into the barrel. There was a moment of resistance as the wire pulled taut, but Jamie braced himself and the stake sucked out of the target, whirring back across the room and thudding into the tube, rocking Jamie back on his heels. He let the weapon drop to his side, and breathed out heavily, looking across the room at the hole the stake had made in the target.
The hole was perfectly round and sat dead center in the middle of the target. Terry walked past him, clapping him lightly on the shoulder and leading him across the room. Behind him there was a murmur from the spectators. Up close the hole was ragged around the edges, but there was no doubt about the accuracy of the shot. It had completely obliterated the dot in the middle of the target. Terry pushed his hand into the hole and whistled softly.
“That’s a hell of a shot,” he said. “A hell of a shot.”
Jamie flushed with pride. He wanted to explain to Terry how easy, how natural it had felt, standing there with the T-Bone against his shoulder, the only things in his mind the target in front of him and the weapon in his hands. He settled for saying “Thank you” in a low voice.
The instructor and the teenager walked back across the room and stopped next to the steel table. Still lying on the metal surface was a small cylinder that looked like a torch with a handle and a trigger, two rows of black spheres, and a large gun that looked to Jamie a lot like the grenade launchers he had used in a dozen computer games. He reached for the table, but Terry stopped him.
“You don’t need to worry about them for now,” he said. Then the instructor lunged for him, and Jamie, caught totally off guard, failed to even get his hands up in front of him. The flat of one of Terry’s palms crunched into his solar plexus and drove him back to the mat, gasping for breath.
“Get up,” said Terry.
Jamie defended himself better than he had during the night, deflecting some of the instructor’s blows and reading his feints, but he still found himself on the ground again and again. The cut on his forehead reopened almost at once, and Terry exploited it, dancing around at the edge of Jamie’s vision, where sticky blood ran into the corner of his left eye. A roundhouse kick appeared from nowhere, and he went down hard. As he pulled himself to his feet, he looked over at the spectators and saw Major Harker smiling. He redoubled his efforts and blocked punches and kicks, twisting his body out of the instructor’s range and launching several counterattacks of his own, clumsy, easily telegraphed blows for the most part, but a couple of punches slipped through Terry’s guard, and one landed flush on the end of the instructor’s nose, snapping his head back and sending a thin trickle of blood running down his upper lip. Terry grinned, smearing crimson across his teeth, and came toward Jamie again.
Jamie stood in the shower, watching tendrils of dark red diffuse in the water that was running down the drain. Every inch of him ached, and his torso was a rapidly darkening rainbow of purple and yellow bruises. He gently washed the blood and sweat from himself, then rested his head against the hard tiles beneath the showerhead and closed his eyes.
His mind was racing. He had been trying to slow it, to shift himself into neutral; Terry had warned him as he dismissed him that he was not done yet, and he was trying to squeeze every possible second of rest out of the break. But his mind was not obeying.
How did I get here? How did I get here? How did I get here?
He was trying not to think about his mother, or his father, or the life it was now becoming clear to him that he had left behind, but he couldn’t help it. The difference between the world of skipping school, avoiding bullies, the gray streets of the estate, and fights with his mom, and the world in which he now found himself was almost incomprehensible. He had no friends to speak of, not anymore, but if he had, they would not have believed him even for a minute if he had told them the events of the last three days. And he had no one to tell him that his mom was going to be OK, that he was going to find her and bring her home.
He climbed out of the shower and dressed himself, wincing in pain. When he pushed open the door that led back into the Playground, he gasped; the large circular room was now crowded with people, lining every inch of the curved walls. There were scores of soldiers in their black uniforms, doctors, scientists, and several older, extremely serious-looking men with at least as many, if not more, medals than Major Harker was wearing. Terry was standing at the end of the room next to the raised platform, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on Jamie, and Jamie walked toward him, trying not to look at anyone apart from the instructor.
He stopped next to Terry, who mouthed, “Don’t be scared” at him as he approached. The instructor helped him into a set of the black armor, then presented him with a series of items; weird plastic versions of the Glock and the MP5 he had fired earlier, a plastic stake with a rubber handle, and a plastic T-Bone that was just an empty tube with a handle beneath it. At Terry’s urging, he stepped up onto the platform and walked out into the middle. It was a large circle of black rubber, at least fifteen feet in diameter, which seemed to be a treadmill that moved in every direction; Jamie took a step forward, and the rubber moved underneath him, returning him to the middle of the circle. He took two quick sidesteps to the right, and the surface moved faster, keeping him again in the middle. He turned back and looked at Terry, who motioned him down toward him. Jamie crouched next to the instructor, who handed him a helmet with a matte-black visor and then spoke to him in a low voice.
“This simulation is extremely advanced,” Terry said. “It’s the final part of a training program that normally lasts nine months. No one has ever attempted it with as little training as you’ve had-in eleven years, no one has ever finished it on their first run-so no one is expecting anything. So just try not to panic and do your best, all right?”
Jamie nodded, and as he stood up and put the helmet on, he realized he wasn’t scared. He wasn’t even nervous; he was excited. The helmet shut out the Playground entirely; he could no longer see the platform or the screen, or hear the excited whispering of the watching crowd. Then Terry’s voice spoke directly into his ear, telling him that they were starting the simulation, and a second later, he was standing in the cavernous hallway of a stately home. He looked around him, then moved his gloved hands around in front of his face, and voiced a silent “Wow” as they moved in front of his eyes in photo-real high definition, the smallest detail intact. He took a step forward, and he moved a step into the hallway. He turned in a quick circle, and the room rotated smoothly around him. Reaching down, he pulled the T-Bone from his belt and looked at it. The weapon he could see in his hands was identical to the one he had fired earlier; he could see the metal projectile nestled inside the barrel. He placed it back in its holster and drew the Glock from his hip; it also appeared to be fully functional inside the simulation, the barrel clear, the clip full.
“OK, whenever you’re ready,” said Terry, his voice loud in Jamie’s ear.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Just explore the house. It’ll all become clear.”
Jamie took a deep breath and started forward. He crossed the grand hallway quickly, heading toward a wide staircase that took up most of one end of the room. As he approached the first step, he heard a snarl above him and jerked his head up. A vampire in an elegant dinner suit had appeared at the top of the staircase and crouched, as though readying itself to leap down on him.
Jamie slid the T-Bone smoothly out of its holster, brought it to his shoulder in one fluid motion, and pulled the trigger. The stake shot out of the tube and crunched into the vampire’s chest, punching a circular hole through the flesh and bone, before retracting on its pneumatic wire. Before it thudded back into the barrel, the vampire exploded in a gaudy shower of blood and gristle that pattered softly onto the thick carpet of the staircase. Jamie kept the weapon in his hand and crept toward the first stair.
Movement caught his eye, and two more vampires dropped from the high, shadowy ceiling onto the staircase. Jamie’s mind, clear and cold as ice, did the math quickly.
One stake in the T-Bone. Two vampires. No time to fire it twice.
With his left hand, he drew the MP5 from his belt, slid the selector switch to full auto, and sprayed the staircase from left to right with bullets. The rounds tore through the knees of the vampires, dropping them writhing to the ground. He replaced the submachine gun in its holster, transferred the T-Bone to his left hand, drew the stake with the rubber grip with his right, and sprinted up the stairs. The three movements took less than two seconds, and out in the Playground one of the watching soldiers drew in a sharp intake of breath. Jamie reached the vampires, who were screeching and howling on the rapidly reddening carpet, and plunged the stake into their chests, one after the other. He stepped back quickly, and when they exploded, only a light mist of blood sprayed against the body armor on his chest. He turned on the staircase, checking behind him, and saw a fourth vampire, this one a woman in a beautiful flowing ball gown, speeding silently across the hallway toward him. He
