Inside Kids: The Second Zak Steepleman Novel: Zak Steepleman, #2

1

THERE WAS A LONG PAUSE—a long pause considering how our Chat sessions usually go.

Then the abuse began.

James: LOL. Y?

Alan: That scks.

Chung: Agreed.

Kate: . . . Well, I kinda like it.

That last one again sent a kind of warmth through my blood.

At least Kate liked the idea.

James: Wat’s it mean?

Me: Dunno, like how were always inside, u no, cos were like gamers?? Kinda like when people say that they have an inside dog or a cat, like they nvr go out?

Alan: Nah, dont like it.

Chung: Agreed.

That was the thing about Chung, he was sort of really into saying ‘agreed’ to just about everything at that time.

Kate: We should vote on it.

Alan: Yea, pic sumthin else.

James: K.

Chung: Agreed

I squeezed my gamepad tighter for some reason—it was like I was tense about this, or something. Then I tapped out:

Me: K, lets vote then.

Kate: Yes or no, okay?

Nobody said anything, so I guessed that we were all happy with the format, and then, before I knew it, the vote was already happening:

Alan: N

Chung: N

Kate: Yes

I was waiting on James, to see what he would say about it.

I tapped my fingers against my thigh, glanced out the window to the traffic as it was trundling on past, and then I looked back to the screen.

James: Y

Another pause. I guessed this was because everyone was working out just what this meant. What a two-two tie meant, and then another message came in:

Kate: What do you say, Zak?

I felt myself smile just a little, and then I tapped back:

Me: Y

It was almost like I could hear Alan and Chung groaning from here, in my bedroom, hundreds of miles away from theirs.

All of us lived faraway so we never had any chance to meet up in person . . . well, that last part wasn’t entirely true, but whatever.

Things happened quick in the Chat from then on. Kate said that she’d put together the server, and that she’d do all of that extra stuff seeing as her dad was an expert—or something—meanwhile Alan complained some more, and threw out even more names that he thought would be better.

But none of them seemed to catch on like Inside Kids did, so it looked like it would be Inside Kids after all.

Done.

When Alan said that he had to go, that he had another of those appointments with a psychiatrist, we all decided that enough was enough. Kate said that she’d let us know about the server, that she’d send us all a message once it was online and ready for use.

As I quit Chat, I heard the crunch of gravel beneath car tyres and knew that Mum had just got home. I peered on out the window and watched her pulling up in her light-purple car—the one that doesn’t have any doors for the backseat so, whenever I can’t sit up front, I inevitably fall over when I try to clamber inside.

But, these days, I don’t have to get into the back seat often.

Not now that my parents got divorced.

That’s one good thing about it, I suppose . . .

I gave a yawn and then reached out and flipped off my TV. Next, and always last, I turned off my Sirocco—watched as that green light turned to its standby red.

Then I shucked on down the stairs to meet Mum at the door like some sort of a Labrador, or something.

She had a bunch of shopping with her, so I helped her to bring it in from the car boot, leaving it on the kitchen floor.

I’d just about got halfway through when I gave myself a stitch.

I could feel the sweat pooling in the middle of my back, under my t-shirt.

As I puffed on in with the last lot of shopping, Mum gave me a sort of wry smile and said, You know, maybe you should get some more exercise—get involved in an afterschool programme, something like that?

I gave a shrug then thought about the kinds of kids who play football, and cricket, and—shudder—rugby. Yeah, maybe, I said.

As she set the last shopping bag down in the middle of the kitchen floor, she turned to me, one hand on her hip in that way I know is always when there’s something important to be talked about. At the supermarket, she began, I got a phone call, from your father.

I felt my gut tighten just a little bit.

Only from the thought of it.

For some reason, it’d just got really awkward around Mum whenever she talked about my dad now . . . like some kind of ice sprung up in the air: sort of like Frozen Kingdom.

He says that he’s planning a trip.

A ‘trip?’ I replied, feeling my gut squeeze in on itself—hoping that this wasn’t going to be one of these badly thought out father-son activities . . . I’d had easily enough of those ever since my parents separated.

Hmm, Mum said, crouching down to a shopping bag on the floor and rifling through it. He says that it’s something he has to do.

"Alone?" I said, trying, and failing, not to sound like I had any interest in this at all.

Yes, he said that he’s bought a campervan and that he’s going to travel about Europe in it for the next few months.

"But Dad hates camping," I said.

Mum shrugged. And he hates travelling too . . .

I thought this over—tried to work out just what Dad might be up to, where he might be coming from. From the stuff I’d heard, from muffled phone conversations, emails left open on screens, and things like that, I was fairly certain that there was nobody else involved.

That neither my mum or dad had been having an affair.

That they’d just decided they were too different.

But this made me wonder—if Dad, maybe, had found a new girlfriend.

Or something like it.

As I slunk back from Mum, looked at her in profile, I saw the worry in her eyes, could see that—maybe—she was on the verge of tears.

I didn’t really want to be around for that, so I bent into her, gave her a kiss on the cheek—she gave me a smile—then I headed on back up to my bedroom.

When I got myself sitting back on the edge of my bed, I thought about flipping on my TV, getting in some more practice, or something, but, for some reason, I felt weird.

Like I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to play video games.

Maybe Mikey had been onto something—about me not playing games for fun . . .

So I got a head start on my homework.

. . . Yeah, I know.

2

IT TOOK about a week before everything was all set up—before Inside Kids was ready to run. I got a message through in the inbox of my Sirocco one evening from Kate, telling me that everybody was planning a sort of party around eight.

Just because it was our first time playing.

And we were going to see if we could get it to work.

Work properly . . . which meant us all getting inside the games console.

Though we’d met one another inside the games we played a few times—transported ourselves into the game using the infrared strip at the back of the Sirocco—we’d all pretty much decided that it would be too dangerous for us to be doing that on a public server.

After all, we didn’t want something to happen like what had happened to Alan—how one of the characters from the game had managed to escape from the Sirocco, and trap his parents.

Nope, we didn’t want that at all.

So, with help from Alan, getting some advice from him, Kate had given instructions to her dad on just how to build the server, how to protect it against something like that happening again.

And now we were ready to give it a whirl.

As I sat on the edge of the bed, still dressed in my school uniform, with my bag tossed into a heap at my feet, I noticed that my hands were actually shaking.

I guessed I was just a little nervous about all this stuff—about what we were going to do here.

But, at the same time, I was incredibly excited.

Because, I knew, if we could actually get this to work, it would open a whole other world of possibilities.

And be just about the coolest thing ever.

So I held still, waited for my invite to the Inside Kids server, accepted, and then I got on up and wandered around the back of my Sirocco 3000.

I held back a few moments, listened out for my mum, though I knew she was out at the gym. I was alone here—just as I knew that all of us were alone in our own houses. That was how we’d planned it. Nobody wanted to take any unnecessary risks of our parents walking in.

I listened to the grind of the fan of my Sirocco 3000, and sort of felt like it might be spinning around inside my head. And then, sinking my teeth into my lip, I reached out and touched the infrared strip on the back of my console.

Everything went black, as was normal. I felt myself tumbling on down an apparently endless hole. I knew that soon something would break my fall—or that I’d somehow land on my two feet. But it still made my stomach crunch in on itself, and sent my head spinning.

As I continued to fall, I could taste salt on the air, and could hear the gentle swish of waves in the background.

Kate hadn’t revealed which game we were going to try out first.

She had wanted it to be a surprise.

When I breathed in, the fishy smell was almost too much to bear, and it sent my skin into a whole bunch of pimples, as if they were bursting right out of me.

I kept on falling.

But the light grew brighter.

Before I knew it, I found myself dropping down through clouds, and then seeing an island spread out below me. Lit by the moon. As I looked on out across the expanse, I saw the quiet waves rolling in gradually to the sandy beach which surrounded the island on all sides.

Then I remembered I was still falling.

And I looked down.

Tried to get some sort of an idea of my destination.

I must’ve been still about a hundred, or two hundred, metres up in the air.

But I could see them down below.

Just vague shapes.

But they were there.

Alan. James. Kate. Chung.

Waiting for me.

All of them craning their necks up and watching me drop towards them.

Now, under any other circumstances, I might’ve felt a little more scared—what with all the falling-quickly-through-thin air stuff, but, at the same time, I knew that this was just a game.

And that no harm would come to me.

The worst thing that would happen, would be for me to die in some way, and be sent directly back to my bedroom.

I dropped down the final few metres. Landed face down with a whole cacophony of crunching and felt the sand shifting below me.

When I summoned the strength to look up, I saw them all standing above.

My four best friends.

. . . Well, I suppose that Mikey’s my best friend too . . . but he’s not one of the Inside Kids.

Right as I helped myself up off my belly, and back onto my feet, I thought about how Mikey had said that thing about me not playing games for fun any longer.

If only he knew the truth.

He had no way of knowing just how much fun the Inside Kids were going to have.

As I looked over my four friends, I felt the gritty texture of the sand in my mouth. And that flavourless taste on my tongue.

Got here fine, then? James said, grinning widely.

I rolled my shoulders about, freeing up all my muscles which’d become just a little stiff from the fall. Seems like it.

I looked to my side and saw Chung and Alan there.

Both of them were grinning back at me too.

I said hi to them, and then I turned about, saw that Kate was standing nearby, staring at me. Her smile must’ve been the widest of them all. In the moonlight, her blond hair looked like it was silver, and her green eyes had an extra sheen to them.

When I glanced down, I saw that she was wearing a hoodie with a drawing of a Martian on it, and the Martian had a big space blaster and was pointing it at a pair of astronauts who both held their hands pointed to the sky. Underneath it read: Intergalactic Holdup.

I didn’t really get it.

But, then again, I didn’t really get any of the funny slogans on Kate’s jumpers and t-shirts.

So, she said, what’d you think?

Same as usual, I said, still feeling a little of the effects of having tumbled right through a whole ton of nothing.

She rolled her eyes, and then threw her arms out to indicate the area surrounding us. No, she said, "I meant this."

I felt myself blushing just a touch, and my blood seemed to get a couple of degrees warmer. When I looked about me, to the beach we stood on, and then to the crystal-clear water, I had to admit that it was a nice-looking place.

I turned around, looked back into the island, and saw that it was all rainforest—kind of similar to the Jungle Venom level of Golden Bullets Bite Hardest, the game I was playing with Mikey before.

But hopefully there weren’t any elephants with rocket launchers for trunks.

Um, I said, "it looks nice."

‘Nice,’ Kate replied, " ‘Nice?’ "

I looked about the other three’s faces, and caught the distinct impression that I’d said something wildly wrong right there.

I snapped back to Kate, but it seemed like she was only getting warmed up.

This, she said, spreading her arms wide to indicate the beach we stood on, "is what my dad built."

Oh, I said, now looking about the place—the tide washing up onto the beach with, what I hoped would be, a freshly impressed gaze.

Yeah, she said, flashing her eyebrows. All of this is his.

It’s, uh, I started again, "I mean, it looks cool."

Hmm.

When I glanced across the other three’s faces, I saw that they were all doing their best to avoid making eye contact with me. I wondered if, maybe, they’d run through the same routine with Kate—had her get annoyed because they weren’t sufficiently impressed when they first arrived here.

"Desert Island Dither, Kate said. That’s the name of the game."

I studied the name, tried to think of something positive to say about it, but came up sort of empty. I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t like the name at all, it was more that I was just sort of neutral to it.

I looked back off to the trees which lined the beach, tuning into the jungle sounds which surrounded us. "So, uh, what do we do here?"

Kate rolled her eyes and then let out a heavy sigh.

When I looked back to the others, I saw that James was making a slit-throat gesture, as if to imply that I was better off just not saying anything at all at that point.

3

TEN MINUTES LATER, and we were trekking on through the jungle, Kate guiding us along the way. I hung back a little from the marching group, already feeling the sweat trickling out of me. When I breathed in, the air tasted stale, and my mouth felt dry, in need of water. All those chattering jungle sounds were starting to get on my nerves—I could work out just where the sound loop faded away and then began again, and I made a note to myself to have Kate tell her dad about that slight bug.

Just before we’d left the beach, Kate had explained to us that Desert Island Dither was one of those open-ended ‘sandbox’ games where there really wasn’t anything for us to achieve.

She’d actually designed the large-scale concept herself, because she’d wanted us to have a game that would be an easy area for us to meet in.

So she’d got her dad to simply build up this basic desert island environment with a jungle in the centre of it.

I had to admit that—if it hadn’t been for the heat—it would’ve been nothing short of a paradise.

I watched on from the back as Kate led us forwards, following the trail which led deeper and deeper into the jungle, leading us towards this ‘surprise’ that she claimed lay in store for us. I secretly hoped that it would be a hamburger van and, in my mind’s eye, the hamburger van also had an ice-cold fridge with a variety of soft drinks.

I could dream . . . even here, inside a video game.

James and Chung walked just about on Kate’s heels, chatting among themselves, apparently not having any trouble with the pace of our march.

Alan, though, was like me, lagging back.

He was panting and I could