Holly and Her Naughty eReader (20 page)

“Sounds lovely,” Max said.

“The Mist is on this Kindle,” I
said. “So is Dune, Lord of the Rings, and World War Z.”

“World War Z?”

“It’s a zombie novel. The point
is, if Voldemort and Yoda found their way into this world, who’s to say all the
others won’t find their way in too?”

“But why are they coming here?”

“I don’t know, Max. I’m sorry. I
wish I had time to explain it all. I wish I knew what to do. Right now, I feel
like the best thing to do is keep you safe, and this vault is the safest place
I can think of. I’ll be right back. I promise.”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to get back to the real
world,” I said. “I need to talk to Christoph and find out what’s happening
here.”

“Christoph. You mean me?” Max
said.

“Yes….er…no. I’ll be back soon.”

I pulled myself out of the story
and was back in the hotel room, sitting at the desk, the Kindle in front of me.

“Welcome back,” came a familiar
voice.

I turned to see the man who,
until recently, I thought was Max Brody.

“Christoph,” I said. “Right?
It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Holly, it is indeed.”

Chapter 22

“What have you done?” I said. I
held up the Kindle and waved it in his face. “Max is trapped inside here. We
need to get him out.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Holly,”
Christoph said.

Christoph
. Yes, this man standing here in Max’s body was Christoph
Green. I had been so blinded by his charms that I ignored the obvious. Nothing
about the man who spent the past two days with me was like the Max I knew in
high school. I should have been skeptical right from the start.

Moving as fast as a snake,
Christoph snatched the Kindle from my hands.

“Easy there,” I said. “I don’t
want any trouble. I just want to get Max out and then we can all be on our
way.”

“Max isn’t coming out, Holly,”
he said. He stepped away from me, holding the Kindle out of reach. “It’s better
this way. Don’t you see? Out here, Max lived the life of a loser. But in there,
he can be a glamorous billionaire. He can live the good life in perpetuity. He will
always be young, handsome, and rich.”

“It’s not the good life,” I
said. “Something’s gone wrong. All the stories are getting mixed up. Voldemort
and Yoda were fighting right outside your office.”

“Yes, an unfortunate side
effect, I fear,” said Christoph.

“What side effect?” I said.
“What’s happening in there?”

He extended his hand. “Come back
to bed, Holly. I came here to be with you. We are meant to be together. Let’s
enjoy the night and talk more in the morning.”

“You came here to be with me?
What does that mean?”

“It means from the moment you
arrived in my world I knew we had to be together. One moment Annabelle was the
unassuming new girl on the job, the next she was a brilliant woman with great
ideas and a huge personality with many facets.”

“So you came out here to find
me,” I said.

“Not at first. At first I
thought we would be together in my world, but then you left me and that hideous
woman took your place.”

“Vivian,” I said. “What have you
done with Vivian?”

“Vivian is fine. She was always
fine. She was safe in bed, trapped in the Kindle, happy to be there.”

“It was you,” I said. “You sent
the message to me on Facebook. You told me the Kindle was destroyed. And the
note from Vivian. You wrote it!”

“Holly, it took me only one day
to give you everything you ever wanted. Imagine what I can do for you in a
lifetime. Come to bed.”

“I’m not coming to bed with you,
Christoph! Tell me how to get Max out of the Kindle!”

The sound of my voice echoed in
the small room. From behind Max’s eyes, I could see Christoph looking at me,
judging me.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll find a
way to make this work. Come here.”

He beckoned me with his hand.
“Come on,” he said.

I stepped closer. Big mistake.
Before I knew it, Christoph had me in a headlock.

“Stop!” I shrieked. “Let me--”

I couldn’t finish the sentence.
He did something to my neck that made me unable to talk. Or breathe.

“I’m sorry to do this to you, Holly,”
he said. “But you’ll thank me later.”

Have you ever choked? There’s a
panic that sets in when you realize you can’t breathe, and you lose control of
yourself for a bit.

“This will only be a moment,” he
said. “We’ll get you nice and relaxed and..”

With my right foot, I stamped
down on his bare toes so hard he yelped in pain and his arm came loose. I took
in a deep, cleansing breath of air. Never before had anything tasted as good as
that first breath after I was choking. I felt so alive.

And so ready to kick some ass.

“Okay Holly, if you want to play
rough--”

He couldn’t finish because I
gave him a wicked elbow to the side of the head. He went flying across the
room, and my Kindle clattered across the floor. It came to a stop in the far
corner. I ran to it and picked it up. Then I grabbed the car keys off the
nightstand. As I made my beeline for the door, Christoph got up and put himself
in my way.

“You’re not leaving Holly,” he
said. “I won’t let you go.”

“You can’t stop me,” I said.
“I’ve been trained by Dolph McDougal himself.”

“Dolph McDougal?”

“That’s right,” I said. “It was
a free download. Basic Principles of Self Defense.”

“Oh Holly, let’s stop this
silliness shall--”

Boom!

That was the sound of my first
stretching out and punching
through
my opponent, just like Dolph had taught me. Christoph fell back in a heap, then
staggered away from the door, crashing into the table. With the Kindle under my
arm and the car keys in my hand, I ran out of the hotel room. Wearing panties
and an Alex English jersey, I left the Marriott in Max Brody’s Ford Explorer.

“Hang in there, Max,” I said as
I drove off the lot, the Kindle in the passenger seat. “I’ll find a way to get
you out.”

Chapter 23

I drove the Explorer away from
the hotel for twenty minutes, with no idea where I was headed or what I was
going to do. Should I go back to Albuquerque? Should I go and find Vivian?

The problem was that she was so
far away. And what was I going to do when I got there? She wouldn’t know how to
get Max back any more than I did.

No, the answer to this was
inside the Kindle. This was a magical problem. It needed a magical solution.
Maybe I could get help from one of the wizards in the book. I could hit up
Harry Potter or Gandalf, or I could get a magical object, like the Amulet of
Angoroth from
Mane of the Werewolf
.

I pulled into a subdivision on
the east edge of town, with giant houses set far back from wide roads. I parked
on an empty street lined with elm trees. Taking care to ensure the doors were
locked, I grabbed the Kindle and rested it on the steering wheel in front of
me.

I turned it on and brought up
the carousel of books. Flipping through the titles, I realized just how
dangerous this device was. What if Max had switched bodies with some super
villain intent on taking over the earth? What if that was still going to
happen? Who was to say if Christoph came out that other characters couldn’t
come out too?

And was I risking further mayhem
every time I went inside? What if some other magician was there waiting to
switch bodies with me?

No time to think about all that.
Max was trapped in there and I had to get him out. I had created this mess. It
was my job to fix it. I scrolled through the titles looking for the best one to
try, and wondering what I would find when I got there. If Voldemort and Yoda
were hanging out in the
His Golden
Shackles
universe, who was in their stories? Might I go into LOTR looking
for Gandalf only to find that he had left the novel to go check out a different
universe?

Twilight, Vampire Academy, 50 Shades, The Hunger Games, The Maze
Runner, Divergent, The Help, Life of Pi
, a hundred murder mysteries, a
hundred more paranormal romances. Who knew what I would find in any of them?
Who knew what dangers were lurking inside?

And then I landed on a title
that gave me pause. It was a book that had been on the Kindle since Day One,
but I had never read it. It was buried away in the books section, never to find
placement on the carousel because I never opened it. It was the one title I had
never considered opening up and reading after the Kindle became magic, but now
it was the only title that seemed to make sense. If there was a solution to
this problem, maybe it was here.

About Your Kindle
. The first book that came pre-loaded on the
Kindle when I bought it. What was going on in there?

I opened up
About Your Kindle
and began reading.

Congratulations on your purchase of the Kindle Fire, the ultimate….

And then I was inside, and a
slim man with a bald head and a goofy grin was speaking to me.

“…the ultimate in books, videos,
games, and much, much more,” he said.

He wore a black jacket and a
blue dress shirt, and waved his arms as he spoke. He reminded me of the
ringmaster at a circus.

Behind him stood a big,
beautiful library, with shelves that stretched high into the sky as far as I
could see in all directions. It was a vast space, begging to be explored. As I
looked on, the bald man continued talking as if I was one member of a large
audience before him.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”

He looked at me with a gleam in
his eye.

“You are at the intersection of
computers and whatever they can revolutionize,” he said. “Welcome to the user’s
guide for
your
Kindle Fire!”

“Um…okay. Can you help me? I
need to know why my friend is trapped in here, and how I can get him out.”

“Why is a good question,” the
man said, stepping closer. “But an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’”

“Who are you?” I said.

He dropped his hands to his side
and a serious look came over his face.

 
“Bezos,” he said. “Jeff Bezos.”

I laughed. “Of course,” I said.
“Well, Jeff Bezos, I have some questions for you.”

“I have lots of questions too,”
said Jeff. “Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will
you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? Will you guard
your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will
you..”

“Jeff--”

“…Will you bluff it out when
you’re wrong, or will you apologize?”

I got the feeling he wasn’t
going to stop anytime soon.

“Will you wilt under criticism,
or will you follow your convictions?”

“Jeff.”

“Will you choose a life of ease,
or a life of service and adventure?”

“Jeff Bezos will you listen to
me!”

He stopped talking, and looked
at me like a curious little puppy.

“Have I made you grumpy?” he
said.

“No, I--”

“Because I get grumpy now when I
have to read a physical book. It’s had a great 500-year run, but it’s time to
change.”

“Okay. Sure. I just want to get
my friend out. He’s trapped in here. Can you help me?”

Silence. I was waiting for the
next bit of weirdness to come out of his mouth. But then he said, “Yes, I can
help you.”

Chapter 24

“What’s the story with this
Kindle?” I asked.

“Ah…the story,” said Jeff Bezos.
“There is always a story.”

He went up to one of the
bookcases on the wall and pulled on the spine of a copy of
Moby Dick
. The wall swung open, revealing a long hallway on the
other side.

“Come with me please,” he said.

I followed him into the hall,
which was dark save the brightly colored circuitry flowing through the walls.
We walked to the end of the hall, turned down another, and came to an elevator,
where Jeff pushed the down button.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To a place where you will
arrive,” Jeff said.

The elevator doors opened and we
stepped inside. On the wall was a panel with a hundred or more buttons, each of
them marked with tiny letters. Looking in close I saw that they read,
Central Processor, System Bus, Apps, Docs,
Video, USB, Memory Block,
and much more. Jeff pushed the button marked
Gateway
and the elevator started going
down.

“Your Kindle Fire had an
unscheduled supernatural upgrade,” said Jeff. “The primary changes were in the
Gateway.”

A bell chimed as the elevator
came to a stop. The doors opened.

“Welcome,” Jeff said. “Behold
the Gateway to the Kindle Fire.”

You could practically hear the
glorious music playing as we stepped into the large atrium with the bright,
almost endless, picture window in front of us. It was like standing inside a
giant cathedral where one wall was made of a single, mountainous pane of glass.

And where a terrifying giant
peeked in from outside.

I jumped in surprise at the face
outside the glass. At least ten stories tall, the face I was looking at towered
over us, its chin looming above my head, its mouth above that, its lips…

“Oh my God, that’s me, isn’t
it?” I said.

“She looks a little bigger than
you,” said Jeff.

Completely unfazed by the giant Holly
face on the other side of the glass, Jeff led me across the atrium. Putting
aside nightmare visions of giant me swallowing up little me with a hearty
FeeFieFoeFum
, I followed Jeff to the
center of the floor, where a brilliant white light shone from a hole in the
ground. On the floor surrounding the hole was the word
Bezoface
.