The Spread: The Fifth Zak Steepleman Novel: Zak Steepleman, #5

1

ICOULD HEAR them roaring with laughter downstairs.

Mum and George.

The lovebirds.

More than anything, I wanted to toss off my duvet and go tell them to shut up.

But I was ill . . . or, at least, that was the theory.

I breathed in deeply, feeling the action rocking my shoulders back, and I reached out for my duvet and dragged it up to my throat. The lurgy had knocked me flat on my back from early on in the morning. But it wasn’t until I’d been packing my bag for school, and I’d been searching for my maths book for about five minutes, that I realised I didn’t have maths that day.

Or English.

Or chemistry.

Or any of the other books I’d already packed.

And that was when I realised that, really, I was out of it.

That I needed to stay home in bed.

The weird thing about staying home ill is that, when you’re at school, it seems like just about the greatest thing imaginable. I mean, you get to play video games all day, and just sit about the house, right?

Wrong.

The problem with being ill is the whole ‘being ill’ part of it.

You don’t really feel like doing anything at all.

You just want to stay put.

And so that was what I was doing.

I could see the daylight bursting to get in around my blackout blinds, and I wished that the day would just go away already, and that it would be night-time again. That might shut up Mum and George downstairs—might stop them from rattling the rafters with their conversation.

I glanced about me, knowing that there was no way I was going to get back to sleep now, and I searched for something which might distract me.

My eyes lingered across my bookshelf for, like, two seconds.

I realised that if I even attempted to read anything my vision would go all blurry.

I looked over to my school bag, all slumped-up there, and told myself that getting a head start on my homework was surely one of those symptoms that parents looked for so that they could section their kids under the Mental Health Act.

That was a no go.

When my eyes finally sought out the shut-down TV screen, fell across the burning-red eye of my Sirocco 3000—my games console—I actually thought twice about booting up and seeing if any of the Inside Kids were online.

Then I did it anyway.

With Mum and George still bellowing laughter at each other downstairs, I tapped my way through the menus, getting onto the server as if the gamepad was just another of my limbs . . . and, in a way, I guess it was.

None of the Inside Kids were online, of course, the other five were all at school.

I quit that particular screen and returned to the main menu which showed the various games that I had installed on the Sirocco hard drive.

Over the past few weeks I’d been taking extra-special care with what games I’d play—already I’d managed to be fooled twice . . . twice . . . by innocuous-seeming games arriving on my doormat, only for them to turn out to be extremely malicious.

The first of those had been, of course, Halls of Hallow.

And the other, more recently, Remainders, Remainders.

A couple of days back we learned in English about the expression: ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me again, shame on me,’ and I couldn’t help wincing to myself over it.

I didn’t ask my teacher what happens the third time.

I thought it was better not to say anything.

Bits of code—the main things I seemed to be fighting these days—seemed to be doing a pretty decent job of fooling us humans.

Now, though, I was sure that they would have to come up with some fresh plan, something which wouldn’t involve an actual physical disk.

And that was why I was keeping an eye on exactly what was downloading itself onto my hard drive.

I’d seen, earlier that morning when I’d logged on . . . stupidly thinking that I’d be just fine to play games even when I couldn’t see straight . . . there were a couple of new games installed on the hard disk of my Sirocco.

My problem is that, as an aspiring pro gamer, I’m signed up to all sorts of beta-testing services. All kinds of developers send me their stuff to see if I can break it with my mad skills . . . and most of the time I do find a way to break it . . . though whether or not I’m sat on the edge of my bed, or inhabiting the game itself, depends.

Today, I had three new arrivals.

A game called Lightning Park—which I skipped over right away—next there was Oaken Fingers Twisted—which sounded intriguing, but the blurry, gloomy presentation sort of put me off.

The last new arrival was Grand Tournament Preliminaries.

I blinked at that final entry of the list and tried to put it together in my mind.

I breathed in hard, and then glanced over at the paper calendar pinned to the wall just above my desk. It was blank. I frowned at myself and then glanced back at the screen, looking for some sort of explanation.

I selected Grand Tournament Preliminaries and was greeted with a whole load of text explaining things. I skim read it and surmised that, in a couple of weeks, Gamers Con was on, and, by extension, the Grand Tournament.

The Grand Tournament which I had placed second in last time.

And which’d almost got all our parents kidnapped.

I leaned back on my bed, not really sure how I had allowed the Grand Tournament to sneak up on me like this. It wasn’t like I’d had much else to think about for the past few months.

Or maybe it was because I was just a little burned out with all the stuff that’d been going on with the Cloaked Figure.

I glanced back at the little box of information for Grand Tournament Preliminaries, and tried to bring it clear.

After I’d read it through for about the sixth time, I was in no doubt at all about what it said.

The information on the Grand Tournament Preliminaries then went on to explain how all aspiring gamers wishing to enter the tournament proper would need to pass through the Grand Tournament Preliminaries scenarios that’d been downloaded onto my Sirocco 3000.

I blinked another few times, and thanked my luck that, because I’d reached the Grand Final—been among the last five to compete—I’d automatically qualified for a free sign up for the coming year.

This year.

And what a year this one had been . . .

It was hard to believe all that had happened.

And now it was all going to start up again.

Was I ready?

Would I be ready in the next couple of weeks?

I turned my attention back to the Grand Tournament Preliminaries and decided that, since I had nothing better to do, I might as well turn my attention to qualifying, because, though I had got a free pass, that didn’t mean I didn’t have to prove I belonged in the Grand Tournament on merit.

And this year it seemed like, more than ever, I had to prove it.

To myself.

2

BY THE TIME I’d got through with the Grand Tournament Preliminaries , it had gone dark outside, and I was receiving notifications that the Inside Kids —one by one—were logging onto the server.

Who would’ve thought it, but after a good afternoon of concentrating on the Grand Tournament Preliminaries I was feeling much better. My brain seemed to be way sharper than it had been before. I actually felt like I had returned to the real world. Not just some vague shadow of it.

After completing the Grand Tournament Preliminaries, the game informed me that I had successfully qualified for the Grand Tournament, and then it gave me information on how I had to sign up and complete my application.

I’d do that a little later.

The story on Inside Kids Chat was that everybody else had come home from school to find a copy of Grand Tournament Preliminaries automatically downloaded onto their games console hard drive. The only one who hadn’t was, of course, Mikey.

But Mikey hadn’t gone with us to Gamers Con.

He hadn’t been there because, at that time, about a year ago now, he hadn’t been a gamer.

Mikey’s mum had only allowed him to have a games console a matter of months ago, and though he had made up for lost time, and—I had to admit—was making really great progress with his skills, in my opinion, which I kept to myself, he was still several years away from making it to Gamers Con . . . at least to take part in the Grand Tournament.

But that wouldn’t stop him from manually downloading Grand Tournament Preliminaries, of course, no doubt hoping that he could prove us wrong.

How Grand Tournament Preliminaries worked was by having a series of snippets from a wide variety of games: some of them recent releases, and others which were older titles; and then having the gamer complete a series of challenges to get through to the other side.

You could try as many times as you liked, up until the deadline, which was in a week or so—about a week before Gamers Con.

How it used to work was by having a series of regional competitions spread out through the year—and a series of preliminary knockouts. Now, though, with all the innovations with network gaming, it just made more sense to download a sample pack direct to the gamer’s console.

The idea of the Grand Tournament Preliminaries was to establish a minimum standard before allowing a gamer to sign up for the Grand Tournament at Gamers Con itself.

Any serious gamer would have little trouble in getting through the initial stages: a gamer like me had no troubles.

But, for a gamer like Mikey—a newb—it was going to be tough.

And I didn’t want to sugar coat it.

Needless to say, Inside Kids Chat was over fairly quickly as all the others rushed off to go and whizz through their Grand Tournament Preliminaries program. Though nobody explicitly said it, it was understood that this was a competitive speed-run—everybody wanted to see who would be the first to get it done and return to Chat.

And so, because it’d got all quiet on Inside Kids Chat, I hoiked myself up off my bed and, with a slight sigh, decided that I had to go downstairs and be ‘polite.’

3

THE LAUGHTER went on as I headed down the stairs. Already I could feel my throat constricting a little and the migraine from this morning coming back at me. That was to say nothing at all for the nausea which was rippling right through my gut.

But there was no way to avoid this.

I had to go downstairs.

And act civil.

. . . In any case, I could smell the warm cheesy scent of my mum’s famous lasagne wafting its way up my nostrils, and that might’ve been the factor which pushed me over the edge.

I stepped through the doorway to the kitchen and I took in George.

George sat at the table with my mum. George was facing me, while my mum had her back to me.

I could see that they were in the middle of their dinner.

Chewing up said lasagne.

For a couple of seconds, George’s expression was utterly stiff towards me, and I felt like that slicked-back, black hair of his might suddenly let off smoke.

I knew that George didn’t like fat kids, and that he didn’t like me.

But that he did like my mum . . . very much.

I didn’t much care for George, myself . . . let alone his twin sons:

Dante and Darius.

Mum noticed George staring up over her head and she turned in her seat to look at me. She grinned, and dabbed at her mouth with a serviette. I could see that she had eaten through about half of her lasagne, and that they each had a glass of red wine that was nearly finished.

When I glanced up to the kitchen counter, I caught sight of the bottle and saw that Mum and George had already drained it. I guessed that was the reason for all the laughing right now.

George’s face creased into a smile. Zak, he said, a whole heap of false enthusiasm in his voice. Lovely to see you out of bed.

Yeah, I said, and then, because I couldn’t resist, I could smell lasagne.

Mum got up out of her seat so fast that I was sure it’d been electrified. She paced over the kitchen tiles and to the oven, which had the orange light still lit inside but which was switched off. She cranked open the door and, popping on oven gloves at some point, reached inside for the little porcelain baking container covered in tin foil.

Take a seat, Zak, please, George said, that same old smile smeared over his lips.

I eyed the other seat a little suspiciously—though I’d got my head around everything that’d changed in the last year, what with my parents’ divorce and then their subsequent new relationships, I still found it almost like living in a parallel universe at times.

I couldn’t help picturing this kitchen scene I was now inhabiting, and seeing the kitchen table there, the three chairs all drawn up around it, and not thinking to myself that the seat where George was sitting was where my dad would always sit.

But I got myself over that little hurdle fast enough, when Mum lay my lasagne down on my plate before me.

I watched out of the corner of my eye as Mum went over to the emptied wine bottle on the counter, lifted it, gave it a slight shake, and then realised that it was—indeed—empty.

She busily went about rinsing it in the sink.

So,