The World Keepers_7_A Real World Roblox Suspense Read online

  For Jack,

  You are the inspiration behind the fart jokes.

  (and I love you)

  The World Keepers Series

  Please check Ty The Hunter’s Amazon page to see a complete list of the series so far.

  All of the books are available on Kindle Unlimited.

  Updates are also available on Facebook @TyTheHunter

  Get in touch with me at [email protected]

  “Thomas and Jed, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DOG!?!”

  Those eight words, such a simple sentence, but that’s how it all started. Thomas and I getting grounded, us not being able to play Roblox for a few days.

  It must have been our absence that triggered everything else, the notes, the videos, the messages.

  That’s why it all started, but it doesn’t matter, not really. It would have happened either way.

  I know that now.

  Let me back up a little bit, so you really understand what’s going on.

  Christmas was about three weeks ago, give or take a few days. That’s important because if my mom hadn’t gotten us the putty as a present, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Now that I say it out loud, I realize I could blame all this on my mother.

  I won’t….but I could.

  See, just like any other kids on the planet, Thomas and I make Christmas lists. We ask for the toys we want the most, and admittedly, those lists can get kind of long. They can also have random things added at random times. In Thomas’s case, they will also have random things removed at the last minute. These things will be replaced with other stuff he “really wants more than anything”.

  Mom does her best with all of this, and I know she likes for us to have lots of gifts under the tree, so sometimes she gets us things we haven’t asked for.

  Most parents do this to some extent, I’m sure. I mean if you ask for a pony, and your parents are just NOT gonna make that happen, you probably get something else. A “sorry it’s not a pony, but you can open it anyway” sort of gift.

  This year, because my cousin asked for Aaron’s Thinking Putty, mom thought it might be something we’d like as well since we’re close in age. Really, it’s a great gift. What boy doesn’t love something that resembles slime?

  I have a better question. What boy is actually going to take the time to keep track of the slime for three weeks?

  Not us.

  Are you figuring out what happened to the dog?

  Mom got us this set of putty that came with a bunch of different colors. It had six different canisters of clear putty, four packages of glitter putty, and things to add so that you could make your own designs. You can make something no one else has, only you. Thomas and I were like putty Picassos! If you don’t know who Picasso is, you might want to Google it.

  We sat on the living room rug, ripped into that shiny, silver wrapping paper, emptied the box of its treasures, and went to work like mad scientists. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to our putty making. I mean it was a WHOLE KIT of stuff to put in the putty, so what did we do? We used ALL OF IT, of course!

  The end result was this blackish/green ball of glittery slime that we then combined to make one GIANT glob of putty! Picture me wringing my hands while laughing like “MU HA HA HA HA!”

  It was epic!

  Until it wasn’t.

  Thomas set the putty glob on his floor, which is wood, so it wasn’t a big deal, but THEN he didn’t clean his room when mom asked….

  Now that I say it, I realize I could blame Thomas for all of this.

  So I will.

  Let’s just preface everything after this point with “It’s Thomas’s fault.” Okay? Great!

  BECAUSE Thomas didn’t pick up the putty and because it’s been so cold outside that our heater has constantly been running, the putty sort of melted with the warmth of the room. It flattened out into a putty pancake. The thinner it got, the warmer it got, and eventually, it oozed all over the glossed brown wood of his bedroom floor.

  The “ball” of putty became a “pool” of putty. The pool became a larger pool, and it got very thin, spread out over a large surface, at least a foot wide. It was actually quite nice to look at, like a shiny, slicky bit of goop that you could peel up and remold into whatever shape you wanted.

  It’s the “peel up” part of things that got left out of the equation. Thomas didn’t clean, he didn’t pick up the putty, and the pool spread.

  Ty (our giant, black German Shepherd) came into Thomas’s room to hang out with us. He is absolutely notorious for lying on our things. I’d blame him, but he’s a dog, and he’s a good dog, so I can’t do that. He does love plopping himself down on our stuff, though. My shoes, a bath towel that didn’t get re-hung, Thomas’s dirty t-shirt, my underwear, you get the idea.

  So Ty went in Thomas’s room to hang out with us, saw the putty, said: “Ruff Ruff, it’s something of Thomas’s, it would be better with fur stuck to it.”, and laid down in the putty slick. I guess because it was so thin, it heated up even further with Ty’s warmth, and then when he got up to move, it just peeled up with him.

  It should be called “Aaron’s SUPER STICKY Putty”, come to think of it.

  He almost looked like he was wearing shiny, metal armor on his shoulder blade. It looked really cool!If only it hadn’t been so…..permanent.

  Mom caught it almost right away. She was sitting at the kitchen table, checking over our school work, when Ty came out of Thomas’s room and lay down at her feet. It couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes, but it still had plenty of time to melt down into his fur, and even get stuck to his skin in places.

  He wasn’t bothered by it, but mom was a different story. She had to shave the dog to get the putty out. He looks like an idiot. Mom feels terrible because Ty is avoiding her, and Thomas and I are grounded.

  Poor pup.

  Poor us.

  Consider yourself up to speed.

  For your enjoyment, I have included a picture of Ty after he laid in the putty, but before he had to get shaved. I know it’s hard to see, and no, it’s not your screen or page. He’s black, so if you can’t make out any detail, blame his mother and father, not me.

  Listen, please keep this between us, if my mom finds out I’m sharing that picture around, she’ll kill me. I’m already in deep enough, so….shhhhh.

  Ever since Mom realized how much we love our iPads, that’s the thing that gets taken away first when we get in trouble. I’ve been trying to think of a way to act like I hate my iPad and LOVE schoolwork so she’ll take that away, but so far she’s not taking the bait.

  As it stands now, we have NO electronics, none whatsoever.

  No iPad.

  No computer.

  No Kindle.

  If we happen to have a paperback book on our shelves, we can read that. Thankfully, being just a few weeks after Christmas, I have a lot of paperbacks that I haven’t gotten through yet, otherwise, I’d be completely out of luck. Heck, I doubt she’d even take us to the library at this point.

  It’s been four days since we’ve been able to use any electronics at all. Except for school work, and sometimes getting to play video games on the PS4 when my dad comes home from work at night, we're cut off. At first, it was no big deal. Sure, Thomas and I missed our games, Roblox, all that stuff, but we’ve been grounded before, so we knew the deal.

  Be contrite, look apologetic at all times, and eventually, mom will cave. She always does. Apparently, it’s just taking her longer to get on with the caving this time!

  Since we can’t play Roblox at all, we figured we wouldn’t be able to get in touch with Kat, Adrian, Carina, etc. until w
e were allowed back on. We never, not for a second, thought that any of them would find a way to get in touch with us.

  They did, though.

  Or at least, I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on. We first noticed something was “off” one morning when we were supposed to be doing our school work. I guess I should say “I noticed” something was off, since (as far as we can tell), I got the first message.

  There are a couple of classes we do on the iPad, and mom wants us to learn to type, so we have a typing class on the computer. It doesn’t take long. Thomas has been doing it for two years, and he types over 80 words a minute!! I’m new to this though, still hunting and pecking through the tutorials. So there I am, “peck peck peck”, doing my thing, trying to get through it as fast as I can. That’s when it happened.

  I was sitting in my room, at my desk, all huddled up in my favorite black comforter, typing away, when, all of the sudden, the screen stopped typing what I was typing. I kept hitting keys, thinking they must be sticking or something. Maybe my motherboard broke, maybe Thomas spilled soda on my computer and then just didn’t tell me. He would totally do something like that.

  Anyway, there I was, punching in “aaaa jjjj ssss kkkk dddd llll” and thinking about which fingers to use without actually looking at my fingers, when my screen starts going nutso. Letters start scrolling across the screen on their own accord, as though someone is standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, typing in their own message:

  I stopped typing and sat back in my chair, looking at the screen or glancing over my shoulder to see if Thomas is snickering under his breath while he watches me fall for his stupid prank.

  The message stays on my screen only for a few seconds before flashing out of existence. It happened so quickly that I thought maybe I was seeing things. I stared at the screen for a whole minute longer, but it was gone, nothing there except my regular, boring typing program.

  I shrugged it off. If Thomas was playing a prank, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of me making a fuss about it.

  There wasn’t any point in waiting to continue my lesson, so I started again “ajaj sksk dldl f;f;”, “ask a fall sad lad”, and on and on. A few minutes later, it happened again, my keys stopped working, and after a moment, more words began scrolling across the screen:

  This time, I KNEW what I’d seen, so I took the time to hunt and peck my way through a message of my own.

  “Who is this?” I typed.

  I think I know who it is, I mean, it has to be Kat, right? We all saw her get taken out of the game by that creepy, old dude. Adrian had already ported me out of the game by then, but I ended up right where I’d come in the night before, sitting on my bed, my iPad right by my head. I quickly picked it up so I wouldn’t miss what was happening.

  There was a portal on the lifeboat. Thomas and Adrian were the only ones still in the game. The other players were logged out as soon as I came back into the real world with the beacon. Creepy dude had a death grip on Kat’s arm, and she looked miserable, sort of a mix of terrified and beaten.

  He made some remark about “finding us”, then hauled Kat through the portal. The game reset, and I got kicked off as well.

  Back in the present, I look at my cursor blinking on the screen, the message I typed in just sits there, waiting for a reply. Of course, there’s no answer. That would be too easy.

  I got up from my desk, padded across the floor to the hallway, took a little running start, and did a sock power slide into Thomas’s room.

  Why the sock slide??? Because it’s cool!

  Duh.

  “Thomas, is your typing program acting weird?” I ask my brother as I swing my arms around, trying to keep my balance after that epic skid.

  He peers down at me between the rungs of his bed rail. “What do you mean, weird? I finished up a while ago, but it seemed normal to me.”, he shrugged and went back to his school work, dismissing me.

  Well, no help from him, apparently.

  I hear footsteps in the hallway, and I know I’ve been busted. “Jed! Are you finished with your typing!?”

  That’s my mom. I swear she has supersonic hearing. I’m out of my room for 2.5 seconds, and she knows! I hustle back to my room, almost colliding with her as I run through the hallway. She catches me before I can knock her over, and holds me at arm's length.

  “Hey, Mom! No, I’m not done, but I’m close! I just had a question about the typing, so I asked Thomas!” I sort of pant and puff as I answer, I’m a little out of breath with all this running back and forth.

  “Okay, well finish up.” She hugs me, then places her hands on my back and gently shoves me back toward my bedroom door. Clearly, she’s still irritated about the whole “shaved dog” incident.

  Back in my room, I finish my typing, plonking out the rest of the tutorial, then crawl up my bunk ladder, taking the computer with me. Using one hand to climb, since the other is holding my laptop, I touch the ladder bars as little as I can because the metal is freezing cold! I’m surprised I made it up alive, really. I like to live dangerously.

  Once I’m huddled up under my comforter again, I open my laptop and stare at the screen, keeping the program open, waiting to see if another message will appear.

  It doesn’t.

  Not there, anyway.

  The next time a message came, it came to Thomas, and apparently whoever was sending them was getting bolder, not caring that Thomas might get busted, that I might get busted.

  If it was Kat, and I really think it is, I can only assume that things must be horrible for her, otherwise, she wouldn’t risk our secret like this.

  Mentally, I kick myself. OF COURSE, things are terrible for her! She got dragged through a portal by a guy she was clearly afraid of, someone she had clearly been avoiding, trying to help us navigate our way through “Jumping” without him catching on.

  It makes me a little bit ashamed that I’m so worried about Thomas and I getting into trouble with our folks when it seems obvious that Kat has a lot more trouble than that going on.

  Is that why she sought me out? Is that why she’s taken the time to help us find our footing with our abilities? Is it all so that we can help her?

  How are we going to help her if we’re banned from computers for the rest of our lives, though? She must realize that? I mean, how would we explain to our parents that we’re able to enter video games physically? I don’t think there’s any way that would end well. They’d either think we were off our heads, or that we were playing a joke on them. We’d end up checked into a psychiatrist's office, or we’d end up grounded.

  My guess is that it would be a bit of both. They’d go on and on about video games making us lose sight of reality, how we can no longer tell fact from fiction, how it's warping our impressionable young minds, etc. There’s no way it would end well, that’s for sure, and if it doesn’t end well, there’s no way we can help Kat.

  These are the thoughts running through my mind as I sit in the living room listening to Thomas and my Dad playing “Call of Duty”. It has a split screen option, so they can play together, which is great because Thomas loves COD, he’s really good at it, and now that his other electronic options are out of the question, he can’t wait for Dad to get home each night.

  They always offer to let me play, but it’s not really my thing. I prefer stuff like “Overcooked” or “Lego Worlds”, but I do like watching them blow things up, so I decided to join them. We’re all sitting in the living room when the next message arrives.

  I’m on the couch, half watching them play, half flipping through the latest “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book. Thomas and Dad are sitting in these low slung camp chairs that fold up. They’re actually for camping, but they work so well as gaming chairs that Mom bought a couple of extra, just to be kept in the house.

  Dad just got up to get a glass of water, heading to the kitchen, then to the freezer for some ice. I’m zoned out on my book, so it takes a moment for my brain to focus when I hear
Thomas hiss, “Jed, do you see this?!”

  He’s speaking low, so Dad doesn’t hear him, but urgent enough that I’ll take notice. I look up sharply, and see that the game has turned off, the screen is a staticky grey buzz, and there are words, white outlined in black.

  As one, Thomas and I turn our heads toward the kitchen, expecting our dad to be staring at the screen, expecting the questions that are sure to come. He’s still at the fridge though, taking no notice of the TV.

  The words don’t stay up long, a few seconds at most. This time, when they disappear, instead of going away and not coming back, a video pops up on the screen where the words used to be. It looks like something you might see on YouTube, not taking up the whole screen, but rather a smaller video on the screen, again outlined in black, just like the words were.

  We’re looking at what appears to be a hospital room, maybe the picture you’d get if there were a camera mounted high on the wall furthest from the door. The video is all black and white, the screen doing that odd rolling flicker you see on security tapes, so it’s hard to make out all of the details.

  We can see a single hospital bed and a rolling table that would be used to serve food to the person in bed. There's a monitor beside the bed that has some lights flashing on it and a large window on the far side of the room. Beside the window, there is a solid looking door. The flashing lights on the monitor appear to be numbers or maybe words. It's displayed in the upper right corner, but it’s so far away that I can’t tell what they are.

  There are two people in the room, both facing away from us, exiting through the door. One is larger, an adult, in nurses scrubs. The other is smaller, slight, perhaps an adult, or maybe an older child? There’s no way to tell.

  This person is being led by the nurse, ambling, shuffling, as though they’re exhausted, or perhaps drugged?

  I stand up from the couch to get a better look at the TV but don’t make it more than two steps before the screen flickers to black, and COD appears, as though nothing was ever different.