The Witch Hunter's Gauntlet (18 page)

Doc Frost rubbed his hands together
. “So what we have here is the fun part of science; the chance to put a theory to the test by blowing something up.”

That seemed to perk up the class. Everyone pressed up against the glass.

“This is going to be so cool,” Lucas whispered next to her.

A balding man Sam assumed to be Dr. Gupta was double-checking his machine. Finally he gave
the thumbs-up sign. All of the lab coat people scurried out of the testing room, leaving just the metal wall and the giant ray gun.

“All of the last-
minute checks are clear,” Doc Frost announced. “The ion cannon is remote-controlled. We just have to wait for the power core to charge up. If all goes well, we should see quite the show in a little less than four minutes.”

As if on cue
, the whole class started chatting excitedly about what they were about to see, how bright it would be, if they were safe being this close, why people kept trying to build bigger and better weapons when there were more important problems in the world, and why they all had to wear such ugly, ugly goggles.

“Okay
, be honest. How much do I look like a giant fly right now?” Lucas asked.

Sam laughed. “I thought the exact same thing earlier.”

“If I hadn’t already found a great Halloween costume I would think about borrowing a pair of these.”

She couldn’t help but be curious.
“Whatchagonnabe?”

“Wow, slow down,” he said. “I can’t tell you. It would ruin the surprise.”

“Oooh, a surprise. Tell me, tell me.”

He sort of half-
smiled as he ran his hand through his hair. “Well, that all kind of depends.”

“On what?”

She wished she could see his eyes. But judging by the way he grit his teeth, she was guessing he had some bad news.

“It depends on if you… if you want, or would like, or might like, to go to the dance with me.”

Suddenly she couldn’t hear the rest of the class talking. For a horrifying moment, she thought maybe everyone had heard him ask and was waiting to see her respond. Maybe they all even knew he was going to ask and had just been waiting all this time. But then she realized she couldn’t hear anything because her heart was pounding too loudly in her ears.

Soon the sounds of the class returned. No one
seemed to know or care what she and Lucas were talking about.

Lucas
was still staring – she was pretty sure he was staring – at her. His smile had drooped a little bit, and he was running his hand over his perfectly flat hair again.

“I didn’t want to do that here,” he said.

His smile was almost gone now. Sam knew she had to say something quick.

She couldn’t believe it
; her initial thought had been right. It was bad news. Wonderful news, but also terrible.

She was very confused.

Under different circumstances, she would have been thrilled. In fact, she was still thrilled. But she also knew she could not say yes. Bad Guy was still out there. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if something happened to Lucas because of her.

But she had no idea how to explain that at the moment.

His smile completely disappeared.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “Let’s just watch the test.”

He turned to look out the window.

Sam grabbed him by the shoulder and spun
him back around to look at her.

“It isn’t you,” she said, her mind racing. “I just don’t like Halloween. Dressing up like ghosts to beg for candy? It’s for kids. I wasn’t planning to go the dance anyway. Not my kind of thing. It’s more of a Tiffany ‘look at me, look at me’ kind of thing. I’d rather stay in my room. They’re running a
Treehouse of Terror
marathon.”

“I understand,” he said flatly. “That’s fine. I just thought that if you did want to go… It might have been fun. Whatever.” 

She couldn’t tell how he really felt. His mouth wasn’t giving her any signals.

“Thirty
seconds!” Doc Frost announced.

“What do y
ou think is going to happen, Doctor Frost?” Sharon asked.

“Well,
we actually have a little pool going, so best case scenario it atomizes that slab of steel down there, puts a hole in the wall behind it, and I win fifty bucks,” Doc Frost said adjusting his goggles.

“And the worst-
case scenario?”

“The complete destruction of the universe.”

“What?” Sharon asked. Everyone else turned in surprise. “Is that possible?”

“It is
always possible,” he said. “Mathematically unlikely, though. Twenty seconds people.”

The class fell completely silent as everyone trained their eyes on the wall down below. Sam could hear Lucas breathing next to her.
At least the universe ending would get her out of this situation.

It was a long twenty
seconds.

Suddenly there was a burst of blue light that blotted out everything. But
then, just as suddenly, it was gone and there was a giant smoking hole in the metal wall.

Everyone cheered except Sam. As soon as the cheering stopped
, Sam turned to talk to Lucas, but he was already talking to Felix and Leroy about how amazingly cool the ion cannon was.

Sam rode back to class with
Sharon.

When she got back to her room
, she found three game challenges from Lucas on her Facebook page.

She did not respond.

Three terrified civilians ran screaming from the flaming wreckage of the exploding tank, their arms flailing wildly as they ran from the crazy
-eyed man with the rocket launcher.

Lucas switched from his rocket launcher to his flamethrower.

He lost three thousand points. Killing civilians was a big no-no. But Lucas didn’t care about the score. He didn’t care about much of anything except reducing Chicago to a pile of burning rubble.

The controller was sweaty in his hands. He had been playing Hyper-Urban Assault in the lounge for seven straight hours. After two hours people finally stopped
watching; two hours after that, the room emptied out as everyone left to do homework or eat or whatever.

Lucas didn’t care. He liked the privacy
, and since he was the only person there, he could crank the volume up so loud that he could feel every explosion through the floor.

“Hey, where’s the second controller?”

Natch and Jerry appeared on either side of him.

“No idea,” Lucas lied. He had hidden it in the big potted plant in the corner hours ago.

“Uh huh,” Natch said. “So considering you’ve been playing this game, a game which you recently claimed to be completely tired of, every night this week, I’m guessing the Sam situation did not go well.”

“What Sam situation?” Jerry asked.

“Not important,” Lucas muttered while reloading.

Jerry snapped his fingers.
“You asked Samantha Hathaway to the dance!”

Lucas pushed a button and a city bus exploded.
“Maybe.”

“And she said ‘no’?” Jerry asked. “Wow. That had to hurt.”

“A bit, yes. Thanks for bringing it up.”

A taxicab burst into flames.

“Do you have a date, Jerry?” Lucas asked already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“How about you, Natch?”

Natch
laughed. “Yeah, I’m going to waste my Halloween at a stupid dance.”

“That’s what I thought. At least I asked somebody. And FYI
, she did not say ‘no’, she said she wasn’t planning on going.”

He
paused the game to check the real-world damage he had caused. Jerry was staring at the floor, but Natch was smiling back at him like an idiot.

“What?” Lucas asked. Nothing good ever happened when Natch smiled liked that.

“Nothing. I’m just wondering why she lied. Besides sparing your feelings, of course. Like is she already going with someone else, waiting for someone else to ask her, or does she simply not want to go with you?”

Leave it to Natch to ruin his fun with the harsh light of reality.

“Well, she is very nice,” Jerry offered.

“Exa
ctly.” Natch nodded. “But apparently not the kind of nice that would accept a friendly invitation to a dance over staying at home.”

Lucas had thought of that already. In fact, he had thought of little else over the last few days. Maybe she thought that going to a dance together would somehow put a weird vibe on their friendship. Or maybe they just weren’t as close of friends as he thought. Either way
, he really didn’t feel like talking about the most embarrassing moment of his life right now. But as usual, Natch was immune to other people’s opinions and feelings.

“I could do a little sleuthing. See who she is really going with,” Natch offered.

“I told you, she isn’t going.”

“Uh huh,” Natch said with a maddeningly smug look on his face. “And why is that?”

“I don’t know. She just said that she didn’t want to go.”

Natch nodded.
“Sure, that makes sense. Girls hate dances.”

Jerry snickered.

Lucas knew it was a weak story, but if he was willing to accept it, why couldn’t Natch and Jerry?

“She thinks Halloween is dumb.
Whatever. Leave it alone,” he said, knowing that there was zero chance they were going to leave it alone.

“That’s a shame,” Natch said.
“And after you spent two months’ allowance on that costume to impress her.”

“I did not- Wait, how do you know how much how I spent on my costume?”

“The receipt, duh.”

B
ut Lucas threw the receipt away, didn’t he?

“Stop going through my trash
, Natch. It’s creepy.”

Natch
shrugged off the comment. “Did you tell her you were still going?”

“No. We haven’t really talked about it since.”

The truth was they had barely spoken about anything other than schoolwork all week. Between the game challenges, bumper stickers, and hilarious e-mail forwards he had sent her two dozen online messages in a vain attempt to act like nothing had changed. But when she did not respond after four days he realized he was probably coming off as a desperate geeky weirdo, so he stopped.

Natch
smiled. “Okay, good, we can work with that. Here’s what you do. Subtly drop the hint that you are going to egg teachers’ houses with Jerry and me then we all show up at the dance and catch Sam with her date.”

“I told you,” Lucas said slowly
, so that even someone as thick as Natch could understand. “She is not going. Neither am I.”

“And I think it is really cute that you believe that, but we have to get serious here. This is war.”

“No, it is a dance,” Lucas corrected.

“Silence!”
Natch yelled with a dismissive wave of his hand. “This is indeed war. And the key to any war is intelligence. We need information.”

He pulled out his cell phone and started scrolling through his contacts list.

“I really don’t think this is necessary, Natch,” Lucas said hopelessly. Natch was too excited to be stopped now.

“You know,” Jerry chimed in. “In the old days
, if you liked a girl, you could just buy her from her parents for three chickens and a goat.”

Lucas and
Natch just stared at him.

“That is very romantic
, Jerry,” Lucas said.

Jerry sheepishly looked at the floor. “I’m just saying I could find three chickens and a goat.”

“I’m sure you could,” Natch said with mock encouragement.

“I don’t need any goats
, Jerry,” Lucas said. “I just wanted to go to the dance. But a horror movie marathon is just as good.”

Natch
shook his head and sighed deeply. “No, no, no. You have to go or she wins.”

“Wins what?”

“She just wins,” Natch yelled. “She gets you to change your plans and waste that expensive costume you bought. You don’t want to be the weird depressed guy that misses the party of the season.”

Lucas was getting worried, because Natch was actually making sense, at least in a weird
, crazy, paranoid sort of way, except he seemed to have forgotten something.

“Uh, didn’t you just say you weren’t going to the dance?”

“True. But I’m not trying to prove to some girl that I’m not some whiney loser stupidly pining away in the game room like a little kid.”

Jerry got a good laugh out of that one.

Lucas’ first impulse was to slug Natch, but he had never hit anyone before, and it seemed like a really bad time to start. Besides, Natch did kind of have a point.

Lucas didn’t know much about girls, but he was pretty sure that you couldn’t impress them by moping around and bombarding them with stupid online messages. 

At that very moment, he vowed to stop wasting his time playing Hyper-Urban Assault and start being happy, charming, and outgoing. Or at least he was going to do his best to pretend he was all of those things.

Unfortunately
, when Lucas made this great new life proclamation, he failed to factor in two important facts.

The first important fact was that he did not know very many girls. At least not well. With just over a week to go before the dance
, there were very few girls left that did not already have dates lined up. And since he barely saw Zoey anymore, he turned his brand new happy charming self on Tasha, who he quickly discovered was already going to the Masquerade Ball with some guy from her gymnastics team.

The second important fact he failed to consider was that part of his tuition was waived because he had agreed to play Hyper-Urban Assault against Zack over and over again while Dr. Z
hang studied him like a lab rat. So if he stopped playing he couldn’t afford to stay, which would mean that he couldn’t go to the dance. He was stuck.

So that Friday after class he made the long lonel
y trek to Miyamoto Hall on the university side of Lake Laverne.

“Welcome back
, Mr. Fry. I trust you have been practicing,” Dr. Zhang said, ushering Lucas over to the changing room.

“Yeah, a little.”

“Ha.” Zack emerged from his changing room in his biosensor suit.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that Lucas and Za
ck, as well as a couple of very talented college students, had to play the same game over and over again, they also had to do it while wearing full-body suits that monitored their heart rates, reflexes, brain waves, and other medical information Lucas didn’t understand. All he knew was that it was terribly uncomfortable and stupid-looking.

Zack turned his charming smile on Dr. Zhang. “Lucas here has been spending long hours practicing in the lounge.”

Dr. Zhang nodded. “Good, good. More practice is always good. I noticed a fifteen-percent drop in Mr. Fry’s response time over the last two weeks. Have you been ill recently, Mr. Fry?”

Zack laughed.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Excellent.
Today we are going to try a simple one-on-one scenario.”

Those were Lucas’ favorite. While he enjoyed thoroughly annihilating an
entire army with his hovertank, it did not compare to the thrill of blasting Zack out of the sky. Dr. Zhang always let Lucas and Zack duke it out in these one-on-one battles. It was the only way to keep them fair.

It took Lucas nearly twelve m
inutes to wriggle into the skintight suit and make sure each of the sensor pads was in its proper place, but when he finally stepped out of the changing room, Zack was still standing there with fake concern in his eyes.

“Are you sure you’re okay
, Lucas? I’d hate to mercilessly beat you again when you weren’t at your peak gaming level.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Lucas
opened the door to his virtual reality pod. “Just try to give me a challenge for a change.”

“That’s the spirit. You know
, Natch asked me to go easy on you today. Sure, most guys would be completely crushed if a girl turned them down in favor of going out with… well, no one. But I told him you were a fighter.”

Zack climbed into his
pod before Lucas could think of a good comeback.

As he climbed into his own pod
, Lucas couldn’t decide which was worse: that Natch had apparently gone around telling everyone about Sam turning him down or that Lucas had been dumb enough not to expect Natch to tell everyone about Sam turning him down. Either way, he was grateful to be sitting inside the virtual reality cockpit of a heavily armed combat vehicle.

The VR pod perfectly simulated the experience of actually being inside Hyper-Urban Assault, except better. While Hyper-Urban Assault boasted some of the best graphics on the market
, the images inside the VR pod were completely realistic. Lucas honestly felt like he had been to Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, and a dozen other cities around the world.

Judging by the gondola gently floating by
, he was in Venice this time.

He performed a quick systems check. Sometimes Dr. Zhang liked to switch off some of their weapons or damage their engines in order to see how they reac
ted. But according to his head-up display, the rocket launchers; dual machine guns; surface-to-air missiles; flamethrower; and, most importantly, the laser cannon, were all in perfect working order. It was hunting season.

He immediately spun the tank around and sped down a narrow alley
, making sure to stay low between the buildings. Early on, Lucas had learned to zigzag and keep his eyes open. Zack loved to plant proximity mines and snipe people with his laser cannon.

Lucas checked his radar display, but there was no sign of Zack. Normally Lucas would hunt Zack down, but today he felt like having a little fun. After all
, how many times was he likely to be driving a hovertank in a city where many of the streets were made out of water? He decided to take a pleasant little drive around town and draw Zack to him.

So he gunned the engine and sped out onto the street scattering the terrified virtual Venetians in front of him. He found the nearest bridge and made a hard right turn. He flew off the bridge and streaked along
, skimming low across the water and forcing a particularly tall gondolier to jump off of his boat.