The World Keepers_7_A Real World Roblox Suspense Page 7

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Julia says.

  In the next moment, she’s got a gun in her hand.

  “Julia, NO!” I scream and jump from my seat toward her outstretched arm, but I’m too late. She pulls the trigger with a soft “pfft”. A dart shoots out, and Jake only has enough time to turn and bare his teeth at her before he slumps over the steering wheel once again.

  “You killed him! You killed him!! He’s my brother!! He can’t respawn now. He can’t help us! He’s going to be sitting at home going crazy because he can’t see what’s going on! What have you done!?!?”

  I feel like I might be losing my mind. My one connection to the real world is out of the game! As tough as Thomas acts, I know he’s going to be going crazy with worry. Not to mention the fact that my mom isn’t sick anymore, she’s up and walking around. How is he going to explain this to her!?!

  Julia smacks me again, stopping my tirade mid-breath.

  “Jed, I did not kill him, I only put him to sleep for a few minutes. We need to get out of here so we can make a game plan. If he leaves this van in some screwed up quest for vengeance, no one benefits. This way, we can go somewhere else, figure out what to do, and come at it RATIONALLY!”

  She moves toward the driver’s seat, hooking her hands in Thomas’s armpits, “Help me put him in the back so I can drive.” she gestures for me to get a move on.

  I just sit there, it’s like too much has happened all at once, and my body won’t obey. I’m in the game, my brother is out of action, and my mom is home. Those three thoughts play on a continuous loop in my head.

  I’m thrust back into the situation when I hear some chimes in my head. I know what they mean. Thomas has dragged my name into the discord channel. Another chime indicates a new member, and I know who it is a second later.

  “Jed, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” It’s Jake.

  “Jake, why did you do it? Don’t you know I can die in here? Don’t you understand what you’ve done? I would have helped. I would have done everything I could, why did you make this decision without even talking to me?!”

  “I’m sorry, Jed! I had to! I know you would have done everything you could, but you wouldn’t have done it like you would if you were really here, if your life was really at stake. None of you would have done EVERYTHING you could, and I needed you to give it 100%!” Jake replies.

  “I would have! I said I would have! Can you bring me back out? My mom is home. She’s going to freak if she figures out I’m not home! Do you get that? She’ll call the police. She’ll report me missing. She’ll lose her mind! Do you know what she’s going to go through if she thinks something has happened to me!?!” I’m screaming at him, uncaring that Julia is staring at me like I’ve gone crazy. Apparently, she can hear my side of the conversation, but not his.

  “Jed, I’m here too. I’m really here, too. I do get it, completely. I haven’t been able to get home in 5 days, I can’t leave, I’m running out of food, and you are my last hope. If you don’t take this beacon out of the game so I can get out, I’m going to die, do you understand? I’ll die in here. I can already feel it happening. I’m starving to death.” His voice is pleading, “You’re my last hope, I swear I’ll do everything I can to help you, but please, I don’t want to die here, I want to go home.” He trails off, then speaks so softly, I can hardly hear him. “Please…..”

  I sit back in my seat and stare up at the ceiling, then I look over at Thomas, slumped forward, the grips on the steering wheel digging into his forehead. I move across the space between the seats, crawl over him, and push the lever that will let him recline. Julia lets me do this, apparently realizing something big is going on. She keeps hold of his shoulders and keeps his back pressed to the seat as I move it so that he’s at least laying down in a more comfortable position.

  “Jed, what’s going on?” she says softly, touching my arm. “What happened just now?”

  “I’m in the game, for real in the game, I’m not home anymore.” I tell her, and she nods. “Jake is here as well, just like me. He Jumps like me.”

  She nods again, indicating I should continue.

  “He can’t take the beacon out of the game. I can, that’s the difference I guess. He could port me in, but only if he could see my character in the game, which is why he wanted me to come here.”

  “Can he send you home?” she asks.

  “He can, but he won’t, he says he needs me to try as hard as I can, and he was worried we wouldn’t give it our all if we didn’t have anything on the line.” I stop, looking at Thomas, thinking. “He’s right, you know? We would have tried, but we would have stopped if it got too bad. There’s no way Thomas would have let Adrian port me in here unless we were sure we could win.”

  I hate that Jake is right about this, but it is what it is. “He’s dying in here, Julia, do you see? He’s been here for five days. All that time Thomas and I have been grounded he’s been in here, starving to death, eating what he can in the restaurant, but the game can’t reset, the food is going to spoil, he’s running out of time.”

  She just sits, looking at me, letting me work through all of this on my own.

  “I have to save him, maybe I’d have done it on my own if I had known he was like me, but it doesn’t matter, I’m here until we get that beacon out, that’s that.”

  I can feel my resolve coming back, just a little bit. Talking about it did make things better.

  “We’ll win,” she tells me, “I already told you that we’d win. I wasn’t just making you feel better. I promised Kat I’d help you, and I will. I can do things you cannot even imagine.”

  She squeezes my shoulder, and despite the awful situation, I do feel a little bit better.

  “Well, Superwoman, I guess it’s about time you show us what you’ve got, because one way or another, we’re going to have to face those bugs.” I gesture to the mass of roaches still swarming over the pizza place.

  “Why do you suppose they’re concentrated here, as opposed to wandering all over the place?” she asks me.

  I’ve given this a lot of thought. “I guess that they want food, and that’s where the food is. They must be able to smell it. Can cockroaches smell things? Either that or they can sense it somehow.” I tell her. “Probably they were all over the place when they first got here. Once they killed and ate the body parts, they must have decided to stay where they thought they’d be most likely to get their next meal.”

  “And now,” Julia finishes for me, “with all of those people trapped in that restaurant, the bugs have both food and…...game….for lack of a better word.” She sort of grimaces, but it’s true, those people are sitting ducks.

  One way or another, we’ve got to get rid of the bugs. Once we do that, everything will get much easier. I don’t even bother saying that out loud because really, it’s obvious and I’m sure she already knows.

  “So what have you got in your bag of tricks?” I ask her.

  I saw her conjure that dart gun out of thin air, very impressive. I’ve created gear in the game a few times, but it takes so much effort that I mostly don’t bother. You have to know the code. Then you have to type in the code like /:me: 14537658.

  If you do it right, you get a cool gun or sledgehammer. If you do it wrong, you just get to stand there while your opponents pound you into the dirt.

  “I can bring in just about any weapon you can imagine, don’t worry about that.” She stops, looking like she’s about to break some bad news. “The thing is, I can’t bring in anything that will outright kill those bugs.”

  “What do you mean? If you can’t bring in anything that will kill them, how are we supposed to kill them?!” I feel myself losing my tenacious grip on my cool.

  “I can do THINGS to them. Make them go to sleep, shrink them. Make them friendly for a short time, etc., but we have to kill them here, in some way that was already here when they came in. I don’t understand the mechanics behind it, but that’s just how it is, something the
game makers put in to keep people from interfering with how the game works.”

  “Well, good for them, but I’m sure they never meant for these bugs to be here!” And then I remember that they actually did intend for the bugs to be here, only they changed their minds about the type of game it was going to be.

  Julia apparently also knows that the game changed genre before completion. “The game makers should have removed the horror codes as soon as they realized they no longer wanted that theme. But they took a shortcut and just “plugged” the holes. It’s their fault for not following through, and sort of Kat’s fault for not thinking about what she was putting at risk when she let them loose.”

  “Did she know there was a beacon in here?” I ask.

  “Yes, I mean I’ve thought about this a lot, and she must have known.” she replies.

  “So she knew, no matter what, we were going to have to end up back here. She figured we’d have a chance to fix things and it wouldn’t be that big a deal.” I wonder to myself whether or not she knew that Jake was in here.

  I think I’d rather not know for sure.

  Beside me, Thomas starts to move around a bit, his eyelids flutter, and I can see his pupils darting back and forth beneath the thin skin.

  “You should go sit in the way back,” I tell Julia, “he’s going to be super mad when he wakes up, so let me deal with it.”

  She sits there for a minute, and I think she might argue. Then she scoots to the back of the van, pulls her knees up to her chest, wraps her hands around her legs, and waits.

  Thomas wakes slowly. His breathing goes from very deep, to more normal, becoming shallow as he sucks in a breath, opens his eyes, and turns his head to look at me. I kind of forgot that he wasn’t asleep in real life. No doubt he’s been sitting on his bed, staring at the screen, waiting until he can move his character around again.

  “Jed! I am going to kill Jake, that guy is dead meat!” Immediately, he reaches for the door handle, opens the door, and goes to fling himself out, but his buckled seat belt catches him. He reaches over to unclick the belt, but Julia’s voice stops him short.

  “Thomas, unless you want to go back to sleep, I’d suggest you calm down.”

  He turns to look at her, and I turn as well. She’s no longer sitting with her arms around her legs. She’s shifted so that she’s in a steady shooting stance, one knee on the floor, the other at 90 degrees, and she’s got that gun in her hand again.

  Thomas goes still, apparently not wanting to risk being out of the game for any longer than he’s already been. He holds his hand up in a gesture of placation. “Okay, calm down, don’t shoot me again, I won’t leave the van, yet.”

  “We need a plan, guys.” I say to them both, “What are we going to do to get rid of the roaches?”

  “Can we shrink them?” Thomas asks. “At least if they’re small, they’ll be easier to step on.”

  “That’s true,” Julia says, “but they’ll also be harder to see, and much harder to catch.” She moves forward, disappearing the gun from her hand as she goes. “What we need is a way to get them all together in one place so we can kill them in one fell swoop.”

  Thomas and I both look out the window.

  “It seems like they’re all in one place right now.” he says, gesturing.

  I’m not so sure about that. Thomas said he released about a hundred bugs. Even given the masses all around the restaurant, I don’t think there are a hundred of them. It’s hard to tell though. They don’t sit still. They’re continually squirming and crawling and writhing around each other.

  Yuck.

  “Right, I think most of them are here, but we need to do something that will keep them here once we do….whatever it is we’re going to do. We also need to figure out a way to attract the rest, because I really don’t think we’ve got them all.” she says.

  “What’s the big deal if some are missing, don’t we just need to kill enough to get inside to the beacon so Jed can leave the game with it, and things will reset?” Thomas says. He’s got a great point don’t need to kill them all.

  “True enough,” she says. “The problem is, if you need to get Adrian and Carina in here, some of these bugs have to die. The stuff I can do to them doesn’t last long, a few minutes at most, not near enough time for them to get in here and get to the restaurant.”

  “Can we shrink them, then run them over or something?” I ask.

  “How about we shrink them, then put them to sleep, then toss em all in a pizza oven!” Thomas says. Man, he’s morbid. I don’t think I’ll ever eat pizza again.

  “Well, whatever we do, I think for sure it needs to start with us shrinking them. We don’t want them to run all over the place when we do, so we need to make them sleep. The problem is, I don’t have a “Sleep spray gun”, just the dart, so we’d have to hit them individually, which could be tough.”

  We all sit there and think about it. Thomas reaches down into the floorboard, where the dart she shot him with landed once it fell out of his skin. He stares at the cartridge, rolling it around in his fingers, thinking. “I think I’ve got an idea….maybe.” he says.

  “Well, don’t keep us in sus…..”

  Julia’s sentence is cut off as a great “BANG!” sounds from outside, and the van lurches to the side.

  “What the heck?!” Thomas yells. “What is going on!?”

  The van rocks again, tipping up onto it’s left wheels. Thomas and I end up in a heap on the driver’s side dashboard, and Julia gets tossed like a ragdoll, landing hard on her back, pushed against the panel of the van.

  Prickly brown bodies surround us. It’s all I can see through the front windshield. We’re stuck. There’s not even any way we can drive away since we don’t have four wheels on the ground.

  We start to spin in circles as the bugs jostle for position, each wanting to be the first to crack open this tin can of people meat.

  The van lurches again, this time to the right, tipping upward and landing back on all four tires with a screech of metal.

  Though I try to grab on to Thomas, and he tries to snatch some of my shirt to keep me steady, I go flying back to the passenger side of the van. My body hits the door with such force that it flings open. I find myself suspended in midair. Momentarily caught with my legs on the seat, my hand gripping the metal of the door frame, and my butt and back outside, inches from the spiky brown hair on a cockroaches legs.

  “Jed!” Thomas yells as he tries to move toward me. His legs are tangled in the seatbelt, and the motion causes him to get tugged backward, his upper body wedging itself between the two front seats.

  My grip on the door frame starts to falter, it’s too much weight to hold, all of me is hanging from just a few fingers on my right hand, and I begin to slip.

  “Chud A Dud” I hear from behind me, “CHUD A DUD!” The noise gets louder as the bugs see their opening. It’s a scramble of noise, like someone scratching their nails through a bed of gravel. “CHUD A DUD CHUD A DUD CHUD A DUD!”

  My body falls, and for a moment, I’m thankful as something catches me in mid-air, preventing me from smacking my face on the blacktop below. I crane my head and am immediately NOT thankful.

  My shirt is snagged on the left mandible of the nastiest looking roach I have ever laid eyes on. I go still, hoping that it won’t notice me if I don’t move. I look into the van, where I can still see Julia, crumpled on the floor. The fall must have knocked her unconscious.

  “Thomas, help me…..” I say, very quietly, still hoping I’ll escape the notice of these creatures.

  He moves slowly, untangling himself from the seatbelt and pushing toward me. Reaching out a hand, I can see that he intends to grab me once he gets close enough. I almost think he’s going to make it, I hold my hand out, and he closes the gap, six inches, five inches, four inches, three inches….

  It all happens in a moment. The van lurches again. The front end is spinning away from me like a rock skipping across a pond. The roach closes it
s mandibles, piercing me with the right one, shoving me firmly on to the left. The jagged edges are tearing through my shirt and into my skin.

  Pain shoots through my body, and, once again, I’m out.

  Pain.

  Pain.

  Pain.

  There’s nothing in my world right now except for this.

  I can’t think, I can’t breathe, I can’t see, all I can do is feel the throbbing that consumes my entire body.

  Pulse.

  Pulse.

  Pulse.

  With every beat of my heart, blood flows through my veins, scorching my nerves. I feel like I’m on fire. My body is wrapped tightly in some kind of sticky material, it clings to my abraded skin, and presses on the jagged holes in my flesh.

  I move my head around and am immediately overtaken by a wave of nausea. I start to retch, even though I can’t remember the last time I’ve eaten anything.

  My stomach heaves and bile rushes up my throat, spurting out of my mouth and down into my nose. It’s warm and slimy, and it smells awful as it overflows and runs into my eyes. It burns, I’ve never had stomach acid in my eyes before, but it burns.

  I try to suck in air. It only makes things worse. I inadvertently bring the bile into my nostrils and feel it lodge at the back of my throat, not traveling any further down, as though gravity no longer exists.

  Wiggling around, I attempt to bring my arms up to wipe my face, but I can’t, they’re pinned to my side by that same sticky material, restricting all movement. My wiggling does serve a purpose though, as I realize that the motion has set me in motion, swinging back and forth.

  Wait, I’m swinging back and forth…..

  The thought shakes something loose in my brain, and I use every ounce of might to bring my head up toward my shoulder. Contorting as much as I can so that I can at least sort of wipe the bile away from one eyeball, allowing me limited vision.

  What I can now see confirms my fear. I’m in a cocoon, in a cave, attached to the ceiling by a thin strand of web, the same web that encases my entire body. Craning my neck, I glance below me, trying to judge the distance to the ground, but immediately regret it.