The Never Game

The CEO leaned back, lost in thought, eyes closed. They popped open. “What were the five objects he left with the girl?”

Shaw told him: “Water, glass bottle, a book of matches, fishing line, a strip of cloth.”

Avon said, “Good.”

41

For all his traveling, the restless man had never been in a helicopter.

Now that he was, he wasn’t enjoying it.

The altitude wasn’t the problem, not even with the open door. Canvas and steel, in the proper configuration, are substances that you can depend on, and the harness in the Bell was intimately snug. Shaw and his siblings had gotten over any fear of heights early — Ashton again — by learning to climb before they were thirteen. When no challenging jobs beckoned, Shaw would find a nice vertical face and ascend (always free-climbing — using ropes to prevent falls, not to aid in the climb). Earlier in the day he’d looked fondly over Standish’s shoulder at the trail map leading to the site of the climb he’d been planning while visiting his mother at the Compound.

No, the five hundred feet between him and the tree line was not a problem. Shaw simply didn’t want to puke. That, he hated more than pain. Well, most pain.

Maybe inevitable, maybe not. Teeter-totter. He inhaled deeply. Bad idea; exhaust and fuel fumes were coconspirators.

LaDonna Standish was strapped in beside him. They were riding backward, facing two tactical officers, dressed in black, with matching body armor. POLICE was printed in white on their chests — their backs too, Shaw had seen, in larger type. They were holding Heckler & Koch machine guns. Standish was not enjoying the trip either. She refused to look out the open door, and she kept swallowing. She clutched an airsickness bag and Shaw hoped she didn’t start in with that. He really hoped she didn’t. The power of suggestion is formidable.

She wore body armor and had only her sidearm. Shaw too was in a Kevlar vest, without weapon, per the rules. The out-of-harm’s-way dictate had obviously gone to hell.

How they happened to be here was thanks to the creator of The Whispering Man, Marty Avon. The CEO had explained that the game’s algorithm randomly assigned three of the five items that players were abandoned with, like Sophie’s fishing line, scarf and glass bottle. The other two items might vary but fell into two categories: sustenance and communication. Food or water — Sophie had been given the latter — and some way to signal for help, to let an ally know where you were, or to warn about danger. Matches, in her case. Players sometimes got a flashlight or signal mirror. More often, they received a way to start a fire. If not matches, a cigarette lighter or a flint-and-steel kit. This could also help players stay alive in some of the colder game settings, like mountaintops and caves.

“If the victim’s in a forest and he has matches or a cigarette lighter, he might try to start a fire,” Avon had suggested.

Shaw had said, “A brush fire in northern California? That’s one thing that’d be sure to get somebody’s attention.”

Drought, heat and winds had helped fires ravage part of central and northern California lately. Shaw and his family had battled one on the Compound years ago and nearly lost the cabin.

“He won’t be a fool,” Standish had said. “He’ll control it. Probably set a small bonfire in a clearing or on rock, where it’ll be noticed but won’t spread.”

Standish had called the Park Service, which used drones and satellites mounted with thermal sensors to see if any of the systems had registered flames. She learned that, yes, the service had monitored a small blaze on a rocky hilltop in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. It had flared up about midnight, burned for a brief time and then went out. Infrared scans showed that by 1 a.m. the ground was fire- and ember-free once more. They’d marked the site to check it out later but sent no crews at that time.

Shaw had looked up the location on the map. It was a forty-minute drive from where Henry Thompson had been kidnapped.

Via speakerphone, the ranger had explained that it was curious there’d been a fire at that location at that time of the morning, since it wasn’t near any hiking trails, and the only road nearby, an old logging way, was chained off. Odd too that there was a fire at all, since there’d been no lightning strikes and the blaze was limited to a rocky shelf that didn’t seem to have any natural brush growing from the cracks in the stone. “Best we could figure, some campers went off road.”

Standish had then asked, “Satellite images of the site?”

The ranger had sent some and she, Shaw and Avon huddled over the game maker’s high-def monitor.

They were looking at what might have been a configuration of rocks or shadows but also might have been a human form, standing near the fire.

“Good enough for me,” Standish had said and grabbed her phone, pressing a single button to make a call.