Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“I thought it was the Shermer Bulldogs,” I said.

“The football and wrestling teams are the Shermer Bulldogs,” she said. “The basketball team is the Shermer Mules. See?”

She pointed to a poster, announcing an upcoming away game, between the Shermer Mules and the Beacon Town Beavers.

Ahead of us, we found Shoto looking through another open doorway, into some sort of shop class, where dozens of male students were making identical ceramic elephant lamps. They lit up when the elephant’s trunk was pulled. But one of the boys couldn’t get his lamp to turn on, despite repeated attempts. When he turned around, we saw that it was Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall’s character in The Breakfast Club ). Aech turned away to continue on to the next classroom, and I reluctantly followed her. Just before I lost sight of him, I saw Brian frown and cast a terrified glance toward his gruff-looking shop teacher.

We rounded another corner and Art3mis suddenly threw her arms out as she skidded to an abrupt halt, causing the rest of us to collide with her and one another. Once we’d regained our balance, Art3mis pointed up ahead. There was Andie Walsh, standing beside her open locker with an oddly dressed and extremely young Jon Cryer.

“There he is,” she said. “Philip F. Dale. Better known as Duckie, aka the Duck Man. One of the most divisive and controversial characters ever to spring forth from John Hughes’s imagination.”

“Oh, that dude,” Aech said, rolling her eyes. “What do we want from him? Fashion advice?”

Art3mis laughed and shook her head.

“Just trust me, OK?” she replied. “I used to come to this place a lot. I’ve completed every single documented quest anchored here. A bunch of the older quests don’t have any developer credits in their colophon, so no one knows who created them. But there were always rumors that some of these quests were created by Kira and Ogden Morrow, including several of the Pretty in Pink quests. I never took them seriously, but now I’m thinking those rumors may have been true….”

We watched as Andie closed her locker and began to walk down the hall, Duckie buzzing around her like an insect.

I recited the clue printed on the Second Shard again in my head, trying to figure out why Art3mis had brought us here. Then I groaned and rolled my eyes.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “The first line of the clue is a goddamn pun? ‘Recast the foul’? Meaning a ‘fowl,’ like a waterfowl ?”

“Correct,” Art3mis said, smiling at me. “More specifically…a duck!”

She nodded toward Duckie, then drew her curved Elven sword from the scabbard on her back. Its blade sang like a giant tuning fork as she pulled it free.

“Arty,” Aech said, “what the hell are you doing?”

“Wait for it,” she said, gripping the hilt of her sword with both hands. She stood there waiting as another warning bell rang. Andie bid Duckie a hasty farewell and scurried away from him. Duckie raised his voice and continued to shout at her, asking if he should make lunch reservations for them in the cafeteria, perhaps at a table by the window. Andie covered her face in embarrassment, then turned and continued to walk in the other direction.

“Um, listen, may I admire you again today?” he shouted as Andie disappeared into one of the classrooms down the hall.

“Poor Duckie,” Shoto whispered as we watched all of this go down.

“Poor Duckie?” Art3mis repeated, aghast. “Don’t you mean poor Andie? She takes pity on the guy because she knows he’s struggling with his own sexual identity, and that he doesn’t have any other friends. And how does Duckie repay her sympathy and kindness? By ignoring her boundaries, hounding her twenty-four-seven, and humiliating her in public every chance he gets. And check out how he treats other women when Andie isn’t around….”

She turned and motioned back over at Duckie, who had just walked over to a pair of preppy-looking girls standing a few yards away from us.

“Ladies, ladies,” we heard him say. “Listen, I may be able to work out a deal where either one or the both of you could be pregnant by the holidays. What do you—”

Before the Duck Man was able to finish his sentence, Art3mis ran over to him and swung her sword, lopping his head completely off at the neck.

“There can be only one!” she shouted as Duckie’s head went flying, taking his blow-dried pompadour along with it. It bounced off a nearby locker with a loud metal clang before coming to rest on the waxed marble floor of the hallway, not far from his now-decapitated body. The preppy girls he’d been addressing a split second earlier screamed and scattered, along with the other student NPCs who had been lingering in the vicinity.

“Jesus Christ, Arty!” Aech shouted. “You could’ve warned us first!”

“Yeah,” Shoto added, chuckling to himself. “Next time give us a heads -up!”

Aech cut his laughter short by shoving his avatar into a wall.

I watched as Duckie’s head and body faded away, leaving behind the loot he’d been carrying—a few gold coins, his vintage thrift-store clothing, a bolo tie, and a pair of battered white wingtip shoes with buckles instead of laces.

Art3mis scooped up the shoes and the tie but didn’t bother with the clothes or the coins.

“Annoying dipshit,” she said as she wiped Duckie’s blood off her blade and slid it back into its scabbard. “I never liked him. Or the generations of spineless tool bags who’ve rooted for Andie to end up with him.”

“Hold the phone,” Shoto said. “Are you telling me you’re on Team Blane?”

“Of course not,” Art3mis replied, looking mildly revolted. “Blane is even worse than Duckie. I never thought either one of them was a good match for Andie. And Kira Morrow held the same opinion….”

“OK…” Shoto said slowly. “But I still don’t understand why you decapitated Duckie.”

“To ‘recast the foul,’ ” she said. “And ‘restore his ending.’ ”

“How are we supposed to restore the ending where Andie winds up with Duckie, when you just killed Duckie?” I asked.

“I’ll show you,” she said. “But we need to make one more stop first.”

She took off running again, and since we really had no choice, Aech, Shoto, and I followed. After several more identical-looking hallways, Art3mis finally slid to a halt in front of a long row of orange lockers. One of these lockers had a warning scrawled across its door in black magic marker: TOUCH THIS LOCKER AND YOU DIE, FAG!

“Hey!” I shouted. “Bender’s locker!”

Aech nodded and folded her arms. “I always questioned his reasoning here,” she said. “Don’t you think this homophobic graffiti would encourage people to mess with his locker rather than discourage them? Bender didn’t think things through!”

“Yeah,” Art3mis replied. “Lucky for us…”

She turned and grabbed a fire ax off the wall. She used it to smash open Bender’s combination lock, then gingerly opened the locker door and quickly yanked her hand clear. When the door popped open, a small guillotine slid down the length of its frame, chopping off the toe of a sneaker that was poking out of the bottom of the locker.

Art3mis dug through the locker’s bizarre contents until she finally found a crumpled brown paper bag. She opened it and pulled out another, even smaller paper bag, stained with what appeared to be French-fry grease. From inside that bag, she then withdrew a clear plastic sandwich bag, filled with a copious amount of marijuana.

Arty held up the bag of weed in her left hand and Duckie’s shoes in her right.

“We’ve got the magic herb and the magic slippers,” Art3mis said. “Now it’s time for us to hit the city, baby. Dead-on. We have some drinks. A little nightlife. Some dancing…Let’s go!”