Demon Zero

by Randall Pine

  “What does her energy normally feel like?” Simon asked.

  Llewyn scratched his cheek. “Like milled cedar,” he decided.

  Simon considered this. “Huh,” he said.

  Llewyn knocked his hand against the roof of the car. “The fact that I can’t reach her is…troubling. Find her.”

  “We will,” Simon said, turning the keys in the ignition.

  “Good.” The wizard straightened up and stepped back toward the drainage ditch. “An energy shift that drastic…I don’t know what it means, but I don’t think it can be good.”

  Chapter 22

  They stood inside the entrance to Squeezy Cheez and let their eyes adjust to the darkness. “I know I say this a lot,” Simon said, looking around at all the children and the flashing lights, “but why do we keep coming here?”

  “’Cause it’s got the best animatronic band in town,” Virgil answered, nodding toward the back room, where the huge, jerky robots were whirring to life. They were old, those robots, probably wrenched together sometime in the early 80s, but they somehow never seemed to look any worse from one year to the next. They certainly didn’t look good; they were rusty, and their paint was flaking off, and sometimes their motors jerked their limbs too hard, and the robots would rock dangerously on their moorings. But in the ten years since Simon and Virgil had starting coming to Squeezy Cheez, the robots hadn’t changed a bit.

  They were oversized, anthropomorphic animals, most of them. Squeezy Cheez himself was a dog that looked like a cheap Goofy knock-off, with his floppy black ears and his long, pale snout. Suzie Kablooie was a female sheep with a long blonde ponytail. Her face was covered with splotches of pizza sauce, and her fur was blown backward, like she had just witnessed a terrible pizza-pie explosion. She played the electric guitar. Phony Pepperoni was the antagonist of the group; he was a duck with a pencil-thin mustache stuck to the end of his beak. He wore a boxy, pinstriped gangster suit, and there was a poorly-tilted fedora perched on his head, and he held a plastic saxophone in his hands. Pippa Pepper, the keyboard player, was a raccoon with green fur around her eyes instead of the traditional black, and the final member of the band, Crust Man, was, inexplicably, a huge piece of lightly-chewed pizza crust that had sprouted arms and legs.

  “They really phoned in Crust Man,” Virgil observed aloud, for maybe the thousandth time.

  “I don’t think they put a whole lot of thought into any of them,” Simon said. Then he shivered.

  The animatronics had always given him the creeps.

  The game room was quiet, which wasn’t surprising for dinnertime on a weeknight. Most of the families were gathered in the back room, sitting at the long community tables and watching the Squeezy Cheez band with reactions ranging from exquisite delight to absolute fear.

  A few stragglers had gathered near the new race car videogame, and some scrawny kid with Coke-bottle glasses was hitting every single basket on the Pop-A-Shot, but otherwise, they had the game room to themselves.

  “There’s Abby,” Virgil said, lifting his chin toward the line of pinball games. Abby was bent over the glass of the Ninja Frogs machine, wiping the glass with an old, mottled rag.

  They crossed the room, Simon’s heart swelling a bit as they got closer. He was all the way gone where Abby was concerned. There wasn’t much use denying it.

  He had a crush.

  “Hey, Abby,” he said as they approached.

  She didn’t look up. She just kept wiping the glass.

  “Now that is some serious dedication to grade school gunk,” Virgil teased, watching her scrub at some sticky residue left behind by one of the children from the day.

  Still, Abby didn’t respond. She kept her head down and worked the rag over the glass.

  Simon frowned. “Abby?” he asked. He stepped up to the other side of the pinball machine and placed his hands on the edge. He leaned down, trying to see her eyes. “Abby?”

  She didn’t look up. She just cleaned the glass.

  “Hey! Abs!” Virgil clapped his hands to try to get her attention. She didn’t even flinch. Instead, she finished with the spot of residue, picked up her rag, picked up the spray bottle of cleaner, and moved on to the next pinball machine.

  Simon and Virgil exchanged confused looks.

  “Energy like straw,” Virgil said.

  “It’s definitely not blueberry,” Simon replied.

  They hurried over to the next pinball machine, and Virgil waved his hand in front of Abby’s downturned eyes. “Hello? Abby?”

  She didn’t register them. She just sprayed the cleaning solution and started to wipe at the glass.

  “Abby…” Simon said, reaching out and touching her shoulder. She flinched then, and pulled back, turning away from the pinball machine. She raised the spray bottle and squirted a mist of vinegar and water into Simon’s eyes.

  “Owww!” he cried, stumbling backward blindly and throwing his hands over his eyes. His whole face burned, and tears immediately sprang up in his eyes, flushing out the vinegar. “What is that about?” he cried, keeping his eyes shut.

  He felt Virgil’s hand on his arm. “Come on,” Virgil murmured, pulling him away. “Let’s go talk over there. This is all wrong.”

  “Oh, you think?!” Simon demanded, scrubbing at his eyes. He blinked them open, and the flashing arcade lights felt like powerful lasers against his vision. He closed his eyes again. “What did she do that for?”

  “Something is seriously wrong here,” Virgil said, leading him back toward the front counter.

  “No kidding,” Simon snapped. The burn in his eyes was subsiding. He opened them again, and the world came into a watery focus. “What do you think is going on?” he asked.

  Virgil shrugged. “No idea. It’s almost like she’s under some sort of spell.”

  Simon started. “What if she is under some kind of spell?”

  “Yeah, but…how? I mean, unless some dark magic got into her apartment last night. You and I were with her until late, and we all left Mrs. Grunberg’s house at the same time. She’s working a double today, right? So she’s been here since they opened at ten. That’s not a huge window for the Forces of Evil to work their magic on her brain.” He looked back over at Abby, who had moved on to a third pinball machine. “Still…I mean, I totally understand being put off by your advances, but cleaning spray to the eyes is a little harsh.”

  “But that’s just it; she’s not put off by my…” He stopped himself, then waved his hands through the air. “Not advances...I’m not making advances. I’m not a creeper.”

  “Says you,” Virgil said.

  “Shut up. They’re not advances. But, like…she touched my arm last night when we said goodbye. And I know,” he said quickly, because Virgil had opened his mouth to speak, “I know that’s not, like, a declaration of love or anything, but it’s also definitely not a ‘don’t ever touch me or I’ll spray vinegar in your eyes’ kind of move, either.”

  Virgil rubbed his chin. “Hm. Yeah. That’s true.”

  “Do you think this is Asag?” Simon asked, looking over Virgil’s shoulder and watching Abby carefully. “Or something else?”

  “I don’t know,” Virgil admitted, turning to follow Simon’s gaze. “We know there’s a lot of weird stuff that happens in Templar. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was something that didn’t have anything to do with Asag.”

  “Neither would I.” Simon frowned as he watched Abby finish with the pinball machines and walk over toward the Whac-A-Mole game. She moved with a strange stiffness; her spine was completely straight, and her arms and legs moved as if they were on pistons. “Still…something about this feels…related.”

  “Yeah,” Virgil sighed. “Yeah, it does.”

  Abby mindlessly scrubbed at the surface of the Whac-A-Mole, spraying the cleaner and wiping it away with a completely blank exp
ression on her face.

  “So what do we do?” Virgil asked.

  Simon shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  In the next room, the animatronic Squeezy Cheez band finished up their set. The robots bowed clumsily at the waist, all of them ratcheting down too hard, and too fast, and bobbing precariously at the bottoms of their bows. Then they reared back up, blinked their eyes, and moved along their tracks, crossing back to the rear end of the stage. The shiny purple curtain pulled itself closed across the back of the stage, hiding all of the robots. As it passed them, Squeezy Cheez gave his usual final goodbye: “Thank you, everybody! You guys are on fire!”

  The lighting in the dining area changed, becoming brighter for the patrons. They began to chatter to each other, and Simon turned to Virgil, blocking them out of his mind. “Am I wrong to think this might call for something drastic?” he asked.

  Virgil eyed him suspiciously. “I guess I would say that depends on how drastic you’re talking.”

  “Pretty drastic,” Simon replied. “Call me crazy, but the Squeezy Cheez band just gave me an idea.”

  “If the Squeezy Cheez band gave you an idea, then you are crazy,” Virgil pointed out.

  Simon strode over to the unmanned game room counter, and he pushed his way through the swinging door marked “Employees Only.”

  “Simon!” Virgil gasped. “That’s against the rules!”

  Simon ignored him. He crossed behind the counter until he found the trash can near the register. He picked it up and set it on the counter. It was filled with paper receipts and candy wrappers, mostly. Then Simon turned to the wire shelves on the wall behind him, the ones that held all the prizes people exchanged their tickets for. One of the bins was filled with cheap metal lighters. Simon pulled one out, flicked it open, and struck his thumb against the wheel. A flame instantly sparked to life, waving like a serpent caught in some flute-player’s spell.

  “Are you about to do what I think you’re about to do?” Virgil asked, his eyes wide.

  “It’s totally safe,” Simon protested. “Trash cans are, like, made for this.”

  He lowered the flame down into the trash can. The papers caught almost instantly, springing to life in a flickering fire.

  “Fire!” the kid playing Pop-A-Shot cried, pointing at the trash can and shrieking. “Fire!”

  The call was picked up instantly by the parents in the second room, and they all sprang into action, gathering up their children and pulling them toward the exit. They all ran toward the door, and one of the mothers pulled the fire alarm handle on her way out. A siren immediately began to blare, and fire sprinklers popped down from the ceiling, showering the entire establishment. Soon, the only people who were left inside Squeezy Cheez were Simon, Virgil, and Abby.

  The fire in the trash can began to flicker out, its flames dying against the downpour of water.

  “Oh,” Virgil said, spitting water off of his lips. “That’s what you meant by ‘drastic.’”

  “And it was drastic, as promised,” Simon replied, not taking his eyes off of Abby. He nodded in her direction. “But look.”

  Virgil turned his head to get a better view. Abby was still bent over the Whac-A-Mole game, running her rag over the increasingly wet surface. Her hair hung down over her eyes in wet, purple tendrils, and her glasses were too splattered with water for her to see through.

  “Okay, this is too weird,” Virgil decided. He pushed the water back off of his own hair. “She’s like a robot.” His eyes grew wide. “Oh man...do you think Abby’s actually a robot?”

  Simon shook his head. “No way. If she were a robot, she’d short-circuit in the water.”

  “Oh,” Virgil said. “True.”

  Simon moved out from behind the counter and walked cautiously toward Abby. “One more thing to try,” he said.

  “What?” Virgil asked, coming up close behind him.

  “She’s a strong empath, right? She feels other people’s memories with skin-to-skin contact. So if I touch her, that should give her something to react to.”

  “But she’s wearing her gloves,” Virgil noted. “They cover her arms up to her sleeves.”

  “Then I’ll touch her ear,” Simon replied, growing frustrated.

  “Dude. You don’t go around touching other people’s ears. That’s weird.”

  “Is it less weird to touch her face?” Simon demanded.

  Virgil thought about that. “Well, yeah, kind of,” he decided.

  “Virgil. I’m going to touch her in an appropriate place for a very short amount of time and see if she responds, or if she’s under some sort of numbing spell or something. Okay?”

  “She did react pretty strongly when she touched you bare-handed the other day,” Virgil recalled. He nodded. “Okay. Do it.”

  “I’m going to do it, that’s why I told you that’s what I’m doing,” Simon pointed out. “Stop trying to steal credit for my ideas.”

  He crept up closer. Abby didn’t notice them; she just kept cleaning the Whac-A-Mole machine. The sleeves of her denim jacket were pushed up around her elbows, her arms bare from her forearm down to her fingertips. Simon walked up behind her, took a deep breath, reached out, and touched her ear.

  Nothing happened. Abby didn’t so much as flinch.

  “All right, enough of this,” Virgil said. He strode up and clapped his hands right in front of her eyes. Abby didn’t even look up. Virgil shook out his arms, then he closed his eyes. He stretched out his hands. He focused on the energy magic in his gut, and he pushed it out through his arms. His fingertips glowed with orange light.

  “What’re you doing?” Simon hissed, giving Virgil a shove. “You can’t magic-shoot her!”

  “I have to magic-shoot her, look at her, Simon, she’s a total automaton!”

  “She’s still a person, Virgil, you’ll kill her! You don’t have a manacle to control it! And even with the manacle, you’re a terrible shot!”

  “Well I don’t see as how we have any choice! She doesn’t respond to movement, or sound, or to empathy! We have to snap her out of it!”

  “This isn’t going to snap her out of it,” Simon cried, snatching up one of Virgil’s glowing hands, “it’s going to melt her!”

  “It’s not going to melt her, don’t be so dramatic! We just need to give her a little fire-jolt jumpstart. Haven’t you ever seen Temple of Doom?”

  “Of course I’ve seen Temple of Doom, how is this anything like that?” Simon demanded.

  “Indy gets taken over by the evil cannibal spirit, and Short Round has to bring him back to himself. It is just like this!”

  Simon rubbed his chin. “You are so stupid,” he said, shaking his head. Then he thought about it for a second. “But yeah, I guess that is sort of like this…”

  “Exactly.” Virgil crossed his arms in triumph. “And how did Short Round bring Indy out of it?”

  Simon sighed. “He set him on fire with a torch.”

  “He set him on fire with a torch. Exactly.” He uncrossed his arms and held up one hand. It lit up from within, radiating its orange light. “So I’m going to burn Abby, very lightly, and she’s going to wake up, too.”

  Simon bit his bottom lip nervously. He looked at Abby. “Fine,” he sighed, putting up his hands and stepping back. “But I swear, if you do any permanent damage…”

  “I’m not going to do any permanent damage, I’m a professional.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Virgil stepped around the Whac-A-Mole machine, his hands glowing with bright magic. Abby reached out for the spray bottle, and as she did, Virgil reached down toward her fingers. The light from his hands seemed to extend from his skin, reaching toward Abby’s hand.

  Suddenly, Abby looked up. She seemed to register Virgil for the first time. She snatched her hand back, as if she had been close to touching a flame. S
he glared at Virgil, her eyes burning with anger, and she reached out toward him. Virgil was startled, and he stumbled backward, out of harm’s way, but as Abby stretched forward, her arms seemed to unravel from her shoulders, and like an unspooling thread, they swirled and became thinner and thinner, and longer and longer, reaching for him. Virgil cried out as he backed into the Pop-A-Shot. With his back against the game cabinet, he tried to dart to his left, but Abby’s long, tangled arm slammed up against the cabinet just past his shoulder. Virgil stopped, then tried to spin around the other way, but Abby’s other hand burst past him on that side, too. He was trapped.

  Simon gaped at the sight before him. Virgil was pinned into place against the Pop-A-Shot by Abby’s outstretched arms, even though Abby herself was still standing behind the Whac-A-Mole game, at least ten feet away from Virgil. Her arms hung loosely from her shoulders like Slinkys, drooping down in the middle and inclining back up to meet her hands. The sleeves of her denim jacket only stretched so far; they had started at her elbows, but now they only covered the upper parts of her biceps. The rest of her arms, stretched out to seven or eight times their normal lengths, were thin and fraying, like threads.

  Simon’s jaw fell open. He blinked hard. But when he opened his eyes, the scene before him hadn’t changed. “Abby?” he said.

  She turned her head. Her eyes were full of fury, and her cheeks were red with anger. The skin over her cheekbones began to peel back, bursting like blisters, as if her whole skin was stretched so thin that it was breaking away in other places. “Discedite,” she hissed in a language that didn’t sound like English, in a voice that didn’t sound like her own. Then her eyes glowed with bright, white light, and she said it again, screaming it this time, so loud that Simon had to clamp his hands over his ears: “DISCEDITE!”

  The windows of Squeezy Cheez exploded at the sound of her screech, and so did the glass from the display counters, and the glass on top of the pinball machine. From every direction, Simon heard the ear-shattering sound of glass popping and breaking. He covered his head with his arms and shrank back, crouching down behind a table, holding in place as the shards of glass fell around him like sleet.