Characters: Sophia, Pip, Neil, Marcus, Russell
“No luck,” Pip frowned as he double-checked his results. “The virus definitely didn’t come from Joan’s computer—although she’s downloaded about eight hundred hours’ worth of illegal rap and R&B songs, if you want to call the bad music cops.”
Sophia stood over him, holding a slice of veggie pizza in one hand and keeping the cheese from dripping with the other. “There are still three more houses. I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”
“If I want to keep from my job?”
She said nothing, but took a huge bite out of the warm pizza dough and used Pip’s collar to wipe off her fingers. He didn’t notice because her touch was so gentle and she wasn’t going to tell him.
“Incoming call,” Neil said. Then, as if he were physic (or able to see the flashing red button beforehand), the phone rang. Nobody picked it up, of course, so he put it on loudspeaker. “Marcus, is that you?”
“Yeah,” came the static on the other end. “I think I took a wrong turn, though.”
“Why? Where are you?”
There was a pause. “I’m at some sort of satanic ritual. There are candles and books covered in skulls and blood and wax.”
“Uh…where’d you make the wrong turn?”
“In the hallway. I went to the second house on your list and…now I think I’m in hell.”
“It’s probably just a stereotypical Goth’s room,” Pip said from across the room. “You know, the kind that people write stories about when they have no clue what a Goth is actually like, so that the whole populace has a clichéd idea of teenagers who wear black make-up and have pale skin. Very common in bad fiction.”
“I see…”
“Did you get the code?” Sophia asked.
“You…actually want me to go near that freaky girl? She might bite my neck or something.”
“Would probably be the only hickey you’d ever get,” Sophia muttered.
“What was that?”
“Just get the code.”
“I’m on it, cap’n.”
“Make sure he gets it right,” Sophia said, putting her hand on Neil’s shoulder and running it across his spine as she stepped away. A cheesy, tomato sauce-encrusted trail marked the back of his shirt. Sophia grinned, putting her thumb to her lips as she proceeded to lick away the last glob of sauce from her skin, when her teeth suddenly clamped down. As if a sudden weight had lassoed her neck, her ankles trembled and she collapsed back against one of the desks, letting out a blood-chilling scream that shattered Neil’s glasses.
“What is it!?” he cried out, jumping to his feet as a shower of glass shards rained down from his lenses. Then he turned around and saw a sight, a bone-chilling nightmare through the world of broken glasses, which would haunt his mind from that day forth. In the corner of the room, where the Neverquest chair had been, where his friend Tony had been, there was now only a pile of limbs and blood. It only took him a moment to realize that those body parts were Tony’s, but that didn’t lessen the surrealism. It only made it more sickening.
He threw up in that instance and kept throwing up until his stomach wheezed like a dying old truck, sputtered, ran on fumes and acids as he shielded his face with his hands and tugged as his skin until it nearly peeled away.
By now, Pip was on his feet and back down again as a sudden wave of vertigo overtook him. He couldn’t hear Sophia even though she was screaming in his ear. Somehow, though, in the frozen trance of time, his hand found the way to the phone and he called security. He didn’t know what he was doing, the number he just dialed, or even the trembling words that seeped out of his mouth like dry ice. It was all like a dream—a terrible, terrible dream that no child should have to live through. The phone remained in his ear long after security was on their way.
The next ten minutes were the longest in their lives and yet they stood numb, motionless through it all. They witnessed it before their eyes, but they couldn’t remember it in a thousand memories; the security team rushing in with their plastic bags and carrying Tony away in pieces, the terrible silence that followed, the darkness in the room that became apparent now more than ever before. An invisible wind stole their breaths away.
Sophia watched with her lips shuddering and her eyes glazed over in a chilling ice that made all her tears come out frozen. Pip sat in his chair, his hands folded and shaking in his lap as he rubbed them together like two long sticks as if that would keep him warm. Neil never moved from his original position. He stood as lifeless as his friend, his gaze never leaving the seat where Tony’s head lay, hidden under the blinking lights of the Neverquest game helmet. When the security team finally took the helmet away, he followed its bouncing antenna out the door with his eyes and tried to imagine where they were taking him, where he was destined to go. Then he fell back, his eyes stinging and swelling as if they were prodded by a swarm of cruel, heartless wasps.
No more than twenty minutes later, the door to the control room banged against the wall and a tall man with a full-grown goatee and hair the color of pepper and sand rushed in. He must have known right where he was going, though, because he found his way immediately into Sophia’s arms and held her until the frozen tears were forced from her eyes like melting icicles. The moment came quickly and she cried forever into the soft leather padding of his shirt, feeling the distance pats of his hand stroke her shoulder.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” he whispered, kissing her ear. “I’m here now. Nobody’s going to hurt you. It’s alright. Daddy’s here. It’s over.”
“H-he’s dead…” Sophia sputtered and her own voice sounded so fake, so unreal. She repeated herself again and again, trying to rationalize, trying to realize, what was going on in her mind. But she hadn’t a clue and soon the words were garbled together into one long stream of tears and all she could do was cry again, burying her face into her father’s arms.
He wrapped his hands tighter around her, letting her body rock like a baby in his strong grasp, as he looked over at Pip. “Pip, what happened here?”
Pip opened his mouth to speak, but the air was dry and he had to try twice to get the words to form. “I…I don’t know, Mr. Russell. Everything that’s happened today… I don’t understand it… None of this makes any sense.”
The tall man bent down, pressing his lips against Sophia’s sweet black hair as he stared at Pip through the curling, messy strands. “Sophia… Please, wait outside. I’ll be there soon and we’ll take you home.”
She wasn’t sure if she nodded or not, or said anything to her father, but she ran from the room and threw herself against the wall in the hallway, gasping for air before the tears took her under again.
Meanwhile, Russell stepped over to Pip’s desk and yanked him out of his seat by the collar of his shirt. “What the hell is going on here, boy?” He tried not to sound angry or upset or even sad, but it was clear he was all three as the brick wall that was his face began to quiver.
“Sir, I wish I could tell you…” Pip answered. “The truth is, none of us know what’s going on around here. It…it all started when we discovered a virus in our systems earlier this morning. We didn’t think it was much at first, but it started affecting gameplay to the point where we had to take a look. We sent Tony into the game to see if he could find any problems and…and that was an hour ago… He… I…”
Russell squeezed Pip’s arms, shaking him in frustration. “Pip, Neverquest is a game. I want to know why my best friend and partner was found dead in six pieces. Can you answer that!?”
“…No, sir, I cannot.”
“Who else was in here in the last hour?”
“J-just me, Neil, and your daughter. Sophia left the room for ten minutes or so to get a pizza.”
“And you never saw anybody else come or leave?”
“No, sir.”
“What about Marcus and his weird little friend? Where are they?”
“We sent them to check on all households that have been logged into the Neverquest servers for over a day. We…had hoped that they would be able to figure out who planted a virus in our systems.”
Russell released Pip and turned his back, putting his hands on his hips. “I think we have a bigger problem here, don’t you?”
“…Sir, if I may say so, I don’t think these two problems are necessarily unrelated.”
“What do you mean?”
“He means that the virus had something to do with Tony’s death,” Neil whispered from where he was quietly murmuring thoughts to himself. They had forgotten about him up until now. “…Whatever got into that game is taking over.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Russell bellowed. “Tony and I built Neverquest pixel by pixel. I know what went into it. Every part. We never put anything into the game that could hurt players.”
“You didn’t, but somebody did. And they definitely knew what they were doing.”
The room was quiet for a moment. With the exception of Sophia’s sobbing and pounding through the walls, they could hear each other breathe, blink, ponder their own desperate thoughts as the shadows of the room washed over their skin. Neil found himself staring at the puddle of blood that remained on the chair and shivered. He tried not to think about Tony, but he couldn’t help it. When he last looked, he was right there…
And then…
Finally, Russell turned around and stared at Pip with frightful black eyes that couldn’t suppress the fear any longer. “…Pip, what are we supposed to do? What are we up against here?”
Giantess World
