LevelUP: an 8-bit novel by Micah Joel. Author's definitive online edition.

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Chapter Eleven

0-10: Entrance

Galloping: somehow even more terrible than Max remembers. What’s not to like about getting repeatedly punched in the inner thighs by a side of beef? “What…did…you…see?” he asks.

Molly, for her part, seems to hardly notice she’s on a horse, much less at a hard gallop. Her voice carries effortlessly over the clatter of hooves. “A phone. I saw a phone, Max. Miyamoto had a phone in his pocket.”

That doesn’t make any sense. The library’s tech dated from the era of vintage plastic handset phones strung along curly wires. Sure, LevelUP has their facial recognition gateway appliance set up at the entrance, but that’s true of any building of significance these days. Other than that, the library is simply not a place one would expect to find technology.

“Why…would…” Max never finishes the sentence. He doesn’t need to. The only way Miyamoto would have a cell phone was if LevelUP provided it. Hemera had been there before them. Who knows what kind of threats or incentives she might have left rolling around in the back of Miyamoto’s mind. The second he left, he must have been on the phone to her. Thus, great urgency to get to the address before Hemera.

The brisk night air slaps him into wakefulness, senses sharpened. Even tiny details in the moonlight stand out. Max digs his heels in, and his horse responds with an extra burst of speed. “Yaw!” he whoops, though the horse is less than impressed.

Molly takes lead. Across a crumbling overpass, alongside a factory building that was the ugliest structure Max had ever seen—and that was before it was abandoned—they arrive at the address. It’s a grassy dome standing watch over a barren and cracked expanse of blacktop once used for parking vehicles—back years before Damage, when cars needed people to drive them.

But that’s not the most disturbing part of this neighborhood. “Why are we right across the street from a LevelUP building?” Max asks. “Are we safe here?”

“I don’t know this place,” Molly says.

The LevelUP satellite office looks dead at this hour. They’ll be fine. Probably. But then, an electric blue SUV, reflecting light from the LevelUP building, rolls into view a block away.

“This way,” Max says, and turns onto the grass. Molly’s horse follows course, and they end up side-by-side.

“We need to get these horses out of sight,” Max says. The dry grass isn’t even knee high. The only structure in sight is a rickety shed near the top of the gentle hill. At least it’s out of sight from the road and the LevelUP building.

“No hitching post,” Molly says.

Wooden slats lining the shed look older than the shed could possibly be, faded and gray, even in the pale moonlight. A split in the siding is wide enough to fit the rope through, but with no place to tie off. The splintery wood feels warm against the cool of the night. Max wedges his rope in, and it seems to hold. “Just do your best. I’m sure they won’t go anywhere,” Max says.

He lets go of the rope and reaches to pat the horse. But the old nag angles its head away from Max, and the rope pops free. He nudges his companion with a friendly snort, and Molly drops her rope. The two horses turn and trot out of grasp. Max could swear that his horse looks back at him with a mocking eye.

“Help me corral them,” Max says. “They’re attracting too much attention.”

“I know those horses,” Molly says. “Trying to catch them will raise far more attention.”

Fair enough. The horses chase each other down the road and disappear around the corner.

“They know their way back to the camp, right?” Max asks.

Molly’s attention is already elsewhere. “This is it?” she asks.

Max tries to visualize the map they had seen at the library. “Yeah, it would be right about in the middle of this field. Top of the hill.” Max takes another breath. “Do you smell that?”

Molly’s nose wrinkles, and she nods. It’s a faint, sweet smell. When Max leans in, it’s coming from inside the shack. There’s a faint breeze diffusing from between the slats. It smells a little like new electronics, but with a sharper edge.

Max peeks around the edge to get a view of the LevelUP building. The blue SUV isn’t in sight. For the moment they’re alone.

There’s a door on the side of the building, with a scrap of wood nailed in as a handle. Max tugs on it, but it’s securely latched, like there’s a board across it from the inside.

“Try knocking?” Molly says. She raps on the door, and the sound is strikingly loud; seeming to echo off the buildings around them.

“Not so loud,” Max hisses. “You don’t know if—”

Something inside thunks, a sound like a piece of wood sliding against another, and the door creaks open. The pitch black inside is broken only by slender threads of moonlight stabbing through gaps in the planked walls.

“Hello?” Molly asks. Her voice is soft and uncertain. It sounds out of character for her. She pushes the door all the way open.

“Nobody’s here,” Max observes.

“Then who opened the door?” Molly says and walks inside.

“Wait!—”

The interior is bare. If this were a shed, there’d be tools. If this was someone’s idea of a house, there’s be furniture. Only creaking wood planks, and a fraying rug in the center, covering a slight bulge, as if there’s something underneath. Like Lockheed, this place is another Superfund site. Instead of military waste, this one covers huge amounts of pollution left by Silicon Valley chipmakers half a century ago, some of it so pernicious that it was just now breaking down into merely carcinogenic compounds^[8].

“What is this place?” Max asks. “A well or something?”

“That rug,” Molly says.

Max kicks the rug, releasing a choking cloud of dust. But sure enough, he can tell that parts of it are slightly less dirty than others. It has a pixelated design woven into it: three parallel bars, curving away at the bottom.

“Atari,” Molly says.

“Atari as in Atari Lynx?” Max asks.

Molly nods.

“So this is all connected.”

The rug looks just out of place enough that Max and Molly have the idea at the same time: they reach together and shove the rug out of the way. Underneath is a rectangular seam in the floorboards.

“That looks unsturdy,” Molly says, pressing her full weight against the rectangle.

Something under the floor cracks loudly. The panel Molly’s standing on pivots away from her—a trapdoor. Molly plummets, scrambling to hold on to anything she can reach. She gets one hand on the splintered edge of the floor, but before Max can react, her grip falters, and she plunges into the darkness below.

footnotes

[8] Technically, California’s Proposition 65 was never repealed, even throughout Damage. It’s just that people got so used to warning labels on everything, they just tuned it all out.

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