Scavenger

  “It seemed natural coming from someone with an I.Q. of one hundred and ninety. He told me he wanted to acquire the education he never had the patience or time to pursue.” She stopped, waiting for another spasm of pain to go away.

  Balenger glanced down, trying to give her privacy.

  She breathed and continued. “Jonathan went to the philosophy department first, on the assumption, he told me, that Truth was most likely to be found there. He studied Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Do you know much about philosophy?”

  “A little from history books I read.”

  “Some philosophers maintain that the buildings, trees, and sky around us are as insubstantial as shadows in a cave. Others believe that reality is as solid as the rock a person kicks in bright sunlight. Jonathan thought it was a pointless debate. It seemed obvious to him that those who believe the world is a dream are right. To him, the world of imagination was far more vivid than so-called physical reality, as any game designer and player knows.

  “He tried literature next but felt that most literature teachers believe they’re adjuncts of the philosophy or political science departments. Nowhere did he hear anything about the hypnotic way in which stories transported him to a reality more vivid than the supposedly solid world around him.

  “Then he tried history. Understand, he didn’t sign up for courses. He merely wandered the corridors and paused outside any classroom where something interested him. He told me he overheard lectures about the assassination of Julius Caesar and the Norman invasion of England and the murder of the princes in the Tower of London and the Hundred Years’ War and the almost million casualties of the American Civil War. He regarded none of this as fact. Every first-hand description of an event was biased, the secondary accounts more so. All were merely stories, he told me. Shadows. There was no way to prove they happened. But their plots were fascinating and transported him from his nightmares.

  “He was prepared to walk more corridors and hear stories about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the chlorine-gas attacks of the First World War and the death camps of the Second World War when he paused outside my classroom and heard about the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. His life changed at that moment, he said. He never explained why, but for the next three months, he attended my classes and visited me during office hours. We had breakfast meetings or took afternoon walks through Washington Square.”

  Her face looked grayer, emotion making her pause.

  “My husband had recently died. I never had children. I felt motherly toward him. Jonathan taught me that the fantasy world within a game could be more real than the grief I wanted to escape. Then I had my first cancer scare, and he taught me that games didn’t waste time but rather extended it. The speed of the countless choices they required subdivided each second and filled it to the maximum. In the end, after turning his back on games, he embraced them again. He entered what he called his next evolution and decided that games were the metaphysics that the philosophers failed to grasp. They were the Truth.”

  Professor Graham took another breath and reached into her purse for a vial of pills. She swallowed two with some tea, then looked at Balenger. “He and his sister—”

  Balenger straightened. “Wait a minute. He has a sister?”

  “She’s taller, a brunette while Jonathan is blond.”

  Balenger spoke quickly. “Does she wear her hair pulled back in a bun? Tight features? No makeup?”

  “I met her only a few times, but yes, she tries hard to look plain. You know her?”

  The memory of meeting her filled Balenger with rage. “She told me her name was Karen Bailey.”

  “Karen is her first name. She and Jonathan look different from one another because they had different fathers. Their mother was promiscuous. The man who raised them wasn’t their father, but he lived with the mother for a time, and when she left him, she also abandoned the children. He kept them as bait, hoping that the mother would come back to see them and he could persuade her to stay.”

  Professor Graham braced herself to continue. “The stepfather was a drunk. A violent one. Jonathan told me he never took his eyes off the man because he never knew when he’d fly into a rage. The stepfather also had an unnatural interest in Karen, who looked so much like her mother that she wasn’t safe alone with him. That’s why she tries hard to look plain, even though I suspect she could be attractive. She’s determined to avoid attention from men.

  “Karen became a surrogate mother to Jonathan while he in turn protected her by making the stepfather angry and distracting him from Karen. They hid whenever they could. Out of spite, when he found them—in a closet or the basement, for example—he locked them in. Jonathan said he and his sister once spent three days in a cubbyhole their stepfather nailed shut. No food, no water, no toilet. In the darkness, Jonathan invented fantasy games, the equivalent of Dungeons & Dragons. He and Karen escaped into the alternate reality he created.”

  Balenger’s forearm ached worse. As he listened intensely, he couldn’t stop rubbing it.

  “The single positive thing the stepfather did was buy the children a video-game machine. That was in the late 1970s when the only game machines were the kind you connected to your television set. Jonathan was just a child, but he took the machine apart, learned how it worked, and improved it. Eventually, the stepfather died from liver disease, and the children were put into foster care, but they never stayed with any family for more than a half year. Something about Jonathan and Karen made their various foster parents uneasy. Basically, the children could relate only to one another and the games Jonathan invented.

  “By the time Nintendo came out in 1985, he was programming for it, using the computer labs in the numerous high schools he and Karen went to. He took special pleasure in knowing that the bullies who made his life hell in school probably went home to play games he designed, without dreaming who created them. He pioneered many of the important advances in video-game technology. For example, the early games could only move up, down, right, and left. Jonathan was the first to add front-to-back motion. He was also the first to overlay scenery in the background. Both techniques contributed to the illusion of three dimensions.”

  She paused, in pain.

  “I know this is hard for you,” Balenger said.

  “But I want to help. You need to understand about Infinity.”

  “What?”

  “In previous games, there was always a limit to the number of variations in which a player could move. The action happened within a predictable, closed space. But Jonathan designed a game called Infinity, in which two space ships chase each other throughout the universe. He told me he created it in reaction to the three days he and Karen spent in that cubbyhole. The game gives the impression that the space ships can keep going forever in any direction and find constant new marvels. He joked to me that he wanted a player to zoom around a comet and expect to see God.”

  “Infinity.” The concept gave Balenger vertigo. “Sounds like a player could disappear into the game.”

  “That’s what happened to Jonathan.” Professor Graham closed her eyes for a moment. “Game designers are obsessive. It’s not unusual for some of them to work as long as four days and nights without sleeping. They live on Doritos and Jolt cola. For variety, Jonathan told me, he drank strong coffee sweetened with Classic Coke.”

  “But that long without sleep can make a person psychotic,” Balenger said.

  “His sister watched over him when he was in these four-day visions. That’s apparently what they were: visions. Jonathan scribbled computer codes as if they were automatic writing. His royalties and patents earned him over a hundred million dollars. But he never cared about the money. What mattered were the games. In the industry, there’s a constant challenge to take designs to the next level and the level after that. Jonathan was determined to create a game so ultimate that no designer could ever outdo it. With Karen mothering him, he went into new visions that lasted even
longer without sleep. Five days. Six. Until finally he had the breakdown that Karen always worried about.”

  Balenger could no longer tolerate the burning, swelling sensation in his arm. He pushed up his jacket and shirt sleeves. An abscess startled him, angry red surrounding it.

  Professor Graham viewed it with alarm. “You’d better go to a hospital. That looks like blood poisoning.”

  “It feels as if something’s…”

  “Something’s what?”

  Under the skin, he thought in dismay. “Wait here for a minute.”

  He made his way past tables to a door marked MEN’S ROOM. Inside, he saw sneakers under the closed door of a stall. At the sink, he took off his jacket and draped it over his right shoulder. He rolled his left shirt sleeve all the way up, took a breath, and squeezed the swelling.

  The fiery pain made him groan. Yellow liquid popped out. He kept squeezing. Now the yellow oozed, followed by red. Good, Balenger thought. I need to get this thing bleeding. I need to find what’s festering in there.

  He bit his lip from the pain. Something black appeared. Small. Thin. Square. Metallic. He squeezed until it reached the surface. He put it on his index finger and held it up to the overhead light.

  Son of a bitch, he thought. He didn’t know anything about electronics, but he could imagine only one reason the object had been embedded in him. To track his movements.

  Furious, he put it in a handkerchief and shoved it into his jacket. He set to work soaping the hole in his arm. He rinsed. He soaped again. He didn’t think he’d ever feel clean.

  3

  Professor Graham had her head down when Balenger returned to the table. She looked up, her expression weary. “Your arm?” she asked.

  Trying to sound calm, Balenger took the BlackBerry from his pocket. “I washed it, but that only made the infection look worse. You’re right. As soon as we finish, I’ll go to a hospital.”

  He studied the BlackBerry. It was silver, with a gunmetal gray front. Its screen was larger than on a conventional cell phone. In addition to the many number-and-letter keys, it had a button at the top as well as a wheel and a button along the right side. He was certain now that it was equipped with an eavesdropping device. Maybe a tracking device also, he thought, a backup to what the bastard put in my arm.

  “How do I turn it on?”

  He tried the button on the top. Instantly, the screen glowed. The coffee shop’s overhead lights made the icons on the screen hard to see, but he discovered that by tilting the BlackBerry away from the glare, the screen was vivid. On the upper right part of the screen, a red arrow flashed. A few moments later, a green light pulsed.

  “Looks like I can receive calls.”

  The BlackBerry rang.

  Balenger tensed. Two of its buttons had phone icons, one red, the other green. Green for go, Balenger thought, and pressed that button.

  “Where’s Amanda?” he insisted into the phone.

  “Do you know what an avatar is?” a man’s voice responded, sonorous, like an announcer’s.

  Balenger’s rage almost overpowered him. After so many obstacles, he finally spoke to the man who abducted Amanda and was responsible for so much pain and fear. He thought of Ortega, the blood seeping from his dead mouth. He wanted to scream obscenities, to vow to get even in the crudest way possible. But all his military and police training warned him that everything would be lost if he didn’t keep control.

  “An avatar?” Balenger repeated bitterly. “Afraid not.”

  “Amanda knows what that is.”

  Balenger kept steady. “Is she hurt?”

  The voice paused so long that Balenger worried the phone transmission had failed. “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  “That’s what you need to find out.”

  “To win the game? Then you’ll set her free?”

  “You’ll need to do more than find Amanda to win the game.”

  Sickened by the rush of his heart, Balenger realized that Professor Graham might be able to identify the voice and confirm that it belonged to Jonathan Creed. He held the phone between them.

  “You mentioned an avatar,” Balenger said. “Tell me what that is.”

  “A god in bodily form.”

  Professor Graham listened.

  “You are my avatar,” the voice declared.

  “Does that mean you’re the god?”

  “I’m the Game Master.”

  Balenger felt his head throb.

  “Scavengerthegame-dot-com,” the Game Master said.

  “What about it?”

  “You understand that a BlackBerry can access the Internet? Use the wheel on the side to scroll down to the icon shaped like the world. Press the wheel, and you’ll have access to the web. Your BlackBerry has high-speed capability. You should be able to enter the website quickly.”

  “Internet? Website? What are you talking about? What am I going to see?”

  The transmission became silent, the connection broken. Balenger pressed the red phone button to discontinue his end of the call.

  “That isn’t Jonathan’s voice,” Professor Graham said.

  “No. It’s got to be. Everything points toward—”

  “I told you Jonathan has a thin, frail voice. That voice sounds like it belongs to someone who reads the evening news on television.”

  Balenger couldn’t believe he was wrong. “Maybe it’s been distorted. Amplifiers and filters can do a lot to change a voice.”

  He followed the directions he’d been given, accessing the Internet. It took him a frustrating couple of minutes to familiarize himself with the controls. The BlackBerry used an hourglass icon to tell him it was processing the information he typed into it. The symbol reminded him of the hourglass half-filled with blood on the cover of the game case for Scavenger.

  That game case now appeared on the screen. Abruptly, its hourglass changed to a series of still photographs that showed Amanda in pursuit of another woman. Pressure made Balenger’s veins feel swollen. He’d never stared at anything more intensely.

  Amanda wore a blue jumpsuit and baseball cap. The other woman wore gray. They were outdoors, with mountains beyond them. Amanda’s mouth was open, as if yelling in desperation.

  A red blur filled the screen. Balenger took a startled moment to realize that the photograph showed an explosion. Chunks were suspended in mid-air. Body parts. A hand. A section of skull. Blood. The effect was all the more surreal because there wasn’t any sound.

  Ice seemed to line his stomach. My God, is that a photograph of Amanda being blown apart? he thought. A new image showed her gaping at the explosion. Relief swept through him, even as the horror on her face became his horror.

  What am I seeing? he thought.

  The screen went blank. A moment later, words appeared, telling him THIS SITE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE.

  Balenger’s fingers ached from the force with which he gripped the BlackBerry.

  “What’s the matter?” Professor Graham asked. “What did you see?”

  “Hell.”

  The BlackBerry rang.

  He pressed the green button. More than ever, he wanted to express his rage. Instead, he forced himself to be silent.

  “Thanks to technology called Surveillance LIVE, you’re able to see those webcam photographs. They were taken several hours ago,” the voice said.

  Balenger felt breathless. “Hours? In that case, I have no way of knowing if Amanda is still alive.”

  “She is.”

  “Suppose you’re not telling the truth.”

  “Then the game would be flawed. The rules are absolute. One of them is that I do not lie. Here’s another rule. It’s very important. From now on, no police, do you understand?”

  For a moment, Balenger couldn’t make himself answer. “Yes.”

  “No FBI, no law enforcement, no military friends, nothing of the kind. At the start, it was natural for you to go to the police. But not anymore. We’re at another level in the game. You’r
e on your own. Understand? Say it.”

  The words felt thick. “I understand.”

  “You are my avatar. Through you, I take part in the action. I cheer for you. I want you to win.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “But I do. I want you to rescue the kidnapped maiden and struggle to the final level where you find the secret.”

  “The Sepulcher of Worldly Desires?”

  “And everything it represents. I don’t exaggerate when I say it’s the meaning of life. If you rescue the maiden and find the Sepulcher, you are worthy to know the secret. I already know that secret, but I want to feel its discovery one more time. Through you.”

  “I thought the game was over. I thought it took forty hours and ended at five this afternoon.”

  “No. For you, Scavenger began at ten this morning. You have less than thirty-one hours remaining.”

  “Scavenger.” The word carried the chill of death. “What happens if I don’t rescue Amanda and find the secret within the remaining time?”

  The connection was broken.

  4

  Outside the coffee shop, buildings obscured the setting sun. The sky had an orange tint, but lower Broadway was sufficiently in shadow that cars had headlights on.

  Balenger put the BlackBerry in his pants pocket and tapped his hand against it, preventing the Game Master from hearing what he asked Professor Graham. “How do I find the valley you mentioned? Where’s Avalon? Where’s the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires supposed to be? You mentioned Wyoming and the Wind River Range.”

  Professor Graham looked exhausted. “Avalon no longer exists. To call it a ghost town gives it too much stature. Cottonwood doesn’t exist, either. Even with the help of the Wyoming Historical Society, it took me a month to identify the valley Reverend Owen Pentecost visited.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Lander is the nearest large community. The valley is fifty miles north along the eastern edge of the mountains.”

  Balenger kept tapping his hand against his pants pocket and the BlackBerry inside. “How will I know I found the right place?”