Brainboy and the Deathmaster Read online

  “It’s mine,” he cried, jumping up.

  “Hey. I said keep it down. Your smokes is right there. That was the deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “What do you think I was doin’ all night, cuttin’ my freakin’ toenails?”

  “I don’t want any cigarettes. I don’t smoke.”

  “Never too late to start.”

  Glancing back at the screen, Darryl saw his troops being engulfed by Controllers. It was hopeless.

  He grabbed the carton of cigarettes and tossed it onto the other bed. “Give me my GameMaster,” he said.

  The boy leaped up and pulled something from his pocket. Click. A knife blade glinted half an inch from the end of Darryl’s nose.

  “You gonna shut your pie hole, or am I gonna have to cut you?”

  3

  “I do appreciate your help, sugar pie. This is the one that always gets to me—those two long flights of stairs.”

  “No sweat, Ma.”

  BJ Walker got out of the car and went around to the trunk and pulled out the bag with the MCS tag pinned to it. It was full of books and videos. His mother worked for the Seattle Public Library, and on Saturdays she took books and videos to a couple of nursing homes, some hospices, and this place: the Masterly Children’s Shelter. BJ had started helping her three weeks ago, when his summer vacation started, and on his first visit to the shelter he’d been awed by its grandeur. It was in an old mansion with a huge crystal chandelier at the foot of the front staircase and a paneled dining room with a table big enough for a skateboard course. But once he’d gone from room to room on the second and third floors, collecting old library books and handing out new ones, his awe had turned to pity. He’d always felt unlucky for never having known his father, but the kids here were totally alone in the world—wards of the state, waiting till strangers picked them out. When BJ got back into the car that first Saturday, he leaned over and gave his mother a hug.

  “What’s that for, sugar pie?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The shelter wasn’t all that far from their house, and this morning they’d made it their first stop. He said, “Morning,” to the plump Mexican-looking woman in the yellow uniform who was setting out boxes of breakfast cereal on the table in the dining room; then he poked his head in the half-open door beyond the stairs. Ms. Grimsley, the boss of the shelter, was in her office, leaning back in her desk chair, reading a paperback. Though around his mother’s age, Ms. Grimsley was about as different from her as a person could be, thin and pale and dry as straw, with steel-rimmed glasses and a mouth set in a natural frown. But this morning she didn’t look as cheerless as usual. On the cover of her paperback a wavy-haired white guy was crushing a delicate woman in his muscular arms.

  “Morning, Ms. Grimsley.”

  She let out a yelp and nearly toppled over backward. As soon as she steadied herself, she thrust the paperback into a handbag that was hanging off the chair back.

  “Sorry, ma’am. Just wanted to give you the new videos.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll collect the old ones and leave them for you on the hall table. You can go on up—everybody should be awake. Breakfast’s in ten minutes.”

  He gave her this week’s videos and headed up the front stairs with the bag of books. The shelter had a high turnover. According to his mother, they tried to place the kids with foster parents as quickly as possible—but the sneering redheaded girl who liked horror stories was still in the first room on the second floor, as was the wild-haired boy with the nose ring next door who didn’t “read no books.” The third bedroom on the second-floor hallway, empty last week, was now occupied by two Asian boys, clearly brothers, who politely accepted the first two books he offered. The black boy in the next room, who’d liked books about the sea, had been replaced by an Eskimo-looking boy who chose a book about wolves.

  There were only a couple of rooms up on the third floor. When he knocked on the first door, no one answered, but he opened it anyway, remembering last week’s lodger: a boy who’d lain in bed, totally unresponsive, staring at the ceiling. BJ had actually thought of him a couple of times during the week. Of all the kids in the place, that one seemed the saddest case, the most dazed with grief. He was still there—but today he was sitting up in bed while another boy, a skinny kid with a greasy ponytail, was holding a switchblade to his nose.

  “Who the freak are you?” the boy with the knife demanded.

  “BJ Walker,” BJ said. “Who are you?”

  “None of your friggin’ business.”

  BJ stepped in and set his book bag by a laptop on the desk. All the rooms here had laptops. “You guys want something to read?”

  “You nuts? Can’t you see we’re busy?”

  “What about you?” BJ asked the other boy.

  “Hey,” the first boy said, turning the knife on BJ. “You think I’m talking to the friggin’ walls? I said get out of here.”

  “What’s that?” BJ asked, shifting his eyes to the window.

  As soon as the boy looked that way, BJ had his wrist. He twisted the arm till the elbow was pointing at the ceiling and the knife clunked onto the spiral rug between the twin beds.

  “Let go of me!”

  “Whatever you say.” BJ shoved the scrawny boy facedown onto the bed nearer the window, his head at the foot, and sat on the small of his back.

  “Get off me!”

  “Put a sock in it,” BJ said, smiling at the other boy, who looked about his age, though a lot smaller. His blue eyes were glazed, and his dirty-blond hair was every which way, as if he hadn’t combed it all week. “What’s your name?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Don’t you have a name?”

  The boy took a deep breath and said: “Darryl.”

  “Why’d he have a knife on you, Darryl?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Get your black butt off me!” squealed the pinned boy.

  “I said put a sock in it. You don’t know how come he pulled a knife on you?”

  Darryl reached between other boy’s running shoes and pulled something out from under the pillow.

  “Wow,” said BJ, who’d been saving up for a GameMaster for months. “You mean they give them out here?”

  “It’s mine,” Darryl said.

  “It’s mine!” the other boy squealed. “We had a deal! I got you them cigarettes.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “You’re killing me, man! You weigh a friggin’ ton.”

  A bell rang in the distance. Footsteps sounded out in the hall.

  “Breakfast time,” BJ said. “Hand me that knife, will you?”

  Darryl set his GameMaster on the table between the beds, collected the knife off the floor, and gave it to BJ, who closed the blade.

  “Surprised they let you in here with something like this. What’s your name?”

  “What’s it to you?” the pinned boy said.

  “Just being friendly.”

  “If you want to be friendly, get your smelly butt off me.”

  “The only thing that smells around here is your shoes, Nabatw.”

  “What you call me?”

  BJ poked the tattoo on the boy’s arm. It was of a flag, but instead of stars and stripes inside, it had the letters NABATW.

  “That’s not my name.”

  “What is it then?”

  “None of your business.”

  BJ bounced on him, making him gasp.

  “Okay, jeez. Name’s Boris.”

  “If I let you up, Boris, are you going to be nice?”

  Boris sniffed. BJ bounced on him again.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be nice.”

  When BJ stood up, Boris jerked into a sitting position, his face scarlet, his smelly shoes wide apart on the rug, his slitty eyes shifting between BJ and Darryl.

  “Give it to me,” he said, his eyes stopping on BJ.

  BJ slid the knife into the pocket of his baggy jeans. “You can get it back from
Ms. Grimsley”

  “You can’t give it to Grimface!”

  BJ sat on the bed by Darryl.

  “How old are you anyway, Boris?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Pretty runty for fourteen, BJ thought. “Where you from?” he asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Eugene.”

  “Oregon?”

  “No, Hawaii. What do you think, dipwad?”

  “What are you doing up here in Seattle?”

  “’Bout six months ago my sister and me got tossed in a place like this down in Portland, but the second morning I come down to breakfast—no Nina. They don’t let boys and girls share rooms in these joints, even if they’re related. Anyhow, somebody must’ve done something really crummy to make her take off without telling me.”

  “You sure they didn’t stick her with foster parents?”

  “That’s what the dorks that run the place said. But Neen wouldn’t’ve gone without telling me. Since then I’ve been looking for her. I’ve been to Yakima, Centralia, Tacoma, all over the friggin’ place. Figure she’s gotta be somewhere in the Northwest.” He dug a worn cowhide wallet out of his back pocket and showed them both a dog-eared photo of a girl who looked a lot like him, except she was kind of pretty and wore glasses and her blond hair was curly. “Seen her?”

  “Sorry,” BJ said.

  “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that,” Boris said, “I’d be rich as that Masterly jerk.”

  “Hey, who are you calling a jerk?”

  “What’s it to you? Like you know Keith Masterly or something?”

  “Well, not personally,” BJ admitted. But he knew all about him: how he’d invented the GameMaster when he was only nineteen years old, how he’d founded MasterTech when he was only twenty, how instead of hoarding his billions, he financed charitable causes: hospitals for the mentally challenged and shelters like this one for orphaned or abandoned children.

  “What about your parents?” he said. “Are they dead?”

  “My mom is,” Boris said.

  “And your dad?”

  Boris spat on the floor. “Far as we’re concerned.”

  “How about you, Darryl?”

  Darryl turned and stared out the window.

  “He’s a space case,” Boris said. “But I got to admit, he’s a friggin’ whiz at that GameMaster stuff. He’s as good as Nina.”

  “Where’d you get your GameMaster?” BJ asked. “You rich or something?”

  Darryl didn’t respond.

  “What’s your favorite game?”

  At this Darryl seemed to perk up a bit. “StarMaster.”

  “Never played that. Could you show me how?”

  Instead of picking up his GameMaster, Darryl moved to the desk chair. When he hit a key on the laptop, the word MondoGameMaster appeared on the screen, each vibrating letter a different color.

  “They’re like big GameMasters?” BJ said, moving over behind him. “Is that because Keith Masterly owns this place?”

  “I guess,” Darryl said. “But it’s weird. I think you play against somebody. First you have to get through this maze, though. Huh. It’s different this time.”

  An unbelievably intricate maze had appeared on the screen.

  “They only give you two minutes to get through that?” BJ said, seeing the countdown in a corner of the screen.

  But to his astonishment, Darryl guided the figure through the maze with twenty seconds to spare.

  “Wow,” he murmured as congratulations appeared on the screen.

  There was quite a long pause; then a game list appeared. Darryl clicked on StarMaster 3.

  “Skip the rules,” BJ said. “I’ll just watch.”

  Darryl answered the question “Want to play?” and learned that his opponent was called LabRat. After Darryl identified himself as MDK, a map of the universe appeared.

  “It looks like the beginning of Star Voyager,” BJ said. “That’s my favorite movie of all time.”

  “Same here,” said Darryl.

  “Is Captain Geomopolis in this game?”

  “Nah. What you have to do is … first you have to find out where the Controllers and the Individualists are.”

  “The what?”

  Darryl explained as he played, and before long BJ was totally absorbed. Darryl’s dexterity in steering his ships out of trouble was as remarkable as his knack for locating star gates, but what left BJ agog was his ability to recruit the Individualists by answering their questions. He’d never seen anything like it in his life.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  Same as him. He turned to ask Boris if his sister was as good as this.

  Boris wasn’t there. BJ looked under the beds. Under the one near the window was a battered suitcase covered with National Park stickers. Under the other there were only a couple of dust balls.

  “Where the heck did he go?”

  The desk chair squeaked as Darryl swiveled around. His eyes went straight to the tree out the open window.

  “Think he climbed out?” BJ said, going over there.

  There was no sign of Boris in the madrona tree. When he turned back, Darryl’s face was as white as the pillowcases on the beds.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Darryl’s eyes were fixed on the night table. The only things on it were a lamp, the library book BJ had left last week, and a paperback called The Expanding Universe. The GameMaster was gone.

  4

  “Here he comes now,” Ms. Grimsley said as BJ rounded the curve of the lower staircase.

  “Sugar pie,” said his mother, “I’ve been waiting half an hour.”

  BJ said nothing as he joined the two women—one fat and chocolate colored, the other pale and stick thin—on the Oriental rug under the chandelier. Through an archway he could see kids eating breakfast in the dining room.

  “What’s the matter?” Mrs. Walker said.

  BJ shrugged.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I was talking to this kid, Darryl,” he mumbled. The truth was, Darryl’s brilliance had shaken him.

  “Were you really?” said Ms. Grimsley. “He hasn’t said boo in eight days. Not even the counselor could get a word out of him. What were you talking about?”

  “Nothing. He was playing this game, StarMaster 3.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that. Maybe he’s coming around.”

  “Coming around from what?” BJ asked.

  “He’s been in shock. He lost his entire family in a fire.”

  “No!” Mrs. Walker cried.

  “I’m afraid so. It was over on Bainbridge Island.”

  “Good lord, I saw something about that in the paper,” Mrs. Walker said. “A family reunion, wasn’t it?”

  “His grandmother’s birthday, I believe. The house went up in flames in the middle of the night. Nobody got out alive.”

  “Nobody?” BJ gasped. “How about Darryl?”

  “He was sleeping in a tree house in the backyard. He lost his parents and his brother and his grand-parents. An aunt and uncle and cousin, too. We’ve been running a search for other family members, but so far we’ve come up blank.”

  “Can he come over for dinner, Ma?” BJ said, his jealousy turned to sympathy.

  “Well, sweetie, that’s a kind thought, but I’m not sure …”

  “Are the kids prisoners here, Ms. Grimsley?” BJ asked.

  “Prisoners? Not at all. But Darryl’s been traumatized. He’s barely eaten. He’s fine, physically, according to the doctor, but he’s in denial about the whole episode. What we do in these situations is we wait for the child to work himself out of it a bit before trying to place him.”

  “Bet you ten bucks he’d eat Ma’s cooking.”

  “BJ,” Mrs. Walker said, smiling in spite of herself.

  “You’ll like him, Ma. He’s smarter than me.”

  “That I doubt.”

 
“No, you will.”

  “I mean I doubt he’s smarter than you. BJ’s been top of his class the last two years.”

  Though Ms. Grimsley’s mouth wasn’t made for smiling, it did its best. “Good for you, young man. And I appreciate your taking an interest in Darryl. But at this point I think it would be best if he stayed put. He hasn’t even cried yet. It’s all still bottled up inside him.”

  “Poor guy,” BJ said. “First his family, now his GameMaster.”

  “What do you mean? The GameMasters are bolted down.”

  “Not the laptop—his. That Boris guy grabbed it and took off out the window.”

  “What!”

  “Who’s Boris?” Mrs. Walker said.

  Ms. Grimsley’s natural frown was back. “Boris Rizniak. He showed up here a few weeks ago and we tried to place him—then he disappeared. He claims he’s looking for his sister, but he’s a dreadful liar. And a trouble-maker. He must have had a rough upbringing—he has some ugly scars on his back—so when he showed up again yesterday, hungry and tired, I didn’t have the heart not to take him in. But stealing! Next time it’s juvenile detention.”

  Boris seemed to be in plenty of hot water already, so BJ didn’t mention the cigarettes, which had also disappeared, or the switchblade in his pocket.

  “Where’s this Darryl from?” Mrs. Walker asked. “Bainbridge Island?”

  “No, that’s where his grandparents lived,” Ms. Grimsley said. “He’s from here in Seattle, just over on First Hill. A small house, mostly mortgaged. The parents didn’t have any money to speak of. Very outdoorsy, apparently. They led hiking parties in the mountains.”

  “Sounds as if he might be able to use a little home cooking.”

  “Well, you may be right,” said Ms. Grimsley. “But—”

  “Great, Ms. Grimsley,” BJ said, grabbing the old videos off the hall table. “We’ll come back after we finish our rounds.”

  5

  Darryl sat slumped on one of the beds. He hadn’t felt much of anything over the past week, but now that the broad-shouldered black boy in the baggy jeans had left, he was feeling a little lonely.

  Eventually a scuffling noise drew his eyes to the window. A squirrel was climbing up the madrona tree, circling the trunk like a stripe on a barber’s pole. The same tree the other boy had climbed down with the GameMaster that had been given to him by …