by Adam Cesare
He worked at the Arby’s near Milton, but at night, on his way home, the only fast food he wanted was Micky-D’s.
The power outage ten minutes ago had been frustrating, but now he was on such an epic run that he didn’t care. Between level transitions he craned his head to see if Boden was around, he’d want to see this. Hank hadn’t missed a single point and, although it may have been premature, thought this might turn out to be a historic enough run to make it onto Boden’s website.
The spinners on the machine had always played loose, not as responsive as they had been in 1983 when the game had been released. Today they seemed snugger, rejuvenated. Either Dan had ordered replacement parts or Hank was just in-tune with the spirit tonight.
He was sweating, his fingers slipping on the hard plastic Frisbees that controlled the machine, but not even that messed him up.
“Hey Yosef,” he yelled.
“Yeah,” Yosef replied. The chubby dude was still chipping away at Centipede. Hank had once tried to tell him that the record was unattainable, unbeatable scores had already been reached and Yosef wasn’t going to be one of them, but he didn’t want to hear it. Hank’s friend lacked the discipline to do well, he was good but he wanted to dance his way through every game by the seat of his pants. You couldn’t play a game like Centipede by feeling alone: it was all about studying the patterns, memorization and strategy. Yosef had a habit of splitting the Centipede too early, impatient with waiting for it to descend.
“Is it hot in here, or is it just me?” Hank used a finger to clear the fog off of his glasses.
“The lights are off, maybe the A/C is, too.” Yosef said.
Hank looked up, for the first time noticing that they were standing in the dark. Down the aisles, screens and marquees were the only light. Hank had always imagined that this was what the arcade looked like when it was closed, the lights off but the machines kept on. He knew that this was wrong, though, the machines were unplugged every night not only to save energy but to preserve the integrity of the tubes.
He looked back at the screen just in time to see himself struck with a disc. Shit, derezzed.
“Well, there goes that,” Hank said to himself. Once he’d lost momentum like that, there was no regaining it. It was his fatal flaw as a gamer, once he slipped he never regained enough composure to keep going.
“What?” Yosef asked, his voice twisting the knife of defeat.
“Nothing. Play your fucking game.” Hank tightened his grip on the discs. He never took losing well, but he’d been raised right and would never yell out profanity in an arcade, within earshot of families. That was a slip he hadn’t made since he was a kid.
There’s no one around to hear, anyway. Say what you really feel. The voice startled Hank, because it was not Yosef’s. He jumped back, taking his hands off the machine. He’d heard it inside his head, but it was not his own voice.
There was a metal clang and then the sound of panicked voices echoing up the stairwell that led downstairs. The volume of the music seemed to swell in response, strains of “Heart of Glass” drowning out the screams.
He put his hands back on the disc, frightened now and looking to the game for comfort.
“What the hell is going on?” Yosef said, standing behind Hank now. He’d abandoned his own game, probably a lost cause anyway, as Hank had always suspected all of his runs at Centipede were.
“I…don’t…” Hank had no idea, so his words were placeholders until Yosef spoke again. Hank stared into Yosef’s hairy face. There was wiry black fur all the places on his face but where it was supposed to be. Yosef could only grow a patchy, stringy beard, but the hair joining his eyebrows was plentiful. He didn’t shave high enough on his cheeks, so there was a spot of hair between his eyes and his sideburns. Hank himself would never be Johnny Depp, but his friend was punishingly ugly.
“We should go check it out, it sounds like someone’s hurt.” Yosef said, having to yell over the music now. The track had cut over to a new song, not allowing Blondie to finish and the guitar of “Personal Jesus” starting up. Yosef’s lone eyebrow fixed itself high in an expression of concern as the sounds from downstairs were drowned out.
Hank looked back at the screen, watched himself lose another life, his last. Game over. There was a static spark as his fingertip grazed one of the screws connecting the control panel to the rest of the cabinet.
There was an audible zap, but, upon thinking about it, what Hank had heard was a single word. Kill.
“Are you all right?” Yosef asked. They’d been friends for over twenty years, but right now Hank couldn’t think why. Yosef was a loser. He didn’t even have a job. He cashed disability checks for his tokens and took care of his sick mother during the day.
Pathetic. That was a word that Hank never used, because if he thought about it for any length of time, the word hit too close to home.
Yosef was still staring at him with that dumb look on his fuzzy face when Hank tossed a fist, wide and untrained, at his ear. Hank had never thrown a punch before in his life, so perhaps it was beginner’s luck. Either that or Yosef had a glass jaw, because the bigger man dropped, his elbow smashing into the floor and the thin carpet doing very little to break his fall.
“What are you doing?” Yosef asked, so shocked at the idea of his friend hitting him that he was still not roused to fight-or-flight mode. That was a big mistake on his part, Hank grabbed a fistful of his beard with one hand, a mound of scalp with the other.
Why am I doing this? He asked. It was a good question, but not one that made him stop.
The clasps of Yosef’s suspenders snagged on the carpet as Hank dragged the man along the floor, down the aisle to the Centipede cabinet.
Yosef’s t-shirt was pulled up around his neck, his back must have been an excruciating mound of rug-burn.
The prone man’s eyes went wild. He lashed out with an arm. Yosef had at least thirty pounds on Hank, but the lighter man still had the advantage. The disability checks hadn’t been fraud: Yosef suffered from acute asthma.
“No,” Yosef screamed between wheezes. It sounded like it was becoming hard to get enough air, Yosef’s face was purple.
Yosef’s nose buckled and spurt as Hank kicked him in the face.
Hank’s New Balance sneakers were comfortable because they offered support for his high arches, but right now he wished he had a pair of steel-toed boots on so he could more effectively cave Yosef’s head in.
“Why?” his friend asked again, some of his teeth broken or chipped from the sound of it.
It was time to end this, Hank knew. No reason for cruelty. He helped Yosef to his feet.
Yosef was shaky, his knees wobbled and he listed to one side. Hank offered him an arm and he took it.
Why, given what had transpired over the last two minutes, would he take his arm?
Hank drew him close and then hit him in the throat with the blade of his hand. Yosef made a choking sound, his eyes popping open like a cartoon character. They were facing the Centipede cabinet now and Yosef seemed to recognize it, even in his dazed state.
“Here,” Hank said, unsure whether he was about to continue speaking or not. He reapplied his grip to Yosef’s long, greasy hair. It was tougher to get a hold of now with all the sweat and blood.
Hank brought his face down into the Plexiglas of the screen. Yosef’s broken teeth and cheekbones didn’t leave a scratch on the screen, instead his beard had soaked up enough blood that it formed a giant splotch.
Yosef had finally left his mark on Centipede.
Hank looked down at the play-area. Centipede was controlled using a trackball, that wouldn’t do for what he had in mind. Turning Yosef around, Hank pointed him toward Tapper and flung him away. The barely conscious man’s momentum sent him sailing, a WWF wrestler into a turnbuckle.
There was no more fight left in either of them now. Hank had resigned himself that the violence he was now inflicting on his friend, and the hate that caused it was now a part of him.
Yosef had given up on everything but breathing, his intake of air a strained whistle, trying to suck oxygen through a cocktail straw.
Hank put one of the game’s joysticks through Yosef’s eye, burying it in his brain, then kicked the taller man’s feet out from under him and left him hanging there, his skull bolted in place.
When it was done Hank took out his handkerchief and pocket knife.
He’d received the knife in the boy scouts, back when he used to see the outdoor world every once in a while. The handkerchief had belonged to his grandfather and he now used it to clean Yosef’s blood off his glasses. Once he could see again, he took a look at his handiwork, folded the cloth up into a square and stuffed it back into his pocket. Then he sat with his back against the Centipede machine and sawed back and forth with the knife, opening his own throat.
CHAPTER 10
Kate had missed seeing the gate fall and sever Mr. Harmon’s hands from his body, she’d been too busy texting her friend Donna.
HOLLY SHIT! SOME1 DEAD AT THE CAVE!!
When she looked back up, the gate was down and the group gathered there was scrambling to lift it. Dan was propping the glass doors open so they didn’t have to hold them back to access the gate. The three boys had their bodies pressed against the metal partition, their fingers trying to find purchase on the smooth gate.
“It’s locked in place,” Jason Day screamed at Dan. “Do something!” Was that blood smeared across his white t-shirt?
Kate decided that it was time to leave the food counter and go help, or at least investigate so she could tell everyone what had happened: the cops, her friends, the news crew.
Crossing the arcade floor, she could smell barbeque. She worked at the lunch counter and knew that they didn’t serve anything close to barbeque. Upon seeing Chris Murphy’s burnt body, its legs crushed completely flat under the security gate, Kate felt both disgust and abject sadness. She should have been nicer to the kid. Her little brother went to school with him. She’d known his name ever since she’d started working at Funcave.
It was too late now.
Alongside the stumps of Chris’s legs were a pair of hands, bleached white by blood loss. Her eyes ticked over, checking that Chris still had both his hands.
“Whose hands are those?” she said, her voice squeaky and the corners of her eyes burning with tears. The group turned to look at her, the same expression of confusion on all of their faces. They were trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, just like she was, even if she was a little later to the party than they were.
“Go get some towels or something,” Cal Elliot said. Cal used to tell his friends that he hooked up with her one day after work, when Kate found out about the rumor she’d poured a jug of used fryer oil through the cracked window of his El Camino, ruining the front seat.
“Towels to do what? Chris is gone,” she said.
“No, for the hands. We have to stop the blood or Mr. Harmon’s going to die.”
As if in answer, there was a groan from the other side of the gate. She looked at the hands again, noted the school ring wrapped around one pinky and the hair on the knuckles. They did belong to Eddie Harmon.
Kate raced off to grab some rags from the kitchen supply closet. There was a moment where she debated settling for a handful of napkins, but walking the extra few steps for the rags seemed like the right thing to do. Despite growing up telling everyone that she wanted to become a veterinarian when she was older, she didn’t have any medical training. With or without the expertise, she could tell that Mr. Harmon had lost a lot of blood. Too much.
When she returned there was even more blood than she was expecting. The Asian girl, Tiffany, was kneeling and talking under the gate to Mr. Harmon.
“Hold on,” she said under the door. Kate admired her, her bedside manner. “We’re going to get this off you and the ambulance is already on its way.”
Tiffany raised her head up and motioned to Kate. There was a speck of blood on her cheek from where she pushed it to the ground, the dark spot stood out on her white skin.
“Quick, give me those.” The girl took the rags and spread them over Mr. Harmon’s hands, then wedged the remainder under the door, like she was trying to lay down a towel to block a draft on a winter’s night. The hands were unnaturally white, the consistency of wax candles. Kate should have brought ice, in case they needed to be reattached.
“Everyone listen,” Dan said, he was trying to yell, but couldn’t, it seemed to take him great effort to speak intelligibly under the best of circumstances. The three boys stopped struggling with the gate and listened. “The control panel is back in the office. One of you needs to run there, and use this key to try and raise the gate.”
“I’ll do it,” Jason said. There was another person with leadership skills that made Kate feel ashamed for not helping sooner. If Mr. Harmon died, pausing to send that text would haunt her for the rest of her life.
“I’ll follow you, but I won’t be quick,” Dan said, motioning at the right side of his body with his left hand. “There’s a blinking red light on top and a keyhole that says ‘open’ on one side and ‘closed’ on the other. Turn it toward open.”
“I figured,” Jason said, then sprinted toward the back of the arcade.
As her eyes followed him, Kate realized that the metal partition between the arcade floor and the bowling alley had been lowered too.
“Are we trapped in here?” she asked aloud, but no one paid any attention to her, they were too excited by the gate opening. It was just an inch, but progress was progress.
“I’ve got it,” Cal said, the veins of his arms popping as he fought against the gate. David rushed to help him, both of them getting their fingers to fit under the lip of the gate for the first time.
A moment later the whole room glowed blue and darkness descended upon them.
CHAPTER 11
Everything had gone so far, so fast.
Death. Death by the truckload. Uncontrollable, unexplainable, but all of it Robby’s fault. Chris had poisoned him, turned his own network against him.
No, that wasn’t it—he wasn’t entirely blameless in the massacre. There was no Chris anymore, just like there hadn’t really been a Robby Asaro since he’d taken a trip through the pizza oven in eighty-nine. There were just feelings and electricity, and now those feelings were predominately hate, pain and confusion.
He wished he could dissipate into nothing and take the memory of Chris Murphy with him. An object in motion would remain in motion, though. And besides, he felt so damn weak.
The hate dispersed throughout the arcade while Robby wasn’t looking. Some of it had jumped into Hank McKenzie before anything could be done to stop it. Now the two most stalwart patrons of the arcade were dead, one with his blood and brains dashed all over Tapper and the other with his neck sawed in half by his own hand.
What he’d been trying to do with the gates was contain the situation, lock Chris Murphy’s body out so matters didn’t get any worse, but even that had backfired with deadly consequences. Breaking the gate hadn’t been an accident, but he also didn’t think that the results would be so bloody. At least, he thought that was true. It was impossible to be sure where the murderer ended and began, everything was so confusing right now.
Robby watched as Dan handed over the keys to Jason. They weren’t calm, but they were taking action.
All of them, from Cal with his baggy shorts to Kate with her spray tan, had put aside their differences and were banding together to help. Robby was rooting for them, wanted to do something to help.
He spun the motor in the gate, thinking for a moment that he might be able to catch the latch and raise it back up, but he was only able to lift it less than an inch before it spun, nothing to hold on to.
The little victory had heartened the would-be rescuers, Cal and David got their fingers under the gate for a final push.
Please, Robby pleaded, he moved away from the motor to observe them from a better angle, hopi
ng that in a few seconds he would watch them hold the gate triumphantly above their heads while everyone in the arcade scrambled out to the safety of the parking lot. This place is damned, escape while you can.
The lightning rippled across the beveled metal gate like blue spider webs.
Cal had placed one hand under the lip of the gate and the other hand flat against its side, so he was able to disentangle himself from the full force of the blast. David had squatted with both hands under, trying to pry the gate up the way an Olympic weightlifter would approach a dumbbell.
Cal shot back from the gate, the skin of his palms staying on the metal, blackening at crackling, all five fingers still distinguishable as the lightning dissipated.
Conversely, David was anchored in place by how low to the ground he was when the current had begun to flow. His knees pressed up into his chest, David was a ball of spasms. The muscles of his legs alternatively locked and loosened as the bolt traveled up and down the face of the door.
After a few seconds that seemed to drag on like minutes, the brilliance of the blue lightning faded and the room was plunged into darkness.
Robby, former king of the arcade, had now lost all control, the pain of Chris Murphy was now able to travel wherever and do whatever it wanted.
After a minute of darkness, the only sound Cal’s insensible cries of anguish and the breathless sobs of Dan, Tiffany, and Kate, the room was lit again by a soft orange glow.
David’s shirt had quit smoking and burst into flames.
CHAPTER 12
As early as this morning, Dan looked forward to the sound of all of the games jumping to life. It was part of his daily ritual, throwing the circuit breakers located in the office and listening as the games, ten at a time, began to chirp their start-up music.
Now there was something unholy about the din. The girls used their sweatshirts to beat against the flames that had sprung up on David’s back as all of the games rebooted themselves at once.