huge black cloud exploding out of Mount Fuji—it must be the famous eruption of 1707!

  Before I could scramble for cover—bam!—we were at a camp of ancient Japanese soldiers armed with wooden spears and polished stone axes, and then—bam!—back to pristine forest. And then—bam!—back to some sort of ice age and we were on a glacier, and then the glacier was gone and there was a grassland, and then a forest with really weird trees, and then—

  “This should do,” said my father, looking around at the primitive jungle. “So, Daniel, it’s time you got caught up on your homework. What do you know for a fact about Number 7 and Number 8?”

  “They run a video-game company, live in Tokyo, have a son, a really nice apartment, and they like to hunt and eat endangered aliens?”

  “So what puts them in the List’s top ten?”

  “They’re plotting to decimate the human race by brainwashing kids to become killing machines like the ones in their video games.”

  “You mean to go after them, and this is all you know? What’s the rest of their plan? How will they initiate it? How do you know it hasn’t already begun?”

  “Well—” I started to say, but I knew he was right. Had I ever been this badly underprepared for anything?

  “And how about Number 1?” he asked me. “We’ve heard he’s been in town recently. What have you learned about him after all these years on the same planet with him?”

  “You mean other than that he can give a person bad nightmares?”

  “What do you know about him in terms of his abilities or physical appearances—”

  “Well, he has dreadlocks, red bug eyes, looks like a big giant praying mantis—”

  “Always?”

  “Well, the List computer says he’s a shape-shifter—”

  “So, he could, in theory, look like this?” asked my father, morphing into a twenty-foot-tall carnivorous dinosaur with red bug eyes and dreadlocks.

  “Run, Daniel. Run,” he roared.

  I didn’t ask. I just did.

  Chapter 29

  I GUESS YOU’VE got to trust your parents know what’s best for you. Even when they’re in the form of the largest land-based predator the Earth’s ever known and are testing your ability to survive by attempting to kill you.

  “Daniel,” boomed my tyrannosaur father, knocking down a huge fern tree as he charged after me. “Here are the rules to this little training exercise—” He cut himself short to lunge at me with his wicked six-inch teeth. I barely managed to leap over a moss-covered boulder and out of reach.

  “Each time you survive one of my attempts on your life, you earn a catechism question.”

  “What kind of reward is that?!” I panted.

  My dad was big into what he called his “catechism”—a way of verbally instructing me with hard-core questions on all manner of philosophical and ethical topics.

  “And each correctly answered question—” he roared, stubbing one of his big clawed toes on a spiky cycad plant, “will earn you the next level. Complete all the levels, and today’s training will be complete.”

  “And if I d
on’t complete all the levels?”

  “You ever wonder what it would be like to get bitten in half?” he said, stopping and snapping his enormous jaws down at me.

  I leaped out of the way and took off in a new direction.

  “Okay,” he bellowed. “First catechism question: Give me a Japanese proverb on the subject of the difference between wisdom and memory.”

  I knew this one: “Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an, um, donkey.” Call me crazy, but even if my dad was conjured up by my own mind, I wasn’t fond of using what my mother would call “coarse” language around him.

  “I trust you can see how the saying applies to your current situation.”

  I didn’t have a chance to think it through right then. Bam! Dad was now back as his usual self, and we were standing in the future—way in the future by the looks of it. We were in some sort of high-tech, robot-operated assembly plant with silver Honda logos all over the place. Laser saws, titanium rivet guns, and ceramic shears were slicing, dicing, puncturing, folding, and hammering large shapes out of metal, carbon fiber, glass, and plastic all around us.

  This was clearly a place for machines, not people. The air was stifling hot and smelled of sulfur, but worse than the air was the noise. Deafening is too weak a word. It felt like hammers landing on the sides of my head. It was too loud to do anything, much less think, and I almost didn’t notice Dad leveling the Opus 24/24 at me again.

  I leaped backward, landing on a high-speed conveyor belt as the blast ricocheted off a junction box and hit an assembly robot. The poor thing actually seemed to scream as it burst into a thousand pieces.

  I smiled triumphantly back at my father.

  I couldn’t hear him, but it was easy enough to read his lips: “You only earn a question when you survive!” was what he said.

  I rolled over just in time to notice I was being whisked into an enormous laser cutter.