The Unidentified (21 page)

Tesla (toy321) came out next, wearing simple fatigues and her flipstream goggles. They made her eyes bulge like fishbowls, and when she blinked, her lower lashes rose to the top. She looked surreally lizard-like.

“Oh shit! She’s going to play the game
flipped
.” Mikey laughed. “This is psychological warfare at its finest.”

Tesla was showing the meatpounders that she was so confident in her skill, she could play the game upside-down.

But I was worried about what the administrators would do with her flaunting their ban like that. She turned to the seated Meat Hammer players and flashed them a peace sign, then stood beside Mo.

Lexie Phillips, AKA Widow9, took the stage last. Her fatigues were embellished with tiny personalized details:

zombie-bunny good-luck charms, barbed-wire bracelets. It was rare that a newbie got a spot on a League team. I wondered if the Unidentified came out to support her game today.

After all four of the Princesses were lined up together onstage, they turned at the same time and marched to their seats in front of their monitors, solemnly and professionally.

They looked crazy intimidating.

In every War Game, the two teams face off against each other in three rounds, in accordance with the Major League Gaming rules. First up was Capture the Flag, where the teams had to quickly control the map, yank the flag from the other team’s base, and run it back to their own without getting tagged in the back by a grenade or plasma blast. First team to successfully capture the flag three times won that round.

The title screen started up, and the crowd stomped their feet, charging up for the round to start. I could hardly hear the starting buzzer over the shouting and laughter. I squeezed Mikey’s hand, and watched as all eight players spawned on screen, their avatars materializing out of nothingness onto the battlefield.

All the players were miked up so the crowd could hear the strategies and team planning, but the crowd could hear everything else too. Trash talk was booming out through the Pit.

“You’re substandard, Kill-one! Why do you even play this game?” Mo taunted.

“Yeah, yeah. Snipe a guy when he spawns. That’s so cheap!” Junkmonkey was having a hard time getting into the game, Widow9 kept picking him off before he could take a step forward.

Save the Princess was way competent at Capture the Flag, because they were so focused and worked together so tight. Elle grabbed the flag, tossed it up on base where toy321 was waiting. She grabbed it while Mo laid down fire in front of her.

“Ooh! Plasma blast to the face. Did that hurt, meatpounder?” Elle, of course.

Toy321 got picked off as soon as she entered home base, but Widow9 was there to grab the fallen flag before the boys could get their hands on it. Lexie was definitely a skill player.

1-0, Save the Princess. The spectators shouted their support, and I felt my throat go raw with my screams even though I couldn’t hear myself.

Meat Hammer was crude, but the Princesses were raunchy. They skill fully wielded a brand of shit talk that made these hyper-testosteroned meatgeeks blush. The boys practically dropped their controllers, and the Princesses cleaned up easy in the first round, 3-1.

The crowd erupted at the Princesses’ win. I jumped up and hugged Mikey. He hugged me back hard.

“I thought you were still secretly backing Meat Hammer!” I shouted into Mikey’s ear.

Mikey mumbled something I couldn’t hear over the noise, even though his mouth was right by my ear.

We let go of each other. Mikey looked at me for a second, then turned back to the screen. The Team Slayer round was starting. The first team to reach fifty kills won the round, and Meat Hammer had taken an early lead.

Both teams were getting hit hard, but it was still pretty even since one of the Meats—Aggro8, I think—even though he racked up a string of kills, obviously didn’t value his own life enough to play smart and use cover. The Princesses were always just two kills behind, they could still cinch it.

The energy in the crowd was mad now, and then I heard something that sounded like firecrackers up on the second floor. I mean, there was a lot of booming and blasting coming from the surround speakers, but these pops and cracks sounded raw.

Then someone started the crowd chanting. I couldn’t hear what everyone was saying right away, but it was spreading into a chorus. The firecracker pops were still going off, and then a bottle rocket with tail blazing streaked over the stage. I held on to Mikey’s hand and gasped along with everyone else. Some of the players up on stage even took their eyes off the screen as it whizzed in the air over the crowd.

The air filled with that kind of firework smell. A tangy gunpowder scent that stung my nose. The crowd was still laughing and chanting, but I started to feel that something was wrong.

Mikey and I stood up on our chairs and looked around.

Weaving their way through the mob, I saw a few people wearing flesh-colored but faceless plastic masks. They were wrapped in bloody bandages, showing gruesome war wounds.

Then doll parts rained down from the second floor.

Soaked in red paint.

“It’s them!” I shouted into Mikey’s ear, gripping his arm tight now.

It had to be them. The Unidentified. The fake blood, the violent shock. This wasn’t a sponsored scene. It was the real thing.

The voices of the crowd grew more and more rhythmic until words formed from the rumble. I heard the crowd’s gleeful chant, “War! UGH! What is it good for?” but instead of the “absolutely nothing” part, people were squealing, “killing lots of bodies.” Huh, good God.

Hardly anyone was paying attention to the War Game now, the crowd was worked up into a bizarre frenzy by all of the smoke and firecrackers and mutilated doll parts getting tossed around. People were starting to shove. The crowd lurched back into me and I was knocked off my chair, hard.

Mikey called out, “Kid!”

I fell and landed painfully on the tile floor. Hip, shoulder, head. The three spots on my body throbbed in order of contact on the hard floor. I put my hands up to protect my head, to keep people from stepping on it. Some kids who saw me fall tried to help me up, but other people had no clue I was down there and kept trampling me.

I looked up and saw Mikey jump down from his chair, pushing people away to get to me.

Someone’s hands gripped my sore shoulders and helped me to my feet. I turned around, my mouth open to thank him. But I found one of those faceless masks looking back at me, and I lost all words. The human eyes peeking out from behind that eerily inhuman face looked so creepy- wrong.

Mikey pushed his way past the spectators, and stepped up in between the masked guy and me. Mikey grabbed the guy’s wrist to break the grip on my arm.

“Leave her alone,” he said, and pushed him back, a two- hands-to-the-chest shove.

As the masked man stumbled backward a few steps, the hood of his sweatshirt fell back and I saw the dreadlocks. The iconic mullet of the Unidentified leader.

Mikey turned to ask me if I was okay, and I saw the mask face loom up behind him with a smile in his eyes that didn’t match the expressionless plastic face. Then the guy, the mask-man, punched Mikey in the back of the head.

Mikey fell forward against the chairs, then got to his knees.

I yelled into the face that wasn’t a face, “Why are you doing this?” and turned to help Mikey.

I saw how angry Mikey was, and I was worried about what he was going to do next.

Mikey turned to look at me. “Who—?”

But the mask-man appeared out of nowhere again and pushed Mikey hard into the people in front of him. Like a reaction of a wave, the crowd shoved back and Mikey smashed into mask-man again.

This time Mikey was ready. The mask took a swing, but Mikey ducked it. Then they started to brawl, like a rolling-on-the-floor, fists-flying-everywhere fight. The crowd, like a conscious entity, started to reshape itself to make room for them. More people were watching their fight than what was happening on-screen, I couldn’t imagine
anyone
was still watching what was happening on-screen.

I just heard myself yelling, “Mikey!” over and over again, but at the same time, I couldn’t hear anything. It was like being underwater, or watching a film with frame-skips. I could not make sense of what was happening. Mikey was on the ground, struggling to free himself, but that guy was just hitting him. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything?

Mikey was flopping and flailing and managed to throw up an elbow into the guy’s face. There was a sickening crack. The nose was hard plastic, impossible to break, but the nose under it wasn’t. Blood seeped out from under the mask.

Mikey stumbled over some chairs trying to get his balance, not really aware of how much damage he’d done.

Protecht mall security in their pork-colored polyester jackets and toy-looking walkie-talkies finally cut through the crowd. Security supervisor Harrison grabbed Mikey, and another guard lunged to get a hold of the guy behind the mask. But he had retreated back into the now-riotous crowd. He was gone.

On the news that night, our Game site administrators were on the TV saying that it was “regrettable” that when the Game was opened to the public, the problems of the outside world found their way inside. They were using this tragedy to lock down the Game even more, institute tighter security procedures.

Mrs. Bond gave her sound bite up on-screen: “The only thing controversial about our business model is that we give children power, the power of consumers. Their choices and interests dictate what we provide. Education is tailored to give the student, the consumer, what he or she wants.

The people responsible for this attack
want
to disrupt our way of life. As site administrators, we won’t all ow it.”

In the background, firework smoke made the air hazy and little groups of the mob felt free to continue on with some residual vandalism. Kids were jumping off chairs, pushing each other around. Parents held players’ younger siblings in their arms, trying to make their way to the exit.

They didn’t say anything about Mikey, and that was the only news I cared about. Instead, they spent time debating what the score had been before the disruption, and how the matter of championship scoring should be settled.

No mention of the Unidentified at all . They were able to name-drop a bunch of sponsors, however, getting them name-drop a bunch of sponsors, however, getting them free publicity from the coverage. Mrs. Bond even managed to plug After Hours by assuring parents that Protecht security had proven successful at the Friday night events and would continue to be a wholesome socializing experience for the youth of the community.

“I don’t want you going to any more public access events,” Mom said. She got such a perverse pleasure from bad news, she probably liked to see her worldview confirmed. My intouch(r) had been eerily still all night.

Jeremy and Tesla had given some updates. Tesla’s confirmed what the championship rules said about contingency scoring, and Jeremy fired off:

swiftx:
the people who effed up the war game…

swiftx:…
they’ll pay for that free-for-all.

But I didn’t care about any of that. I held my intouch(r), hoping to see something from Mikey. I wanted proof that he didn’t have to give back his intouch(r), that he was still in the Game.

Mikey wasn’t in the Game the next day. His Network page was down and I didn’t know how to get in contact with him.

He didn’t answer any of my intouch(r) texts, and I was starting to worry that he wasn’t getting them.

I stared at my unresponsive intouch(r) and tried to think of how I could find out if Mikey was okay. Maybe Winter-son would know?

Palmer intercepted me as I was crossing the Pit.

“Hey! Where’re you going? We’re all meeting in the lounge.”

“Oh. I don’t—”

“You have to come! You were in the middle of it. Did you know that was going to happen? How often does a spotter get a break like that? You have inside tips, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The War Game Riot!”

He steered me over to the VIP Lounge. The It Listers were gathered in small groups chatting animatedly. I saw Tycho Williams standing to the side, trying to avoid my eyes.

“Hey,” I said, jaw tensed in an unconvincing smile. “I didn’t see you at the War Game.”

He glanced up at me. “Yeah. I…I had to take care of my little sister.”

“Oh. Nice alibi.”

He started to say something, but was interrupted by He started to say something, but was interrupted by Palmer Phillips addressing the room. “OK, then. Let’s get to today’s top story. This one is a real rumor riot so we need to do what we’re best at and tame the trend, control the flow, and sensibly sensationalize. You all have your fingers to the pulse, so you know I’m talking about the disturbance during the War Game yesterday.” He grinned and his fang-tooth sparkled.

He continued, “You know the sponsors’ stance on violence: fun for the whole family until someone loses an eye. So, let’s hear it, what did all you trendsetters think?”

“You know, I think it was kind of beautiful?” Echo Petersson spoke up with her kind of breathy high-pitched voice. “How the whole crowd started chanting as one?”

“Yeah, it seemed so natural,” Abe Fletcher added.

“And easy, like you could get the crowd to say anything, because we were together and, like, a part of something. It was better than viral, it was, um…”

“Emergent?” Palmer suggested.

A lot of people muttered excitedly.

“Yeah, and I just wanted to say?” Verity Clark spoke up, her voice rising at the end, punctuating everything she said like a question. “You don’t really get to see blood very much in real life, right? I mean, it’s in the movies and on TV everywhere? But there’s something really POWERFUL with reall blood,” she added almost reverently. “Is there a way we can use blood more in campaigns? I mean, tastefully, like for Band-Aids, maybe?”

I squirmed uncomfortably at the thought of the spokes- girl for Time of Your Life teen tampons suggesting more girl for Time of Your Life teen tampons suggesting more blood in advertising. But blood sounded good to these lopsided vampires. It was weird to sit in on a focus group for a protest.