Zero Lives Remaining

by Adam Cesare

  “Oh shit.” Jason said and turned to Dan. “It got them.”

  As if in response, something kicked against the outside of the gate, the metal segments buckling and then quieting. There were three more kicks, each one sounding progressively weaker, and then there was silence again from outside.

  Dan sighed and then spoke. “There’s a supply door in the back of the kitchen that gets used for food deliveries. Beyond jumping out the second story windows, that’s the only way out I can think of. We need to try it now, though. Quickly.”

  “What got them?” Tiffany asked.

  “Huh?” Dan groaned. He was busy tucking the sleeves of his shirt into the backs of the gloves, leaving no skin exposed. When he finished he squinted at the keys clipped to his belt. They were a mix of rounded keys that fit into arcade machines and regular ones that opened up the various supply closets and doors of Funcave. He wasn’t going to answer her question, might not have even been aware that she had asked one.

  “Jason, you said it got them, what got them?”

  The boy looked embarrassed. He was no longer the class clown or the Street Fighter champion, but someone about to say a damning secret. “There’s, like, bloodsucking ghost eels in the electronics.”

  Tiffany laughed a little bit, you could find levity in the strangest of places. She stopped laughing when her gaze shifted to movement beyond Jason, and she looked down near Kate’s feet.

  The bloodsucking ghost eels weren’t quite as funny when you saw them slithering out of the prize door of a crane game, poised to grab your friend by the legs.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was getting crowded in here. The flood of memories was too much, Robby couldn’t mediate them, they were a television with a million stations, the channel being flipped three times a second. Cal and David’s memories weren’t so bad, while Yosef and Hank’s seemed to skew closer to the depressing side of things, but the real killer was still Chris’s. The boy had lived eighteen years of torment, all of it he was now trying to inflict onto others.

  Their deaths had awoken something in his network, his ectoplasm spooling around itself, pressing at the inside of his machines, doubling and tripling in mass with each death. There was something dangerous but intoxicating about it, after twenty years Robby felt like he had a physical presence in the world, that he was able to wiggle his toes or scratch his armpit, even if his armpit was on the second floor while his forefinger was in the office.

  Dan Boden caving in the laptop didn’t even sting, the computer was such a small part of him now that it were as if Dan had helped him clip a hangnail.

  Maybe the introduction of Chris’s hate into his system hadn’t been a bad thing.

  Hate was active, proactive, and that was something that Robby had lacked, all through his life and afterlife.

  The ambulance drivers were the first murders that Robby didn’t fight against. Not that he condoned them, but he did see how they might have been necessary. Their bodies were raw materials. And besides, Robby didn’t know them. These people didn’t even have names.

  Of course, once they were dead, their mouths and sinuses filled with his membranous high-speed fiber optic cabling, then he knew their names. But by that point it was too late to save them.

  The young man had been only twenty years old. He’d actually been in the Junior EMT program in high school, had only been out of school two years and was responsible for driving to scenes, saving lives. His name was Eric Kent. He had a second job at the pharmacy. The only bad thing he’d ever done was he’d once stolen a few tablets of Oxy for a girl he liked. She didn’t sleep with him, no one had yet. No one ever would.

  The woman was a bit older, her name was Suzanne Monetti. She looked too young to be a grandmother, only forty-two, but she was a grandmother nonetheless. Her daughter Gabby had made a mistake and brought Ruby Monetti into the world, five pounds two ounces. At least it seemed like a mistake at the time. Gabby wasn’t the world’s greatest mother, but Suzanne was trying her best to be the world’s greatest grandma. Ruby had said “Meemaw” before she’d said anything else. That was two days ago.

  Both of them tasted delicious, their bodies broken down and portioned out for the next phase of action. Robby decided that if Tiffany Park were going to die at all, she would die last and in such a way that Robby could rest assured that she would take her rightful place as the princess of the arcade.

  It was the least he could do for her.

  CHAPTER 16

  Tiffany screamed her name, but Kate had no idea what she’d meant before it was too late and the things had wrapped themselves around her bare legs.

  Their hold was slick, but firm.

  She jumped, trying to push herself away from the machine, but the hands around her ankles held firm, tripping her. As she fell, Kate kept her hands out in front of her body, landing in a pool of congealed blood. Most of the blood had probably belonged to Mr. Harmon, but some could have been from the ambulance workers. She could still hear them outside, dead but their bones snapping, their bodies being reduced, dismembered.

  Tiffany was the first to take action, bounding past Jason and grabbing Kate’s forearms. The Asian girl was surprisingly strong for her size, sliding Kate’s body further away from the machine, but not able to break the tentacles’ grip.

  The appendages were shooting out of the area reserved for picking up stuffed animals won while playing the game, the worms stretched and contracted in order to reel her in, ready to pull her up the half-foot wide chute.

  There were tiny electric pulses up and down her legs, traveling to each hair follicle and exploding in her brain as images. In one flash she saw herself as a little doll, buttons for eyes and yarn for hair, nestled among the prizes in the game. It didn’t seem all that bad, so she wasn’t too alarmed when Tiffany lost her grip, the girl’s fingers slipping on the dark blood.

  Jason was at her feet now, stomping on the tentacles with all his might, but unable to sever the strands, only squishing them flat before they plumped up again in defiance.

  Dan grabbed the boy by the shoulder. “No, stop. Help me move it.” He motioned to the claw game.

  She couldn’t tell why everyone was so frantic, it didn’t seem that bad. Just her foot was inside the door now, her shin wedged against the hard plastic flap. It should have hurt, but it didn’t.

  Jason pressed his shoulder to the side of the machine, pushing it against the carpet but not far enough for Dan’s liking. Inside, the tiny crane jiggled, its claws opening and closing. It would be impossible to pick up anything with that thing, Kate thought. What a rip-off.

  “Further! I can’t reach it,” Dan yelled.

  The tentacles seemed to figure out what was going on and stopped trying to pull her up inside the machine, instead they slithered up her legs, wrapping around her torso to keep a strong hold.

  Tiffany was standing now, trying to get all the leverage she could to pry Kate’s foot out of the machine. Admittedly, Kate wasn’t making it very easy for her, the hypnotic grip of the creature ordered her to make her arms go slack and Kate obeyed.

  Tiffany was trying to help someone that didn’t want to be saved.

  Jason took a step back from the machine, wedged himself against the wall and pushed against it with both feet, moving it a few more inches before it couldn’t go any further.

  “I’ve got it” Dan said and finally Kate could understand what he was up to.

  He was going to pull the plug connecting the machine to the wall.

  “That’s not going to work,” Kate said, her voice giving no indication of panic.

  As he unplugged the machine from the outlet she could feel it through the tentacles. There was a slight dip in strength, the electric hum not as strong as it had been, but they held firm. The only real consequence of unplugging the machine from the wall was that the arms advanced up her body, splitting and dividing, the more surface area of her body they stretched against, the more impossible her rescue seemed to become.
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br />   Objectively, she knew that this meant her own death, but she didn’t much care, it didn’t frighten her like it should.

  “Look,” Tiffany said, pointing up to the ceiling. There were more strands dipping down from the holes in the ceiling tiles, connecting the claw machine to the second floor, rerouting the power from the machines upstairs.

  “Here,” Jason said, making no indication as to his intensions but grabbing the wrench from Dan’s belt before the older man could object. Kate watched as Dan’s keys hit the ground, but it seemed like she was the only one who noticed.

  Reaching up one hand to the top of the machine, Jason hoisted himself up so his head was close to brushing against the ceiling. He swung the wrench, breaking strands, weakening the power supply of the tendrils.

  They were crawling up underneath her bra strap now, the arms ready to wrap around her neck. With less power the arms were more gelatinous now, leaving behind a cool viscous liquid as they moved along her body.

  Tiffany kept pulling, but was careful not to let the goo touch her. That was good, Tiffany was a smart girl.

  “Fuck,” Jason yelled, his bare hand covered in strands of ectoplasm, the fingers were more intent on wresting the weapon from his fist than they were with reeling him in and devouring him.

  Jason allowed himself to fall back, the wrench still stuck in the thickening mass of tentacles connecting the first floor to the second floor like oversized cobwebs.

  The hands were at her neck now and she could feel pinpricks in her cheeks as the chords tightened and deprived her of oxygen. Her vision clouded as blood vessels began to burst.

  “No,” Tiffany said, sobbing. Jason had his hands on hers now, guiding them away from Kate’s body, away from the tendrils that were now coiled around every square inch of her.

  There was pain now, finally. After a burst of red, there was a sharp tug at her knee and Kate could no longer feel her toes.

  She watched as her sneaker worked its way up the chute and was deposited on top of the plush Angry Birds and knock-off Beanie Babies that lined the inside of the glass case. Her foot was still inside the shoe, the entire thing webbed in strands of filament, no longer pale green but dark red, feeding on the wound.

  The last thing she was aware of as herself, was the tendrils sweeping the floor under the machine, grabbing onto the keys and dragging them out of Dan’s sight.

  The worms filled her nose, began feeding on her memories and suddenly Kate was everywhere and nowhere. One with the arcade.

  CHAPTER 17

  Kate was in pieces, stacked with the stuffed animals inside the glass case of the claw game. But that wasn’t the worst part, because inside with her, resting between her pelvis and her head, was Boden’s ring of keys, covered in green-white filament.

  It were as though the creature, fungus, whatever, was taunting him. You had a way out, but now I’ve taken it from you. Why don’t you put a few tokens in the machine and see if you can fish it out?

  Jason and Tiffany were huddled together, as far from the arcade machines as they could get. Both of them were crying. There was no machismo to Jason anymore, none of the save-the-day gusto he’d shown when he’d taken the wrench from Dan’s belt and started swinging away. Now there was just a scared boy who’d just seen a girl divided into twenty different parts. If anything, Tiffany was the one consoling him, her hand making small circles on his back.

  There were no hugs for Dan Boden, the man who stood apart, not just in age or lifestyle, but because Dan knew what he was going to do next. Dan was ready for action.

  He walked over to them, dragging his right foot. It was too much trouble to lift it up at this point. Whispering was near impossible with his mouth the way it was, but he tried anyway. If this thing could hear, it may be able to understand what he was saying and he couldn’t risk that.

  “When I get those keys,” Dan said, not talking to Jason or Tiffany but right in the middle of them, because it was of equal importance that they both understood. “I’m going to do my best and clean them off before I toss them to you. When you have them, you run. You don’t go anywhere else but straight to the kitchen and out the door.”

  “You can’t, you saw what it did to her,” Tiffany said, but her voice told him that she understood that he had to make the attempt.

  Jason took a breath and stared down at his own hand before offering his opinion. Moments ago that hand had been coated in phosphorescent sputum. The smell of the stuff was thick in the air. “If it touches you, it tells you things. Don’t listen to it.”

  Dan didn’t quite understand what the kid meant, but he nodded like he did.

  “We don’t even know that we need them, the door might not be locked.” Tiffany offered her theory weakly, as if she knew that the door locked automatically, that there were only two keys to it because it was only used once every two weeks for deliveries. She didn’t possess that knowledge, but Dan did. The other key was in Eddie Harmon’s pocket on the other side of the gate.

  “The key is one of the silver ones, I think,” Dan said. All of them were silver, so it may well have been an attempt at humor, but he didn’t mean it that way. “Do you understand?”

  Tiffany and Jason’s faces were tearstained, the girl’s porcelain complexion gone, subsumed by red.

  “That a yes?” he asked, no longer even attempting to whisper.

  They both echoed a reluctant yes.

  “Good.”

  Walking over to the gate, Dan reached down and grabbed the pry bar that lay half in and half out of the arcade, the wedged end was facing in, so it was easy to slide the handle under the gate, the metal on metal scrape filling the air with noise. Once completely under, the gate slammed closed, cutting off the sliver of light from the parking lot lamps, making it that much darker inside.

  The bar was heavy, had to be for the job it was intended to do: save lives.

  Dan held the curved end with his left hand, forcing his paralyzed right hand to curl around the base and hold the bar steady. He looked up at the ceiling, the area above the claw machine was heavy with amorphous stalactites (or was it stalagmites?). In the darkness of the arcade, their pale points changed color as they reflected the light from the games below. The tentacles moved gently, dancing in a wind that wasn’t there as they changed from pink to orange to lime green.

  There was a delicate jellyfish beauty to them until Dan looked down at the mess they had made of Kate, a girl whose only sin was sticking her bubblegum under the lunch counter.

  Dan hefted the metal bar over his shoulder and brought it down on the glass of the claw machine. The pane shattered at the top, exploding outwards as the spongy contents poured out like he’d struck a fish tank. They’d been waiting for him, coiled and ready to strike when he broke the glass. He didn’t even follow through, just dropped the bar and forced his hand forward, grabbing at the place where the keys had been, before the glass had been removed and the contents of the machine had begun to shift.

  He needed to keep his attention on the sprawling mass in front of him, but he couldn’t help but sense Jason and Tiffany start to move, to help him.

  “Stay back, don’t come over here!”

  Dan leaned into the machine, broken glass crunched under his heels. He could feel the tentacles already gripping at his ankles and was thankful that he was wearing dress socks that went up to his knees.

  A mass of smaller tendrils were twisting and combining to his right, ready to lash out at his bad side. He ignored them and grabbed for the keys again. Instead of pulling back, this time they keys dove deeper into the pool of prizes. Trying to dismiss the fact that many of the items he was pushing out of the way used to be Kate’s vital organs, Dan dug deeper into the pit. He was bobbing for apples in the sink of a butcher’s shop, the smell burned past his nose hair.

  The tentacles grabbed his right forearm and began working the glove off of his paralyzed hand. He could feel the attack, the attempt to probe his mind, but it was a dull sensation, far fro
m mind control. Dan could taste the electricity on the back of his tongue, like licking a nine-volt. That the best you got? He thought, and somewhere too far away to be understood, he thought he could hear an answer.

  With his good hand he began tossing the contents of the bin over his shoulder, still searching for the keys. Under his belly he could feel the jagged glass of the case grinding into his stomach. Leaning over the lip of the trough had been a bad idea, but it was the only way. Grunting through the pain, he moved a gore-drenched green pig and found them, webbed into the corner of the machine.

  The slime that glued them in place was strong, Dan’s joints—his good ones—howled their unhappiness. He pulled, lifting the keys up becoming easier as soon as the first few strands had been broken. The material snapped free with a Velcro sound.

  “Got them,” Dan said.

  In his mind, this had always been a one-way trip. When he decided to get the keys, he was deciding to sacrifice himself for the good of the group, for the kids, but now that he had them and was relatively unharmed, he felt hope kindle inside him.

  It was trying to turn his body around that tossed a blanket over that hope, smothering it. He’d been so intent on the keys that he hadn’t realized that he was cemented in place, the large cobbling of tentacles having completely overtaken his left arm and shoulder.

  “Take them,” Dan said, “but try not to touch it.” He was drooling now, bent backwards as far as his body would let him. He was sweating in his clothes and could feel the blood rushing to his head. In his imagination he could see the shunt in his brain, the levees getting ready to break, letting a torrent of blood flood his mind. This time the stroke would kill him, he was sure of it.

  The fingers were crawling up his neck now, the buzzing sensation much more powerful as the strands reached flesh that still had feeling. Now he knew why Kate had surrendered so easily:

  It was wonderful.

  He could see them all, real as day, and they were all waiting for him. He walked up to the table and took a seat. Hank and Yosef, his two remaining friends were there, along with Funcave’s old chef, Robby. Jeez, he hadn’t thought about Robby in ages.