Justin Holder sat in the back seat of the minivan. It was his baby sister’s birthday, and she wanted to have the party at the paintball place outside of town. At first, he didn’t want to go, but Loriann practically begged him to be on her team. “You do this stuff all the time,” she said to him at breakfast.
“Don’t you think it’s not fair?” he asked.
She grinned at him, “Who says I care about being fair?”
So he relented, because it was his sister. When they got to the paintball game warehouse, he noticed that some of the girls had brought their boyfriends. They leered at his sister, which he didn’t take kindly to. His sister wasn’t exactly a beauty, at least in his eyes; but she had taken to wearing shorts and thigh-high boots, and tight-fitting shirts. She ignored the looks on the boys, and Justin was introduced.
His mother drove away to the mall down the street, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. Justin got a strange feeling, that she really shouldn’t leave them alone. But he was probably overreacting.
They went into the paintball store and bought their gear. Rules were that if they “died” they had to go back to a rez point to get reset and let back out into the game. You knew they were dead if they were glowing bright red. Shooting such “zombies” – the ones going back to rez point – didn’t count, and it didn’t count if the zombies shot you.
Holder slipped the helmet over his head, and the world grew dark. It wasn’t a night vision goggle, but something like the opposite. He could see people if they were dressed in light clothes, like his sister, but if they were dark, they were invisible.
So were the walls, he found, as he fumbled his way through the maze. Loriann had to shout over the loud music. “We have to capture their people or kill them.”
Holder’s stomach turned – doing either was not what he did in the field. And a splash of paint on the knee wouldn’t be enough to stop someone, as opposed to real life. Maybe he should have taken lessons from Fold.
He got shot about four times, twice in the head. He wasn’t doing a very good job of killing anyone – one guy he shot in the chest didn’t even go down, but laughed at him and shot him.
He sighed as he went back out of rez point. If he had his guns, he would be able to put down everyone without killing them. Didn’t they understand that?
He heard a scream. It was deep in the labyrinth. Normally, he would go rushing to the spot, but he thought it was part of the game. Then the labyrinth was bathed in light for a moment. It got dark almost immediately, and a klaxon went off, like someone had opened the fire door.
The music went off, the place lit up, and Holder tore off the helmet. Loriann came running out of the labyrinth and into Holder’s arms. “What happened?”
People started coming out of the labyrinth, people in her party – all except one, Jenny.
Holder left Loriann with the group as he went into the maze. He got to the fire door to see people leaning out of it.
“Let me through,” said Holder. He wasn’t a tracker, especially in the city – what if they got her into a car and took off?
“You know who’s gone?”
“Yeah,” said Holder, getting through and dashing down the fire escape. He wasn’t athletically perfect enough to jump down the fire escape, but he struggled down. The fire escape’s end was five feet off the ground. He jumped down, awkwardly falling onto the tarmac.
While the guys up on the fire escape laughed, Holder looked around the parking lot. They hadn’t taken any of the party’s cars, he noticed. So it was someone else entirely.
That was when the police and fire department showed up.