His rifle stopped firing. “Amanda, there’s another magazine in the outside flap of my knapsack!” Amanda handed it to him. He shoved it into place, released the bolt that slid a round into the firing chamber, and blew five more screens into pieces.
Monitors can be easily replaced, Balenger thought. He swung toward the shelves of computer equipment to inflict greater damage. As bullet after bullet blasted them apart, sparks turned into smoke and flames. In a cascading reaction, numerous monitors stopped glowing.
He stalked toward metal stairs that led up to the observation room.
“Stop!” a voice pleaded.
But it didn’t belong to the Game Master. The voice was a woman’s. Balenger stopped in surprise. Karen Bailey.
She appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Cartoon colors still radiated from some monitors. They contrasted with her drab clothes, similar to those Balenger had seen at the time-capsule lecture. Her face looked plainer, her hair pulled back more severely.
“You won! Now get out of here! Leave!” she yelled.
“After everything you did to us?” Amanda shouted back. “You expect us just to walk away?”
“I’m begging you, take your chance! Go! Through there!” Karen pointed urgently toward a metal door behind her. “It’ll lead you out!”
“Another trap!”
“No! You’ll find an SUV!” Karen hurled car keys toward the door. They clattered on the stone floor.
“The vehicle’s rigged with a bomb, is that it?” Balenger demanded.
“I’ll prove there isn’t! I’ll get in first! I’ll start it for you!”
“When we finish, we might let you do that!” Amanda yelled. “At the moment, we’ve got business to take care of!”
“Leave now! Let him be!”
“Let him be? Hell, I’m going to kill him!” Balenger stepped forward.
“No!” Karen blocked the stairs. “This is wrong! You weren’t supposed to win!”
“We got that impression. Sorry to ruin your fun.”
“I never dreamed he’d allow anybody in here.”
“He didn’t allow anything!” Amanda shouted. “We got here on our own!”
The Game Master’s booming voice filled the cavern. “That’s true. Their survival skills are better than I expected. They honestly surprised me. At the start, I told Amanda that’s all it took for salvation — to surprise me.”
“You want a surprise?” Balenger asked. “Wait till I get up there.”
“If you kill him, he’ll win!” Karen sounded desperate.
“What?”
“He’ll win. How can it satisfy you to give him what he wants? He tricked you the same as he tricked me.”
“Tricked you?”
“If I’d known the truth about the game, I’d never have helped him! I only discovered its real purpose a while ago!”
“The truth about the game? That he’s God and we exist only in his mind? That’s not the truth! This is the truth!” Balenger fired three rounds. They blasted through several consoles, throwing up sparks and smoke.
He stormed in her direction.
“Stop!” Karen shouted, blocking the stairs.
“It’s okay if he kills people, but it’s not okay if he gets punished?”
“Not this way! He’s insane! He belongs in a hospital!”
“Then why didn’t you put him there earlier? You could have stopped this, but instead you helped! People died! I don’t care what your stepfather did to the two of you! I don’t care about the cubbyhole he sealed you in for three days!”
“You know about that?” Karen asked in shock.
“And how your mother abandoned you to a drunken pervert. That doesn’t give you the right to—”
“His mother didn’t abandon him.”
“What?”
“I’m his mother. I never abandoned him! I won’t do it now!” Karen shouted.
The depth of her delusion almost made Balenger pity her. But what he and Amanda had endured shut out every emotion except rage.
“The cubbyhole was so small that we couldn’t stretch out,” Karen said. “In the dark, we heard him hammering nails, sealing the hatch. We shoved at the hatch, but it wouldn’t move. We pounded our fists against it, but that didn’t work, either. There wasn’t enough room for us to kick. The only air came from holes around the hatch’s edge. We begged him to let us out, but he wouldn’t do it. Three days without water or food. We sat in our shit and piss. The smell made me vomit. I was sure we were going to die, but I couldn’t allow Jonathan to know how afraid I was. He started hyperventilating, and I warned him there was only enough air coming in for us to breathe slowly and calmly. I stroked his head. I told him how much I loved him. I put his hand on my chest so he could feel how slowly I breathed. He whispered stories to me in the dark — about an imaginary world called Peregrine, where birds could think and talk and perform magic. We put ourselves in the minds of falcons and flew toward the clouds. We swooped and soared and glided over waterfalls. The cubbyhole disappeared. Later, I realized how delirious I must have been. The first game Jonathan created was about that world.”
Karen’s eyes changed focus, as if she came back from another place. “I took care of him from when he was born. The woman who abandoned him wasn’t his mother. I’m the only mother he ever knew, the only person he ever loved. He’s the only person I ever loved.”
“Get out of my way.”
Karen reached for something behind her. “I won’t let you hurt him. I won’t let you hurt my son.”
“He’s your brother.”
“No!” Karen screamed.
“Frank!” Amanda warned behind him.
Karen raised a weapon. Despite the failing light, Balenger recognized the shape of an assault rifle. He and Amanda dove to the side as bullets tore stones from the wall next to the door they’d come through. Karen wasn’t able to control the weapon. Its barrel tugged upward, shooting above the door. Balenger stood, lined up the dot on his rifle’s sight, and put two bullets into her head. She collapsed, the rifle clattering.
Balenger hurried along the smoking consoles. He reached the stairs, stepped over Karen’s body, and charged up. A metal door was partially open, light glowing behind it. He kicked the door all the way open and faced the observation room, where the tiny Game Master sat in his spaceship-like chair, surrounded by controls. His goggles hid the expression in his eyes, but his wrinkled, child-shaped face made him look pathetic.
“Well, what do you know? It’s the damned Wizard of Oz,” Balenger said. “The guy behind the curtain.”
“Does that mean you identify with Dorothy?” After the damage Balenger inflicted on the computer array downstairs, the Game Master’s voice-strengthening devices no longer functioned. He didn’t sound like a news announcer anymore. His voice was now a puny squeak. “Perhaps that indicates sexual confusion. In games set on virtual worlds, half the male players choose roles that are female.”
Balenger raised the Mini-14.
“Dorothy’s a disappointment,” the frail figure said. “After the countless colorful wonders she finds in Oz, she can’t wait to go back to her drab home in Kansas. She rejects the splendors of alternate reality. What a fool.”
Thinking of the blood that burst from Ortega’s mouth after the wheel barrow crushed him, Balenger aimed. “Is that where you want me to send you — Oz? Or how about Sirius, where the Solar Temple bunch thought it was going? Or maybe you want to reach a flying saucer on the other side of a comet?”
“Any place is better than this. ”The most painful state of being is remembering the future,“” the squeaky voice said.