The Crash: An Official Minecraft Novel Read online

  Minecraft: The Crash is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Mojang AB and Mojang Synergies AB. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  MINECRAFT is a trademark or registered trademark of Mojang Synergies AB.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Baptiste, Tracey, author.

  Title: Minecraft : the crash / Tracey Baptiste.

  Description: New York : Del Rey, [2018] | Series: Minecraft | “An official Minecraft novel”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018014908 | ISBN 9780399180668 (hardback : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Minecraft (Game)—Fiction. | Video games—Fiction. | Virtual reality—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Media Tie-In. | JUVENILE FICTION / Fantasy & Magic.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.B229515 Mi 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018014908

  International edition ISBN 9780525618775

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180675

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Consultant: Adam Baptiste

  Cover art and design: Ian Wilding

  v5.3.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Dedication

  Also by Tracey Baptiste

  About the Author

  I’d like to find whoever came up with the phrase “everything happens for a reason” and give them a piece of my mind. Because the exact last thing anybody needs to hear when their world is completely screwed up is that it’s actually a good thing. Like, even if you had a magical time machine that could go back and fix your mistakes, you totally shouldn’t use it? Yeah, right. Nobody really believes that.

  Of course, there’s really no good thing to say after everything’s turned into a complete and utter mess. Better to keep moving forward, try to fix your mistakes, and hope everything eventually works out. I feel like I should have something wiser to say here, but nope. That’s all I’ve got. Oh, that and the time machine thing. There’s always that.

  Anyway, the mistake I wish I could go back and fix happened days ago. How many days, I couldn’t tell you. Time is sort of…a mess right now. But one Friday, some time ago, my best friend and I were headed to participate in the social event kickoff of the school year, also known as the homecoming game.

  I’d convinced Lonnie to go with me, even though neither of us were sports fans. We were gamers, really. Sports—outside of a video game—was not high on our list of priorities. But I figured homecoming was one of those hallmark high school experiences they make a big fuss about in the movies, why not check it out? As a newly minted freshman, I was secretly excited about high school. It was like unlocking a new level in the video game of life—full-sized lockers for larger inventory, bigger bosses like the SATs, you get my drift. Lonnie, on the other hand, was not so convinced about homecoming. So I sweetened the deal, literally. I told him that I’d make my famous brownies and bring a blanket so we could huddle up together with chocolate in our teeth. I’d like to think it was the brownies and the blanket that appealed to him, but I’m not sure. I mean, there aren’t a lot of high school juniors that would want to be seen hanging out with a freshman, but we had been friends since I was six and he was eight. So we kind of went beyond the usual high school friendship parameters. Still, the point of all this is, it was all my fault. Everything that happened is on me.

  Lonnie showed up around five. I bounded out with brownies and the blanket, got in the car, let him drive off, and we started talking about Minecraft. Our usual convo.

  “Did you build all the traps?” he asked.

  I scrunched up my nose. I hadn’t. Mainly because I forgot.

  “Actually, I thought it would be better to build up on the base instead. I decided to make the floor of the greenhouse glass, so you can look down on everything.”

  “You mean you didn’t finish what you said you were going to. Again.” Lonnie sounded more like a disappointed dad than my friend, putting me on the defensive.

  “I’ll get back to it after I finish the new greenhouse,” I said. “I don’t know why you have to get on my case about it.”

  “Bianca.”

  “Lonnie.”

  “You need to stick to the plan. This whole world is going off the rails. If we want to have something that works really well, we have to do what we set out to make. Isn’t that the whole point of the test world? Perfect it there, and then move it to the real game?”

  “I thought the point of the test world was to do crazy stuff so we could see what works and what doesn’t. To go as bonkers as we can go, blow stuff up, make a mess, and never have to fix it.”

  Lonnie sighed. He passed his hand over his close-shaven head, and squeezed his eyelids down for a second as if he was in pain. When he opened his eyes again, they were a cloudy gray, like the sky, not the sharp steel gray that meant he was in a good mood.

  “I thought you wanted to do this project,” he said. “You said you wanted to craft a whole world. New landscapes. Entire villages. A whole set of society rules, and then mess around with it.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But first we have to make it. And to make it, we need to have a plan, Bianca.”

  I didn’t mean for us to fight. I wasn’t sure what to say to get him to stop breathing heavily like he was an angry dragon cooking up a fire to blow in my direction.

  “You never follow the plan. First you say you want to do something, and I say, ‘Okay, here’s the plan.’ Then you say, ‘Great plan!’ And then you don’t even pretend to do what I outlined.”

  Oh, so this was going to be a full-on fight.

  “But here I am being your chauffeur,” he added.

  “You just got your license. You need the practice,” I said. “Plus, think of all that horizon-expanding you’ll be doing by finally going to an actual sporting event!”

  “Since when do you like sports?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Since it’s my first time ever going to a
big school thing, and I just want to see what it’s like to be out with the masses.”

  “ ‘Masses’ is just another word for mobs. Trust me, high school’s not all that it’s cracked up to be.” He turned, screeching down West Elm Road. “Where is the stupid field again?”

  “Two streets down and then a right,” I said smugly.

  He pulled up at the light and revved the engine. Even his body movements seemed annoyed. I sucked in my top lip and chewed on it as I pulled at one of my cornrows and wrapped and unwrapped it around my finger.

  “You know, they’re bulldozing the playground,” I said suddenly.

  The light changed and he lurched forward.

  “So?”

  “Do you want to see it before everything’s gone?”

  “What for?”

  “Uh, because it was the scene of our greatest adventures?” I asked. “Because it’ll never look like that again? Because it was our place first?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Do you remember how to get there?” I teased. He turned his steely gray eyes on me, and I grinned. I knew that look. It meant that our little fight was over.

  Instead of turning right on Grandview, he turned left.

  The playground already looked like a ghost town. The swing seats were gone. All that was left was the A-frame, mottled blue from the faded and peeling paint. The rope bridge was lying half in the black rubber mulch, one end still attached to what used to be the climbing wall when all the foot- and hand-rests were still attached.

  I climbed up the ladder, which wobbled now that it wasn’t attached properly, and I went down the tube slide, coming out at Lonnie’s sneakered feet.

  “Have a go?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m surprised this is the first renovation they’re doing since we were little,” he said. “They probably should have condemned it a long time ago.”

  “But it’s our place!” I said.

  “It was,” Lonnie replied, not unkindly. This playground was where we’d met, and where we’d become friends and imagined our first worlds together. We would pretend to be swashbuckling pirates on the rope bridge, launch ourselves like trapeze artists off the swings, and defend our fortress from invading imaginary zombies. In fact, one of our first projects in Minecraft was to create a better version of the playground. The ground was always lava, naturally.

  After all this time, we always stuck together, even as the playground itself fell apart.

  “Remember the time I tried to flip off the monkey bars and you broke my fall?” I asked, looking to stoke some nostalgia.

  “Yeah, I got a broken wrist for my troubles,” Lonnie said, shaking his head. “You never were a great planner even then, always wanting to push the limits but never thinking about the follow-through.”

  “You know, if I wanted a lecture, I could just go to class.” I crossed my arms.

  Lonnie shrugged and kicked the faded yellow plastic cap from something and walked off to what used to be a dome of monkey bars. Most of the bars were in a pile on the ground. I followed him. He stared down at the pile quietly. The sun was just going down, casting an orange glow over the playground. Silence settled around us.

  He was right. This place wasn’t ours, not any longer.

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  “Homecoming rally, yeah!” he mocked.

  I reached my hand out to him and felt a jolt of electricity when he caught my fingers, swinging them as we walked back to the car. Most people thought it was really weird, the two of us hanging out the way we did. A two-year difference in high school is a chasm. Especially when you’re going to two different high schools. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the Grand Canyon with nothing but your cupped hands around your mouth. He turned over the engine, and made a U-turn on the tiny street, then peeled off.

  I pulled out my phone and loaded the Minecraft app.

  “If you’re going to give me grief all night over not building your dumb traps, you should at least appreciate this sick glass floor I put into the greenhouse.”

  I waved my phone screen in his face.

  “Look!”

  “Bianca, quit it. I’m driving.” Lonnie batted the phone away with an arm.

  He turned sharply to the left, tires screeching. The orange glow from the setting sun blinded us momentarily and we skidded a little, and Lonnie turned the wheel to right us. Then we realized, too late, that something was coming toward us, that we must have run the red light, but we still weren’t able to make out whatever the object was with the sun in our eyes, but we knew it wasn’t a small thing. It all felt like it was in slow motion, a few seconds strung out into years, until a robotic female voice suddenly blasted over the car’s speakers.

  “Proximity alert! Evasive action recommended!”

  The air in the car went from electric excitement to sharp fear in an instant, as an oncoming car came straight for us too fast to do anything about it.

  Once the car was close enough and blocked out the sun, I could see the other driver’s face, though not clearly. He had dark eyes and straight hair that spiked in every direction. His head lurched back as his green car collided with our blue one. I remember how the metal crunched as we crushed into each other, folding blue on green on blue on green, how pieces of things began to fly around. Glass, metal. At one point, even the light seemed to fracture and splinter off, bursting into fractals of beams, searing my eyes and my skin. And then there was the smell of smoke. And the taste of blood. And the scrape of something against my body that felt like it had gutted me open somewhere in the middle. I wondered if I’d been halved. I turned, trying to see if I could figure out what was happening, if I could see Lonnie’s face to know from his eyes just how bad it all was. But I couldn’t see him. It was like he’d disappeared and all that was left was me, and the blue car and the green car that now looked like one wrapped-up thing with glass tinkling as it fell like rain all around me, and the shocking realization that the man from the other car was right up on me, like we had been riding together. He was right there. I could reach out and touch him. And I tried. Only my hands didn’t move. Nothing moved but the cars still rippling toward and away from each other. So, I tried to scream for Lonnie, but nothing came out of my mouth.

  And then everything went black.

  There was a halo of light over me. I panicked for a moment until I realized it was just a streetlamp. I must have been lying on the ground. Only, I couldn’t feel anything. Not the ground, not my body. I couldn’t even move. I tried to say something, but my mouth didn’t work either. A woman with a blond ponytail leaned over me, frowning. She looked up and mouthed something to someone I couldn’t see. No, she was talking. But I couldn’t hear her. I couldn’t hear anything. Only my eyes seemed to be working, and even that…Everything was dim, and restricted, as if I could only look up.

  I tried to move something. Anything. A finger. My tongue. Nothing worked. I wondered if I was dead, and my spirit was just hanging out for a bit before it went to…wherever spirits go. Maybe it was stuck, too, and couldn’t move. Maybe we were both paralyzed.

  The blond lady was wearing a shirt that had a patch that read HOLY ANGELS HOSPITAL EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHNICIAN. She seemed to be moving her hands over my body, doing I don’t know what because I still couldn’t feel anything, or move my eyes enough to see.

  I wondered if we were still at the site of the accident, if Lonnie was nearby, if he was in the same shape as me, if the other driver was there too, if he could feel anything, if my parents or my sister knew where I was, if this was where I’d die.

  My vision wobbled and shifted as if I was being moved. The halo of light from the streetlamp was gone. Above me the sky was dark, much darker than it was when Lonnie and I left the park. I tried to think of how long it takes for the sky to get so dark
. A few minutes? Hours? How long had I been there?

  Then my other senses started to come back.

  First, the EMT’s voice rang out over me. “Get her in the rig!”

  Behind that was the sound of sirens, people shuffling about, shouting things I couldn’t make out, and the unmistakable sound of metal warping. I heard the crunch of gravel underfoot, and the click of something snapping into place beneath me. I was being moved, slowly and smoothly. The stars twirled.

  Smell came next. A burst of pungent smoke and acrid rubber. Sweat, and something earthy.

  Then I tasted blood in my mouth. I moved my tongue and tried to feel around. Everything was tender, and I felt jagged pieces against the tip, and bare spaces of swollen gums.

  More sounds. Screaming. Crying. Moaning. The car’s alarm was going off, as the robo-voice calmly intoned that help was on the way.

  Lights flashing red against the shiny white paint of the ambulance.

  The inside of the ambulance. Smooth white roof. Metal latches on supply bins overhead. The face of the EMT lady and another guy leaning over me. One smiling, the other frowning, only I kept mixing up which was which because my eyes couldn’t focus on one or the other, and I kept being bumped, and the siren was going, so we must have been on our way to Holy Angels.

  We hit a smooth, straight patch of road and my vision became less jangly.

  It was the man. The man was smiling.

  Next, I was lifted out and the smell of antiseptic immediately washed over me. The hospital lights were a bright white. Someone should tell them it wasn’t soothing. They should get halo lights like the ones out on the street. I closed my eyes and heard squeaky, sneakered feet running beside me as the wheels on the gurney swiveled and bumped over the hospital floor. I saw the light still beaming down through my eyelids, and I could tell every time someone leaned over me because they cast my face in shadow.