Scavenger (35 page)

“With a bang,” the Game Master said.

“You son of a bitch, you’re going to blow this place up?”

“The game failed. So did the universe,” the puny voice said in the darkness.

Amanda turned on the flashlight, but its illumination was weak, its batteries failing. Balenger groped in his knapsack and raised the night-vision binoculars. He saw a green-tinted version of the boy-man sitting in his game chair, staring through goggles toward the timer. Toward infinity. The spectral green made him look like something in a video game.

“Fifty seconds,” the Game Master said.

It seemed impossible that only ten seconds had elapsed, but Balenger didn’t have a chance to think about that. Turning to Amanda’s green-tinted figure, he yelled, “Grab my arm!”

His wounds were in agony as he led her down the stairs. At the bottom, they stepped over Karen Bailey’s corpse, the green tint of the binoculars making her blood seem unreal. They raced toward the metal door beyond her.

“Forty seconds!” the squeaky voice yelled from the observation room.

Again, the countdown didn’t seem right. Balenger felt that it took longer than ten seconds for them to get down the stairs and reach the door.

Amanda used the rubber glove to turn the knob.

The door wouldn’t open.

Something growled behind Balenger. Startled, he realized that the remaining dog had entered through the open door on the opposite side of the cavern. Ten feet away, its eyes—now tinted green—blazed at him.

“Thirty-five seconds!”

Impossible
, Balenger thought. So much couldn’t have happened in so little time.

“Game Master!” Amanda yelled. “God keeps His word!”

Balenger understood what she was trying. “Yes, prove your game’s honest!” he shouted.

“Thirty-four seconds!”

“Open the door!” Amanda insisted. “We found the Sepulcher. You swore that’s all we’d need to win. But now you changed the rules!”

Silence lengthened, moments passing.

“Show us God isn’t a liar!”

The dog snarled.

Abruptly, the door buzzed, the lock thumping, the Game Master freeing it.

Frantic, Amanda twisted the knob. As she opened the door, the dog attacked. Or seemed to. Guessing that the panicked dog’s motive was to escape, Balenger pushed Amanda down. He felt the animal leap over them and race into darkness. Then he and Amanda charged through.

They found themselves in another tunnel. Hurrying along, Balenger felt that surely the remaining time had elapsed. The tunnel seemed to extend forever. Running, he silently counted
seven, six, five, four
and waited for the explosion’s impact.
Three, two, one
. But nothing happened. His night-vision binoculars showed a lighter shade of green in the area ahead as the darkness of the tunnel changed to the darkness of the valley. He ignored the pain in his knee and forced himself to run harder.

The clatter of their footsteps no longer echoed. Leaving the tunnel, feeling open air around him, Balenger heard Amanda next to him and suddenly was weightless. The roar of an explosion lifted him off his feet. He landed heavily and rolled down an incline. Unlike the blighted area in front of the mine, the slope here was covered with grass. His breath was knocked out of him. He kept tumbling and suddenly jolted to a stop. Amanda hit beside him, moaning. Rocks pelted the grass. One struck Balenger’s shoulder. Agonized, he crawled toward Amanda.

“Are you hurt?” he managed to ask.

“Everywhere,” she answered weakly. “But I think I’m going to live.” He’d lost the rifle and the binoculars. In the glow of a three-quarter moon, he turned and saw dust and smoke spewing from the tunnel above him.

“Server down. Game over,” he murmured.

“But
is
it?” Amanda’s voice was plaintive. “How will we ever know if the game truly ended?”

Balenger didn’t have an answer. Motion attracted his attention, the dog racing along a moonlit ridge.

Amanda collapsed next to him. “The Game Master kept his word. He let us go. He proved he wasn’t a liar.”

“God tried to redeem Himself,” Balenger agreed.

He trembled.

So did Amanda. “What’s supposed to happen next? Do you think Karen Bailey told the truth that there was a car?”

“Would you trust it?” he asked.

“No. An exploding car is one way to end a video game.”

“The alternative is to shrivel like Pac-Man.” Balenger thought of something. “Or like the townspeople in the cave. One thing the Game Master taught me is, a lot of video games can never be won. The player always dies.”

“Yes, everyone dies. But not tonight,” Amanda said. “Tonight, we won. In the cave, when he counted down, the minute seemed to take longer than usual.”

Balenger realized what must have happened. “The countdown was in video-game time. One minute in
his
reality took two minutes in ours.”

The thought made them silent. In the distance, the dog howled. “Why did he give us that chance?” Amanda wondered.

“Maybe he didn’t intend to give us a chance,” Balenger said. “Maybe the only time he knew was virtual.”

“Or maybe he knew the difference, and the countdown was the final level of the game. ‘Time is the true scavenger,’ he told us. At the end of the obstacle race and the scavenger hunt, he gave us something precious: an extra minute of time.”

“Our bonus round.” Balenger had the feeling that, from now on, this would be the way he thought, as if he had never escaped, as if he were still in the game.

Amanda tried to sit up. “We’ve got some walking to do.”

“After we rest a while.” Balenger hugged his chest, trying to subdue his tremors.

Amanda fell back. “Yeah, a little rest is a good idea,” she admitted.

“It gives us a chance to plan our future.”

“No,” Amanda told him. “Not the future.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A time capsule’s a message to the future that we open in the present to learn about the past, right?” she asked.

“That’s what he said.”

“Well, the game made me realize that the future and the past aren’t important. What matters is now.”

Balenger was reminded of Professor Graham. “There’s an elderly woman I met who learned the same thing from video games. I’ll take you to see her. You’ll like her. She’s dying, but she says that the countless decisions and actions she makes in a video game cram each second and keep her in an eternal moment.”

“Yes,” Amanda said, “I’d like to meet her.”

Balenger managed to smile. He peered up at the dazzling stars. “They were right.”

“Who?”

“The ancients. The sky does look like a dome with holes poked into it. That’s a celestial light glowing through.”

“Everything exists in God’s imagination,” Amanda said.

Balenger touched her arm. “
You’re
not imaginary.”

“You’re not, either.” Amanda reached for his hand. “Thank God.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME

When it comes to ideas for novels, I’m a packrat. My office shelves are crammed with file folders dating back several decades. Scribbled summaries of radio reports and TV interviews are bundled with yellowing pages ripped from magazines and newspapers. Stacks of them. Anytime something grabs my interest, a part of my imagination wonders why. The theory is that, if a topic catches my attention, maybe it will catch the attention of my readers. Over the years, I put together so many files that I never had time to organize them into categories, let alone develop their contents into novels.

On occasion, curiosity makes me explore them. With great expectation, I put some on the floor, blow away dust, and read them. But nearly always, the brittle pages in my hands refer to issues and events that seemed important at the time but now are lifeless. The narrative themes and situations they suggest no longer speak to my imagination. Musty artifacts of the mind, they show me the gap of years between the person who put those fragments into file folders and the changed person who now reads them.

In rare instances, however, a topic clings to my imagination so insistently that I keep returning to it, trying to find a way to dramatize the emotions it arouses in me. For example, my previous novel,
Creepers
, was inspired by a
Los Angeles Times
article about urban explorers: history and architecture enthusiasts who infiltrate old buildings that have been sealed and abandoned for decades. The page sat under accumulating file folders, but it kept rising to the top of my imagination, and I couldn’t help wondering why it insisted. The breakthrough came when I suddenly remembered an abandoned apartment building I explored when I was a child. I used it as an escape from unrelenting arguments between my mother and stepfather that left me afraid to remain at home. The memory of my fear and the need to retreat into the past made me want to write a novel in which urban explorers obsessed with the past discover that it no longer soothes but instead terrifies them.

A similar article that kept nagging at my subconscious led me to write
Scavenger
. In fact, it sat under accumulating file folders for eight years, silently shouting, until I finally surrendered. This time, the newspaper was the
New York Times
. The date was April 8, 1998, the place West New York, New Jersey. I love the off-balancing idea that a town called West New York is so far west that it’s in the neighboring state of New Jersey. But for me, the contents of the article were far more unbalancing. “From Time Capsule to Buried Treasure,” the title announced. “Somewhere in West New York may be a slice of town life in 1948.”

I learned that as West New York planned celebrations for its hundredth anniversary, someone suggested burying a time capsule. “Great idea,” everyone agreed. Then a retiree remembered that the same thing had been done for the town’s
fiftieth
anniversary. Whatever happened to it? they wondered. Where was it buried? Searchers spread through the town. They pored through cobwebbed community ledgers and tracked down people old enough to have witnessed the 1948 semi-centennial. At last, they found a possible answer in the town’s library, where an out-of-print volume by a local historian referred to “a copper box containing documents and souvenirs.”

That box supposedly was deposited under a bronze fire bell outside the town hall, but there the search ended in frustration, for the bell honored community firefighters who died while protecting West New York, and no one would sanction tampering with it. Moreover, the bell was attached to several tons of granite. Moving it would be costly and difficult, and what if, after desecrating the monument, the time capsule wasn’t under it? In the end, nothing was done.

That must have been frustrating because, as the
New York Times
reporter indicated, the town had a powerful need to be inspired by a message from the glory days of fifty years earlier. Back in 1948, the area was prosperous, largely because of the New York Central Railroad and the products it transported from the local embroidery factories. But by 1998, the railroad and the factories were gone, and the streets were silent and bleak. In the context of a story about a misplaced past, I couldn’t help noting that the reporter didn’t receive a by-line.

Moved in ways that I didn’t understand, I added this article to my chaotic collection. I forgot it, remembered it, and forgot it again, but never for long. Finally, after eight years, I dug through a stack of files, took yet another look, and made a commitment to try to understand the article’s hold on me by writing a novel that involves a time capsule. That the time capsule would be a hundred years old and that the hunt for the past would involve modern instruments such as global positioning satellite receivers, BlackBerry Internet capability, and holographic rifle sights hadn’t yet occurred to me. I needed to do my customary research and learn everything I could about the subject.

My first step was to go to the World Wide Web. When researching my previous novel,
Creepers
, I typed “urban explorers” into Google and was amazed to find over 300,000 hits. Now I did the same with “time capsules.” Imagine, my astonishment when I got over 18
million
hits. Clearly, this was a topic that obsessed a lot of other people, and with each discovery, my fascination intensified. I learned (as Professor Murdock explains in
Scavenger)
that, although what we call time capsules are as old as history, the actual expression didn’t exist until 1939 when the Westinghouse Corporation created a torpedo-shaped container and filled it with contemporary objects that its designers believed would be fascinating to the future. As gongs were struck, the capsule was buried in Flushing Meadows, New York, where a World’s Fair was taking place. Intended to be opened five thousand years in the future, the capsule is still fifty feet underground but largely forgotten. If you have a GPS receiver like those used in
Scavenger
, you can insert the capsule’s map coordinates and let a red needle guide you to the capsule’s marker. But to learn those map coordinates, you need to find a copy of
The Book of the Record of the Time Capsule
. In 1939, copies were sent to every major library in the world, including that of the Dalai Lama. These days, however, locating that book requires a scavenger hunt of its own.

I learned that the Westinghouse time capsule was inspired by the eerily titled Crypt of Civilization, begun in 1936 at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Disturbed by the increasing Nazi domination of Europe, Oglethorpe’s president believed that civilization was on the verge of collapse. To preserve what he could, he drained an indoor swimming pool and filled it with objects that he believed were essential to an understanding of 1930s culture. Among these is a copy of
Gone with the Wind
, an apt title inasmuch as the Crypt, which isn’t scheduled to be opened for almost six thousand years, was nearly as forgotten as the Westinghouse capsule. If not for a student, Paul Hudson, who explored the basement of a campus building in 1970, the Crypt would have faded from memory. After his flashlight reflected off a stainless-steel door, the student asked questions that eventually led to the basement being turned into a public area, where a bookstore was established and people could pass the Crypt’s sealed entrance every day. Eventually, Paul Hudson became Oglethorpe’s registrar and the president of the International Time Capsule Society.