Scavenger (28 page)

Carefully, he came to his feet, reached for the gully’s top, and pulled himself up, kneeing against the dirt. As he raised his head over the edge, teeth snapped, saliva spraying his face. Gasping, he let go and slid down the bank.

A dog was up there. At once, it leapt.

Balenger rolled to the side, feeling the rush of air when the dog struck his right knee and hurtled down. It landed on the bank, avoided the water, snarled, and charged. On his back, weighed down by the knapsack, Balenger kicked, banging the animal’s nose. He didn’t have time to unsling his rifle. Even if he’d managed, the fight was too close for him to be able to aim. Kicking again, he grabbed the knife clipped to his right pants pocket, flipped the blade open, and worked to raise himself so he could swing.

Another snarl came from behind him, a second dog stretching its head from the top of the bank, snapping at him. Simultaneously, the first dog lunged past Balenger’s boots, teeth aimed toward his groin. Balenger slashed, catching the snout above the nose. As blood flew, the dog lurched back in shock, hit the water, and wailed, its body contorting from the force of the electricity. It jumped from the water, but damage to its nerves took away its strength. Hitting the water again, it thrashed in a death convulsion. Its wail became frenzied grunts that turned to silence, the dog lying still.

The second dog, too, became silent, startled by what had happened. Balenger turned and slashed upward, cutting under its jaw. With a yelp, the dog skittered backward, retreating out of sight beyond the top of the bank.

Balenger surged to his feet and ran to the left along the bank, in the opposite direction from where the dog on top seemed to have gone. Feeling a sharp pain in his right knee, he glanced down and saw blood. The damned thing bit me! he thought. My God, was it rabid?

He reached a spot that looked easy to climb but jerked his hands back when teeth snapped at them. Two dogs lunged into view, foam dripping from their jaws. One had a cut under its jaw. The other was bigger, the size of a German shepherd.

Balenger dropped his knife, unslung the rifle, and risked a quick look to make sure that dirt didn’t plug the barrel. Both dogs darted back. He aimed, ready if they showed themselves. Even with the Kleenex in his ears, he heard growling beyond the top of the bank.

He eased to the left along the stream, staring toward the top, hoping to outflank the dogs. A snarl above him warned that they kept pace with him.

Maybe I can scare them off, he thought. He fired, hoping the sharp noise would drive them away.

For a moment, there was silence.

Then the growls resumed.

The dogs were big but scrawny. Balenger wondered if they were crazy with hunger. He slipped out of his knapsack. Holding his gun with one hand, he opened the flap and pulled out two energy bars. He hurled them to his left over the bank. When he heard movement, he grabbed his knapsack and ran to the right, picking up his knife and clipping it into his pocket as he hurried. He passed the dead dog in the stream and kept running.

He climbed a gentle part of the slope, peered over the top, didn’t see a threat, and scrambled up. The two dogs were a distance away, snarling at each other, fighting over the energy bars. The bigger dog grabbed a bar, swallowed it whole, wrapper and all, and attacked the other dog before it could get to the remaining bar.

The BlackBerry vibrated in Balenger’s pocket. Ignoring it, he stalked toward the reservoir.

3

“Stack them on!” Amanda urged. In the ruins, she held out her arms while Ray set board after board onto them.

“Too many!” he said.

“Give me more!” The strain made her wince. “Okay, that’s enough!”

Amanda headed toward the drained reservoir. She heard another gunshot. It, too, came from the north, but it sounded closer.
Frank?
she thought.
Is that really you? What are you shooting?
At once, she feared that Frank was the one being shot at. Don’t think that way! she warned herself. Frank’s coming! I’ve got to believe that!

The weight of the boards hurting her arms, she staggered onward, finally reaching the basin. With a clatter, she dropped them. Her mouth felt dry, as if it had been swabbed with cotton.

Ray plodded to her and dropped what he carried. He squinted at his watch. “Twenty to two.”

“The time goes fast when you’re having fun,” Amanda said. She grabbed two boards and set them next to each other on the muddy slope.

“Or slower,” the Game Master said through her headset. “Time is relative in video games. It all depends how it’s divided.”

“Go to hell!” Amanda told him. She and Ray hurried to place more boards in the mud.

“Many games have time counters, but in games that deal with the development of virtual civilizations, the counters indicate months and years instead of seconds or minutes. Indeed, a month might last only a minute. Conversely, some games pretend to measure conventional time, but a minute on their timers might actually last two minutes in so-called real time. The player exits the game and discovers that twice as much conventional time elapsed than the game indicated. The effect can be disorienting.”

Amanda continued making a walkway, trying to shut out the voice.

“Then, too, as you discovered, a game’s subjective time can be different from clock time. A friend who’s dying from cancer learned that the intense speed of multiple decisions many games require gives a fullness to each instant and makes time appear to go slowly. For some players, the forty hours that the average game takes can be the equivalent of a lifetime.”

Another shot echoed from beyond the drained reservoir. Amanda stared toward the mountains to the north.

“You can bet
Frank
feels it’s been a lifetime,” the Game Master said.

“Don’t believe him. He’s jerking your chain,” Ray said. “Those shots are probably from hunters. If we’re lucky, maybe they’ll find us.”

But what could they do to help us? Amanda wondered. We’re walking bombs. For that matter, what can Frank do to help us?

“I never lie,” the Game Master said. “If I tell you those shots indicate Frank is coming, you can take my word for it.”

“You never lie? Hard for me to know.” Ray glared toward the sky. “But sure as sin, you never told the complete truth.”

Don’t think that way! Amanda warned herself. Frank’s coming. He’s got to be. Just keep trying to distract the Game Master. She put the last board into the mud and hurried to get more.

4

Balenger reached a solitary pine tree, the only elevated object around, and found, as he anticipated, a video camera mounted on its trunk. He aimed his rifle, steadied the red dot, and blew the camera to pieces.

Lights out, he thought.

He put a fresh magazine into the gun and reloaded the partially empty one. All the while, he glanced to his right, where the two dogs watched him, maintaining a distance of thirty yards. He resumed walking. So did they. He paused again. They did also.

The pain in his knee made him look down. His camouflaged pant leg was stained with blood. The dog’s teeth had torn the fabric. He saw puncture wounds and worried about the saliva he’d seen at the dog’s mouth.

What’s the time limit for getting anti-rabies shots? he wondered.

He set down his knapsack and leaned his rifle against it, making sure the barrel didn’t get fouled with dirt. As the sun intensified, he removed the first-aid kit and the duct tape. He glanced toward the dogs. Their attention was riveted on him.

Shoot them, he thought.

But although his knapsack was heavy with ammunition, he needed to use it sparingly. It was better to blast the cameras apart ... or kill the Game Master
,
he thought . . . than shoot two dogs he maybe didn’t need to. Later, he might want to give anything to get those two shots back.

Let’s see how smart they are.

He lifted the gun and aimed at the bigger dog, the one that looked like a German shepherd.

It raced away, its partner following. He tracked the bigger dog, tempted to squeeze the trigger, but hitting a target that got smaller and lower as it receded in the distance wasn’t easy, and he finally set down the gun.

He untwisted the cap on a bottle of water, sipped the unpleasantly warm liquid, and poured some over his knee, wiping away blood and dirt. The puncture wounds were circled with red, probably already infected. He opened his first-aid kit, took out an antiseptic packet, and tore its edge. The sheet inside smelled of alcohol. He rubbed it over the holes and winced from the pain. He tore open a packet of antibiotic cream, smeared it over the holes, and covered them with gauze. Finally, he used his knife to cut strips of duct tape and secured the gauze to his knee, creating a pressure bandage that he hoped would stop the bleeding. Duct tape. He remembered what some of the security operators he’d worked with in Iraq called it. The gunfighter’s friend.

He scanned the grassland, looking for more cameras.

When the BlackBerry vibrated again, he pulled the Kleenex wads from his ears and pressed the green button.

“Stop destroying the cameras,” the voice said.

“I thought the idea was for me to be resourceful.”

“Except for the vandalism, you’re doing everything the way I imagined I myself would.”

“Then why don’t you get down here and play the damned game yourself?”

No reply.

“Come on!” Balenger shouted into the BlackBerry. “Be a hero!”

“But someone needs to be the Game Master.”

“Why?”

Again, the voice didn’t reply.

“Think about it a different way,” Balenger said. “We talked about a flaw in the game, the fact that you couldn’t keep track of me. How about the flaw in the universe?”

“The game and the universe. Both the same. What flaw are you talking about?”

“God became lonely and created other beings, magnificent ones, angels, and that’s how evil got started because some of those angels betrayed Him. Then God became lonely again, but He thought He’d learned His lesson and created lesser beings, humans, so insignificant that they couldn’t possibly have the pride to betray Him. They betrayed Him, nonetheless. Is that your problem?”

“That people betray me?”

“That you’re lonely? You want someone to play with?”

In the distance, a hawk cried while the phone became silent.

“We’d be delighted to play with you,” Balenger told the Game Master, “as long as you don’t kill us.”

“Sometimes,” the voice said.

“Yes?”

“You confuse me.”

Balenger felt a surge of hope.

“How can I possibly come down and play with you? You’re not real.” The transmission went dead.

“The rounds in this Mini–14 are real,” Balenger murmured. He put the BlackBerry in his pocket, looked for more cameras to destroy, and moved forward.

5

Hands bleeding, Amanda lifted the door at one end, Ray at the other, and helped carry it from the shelter that she and Viv had built the previous night. She recalled Viv sharing water with her and saying that they needed to work together if they were going to survive.

And now Viv was dead.

The shock remained numbing as she worked with Ray to carry the door. Her knees felt limp, her boots heavy. Hunger made her sluggish, but she wouldn’t allow herself to give in to weakness. Not long ago, she’d heard yet another shot, still closer, and if Frank was coming, as the Game Master promised, she wouldn’t let Frank see a quitter. She would do everything she could to help. She would work until she dropped.

That almost happened. Her boot struck a rock. She nearly fell with the door, but she regained her footing and plodded on, coming to the walkway she and Ray had constructed in the mud.

“This ought to do it,” Ray said.

He moved backward down the slope, holding his end of the door. Amanda followed, taking short steps that helped her stay upright on the downward-tilted boards.

When they reached the precarious bottom, they lowered the door to the walkway, setting it on its side so that Ray had room to shift along it, moving higher, reaching Amanda. The boards below them wavered on the mud. Around them, the stench of decay was nauseating. They upended the door so that it stood on its bottom. They walked it forward to the end of the boards, shoved it, and let it flop in the mud. Muck flew. Twenty feet away, a snake hissed.

The door landed next to the mysterious object whose rim was the only part that was visible.

The boards beneath them wobbled. Amanda and Ray held out their arms for balance.

“Too much weight.” Amanda bent her knees, trying for a low center of gravity. “We can’t both be in the same area.” She stepped onto the door, which settled but held. “I’m lighter. I’m the logical one to do this.”

Ray stepped onto higher boards.

Gradually, what they stood on became steady.

Amanda pivoted toward the rim of the object embedded in the mud. Four feet by three feet. Muck was inside it. “I still have no idea what this thing is.”

She knelt and peered warily into it, making sure a snake wasn’t inside. “So what am I supposed to do? Scoop out the mud and see if anything’s buried?”

She tugged out one of the rubber gloves. She put it on her right hand, hesitated, then sank the glove into the mud. She didn’t feel anything and groped deeper. The pressure of the mud rose almost to her elbow, reaching the upper limit of the glove’s sleeve.

“Find anything?” Ray asked.

“A lot of goo.” Afraid she might fall in, she knelt farther forward. “Wait a second.” Her fingers touched something hard. Round. The edges were rough. She closed her gloved fingers around it.

“Careful,” Ray said. “For all we know, there’s a trap inside. Something sharp.”

“No, feels like a ...”

She strained her arm to pull the object free. The suction almost pulled the glove off.

“A rock,” she said, looking at the object in her hand. “Just a rock.” But she knew that seemingly insignificant objects often turned out to be important in the game, so she tossed it onto the bank. “I felt a lot of other rocks in there, also.”