Excerpt: EndGame

"Explain to me again why you got the four-gigabyte behemoth?" Matt said, watching with great amusement as Felicia struggled with the blister pack around her new MP3 player. She had managed to pry apart one corner, but the sealed edge around the rest of the packaging was being very uncooperative.
"You know, if I had a boyfriend, he would be helping me with this," Felicia said, then chewed on the packaging to try and separate it. "Ow."
"Technically, this is still our first date," Matt said.
"Do I need to leave you two alone?" Greg asked.
"Only for as long as it takes for you to find a pair of scissors," Felicia said.
Greg mumbled something affirmative and left the storeroom. They were back in the murky depths of the game store, standing under the still-flickering fluorescent light. It seemed to be taunting them, Matt thought, as if it knew it had more secrets to give if only they could listen to it.
"Anyway," Felicia said, tearing another few millimeters of clear plastic apart, "I figured, if I'm going to buy a new MP3 player, I might as well get one that's actually going to be useful to me."
"You could have gotten one of the smaller models," Matt said. "They were in much friendlier packaging."
Felicia shook her head. "Too damn small. I can't stand those tiny gadgets. They get lost in my purse all the time."
Matt looked her up and down. "You don't carry a purse."
"It's in my backpack. Which is in your trunk. Seriously, do you want to help here, or what?"
Matt grabbed one end of the package while Felicia yanked with all her might on the one side she'd managed to free. It tore a little bit more, but stopped when the tear reached an indentation in the plastic which was molded around the MP3 player so it wouldn't rattle inside the packaging. The molded portion also had the side effect of reinforcing the structure of the plastic, making it impossible to tear further.
"He's going to be back with the scissors any minute," Matt said, letting go of his end of the package.
"Maybe this hole is big enough for me to shake it loose," Felicia said, turning the package upside down and shaking it. "Put your hands there so it doesn't fall on the floor."
Matt did as she said, but didn't think it was going to work. "I don't think that's going to work," he said.
"I hate packaging," Felicia grumbled, stopping her shaking. "I swear, I would pay extra just to buy something in a box that I can actually open without a blowtorch and the jaws of life."
Greg came back into the storeroom. "Scissors," he declared, holding up a pair of orange-handled cutters.
"Thank God," Felicia said, taking the scissors. She cut open the package, extracted the MP3 player, and tossed the blister pack with the manual and other accessories to Matt.
Matt had a pretty good idea what was coming next, and he pried open the cut packaging to pull out the power adapter that came with the MP3 player.
"And of course it's not charged," Felicia said.
Matt held up the AC adapter. "Who's your daddy?"
Felicia made a face and grabbed the adapter. "Don't be gross. Greg, is there an outlet in here?"
Greg looked around the room. "I'm not sure. I don't think so. It's pretty much all concrete walls. I'll go find an extension cord. Wait here."
He walked out again. Felicia kept fiddling with the MP3 player while Matt flipped through the manual.
"Hey, this thing will record audio directly from the FM tuner," he said. "That'll probably come in handy. We can record whatever message is playing in here and then go somewhere else to solve it."
Felicia nodded, seeming distracted. "Matt? Are you worried about the people who killed Warren coming after us?"
Matt studied her for a moment. She turned her head to look at him. There was genuine worry on her face.
"We still don't know for sure he was murdered," he said, trying to comfort her. It always made him uncomfortable to see women sad or in pain. He wondered if that had anything to do with how his mother had passed away.
"Don't backpedal," Felicia said. "I'm serious. You started following this trail because you were convinced that Warren didn't die in an accident. Aren't you worried at all?"
Matt sucked in a breath and exhaled slowly. "They don't have any reason to come after us yet. All we know is that Warren--at least, we think it's Warren--left behind a bunch of clues that, so far, all seem to fit together. We don't know where they're leading us."
"Maybe we don't want to find out," Felicia said. Her voice sounded very small.
Matt took a step closer to her. "Look, you don't have to stay if you don't want to. I can do this on my own."
She clutched the MP3 player to her chest and looked up at him. "And what if I don't want you to be involved, either?"
Matt smiled. "You're not the boss of me."
He tentatively put out a hand and touched her wrist. It looked even more frail and pale than usual, bent around her other hand and illuminated by the fluorescent light. She turned her hand into his, pushing her palm against him, and intertwined their fingers. She squeezed. He squeezed back.
"I have to admit, I never actually liked Warren that much," she said quietly, "but he was... we were of the same tribe. I know that sounds fruity, but I can't think of a better way to say it."
"I know what you mean," Matt said.
"I can't walk away from this," she said. "No. I WON'T walk away from this. Warren may have been a poster child for Asperger's, but he was a good person. If somebody murdered him, if they killed him to protect some secret--" She took a deep breath, as if to calm herself. "Wow. I'm actually getting angry."
"Do the 'we band of brothers' part," Matt said. "I always love that part."
Felicia grinned at him and squeezed his hand even harder. "'And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here,'" she quoted, "'and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's Day.'"
Matt smiled at her. "It's kind of weird to hear a girl say that."
Felicia nudged him playfully. "Excuse me, BOY, you're dealing with a full-grown woman here. Or do I need to check your computer for illegal child porn later?"
Matt shrugged. "You'll never break the encryption."
Felicia narrowed her eyes at him. "Oh, I'm good at math."
"Are you two going to go back to flirting whenever I walk away?" Greg said, coming into the room with one end of a yellow extension cord. "Because if I need to chaperone you all the time, it's going to take a long time to solve all these damn puzzles."
Matt handed the power adapter brick to Greg, who plugged it into the extension cord, and the end with the connector jack to Felicia, who attached it to the MP3 player.
"Okay," Felicia said. "Ready?"
Greg held up the clipboard and notepad he had scrounged from the D&D players upstairs. "Ready."
"Wait," Matt said. "That thing doesn't have speakers, does it?"
Felicia looked down at the MP3 player in her hands. "Shit."
"Earbuds," Matt said, and bent down to retrieve the packaging he had dropped earlier. He dug out the pair of earbud headphones that had come with the MP3 player, disentangling them from the plastic bag, scotch tape, and twist tie that held them in a tight coil. He handed the audio jack to Felicia, who plugged it into the MP3 player.
"Who wants to listen?" she asked.
"Well, you should, obviously, Miss Perfect Pitch," said Matt. "And Greg, you go ahead. You've got the clipboard."
"You sure?" Greg asked, taking one of the earbuds from Felicia.
"I can listen later," Matt said. "The message'll repeat."
Felicia stepped closer to Greg, so the cord would reach both of them, and fitted her earbud into her ear. "Here goes. Eighty-eight point nine."
Matt watched as she and Greg both stared at the floor. Felicia slowly turned up the volume on the radio, and both her and Greg's eyes widened at the same time.
"You got something?" Matt asked. "What do you hear?"
Greg looked up at him, his mouth hanging open but not making any noise.
"It's Warren," Felicia said softly. "It's Warren's voice."
Greg lowered the clipboard and squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.
"You okay?" Matt asked.
Greg nodded, sniffling. He pulled the earbud out of his ear and handed it and the clipboard to Matt. "Sorry. You take it. I can't--it's just--"
Matt took the clipboard and earbud, and Greg turned away, sobbing softly. Matt looked at Felicia. She looked sad, too, but she hadn't played games with Warren every week for the past several years.
She nodded at Matt, and he stuffed the earbud into his ear.
"Positive dandelion two seven three," said Warren's voice. "Negative typography eight eight seven."
The voice was rough, staticky around the edges, and muffled, as if coming over a bad cell phone connection, but it was unmistakably Warren's. Matt recognized the slightly nasal quality immediately, and memories came flooding back of all the games of chess and Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico and dozens, maybe even hundreds of other games that he and Warren had played together. It occurred to Matt that they had rarely played tabletop games that required players to form into teams. It was always every man for himself.
But now, here was Warren, asking for their help. Matt couldn't tell if it was his imagination, or if the voice coming over the radio sounded just a little desperate.
"Eleven plus eleven equals six," said Warren's voice.
"What?" Matt said, frowning at Felicia.
She put a finger to her lips.
"Sorry," Matt said, more quietly. "Are you recording this?"
She nodded. He shut up and listened to the nonsensical message. It was short, and started repeating in less than a minute. Matt wrote down the words and numbers as he listened to them a second time, not having the slightest idea what they meant.
After a couple of minutes, he and Felicia had double-checked and verified their transcription of the message, and Greg had stopped crying and come back to look over their shoulders with red eyes. Matt held up the clipboard so they could all see better.
"That's it?" Greg asked.
"Yeah," Felicia said.
"What the hell does it mean?" Greg asked. "'Positive dandelion?' What the hell is that?"
"Well," Matt said, "it's probably not Morse."
"Brilliant," Greg said, a little irritated.
"No, what I mean is, Warren wouldn't use the same code twice," Matt said. "I played in a couple of his puzzle hunts, back in college. Some of the clues were a real bitch to solve. I think we spent six or seven hours one time."
"On a single clue?" Felicia asked. "That's insane."
"Well, if you're Warren, no clue takes more than forty-five minutes to solve," Matt said. "Even if you have to transcribe an hour's worth of audio data from a CD. Don't ask me how that works. He's just that smart. Anyway, the first time he ran his own event, he didn't really stop to consider that most of the people playing would be mere mortals who take a little longer than he does to figure things out."
"So he's made up his own crazy code system," Greg said. "Great."
"Is anybody else hungry?" Felicia asked. Matt could hear her stomach growling faintly.
"There's a vending machine upstairs," Greg said.
"I need real food," Felicia said, "not programmer food."
"I thought you were an engineer," Greg said.
"Are you kidding? I'm a tech writer. I can read code, but thank God I don't have to debug that shit." Felicia tensed her lips for a moment. "Sorry. I tend to curse more when I'm hungry or tired. If you don't want me to start swearing like a sailor, we should go find a restaurant or something."
"I don't know," Matt said, "foul-mouthed redheads kind of turn me on."
"Wouldn't have figured you for a Carrot Top fan," Greg said.
"Okay, fuck you, and fuck you," Felicia said, pointing to each man in turn. "Screw you guys, I'm taking my MP3 player and going to that bar across the street."
After Greg and Matt had stopped laughing, they followed her out of the storeroom.