Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel by Dave Bakers Page B

known him . . . which, granted, wasn’t all that long.
    “Look,” I continued, “it seems to me that Gamers Con are doing everything they can—within reason—to keep us, the four of us who worked with Alive Action—”
    And that was when Chung spoke for the first time.
    Actually cutting me off .
    “ Five ,” Chung said, “the other one, he also qualified for the quarter finals.”
    I blinked a few times, just as taken aback that this was the first time he’d spoken as by the actual content of what he’d said.
    It appeared that Chung wasn’t finished, either. “His name is Alan.”
    “Oh?” I said, not really sure what else to say.
    Chung nodded. “I heard his name”—he pointed off in the direction of Steve and Harold, the two of them still conferring with one another—“when they read out the list.”
    “Oh.”
    “Yeah,” Chung said, with a shrug, and then added, “Weird kid, that guy, I mean, I know that everyone here at the Grand Tournament wants to win but that kid, wow , he was like a whole different level of intense . . . back at the Winners’ Breakfast I spoke with him and he wouldn’t give me more than one-word answers. Then, when I made a joke about something he gave me this scowl—like this really mean scowl like I’d just killed his cat or something.”
    I stood back, still a little amazed at how much Chung had opened up, and how he was doing an impression of Alan, making his eyes all narrow, and holding his fingers as if they were claws or something.
    I guess you can get people wrong so easily.
    I knew that I’d got Chung wrong, for one.
    I looked beyond him again, to his waiting mother. “I guess your mum’s waiting,” I said.
    He gave another shrug, then slipped me a conspiratorial smile—kind of a secret grin. “Yeah,” he said, “she was a child champion herself, and so she wants me to do the same—win the competition, I mean.” Another shrug later, he added, “I don’t even like video games all that much.”
    Well, that got my eyeballs near enough leaving my sockets.
    I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.
    That there even existed someone who didn’t like video games all that much.
    Oh, sure, there was my mum . . . but, I mean, she was my mum.
    She was old .
    But, I have to admit, that it didn’t change my opinion of Chung at all. In fact, I had warmed to him a great deal, and we swapped mobile numbers.
    Before we parted ways, headed up to our respective hotel rooms—with our respective parents—I had to ask him something . . . urgently .
    “Uh, Chung,” I said, just as he was turning back to his mum—I saw that he’d put back on that same mean expression of his and I guessed that it was some sort of a mechanism he used with his mum to show her that he was one-hundred-per-cent serious about the competition. “You, uh,” I continued, “didn’t see that kid, uh, Alan in a video game that Alive Action Games sent along a few days before the convention, did you?”
    Chung looked at me long and hard, that serious expression of his making me feel a little uneasy—even though I knew the truth that he only used it in the presence of his mother. I wondered if he was going to answer at all, and his mother called out to him soon after.
    But, right before he turned to go, to head up to his hotel room, he gave me a stiff nod.
    That made four of us that’d seen that red-haired kid— Alan —in Halls of Hallow .
    What did it mean?

 
     
     
    26
     
     
    BACK IN OUR HOTEL ROOM, I couldn’t sleep.
    My dad, though, oh he was snoring away.
    But, seriously, how could I sleep with all the stuff that’d gone on today.
    The fact that I’d managed to get into the quarter finals of the Grand Tournament had almost got lost in the revelation first that Chung was a cool guy, and second that, just like me and James and Kate, he’d seen the red-haired kid, Alan, in Halls of Hallow .
    And I felt the weight heavy on my shoulders because I was the only one who knew just the