Zero Lives Remaining

by Adam Cesare

  Shrugging through the pain that was eating up his right side, Boden bent down and cradled Cal’s head.

  “I saw it,” Cal said, his eyes bloodshot to the point that there was no longer a speck of white to them. Dan guessed that right now the boy wasn’t seeing much of anything, the electricity had boiled his eyeballs.

  “It’s all right,” Dan said. He glanced over at the pair of hands that used to be attached to Eddie Harmon. The fingertips were black. If Eddie was going to survive having his hands lopped off, he certainly didn’t make it through the blast.

  “It’s so angry,” Cal said, his tongue sounding fat and dead in his mouth, Dan could relate. “It’s everywhere.” Cal shook his head from side to side, seeing something with his ruined eyes that Dan couldn’t.

  Boden shushed him.

  Dan placed a hand on the boy’s chest and beneath the thin undershirt it was hot to the touch. A loaf of white bread fresh from the oven, nearly too warm to hold. Dan didn’t move his hand away, though, he kept it there until the boy’s rapid heartbeat, overexerted with electricity and fear, cooled and went sluggish under his palm.

  The boy died with his eyes open, drool running down his hot chin that evaporated but left a trail of slime behind.

  Though he’d been in the presence of less live ones than an average man his age, Dan Boden had never seen a dead body.

  Maybe he’d spent all those years in front of arcade machines and Excel spreadsheets of high scores because deep down he’d been frightened of when a day like this would come: when the mortality of other humans would be thrust into his face, forcing him to become an active participant in the world around him.

  Not including himself, there were now three other people (that he knew of) in this arcade. All of them in harm’s way. This was the first score he’d ever been faced with that mattered.

  He looked away from Cal’s body and saw that the girls had succeeded in putting out the fire. The air of the arcade carried a smoky haze now, the atmosphere filled with the stink of burning organic and inorganic matter now that the blood had boiled into the carpet.

  One, two, Dan counted, looking to Tiffany and then to Kate. Where’s three? Dan asked, remembering that he’d sent Jason to the office.

  He wouldn’t lose any more of them, couldn’t. He needed to get the boy back with the group and find a way for everyone to make it through this, whatever this was.

  Out in the night, the ambulance arrived, its siren blaring. Even though the gate was an inch above the ground, its material only a thin sheet of metal, help still sounded miles and hours away from those still alive in the arcade.

  CHAPTER 13

  Jason flicked the switch back and forth, but the lights in the office weren’t coming back on.

  He didn’t smoke, but his mom did, so he’d grown used to carrying a Bic lighter. He wished one day he’d have a chance to light someone else’s cigarette, a brunette from a black and white movie asking him for a light, but so far it had only been for his mom.

  Rolling the starter with his thumb, the flame cast enough light in the room that he didn’t knock his shins on anything, but that was about it. Everything was bathed in shadow and gloom and despite himself, he shivered.

  Out on the arcade floor there was a loud crash that caused him to jump, his finger lifted up from the lighter and the office went black again. He froze in place.

  Jason debated whether to run back to the front door to investigate or to continue trying to raise the gate. He had a responsibility to fulfill and time was wasting, flicking the lighter back on, he chose to tend to the gate.

  The first wall panel he came to was the fuse box, although Dan hadn’t told him to mess with it, Jason threw a few of the plastic breakers just to see if he could restore power to the office. Behind him, the laptop computer awoke from sleep mode, resuming a muted porno that had been paused on the desktop, but there was still no overhead light and the pink glow from the screen didn’t add much to see by.

  The gate control was simple and Jason found it quickly. It was like Dan had described: a blinking red LED and a rounded keyhole. Jason inserted the key into the slot, turned it to “open” and nothing happened.

  He strained to listen if he could hear the clatter of the gate. There was silence in the room and muffled shouts from out front. He needed to get back out there and help.

  There was another explosion of sound, this time from the laptop. The audio had clicked back on, the exaggerated sounds of coitus filling the room. Under such dire circumstances, seeing what he’d just seen, the glistening close-ups and wet smacking sounds of the porn turned Jason’s stomach. He overlaid the images of Chris’s crushed, broken legs to the sounds of the woman being entered on-screen. The combination was enough to turn him off porn for the rest of his life. Or at least the end of the week.

  Looking at the computer screen, he could see that there was a window open behind the video that he hadn’t noticed at first-glance. Moving his finger over the mouse, Jason clicked away from the pornography and brought the other window to full screen.

  The window was divided into six separate squares of low-res black and white video feeds, arranged three by two across the screen. They were coming from the security cameras placed around Funcave and they were live. Jason wondered how that could be possible with no power. The laptop could be working off of its battery, but the modem and wireless router were powered off, he could see them stacked on top of the file cabinet next to the desk, their lights dead.

  In one of the windows, Jason could see the first floor of the arcade, his view obscured by the placement of the camera and the darkness. It was clear that something new had gone wrong for the rest of his group, but he couldn’t leave yet without glancing at the rest of the windows. The next four screens were empty, the power blinked back to the video games as he scanned through the images, offering a bit more light to see by.

  On the final screen were two figures. This camera was placed upstairs, looking down over a section of the classic arcade. Jason rarely went up there, he found the emptiness of it kind of spooky, same as he did the old guys who hung out, pumping tokens into machines that were decades old.

  Even with the poor image quality, Jason could tell that the men were dead. Their deaths were no accident, either. Neither of them had been struck by lightning or crushed by falling machinery: they’d been murdered.

  On the monochrome screen, the puddles of blood that had formed under each man were inky black, their bodies motionless save for the occasional flicker of static.

  The metal of the lighter was too hot to hold, so he let the flame die and upped the brightness on the monitor.

  Jason stared at the image for a moment, trying to puzzle out who could have done this to the men. Every slasher movie he’d ever seen flashed before him, masked men dragging knives across throats, plunging joysticks through eyeballs. Had the killer rigged up the door to slam on the owner’s hands? Was it a disgruntled employee out for revenge? The Phantom of Funcave?

  The plot of his own movie unspooled before him like a blood-drenched episode of Scooby-Doo. The list of suspects limited by the people he’d met today that were still alive: Tiffany, Dan and Kate. His imagination only stopped pointing fingers when he realized that he was the only member of the group out on his own, alone. Never a good position to be in.

  He began to turn away from the monitor, but a flicker of movement caught his attention before he could. One of the men was still alive. No, not alive, but moving.

  The guy who’d been pinned to the Tapper machine moved his hand, his limp arm swinging back and forth at the shoulder. There was no way he could be alive, was there? Jason double-clicked, zooming in, making the feed larger but blurrier.

  There was something coming out of the machine, working its way through the crevasses of the coin slot. The man’s arm hadn’t been moving, it was simply being displaced by whatever pale appendage was slithering out of the cabinet.

  The long white worm glowed on the screen,
wrapping around the corpse’s legs, probing his pockets and coursing between his fingers, and all the thoughts that they might be the victims in a slasher movie evaporated from Jason’s head: they were in a fucking monster movie.

  His knuckles on the desk, Jason leaned forward to watch as this, a literal ghost in the machine, do its thing. The tendrils pulsed, looking like long elastic filaments, one moment ready to snap and the next fat slugs of phosphorescent light. There were two snakes now, with a third nosing its way out of the Centipede machine and investigating the gash at the second man’s throat.

  “What the fuck,” Jason said aloud, the sound reminding him of how theatrical everything about this felt. Game over, man. Game over, he thought, the quote from Aliens taking on a new level of meaning in the arcade.

  The tentacles stretching out of Tapper reached the dead guy’s mouth and pushed their way inside, the ghostly white strand darkening with what Jason assumed was blood, feeding on the man like the proboscis of a giant mosquito.

  That’s when Jason felt it, the warm static hum touching the back of his hand. He pushed back from the desk, getting a good look at what had been going on as he stood mesmerized by the computer. Out of the sides of the laptop, oozing through the fan vents, the same appendages that were on-screen had materialized in the room with him. Even without the bloom of the black and white camera, they still emanated a pale green light as they writhed across the desktop, looking for Jason’s hands.

  He tried to imagine what they would have done if they’d gotten a hold of him before he noticed them. The back of his hand tingled from where it’d touched him and he wiped it on the back of his jeans, rubbing until his skin was raw.

  Jason’s frantic motions caught the attention of one of the strands and it rose up, extending itself out of the computer and coiling its base in order to push itself to eye-level with Jason.

  The creature had no eyes, nose or mouth, none that Jason could see, but as he watched, it split itself into three, each tip peeling off of the trunk, the smaller strands becoming fingers on a hand. Jason pushed himself against the filing cabinet. He wanted to push the creature away but was afraid of letting it get a hold on him.

  On the screen the white blob had overtaken the dead man’s face, pushing into his ears and nostrils, dark with his blood. Jason could see himself falling victim to the same fate and looked for something to smack the snake away with.

  The door behind him swung wide without warning, Dan moved faster than Jason had ever seen him, the two big steps he took into the room seeming more like hops. Jason moved out of his way and Dan used his good hand to bring his wrench down, not onto the tentacles themselves, but onto the laptop.

  Jason could see that Dan was wearing heavy canvas gloves, both of which had been clipped to his tool belt alongside the wrench and his tape measure. The first hit caused a cloud of letters to fly up from the keyboard, the second made the screen go dark. With the third, the white arms lost their luminescence and dissolved into opaque puddles, dribbling over the edge of the desk.

  After it was done, the only sound in the room was Dan Boden’s panting, the older man was breathing so hard that he looked about ready to drop into convulsions. There was a satisfied look to him, though, his chest heaving in exertion but the corners of his mouth raised as he studied the busted computer, the melted tentacles.

  “How do we get out of here?” Jason asked. Dan looked worried, the momentary victory of bashing in the computer forgotten.

  “That’s a really good question.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Tiffany looked to Kate, asking “What do we do now?” without actually saying it.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, a motion that should have instinctually brought comfort but instead only smeared the ashes of David’s fire all over her forearms.

  Boden’s only instructions were to not touch anything and to try and warn the ambulance workers to do the same. The mechanic used his teeth to pull the thick glove down over his bad hand. Tiffany would have offered to help, but he was running off to the office before she could.

  “It’s the games.” He’d said, the wisps of his balding hair upturned, making him look even crazier than the things he was yelling. “There’s something in the electronics, or someone’s controlling them. Don’t go near them, don’t even brush up against them. Just wait here while I go get your friend.”

  Their friend? Kate was not her friend, Tiffany had only ever exchanged words with the other girl while ordering curly fries. And Jason Day as the link between them? Tiffany liked Jason just fine, but it wasn’t like they were hanging out every day after school. Something like this, people dead in strange and startling ways, pressed the survivors together, though. Maybe they were all friends now, the one thing they had in common being that they were alive and wanted to stay that way.

  The ambulance rolled up and the only words Tiffany could make out from under the gate were: “holy shit,” followed by the sound of liquid hitting concrete. If the first responders were puking because of what Eddie Harmon looked like, they should get a load of the two-and-three-quarters bodies that were still inside the arcade.

  “Don’t touch the gate!” Tiffany yelled, going to all fours so she could angle her voice out of the gap. Kate followed suit, the girl appeared dazed, but Tiffany could only imagine what her own expression must have looked like.

  “It’s electrified,” Kate added. “Call the fire department and cut the power to the building.”

  That was good, Tiffany hadn’t thought of that. Maybe she and Kate could be friends after all.

  “Is everyone okay in there? Anyone hurt?” The voice sounded young, there was a pubescent crack on the word “hurt” that reminded Tiffany of her performance in the elementary school play. The ambulance worker was on the ground too, his voice close but still too far away to be of any real help.

  Tiffany looked at Kate, they shared a moment, the three corpses around them providing an answer for the boy outside. “We’re locked in here,” Tiffany said. “There’s four of us I think, everyone else is dead.”

  “My partner’s on the radio with NHEC, fire trucks are on their way. Can you tell me your name?” he asked. They did. “If we can get the power switched off it’s going to get very dark in there, you just need to stay calm, can you do that for me, girls?”

  Tiffany looked to Kate, they both must have been thinking variations on the same idea. “Can you believe this asshole?”

  “Yeah, we’re good.” Tiffany responded.

  “Can you describe to me what it looks like in there? Is the power on?”

  “It’s dark, the only light is coming from the games.”

  “Did the lights go out after your friends got hurt?”

  There was that word again, Tiffany wasn’t friends with any of these people, and now never would be. “Yeah, the lights blew out after they were shocked.”

  “That’s good, my partner and I are going to try to pry the shutters open, okay?”

  “Don’t!” Tiffany shouted. “We just told you it’s electrified.”

  “We’re going to be fine, we have gloves and I think that the first shock might have blown the power.”

  Kate spoke up. “I think you should wait.”

  “We want to get you out of there and help who we can as soon as possible, we’ll be okay.”

  There was no more conversation after that, the polished metallic end of the pry bar dug under the space between the gate and the doorframe. A moment later it was joined by an identical wedge on the other end of the gate. The EMT they hadn’t heard from yet, a female voice, gave a three count and the wedges lifted off the ground. The concrete grit on the other side of the doorway ground against the tools, but there was no movement from the gate beyond a slight ripple as they worked the heads of the bars back and forth.

  Tiffany looked around the arcade, there was a crash somewhere in the office and she wondered if there was a window back there that Jason and Dan had decided to climb out of. No, they w
ouldn’t leave them there alone, would they?

  The metal gate groaned, the shutter rising a couple of centimeters.

  “It’s working,” Kate said. Tiffany half-expected a streak of blue lightning, perfectly timed to coincide with Kate’s optimism, but no bolt came. Instead the rescue workers readjusted their pry bars and continued attacking the gap.

  “What are they doing?” Jason said, running out of the gloom, keeping his eyes glued to the arcade machines that he passed.

  “They think the power’s out. It’s okay.” Kate explained. “Look.”

  Dan followed Jason, his deterioration almost complete now. He was limping badly, but refused to reach out and use the machines to support himself. He really believed there was something wrong with the electronics.

  “Stop,” Dan yelled. “You need to back away.”

  “Calm down, sir,” the squeaky voiced worker replied. “We’ve almost got it.” In response to this, the gate opened another inch, far enough that Tiffany would have been able to stick her arm out and touch freedom if she weren’t so concerned with losing it.

  “Here, hold it up,” the ambulance worker said, talking to his partner.

  Tiffany was on her belly now, watching their boots as the one worker kneeled and gripped the edge of the door with both hands. He was wearing gloves, but they were hospital gloves and didn’t seem anywhere near thick enough.

  The gloves squeaked and stretched as the boy pulled at the gate, the shutter rising, miraculously and mercifully rising. Tiffany could feel the relief wash over her, could feel the shoulders of her fellow survivors, her new friends, getting a little lighter as well.

  Then there was a choking sound from outside of the door and the gate slipped back down against the wedge. Tiffany watched as both pairs of boots were suddenly lifted off of the concrete, as if the rescue workers had discovered the secret of flight.

  “Hello?” Kate said, there was no answer and Tiffany could see that the girl was blinking away tears.