Martin took a cautious step into the room and leaned against the refrigerator to steady himself. He and David hatched plans all the time, but they never came to anything. The astounding success of this one had left him dizzy.
“You’re one of the disappeared people, aren’t you?”
“I saw you out there,” the man remarked, waving a long white arm toward the wall. “You and your toy. Your Alldog. Good boy,” he said to the German shepherd, who had positioned itself between them. The dog gave a low, rumbling growl. The man grinned, his teeth a white surprise in that dark woolly growth. “Stupid jerk,” he said in a friendly way.
It took Martin a few seconds to realize that the stranger hadn’t answered his question. He drew in a breath and tried again. “Where are the others?”
“Up there.” Now the long arm waved toward the ceiling. “Up where there’s law and order. Beer and skittles. Mom and apple pie. Plum Street, a cozy little bungalow built for two. There were three of us, though.” He laughed in a nervous falsetto. “I guess that was the problem.”
“I remember you,” Martin said slowly, thinking hard. Sometime past—maybe two years ago—a good-looking student had vanished shortly after failing the eleventh grade. His outrageous stunts had made him popular, and his classmates had missed him. This hairy creature didn’t look like Martin’s mental image of the cocky young student, but Martin saw a bit of resemblance as those shy brown eyes glanced at him.
“Wanna know my name? It’s Bug,” the creature said eagerly. “Why? Because I’m the Bug in this program. Get it? Every machine has a Bug. This machine has a Bug. Great, huh? I like it.”
“I thought your name was James, Gerald, something like that,” Martin said. “What did your parents call you?”
“Who! Gives! A! Damn!” cried Bug, pounding his fists on the table. The little stacks erupted, and the metal tokens danced about. He stared in surprise at his clenched fists, at the ruin of his solitaire game. Then he started sorting disks once more.
The shepherd was growling again, a nasty sound deep in its chest, and the hair on its neck and back stood up in a ridge.
Martin tried to pat the hair down, wondering what to do. This guy was crazy, and not just crazy the way Matt and David said crazy to each other. Maybe he was dangerous.
“I wasn’t what they wanted,” Bug was saying to himself, as if he had forgotten about Martin. “Never what they wanted. They paid good money too. I should have come with a guarantee. I didn’t go for that moronic voting, that stupid school, those stupid teachers. They warned me, so I broke into the loading bay and put stuff by the big doors, like I’d gotten out. Then I took Granddad’s badge and hid here. And nobody ever found me.”
Martin recalled fragments of a mysterious conversation from that time, noteworthy because his father’s voice had been so angry: No way to tell what happened . . . Left in my loading bay! . . . Of course there are alarms, but if the freight bots didn’t weigh it properly . . . No, I am not going to file a report. Can’t you see they’d blame me!
“My dad thought you did get out,” he said.
“Nobody ever found me,” continued Bug, as if he hadn’t heard. “Nobody ever looked for me. Nobody cared where I went. Know why? ’Cause I’m nobody.”
“Are the rest of you down here too?” asked Martin.
Bug rapidly stacked disks. “No rest for the weary,” he said. “Nobody’s ever here, just me and the television. Now nobody, television, boy, and dog. Uh-oh!” He looked troubled. “What if I’m seeing things?”
“But where are the others?” Martin asked again, raising his voice. “There’s more, right? I mean, you’re not the only one who’s disappeared.”
“Disappeareds don’t disappear here,” said Bug. “Disappeareds disappear out of here. Just like what would have happened to me.” His tower of disks fell over at last, and Bug continued in a quiet singsong, “Just me, you see—nobody looks after me but me.”
“You mean you had the chance to go somewhere else? Man, that would have been really cool! I think you should have gone.”
Bug stopped his game. “You know what you are?” he said with menace. “You’re a moron, that’s what you are! You’re too stupid to be real. I am seeing things. I bet I could wave my hand right through you.”
He stood up, and Martin took a step backward. “Hey, you know, I’ve gotta go now,” he said in what he hoped was a casual tone. “I’ve got stuff to do. Dad’s probably wondering where I am.”
“Your dad!” Bug crashed his fists down on the table again, and Martin and the little disks jumped. “Your dad was a test tube! And your mom was a petri dish! You don’t have a birthday—you have a sale date!”
This was too much for Martin’s dog. The big shepherd leapt over the table and pounced on Bug, toppling him over and out of sight. Disks went flying in all directions with a crash like a slot machine jackpot. Martin raced around the table to find the man pinned to the ground. He was gurgling hysterically, and his eyes looked as if they might pop out of his head.
“Hey, computer chip, let go!” called Martin, trying to pull off the snarling shepherd. It released Bug, but he didn’t get up. He lay among overturned chairs, clutching his arm and rocking from side to side.
Martin dragged the dog around the table. “Look,” he said, “you’ve gotta not go attacking people! I know maybe you’re a bodyguard, but you’ll have to guard some other way. Unless someone’s trying to kill me or something, no snarling and biting! Toys don’t bite! Bad dog! Got that?”
Ears flat against its head, the shepherd wagged ingratiatingly and tried to apologize by licking Martin in the eye. Martin discovered that he was shaking. He picked up an overturned chair and sat down in it.
“I’m really sorry about that,” he said in the direction of the fallen man. “My dog didn’t mean to hurt you, he just didn’t know any better. Hey, you want some candy?” he asked, remembering the gifts he had brought. He dug into his backpack. “You can have a chocolate bar.”
Standing up in stages, as if he were trying a yoga exercise, Bug reached out for the peace offering. “Chocolate!” he said feebly, collapsing into a chair and peeling back the wrapper. “The break room cooker won’t make desserts. It’s always lunchtime and never dessert.” He ate the bar slowly, stopping every now and then to finger his bruised arm. “The bar’s real, anyway. But that toy can’t be real.”
“Well, my chip dog’s real, but he came from the factory with—I don’t know—a different set of chips.” Feeling in need of moral support, Martin unwrapped a chocolate bar of his own. “We were following these crawly government things, so he unlocked a door and let me in down here. That’s how we found you.”
Bug had been licking chocolate off the wrapper. He stopped and crumpled it in his hand. “What government things?” he asked quietly, as if he didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Oh, sorry!” said Martin. “I forgot. I’m not supposed to talk about them. I really shouldn’t be talking about my dog, either, but I guess you know about him already.”
The strange young man drew himself up to glare at Martin. Then he glanced at the watchful shepherd and buried his face in his hands instead. “Look, my life has been hard enough down here,” his muffled voice pleaded. “And this is all very weird. Weird, feared, jeered, beard. Weird. Disappeared-weird. Don’t make it any weirder than it already is.”
Martin ate the chocolate piece by piece, considering what to do. “Come look, then,” he said, standing up.
Out in the hallway, Bug examined the line of sequinlike glass dots, uttering a fluent and colorful stream of expletives. Sometimes they rhymed, and sometimes they crackled in syncopation, like irregular machine-gun fire. Many of them sounded as if he had made them up on the spot.
“No more nobody for me,” he concluded grimly. “I’m not the Bug anymore. These are bugs—real bugs! Looking, listening bugs. They’re damn well going to find me now. I’ll be disappeared for sure.”
“Well, that might be k
ind of cool,” Martin said. “I mean, getting to leave and all.”
Bug jerked around to face him, and Martin’s excited dog had to turn a snarl into a sneeze.
“Idiot!” Bug snapped. “They’ll put me on the shows! That’s what they do with the disappeareds. You did something wrong, so you play till you die, and everybody out there watches. Little kids spill popcorn in the sofa cracks while you go down for the last time.”
“You’re crazy!” Martin said. “Nobody dies. You can’t show stuff like that on television. People get on the shows to win things.”
“Win?” Bug tried to scrape off one of the dots with a bitten fingernail. “Did you ever see them win?”
Martin tried to remember. Mom didn’t let him watch the shows, so he hadn’t seen much. “They’re too greedy,” he said slowly. “They always want to keep playing.”
Bug was breathing hard. “When do they say that? Huh? Never! The host says it for them. ‘He’s decided to keep playing.’ But they don’t look like they want to keep playing. Winners! There’s no winners. There’s only losers. Sooner or later, they all slip up, and then it’s into the snake pit, off the rock wall, under the gas, and while the girls carry his body out, let’s tell the people what he would have won!”
Martin had a horrible image in his mind of the old man on the show Cassie liked. That old man had looked like . . . well, he had looked like something was wrong.
“You have to get me out of here,” Bug said. “You’ve got to help me!”
Martin shook his head. “Hey, wait, this is your problem. I can’t do anything about it, I’m just a kid.”
“It’s your problem now. Yours and mine. Ours! You found me, you found the problem, so you gotta help me think. Think! Think!” Bug lurched toward Martin, hands outstretched and eyes wild, like a late-night-movie monster.
Martin ducked away and bumped into the wall. “Look, I’m sorry I bothered you,” he heard himself babbling. “I think I better go now. Computer chip, you know, what I said before, I think I was wrong about biting.”
The shepherd, positioned between the two of them, didn’t know what to do. It danced with worry, alternately growling and whining. Bug tried to soothe the dog with a reassuring smile, but the expression that crossed his face was more frightening than ever—a kind of ghastly grimace.
“No, don’t bite me,” he bleated. “Don’t eat me, you attack bot! You modified, oddified, unlockified bot.” His brown eyes lit up. “Wait, that’s it! That’s the answer! Your bot can unlock doors. He can unlock the steel gates!”
“Hey, yeah, that’s kind of crazy,” Martin said, backing away, “but, you know, it’s something to think about. So, tell you what, we’ll think about it, and we’ll, you know, we’ll be in touch. Which way out of here?” he asked his dog.
Bug followed him down the hall. “That modified bot, he’s illegal, right? If you don’t help me, I’ll report you.”
“You would not!” Martin said. “You wouldn’t report me because they’d find you. You said you don’t want them to find you!”
“Like I’ve got anything to lose,” answered Bug with a manic grin. “I’ve been a loser for a long time. You’re the one with a life. You meet me in the alley above the loading bay tonight, or I’ll turn in your dog tomorrow. Hiding a modified bot, that’s a criminal offense. Watch out, kid, or they’ll put you on the shows.”
“Just leave me out of your sick problems!” shouted Martin. He turned a corner and started running.
“Be there!” called Bug’s voice behind him. “Or your bot’s not gonna be modified for long!”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dad was just signing off the computer console when Martin got back to the loading bay. “The new bowling balls came in,” he said. “I picked out a red one for your mother.”
Dizzy and out of breath, Martin didn’t comment. He watched the freight bots towing the last of the packets away from the big steel gates. Outside, he thought. He wondered how bad it was out there.
“Martin, are you listening? Get the elevator button! This thing is heavy.”
Martin rode home on Dad’s scooter, thinking no coherent thoughts at all. When the scooter pulled up at the house, he climbed off and headed straight for the door. David and Matt had to chase after him, yelling.
“Where’ve you been?” David panted. “Never mind. Let’s go! We’re taking apart Matt’s Devil Dominator game and putting the bad guys into my ImCity cartridge so they can blow up all the cute little houses. We’ve got this one zombie on the trolley already, shooting everybody who tries to go to the restaurants.”
“He’s so cool!” Matt said.
“Shut up,” David told him. “Anyway, now we need your help. We can’t get the slime demons out right. They show up as rainbow-colored puddles and won’t suck people in and dissolve them. I can’t figure it out, and Matt’s useless.”
“Yeah!” Matt said.
Martin didn’t answer. They stood looking at him expectantly, and he stood staring into space.
“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” David asked.
“I dunno,” Martin said. Then he went inside. The doorbell rang furiously, but he ignored it.
Cassie was sitting on the floor watching television, with a glass of purple juice on the table nearby and a bag of onion squares in her lap. Martin threw himself down on the couch and closed his eyes. His shepherd jumped up beside him.
“Somebody’s at the door,” Cassie said over the noisy ringing of the bell.
“Yeah,” he sighed.
“Aren’t you going to get it?”
“They’ll stop,” he said, and shortly afterward, they did. Encouraged by this, he leaned forward to swipe her onion squares and glanced at the television screen. The weary face of Dr. Rudolph Church looked out at him.
“Cassie!” he shouted. “No!”
“I get to pick, I was here first,” Cassie said. “We watched what you wanted last time. And Mom doesn’t care because she’s not here right now. She’s still at her judo lesson.”
Martin stared at the haggard old man behind the gleaming silver podium. There was a look in Dr. Church’s eyes that made him ill.
“He’s just beaten the highest score!” Cassie said excitedly. “He’s won the biggest prize ever, and can you believe it? He’s still going to play!”
“Did he say that?” asked Martin. “Did you actually hear him say that?” A bead of sweat trickled down Dr. Church’s face, and Martin knew the truth. “Of course not,” he murmured, feeling the sweat break out on his own face. “The host said it for him.”
And now, for thirty-five thousand dollars and ten cases of Au Gratin in a Box: What ingredient gives the popular bouncy toy FlyBall its amazing spring?
Martin didn’t know. He felt a flurry of panic and found himself hating the smiling host. “So what happens on this show if you don’t know the answer?”
“It’s called You’ve Been Caught Napping,” Cassie said. “Get it? You fall asleep.”
No, you don’t, Martin thought. You fall down dead.
Chad, that would be the insect-derived protein, resilin.
Cassie clapped along with the studio audience. “Isn’t he amazing?” she gushed. “All the Exponents are watching him because he’s the only grown-up we know who’s like us. He’s like”—she paused for inspiration—“like our dad!”
Hear that gong? Dr. Church has earned the chance to compete in our double-dozen sweepstakes. And guess what, viewers? He’s decided to play!
Dr. Church seemed to be staring at Martin right through the screen, as if he blamed him for not doing something to help. You’re just going to sit there, eating your sister’s onion squares. You’re just going to watch me die.
Martin snatched the remote off the end table, and the room roared with the din of motor scooters.
“You’re mean!” cried Cassie, jumping up. “You know I want to watch that!”
“It’s sick, Cass,” he said bitterly. “Watch it again and I’ll tell Mom
.”
Cassie stormed out of the room as noisily as a small, skinny girl could manage and slammed her bedroom door hard enough to rattle pictures on the walls. Once she was gone, Martin knelt down by the television screen and flipped through the afternoon game shows. Here was Laserbattle, a misty stage where black-suited gladiators hid behind boulders, shooting each other with red beams. Martin had to admit, it looked like fun. But then a pudgy woman stood up to fire, and red light struck the medallion on her chest. She fell to the ground, and Martin’s stomach flipped over. He could tell she wouldn’t be getting back up.
Next was Obstacle Course, a sleek gray-walled maze. Three men were scrambling over rope walls and trying to avoid trip wires. The ground gave way beneath one of them, a hidden trap yawning into blackness. Clawing at the edge in a desperate frenzy, the man slid into the pit.
“Change the channel, Martin.”
Mom was back, still wearing her loose white judo gi, her long hair tied up in a ponytail. Martin stumbled over to her and let himself be held, as if he were a much younger boy.
“Mom, those people!” he groaned. He closed his eyes, and the man was sliding into the pit again. Mom led him into the kitchen and poured him a soda. His shepherd nosed him, whimpering softly.
“Those people are criminals,” Mom said, pouring herself some tomato juice. “They’re getting what they deserve.”
Martin rubbed his forehead to try to press out the images. “But even for criminals!”
“If we knew what those people had done, we’d probably cheer. I won’t say it again: dogs out of the kitchen.” The shepherd retired to the doorway. “But we don’t have to watch them,” she went on, leaning across the table to ruffle his hair. “I know how you feel. I don’t like to see it either. Sometimes it’s better to turn your back on things.”
“Sure, Mom,” he sighed. Criminals, he thought, feeling a little better. Maybe that old guy of Cassie’s had done awful stuff—killed babies or something.
“Now, what happened to your face?” Mom asked, and the scrape on his cheek smarted as she touched it. “Has my boy been fighting again?”