Chapter 27 Carter
Carter
Adi moved to the opposite door. “Four-letter combination on the lock.”
Carter went to the desk and picked up a notebook, flipping the pages. “This has symbols, maybe an alien language? But I don’t see a key.”
Beck took a closer look under the desk while Sierra paced around the room, examining the walls.
Carter handed the notebook to Adi and inspected the black and yellow stripes on the caution tape.
Beck ducked out from under the desk with a strip of paper. “Found a note. It says: To keep civilians from getting into the bunker, we’ve locked the door. Find the code, get in, stop the attacks. And remember: they may be from outer space, but they’re using our resources.”
“Any letters marked in the note?” asked Sierra, still pacing.
Beck held the strip of paper up to the flickering light. “Doesn’t look like it.”
“Wait. Here,” said Carter, one finger jabbing the hazard tape. “There are markings and—oh, it’s the key for Morse code. Is there any Morse code in the room? That could be the lock combination.”
They continued searching. Beck examined the message on the strip of paper more carefully. The minutes ticked steadily up.
“This is nuts,” said Carter. “It’s only the first part of the room. What was the clue again?”
“The enemy of your enemy is your friend,” said Adi, tugging on the lock. “Our enemy is this damn thing.”
“The clues are always for a big part of the room,” Beck said. “I don’t think it’s for the lock combination.”
He, Adi, and Sierra began to talk at once. Carter squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate. The flickering light bulb was giving her a headache. The eyeglasses were hurting her face.
A four-letter code. She tried to imagine she was sitting crosslegged on top of her duvet cover, her laptop propped on a stack of pillows, watching this episode play out on her screen.
She would pause it right here. Consider what they’d found so far.
A notebook. A message in strange symbols.
A four-letter padlock. A note about civilians and resources. A key for Morse code.
Come on, Solve Specialist. The puzzle pieces are there. You just have to put them together.
“I can’t think,” she muttered, ripping off the glasses and slamming them onto the desk. “Someone should fix that darn light—” Her eyes flew open. “Everyone! Everyone, stop talking!”
The room fell silent. She pointed upward. The light would flutter, then stay on for a second or two, then flutter, flutter, flutter, stay . . .
It only took a few seconds for the others to get it.
Sierra cursed. “How did I not notice that?”
Beck joined Carter at the hazard tape, but Adi raised his hand. “I’ve got Morse code memorized,” he said. “Give me a second.”
Carter followed along with the key in the hazard tape.
Flutter, flick, flick, flutter—the equivalent of a dot, two dashes, and another dot—was the letter P.
Pause.
Four flutters—H.
Pause.
One flutter—E.
Pause.
Flutter, flick, flutter, flutter—L.
“P-H-E-L?” Beck said, grabbing the lock.
“H-E-L-P,” Adi said.
“Help, right.” Beck input the letters. When he pulled the lock, it opened.
Carter followed the others through the door and—
They were plunged into darkness.
“Dammit,” said Sierra.
Their blackout minute had begun.
“Bet this is exciting for the viewers at home,” Beck joked.
“They’ll use night vision cameras,” said Carter, cautiously moving forward until she bumped into something. “Oof !”
“Are you okay?” Beck asked.
“Yeah . . . I think I ran into a table.”
Her teammates shuffled around in the dark, occasionally with grunts and ows. She edged her way along the large round table, feeling for anything that might be a clue, but it was useless. Nothing but a wide, smooth surface, and a clock ticking, ticking, ticking . . .
Finally, light erupted across the room. Carter blinked in the brightness. Her gaze instinctively went to the digital clock high on the wall, frozen at the time they’d come into the room. Thirteen minutes, eleven seconds. Way too long.
“Epic,” Beck murmured as they took it in.
Three walls of the room displayed a giant world map, covered with tiny blinking lights of various colors. Though the outlines of each continent and island were obvious, everything was labeled in the alien language.
In the middle of the room was the huge circular table Carter had run into. Stuck across the entire surface was another world map. More than a dozen countries had been marked with yellow Xs.
The wall not covered with a map was lined with shelves, each one scattered with military gear and MREs, plus a bunch of random objects.
A pitcher of water, a rainbow bath bomb, a makeup palette, some sort of springy contraption, a houseplant, a steel pointer, an old radio, a glass bottle, bug spray, a bag of sand, and dozens of other knickknacks that didn’t have anything in common.
“Jesus,” said Beck.
Carter spun around. “What now?”
“No—literally, Jesus.” He pointed at a dashboard where a screen showed an enormous statue of Jesus Christ with outstretched arms, overlooking a coastal city.
Carter only caught a glimpse of it before the screen switched to the Pyramids of Giza, then the Eiffel Tower.
Each landmark was being attacked in some way, by lightning, fire, earthquakes, and other disasters. Very apocalyptic.
“We’re trying to stop an invasion,” Sierra reminded them. “With as few cities destroyed as possible.”
Adi held up the book of alien language. “The script on the map is the same as this.”
Sierra marched over to him. “Let me take a look.”
“Have at it,” he said, handing it over, then joining Beck at the screen.
Carter grabbed the radio on one of the shelves and switched it on. Through the speaker came the sound of crackling voices—some crying for help, some giving coordinates, some issuing military orders.
“We’re picking up radio frequencies,” she said.
Then a voice came through loud and clear. “Oslo is down! I repeat, Oslo has been eradicated!”
“What? No!” Carter yelled, looking first at Adi, then at the wall. “Where’s Oslo?”
He pointed at Norway and, as they watched, a tiny blue light turned purple.
“Hold on,” Adi said, snapping his fingers between Sierra’s face and the notebook.
She made a disgusted face and snapped her fingers back at him, but he ignored it.
“The city names, in the alien language. Look, four characters for Oslo, and the first and last ones are the same. They correspond to our alphabet.”
“Right,” said Sierra, grabbing a pencil from among the knick-knacks on the shelves.
She started scribbling, making her own key from the cities listed on the wall.
“This is going to take a minute. Carter, you inspect the objects, see if anything has writing on it. Adi, you work out what’s going on with the landmarks and call them out as you see them. ”
“A purple light must mean a city has been wiped out,” said Adi. Even as he said it, more blue lights flashed to purple.
“Wait—didn’t the Game Master say we were supposed to stop the attacks, but that some could also be reversed?” said Beck. “How are we supposed to do that?”
Carter gestured to the objects on the shelves. “Something to do with these? Here, help me look through them.”
As they worked, more transmissions came across the radio as cities continued to fall.
It became background noise, punctuated by Adi’s recitation of the rotating pictures.
“The Eiffel Tower is being hit by lightning. The Sydney Opera House is getting washed away by a tsunami. That’s, er—where is that?
Oh, the Kremlin in Moscow. That’s on fire.
Taj Mahal looks like it’s cracking from an earthquake.
Don’t know where the fifth one is, but it’s being hit by acid rain, I think.
Pyramids of Giza, locusts. Of course. Christ the Redeemer—a landslide? ”
“Wait, locusts?” Beck turned to the shelf opposite Adi. “There’s bug spray over there.”
“The enemy of your enemy is your friend!” Carter said excitedly. “The enemy of locusts is bug spray. Quick, grab it!”
Beck snatched it from the shelf.
“Okay,” said Adi. “We’re back to the Eiffel Tower and electricity.”
“Lightning rod!” Beck said, picking up the steel pointer.
Carter found a sponge for the Opera House tsunami and grabbed the pitcher of water for the burning Kremlin.
“An earthquake,” Adi said, staring at the Taj Mahal. “What’s the enemy of an earthquake?”
Beck laughed, holding up the springy contraption. “Shock absorbers!”
“Huh,” said Carter, “and here I thought they were fancy bedsprings.”
“The plant could be for the landslide,” said Adi. “Roots help with soil erosion. Does anyone know what the enemy of acid rain is?”
“Try a neutralizing solution,” Sierra said without looking up from her decoding work.
Carter hurried over to the glass bottle. “This says it’s sodium hydroxide.”
Beck flashed her a thumbs-up.
“Okay, the bug spray goes on Egypt,” Adi said, directing them where to place all the objects on the huge map spread across the table. “The plant on Brazil. The sponge on Australia . . .”
“Got it!” Sierra shouted, slapping the pencil down. “The first page says: Do not let our rainbow dissolve, lest our forces be weakened.”
“So . . . the aliens control rainbows?” said Beck, grinning. “Cool superpower.”
Carter shouted gleefully and grabbed the rainbow bath bomb. “It has to mean this!”
“A side quest?” Adi said as Carter dropped the bath bomb in the pitcher of water. They watched it fizz away.
Adi scanned the room. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Maybe we have to wait until the bath bomb dissolves completely,” Beck said. “Sometimes they have little toys inside.” He paused before adding, “Dibs.”
“I’ll decode the next page,” Sierra said, returning to the book.
“So . . . where does the sodium hydroxide go?” asked Carter.
Adi glanced back at the rotating pictures, then pointed at one that showed a temple with a Buddha statue. “I think that might be in Thailand. Or . . . Indonesia?”
Beck looked at the map. “There are Xs on both of those. Choose one.”
“Thailand?”
“Thailand it is.” Carter put the sodium hydroxide on the map.
They waited, hoping for a flashing light or the click of mechanics.
Nothing.
“Um,” Carter said.
“Maybe it’s Indonesia then,” Beck said.
“Or something is wrong,” murmured Adi.
“Are we sure this one is in Brazil?” asked Carter, pointing. “There are Xs on Mexico and Peru, too.”
“I’m sure.”
Four more blue lights turned purple. Four more cities down. How many had the other teams lost? Carter liked to think they were solving this part of the game quickly thanks to Adi’s geographical knowledge, but the time wasted in the front room could be their downfall.
Suddenly, the screen showing the disasters flickered. Carter held her breath, hoping it wasn’t about to turn off. If they had to rely on memory to place these objects—
But the screen didn’t turn off. Instead it changed from a picture of the pyramids to a picture of . . .
“Sierra?”
“What?” said Sierra, looking up from the notebook. Her attention landed on the screen, and her expression froze. “What the hell?”
There was Sierra’s face, a screenshot taken from a post-round interview in season four.
Then the screen glitched again and changed to an image of .
. . Cruz Fernandes, one of Sierra’s teammates last season.
But he was replaced by a photo of Fitzy’s playful grin.
Then Louis Augustus Russell. Followed by another of Sierra’s old teammates, Missy Mizuno.
Then Ranielle Russell. Alicia’s teammates.
Elijah Kua. Vera. Then it started from the top again.
Sierra. Cruz. Fitzy. Louis—all suspects in Alicia’s murder, their photos flashing by faster and faster.
Until the images stopped—and they were staring at the beautiful smile of Alicia Angelos. A voice, distorted by auto-tune, rasped, “I know the truth. Have you figured it out yet?”
Then it was gone, and the slideshow of landmarks was back.
“What. The. Actual,” whispered Adi.
Beck smacked his lips, frowning thoughtfully. “That voice—”
“Don’t,” said Sierra, a tight line between her eyebrows. “Not here. Stay focused. We’re almost done, I can feel it.”
But with that creepy video turning in her thoughts, Carter felt like they were suddenly playing an entirely different game.
“Got it,” Sierra said, grabbing the pitcher of now-murky water and pulling out a dripping crystal. “Adi,” she said, tossing the crystal across the table to him. “The book says to replace the radio batteries with this.”
Adi grabbed the radio and wrenched open the cover to the battery compartment. There was a divot where the crystal fit precisely. The voices from the speaker fell silent. Around the room, the tiny lights on the map stopped blinking and turned their solid colors.
“What happened?” Carter said.
“We blocked their radio communication,” Sierra said smugly. “They won’t be destroying any more cities.”
“Yes!” Beck offered her a fist bump, which she begrudgingly accepted.
“But we still haven’t managed to reverse the disasters,” said Adi.
They went through the list of places again, double-checking the landmarks, disasters, and solutions. Beck wandered around, looking at the items on the shelves in more detail.
“It all makes sense,” Carter said, moving the sodium hydroxide back and forth between Thailand and Indonesia. “I don’t know what else it could be.” She glanced up at the frozen digital clock. How much more time had passed? Ten minutes? Fifteen?
She scanned the shelves again. Her attention landed on a small red sandbag, the type used for playing cornhole at the county fair. The pictures rotated back to the Sydney Opera House, half covered in water.
Carter gasped. “It’s not a tsunami, it’s a flood! Quick, Beck!”
She grabbed the sandbag and tossed it at Beck, who caught it one-handed. He yanked off the sponge and slapped down the bag of sand.
All the lights in the room turned green, and Carter heard the most beautiful words in the world.
“Team Helsing, you have escaped!”