There was a faint bar of light under a doorjamb in front of me. I pushed the door and it swung open. It was Bart’s office. The office was lit by a single candle on the desk. Albert Kloughn was duct-taped to the desk chair behind the desk. He had duct tape across his mouth and wrapped around his ankles. His eyes were huge and tears rolled down his cheeks.

I ripped the tape off his mouth and was about to go for the tape around his torso when I saw the bomb.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I’m b-b-b-booby-trapped.”

I snatched at the desk phone. No dial tone. I locked the door from the inside and pawed through the junk on Bart’s desk, looking for something helpful. My hands were shaking and my heart was thundering in my chest. “I hate this,” I said. “I hate this game. And I hate the pathetic excuse for a human being who’s out there stalking me.”

“You have to get help,” Kloughn said. “This guy is crazy. He’s going to kill us.”

“There are just nuts and bolts on this desk,” I said. “I need something I can use as a weapon.”

“I know where there’s a weapon,” Kloughn said. “I can swivel myself in this chair and I was looking out the window into the warehouse when the crazy guy was hiding things. There’s a room off to the side with glass windows all along.”

“The quality control area.”

“I don’t know, but there’s a workstation just by the door to that room. And he hid a gun there. It’s right on top of the table part of the machine.”

There was a knock on the door. “You’re not allowed to lock yourself in Bart’s office,” Clyde said. “It doesn’t matter anyway, I’ve got a key. But now you’re gonna have to get punished before we can go on with the playtime.”

I heard the key scrape in the lock and I grabbed a wooden crate half-filled with gears and threw it at the window that led to the warehouse. The glass shattered and I dove through the window. If I got cut it wasn’t going to be any worse than what was going to happen to me at Clyde’s hands.

I hit the ground and rolled. I’d seen the roll done in the movies and it seemed like a good idea. Problem was, in the movies they weren’t usually landing on two thousand metal gears. Still, I wasn’t decapitated from the glass shards when I pitched myself through the broken window, so that was a point in my favor. I scrambled to my feet, sliding on the debris, and ran for the first workstation. Beyond the first workstation the room blacked out and I was going to have to feel my way to the side room where the quality control people worked.

I was almost to the workstation when I was hit by another paintball. Thank God, I must have been beyond the reach of the taser. The paintball hit square in my upper back. If I lived to see another day, I’d be bruised. I dropped to the floor and put the workstation between me and Clyde. I heard Kloughn give an unearthly blood-curdling shriek, the candlelight went out, and then everything was quiet.