by Matt Ryan
I struggled with him some more, but he easily shoved me back and kept the box away. It was a fun little game to him, so I hit him on the arm. A few damage points floated above his head. He rammed me hard in the ribs and I went down, taking more damage than him.
“It’s mine,” Trevor said, holding the box tight against himself.
Bouncing back up, I knew it was now or never. That brown box held my salvation. And maybe it was Frank fueling my rage, or the misplaced arrogance of Trevor, but I felt my hand close into a fist. I screamed my best battle cry, as if I were in a twenty-five-man raid, and swung at him with a maniacal scream. I swung so hard, I thought I might have torn something in my bicep. And the result of all this fury? A hit to Trevor’s shoulder, an 18-point damage at best.
It didn’t matter though, because Trevor was stunned and I took the moment. My arms became a windmill of fury, swinging and striking at flesh and bone. I kept the screaming up as well; telling them what I really thought of them, in every colorful way I could.
What’s worse than trying to beat up someone and failing? Trying to beat up someone and having them laugh at you while you’re doing it. This enraged me even more, until I was at the point I wasn’t aware of my actions anymore. I had been taken over by some other force and everything became a blur, until my fist hit something different. It made a sound that silenced everything. I opened my eyes to see Trevor taking a step back, a hand over his eye. I’d got a punch through and had hit him right in the face.
Trevor touched his brow and checked for blood on his fingers. There wasn’t any. He then held the package against himself like a running back with a football. “You’re dead.”
“Just give it back and I’ll leave.” I didn’t care anymore. If I didn’t get that box, I’d have nothing. I’d be nothing. Just another homeless kid in the Slabs. Probably end up peddling vapes, or tweak within a week.
Trevor rushed at me and I think he thought I’d run away, but if I’d learned anything from video games, I knew I just needed to find his weakness. If I dodged his first attack, I could counter strike and maybe get him on the ground.
As he charged, I activated a dodge, but he countered, and moved with me. Oh shit.
The punch came so quick, I didn’t even see it; I just felt it. I didn’t even know how I got on the ground, but there I was, head lolling in the dirt. A critical strike, but not a knockout. The dazed-effect remained, as I felt an onslaught of kicks to the torso. Damage points floated around me, too fast to count. All the while, Frank laughed in the background.
I rolled over and saw the face of pure hate from both father and son. Reaching for the prize, my fingers slipped off the brown cardboard, but my nails dug into it and pulled a thread of the brown outer paper off the edge. That was as close as I was going to get to Avarice Online.
It’d taken me a year to save enough money to buy it.
Frank came over and put his hand on Trevor’s shoulder. I wanted to think it was to stop his crazy son from killing me, but it was just to congratulate him.
“Get the hell out of here, Josh, and don’t ever come back,” Frank said.
“I’ll let you know how the game is.” Trevor tossed the box back up, then caught it.
I lay in a pile on the ground, watching them head back into the trailer. Blood dripped from my lip and I spit, watching it land in the dirt, its edges getting frosted with dust. My head hurt and my heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest. I knew soon, the pain from each of the blows he’d landed would start setting in. I didn’t think anything was broken, but I’d have bruises. Hopefully, Trevor’s face took some damage as well.
I stared at the trailer, glad I didn’t have any matches and gasoline, or I might have done something I’d regret. Or maybe I wouldn’t regret it.
Really, the last thing I wanted was to spend time in jail over Frank and Trevor, but I needed to do something that would sting almost as bad as death. Heaving my sore body into a standing position, I ambled over to the low voltage panel on the side of the trailer and opened it. The small black box I’d installed for them early on still sat there, with wires running in and out of it. It was a scrambler that gave them free internet access.
Something they’d become dependent on.
I yanked the small box out and threw it, clearing two or three nearby trailers. If it landed anywhere remotely visible, it’d be gone in minutes.
Wendy squawked from inside her room about the net being down.
I ran to the front of the trailer as the door opened and gave Frank the double middle finger. One wasn’t enough.
“What did you do, you little shit?” Frank said.
“Just taking back something that was mine,” I said.
He growled and rushed down the stairs; however, a man of his size should’ve never attempted such a feat. It wouldn’t have taken Nostradamus to predict what would happen next. He missed a step and fell forward. Flailing arms and saucer-plate sized eyes all came crashing down onto the hard ground in a surprisingly soft thump. His legs came up behind him so high, I thought he might roll all the way over, but then they stopped, and the whole mass of Frank teetered to a halt. He didn’t move.
Critical strike!
Now it was my turn to laugh. Then Trevor appeared in the doorway, staring in shock at his dad on the ground. Before he could put two and two together, I ran hard and didn’t look back. I heard a few yells, but he had no chance of catching up to me. After a few hundred trailers and more turns than I could keep track of, I slowed to a walk, trying to catch my breath. I had to let my stamina regain.
I’d once read a meme that said the best revenge is winning at life. It showed some stereotypical nerd, with his pocket protector and taped glasses, sitting on his private jet, surrounded by fancy women in tight dresses. The image was stupid, but that didn’t take away from the message.
I’d show them. I’d show all these asshole losers in Slab City. Not that they would care. They were just trying to eke out some semblance of a life, with heads down and the occasional glance to the sky.
As I walked down the road, I took in the surrounding trailers stuffed into the abandoned track home development from the fifties. There were a few nearly complete houses in section 4A, the nicer section of the Slabs—if there was one—but even those had taken a beating from their degenerate tenants.
The kind of people who came to the Slabs were those who didn’t want to be seen by the rest of the world, and they weren’t. They were the invisible. The foster kids of America. Cops didn’t come by here, and only once in a while would the government send in a clean-up crew for public health reasons—or to clear out the worst of it. That hadn’t happened in a while now, and the trash had piled up between the trailers and around the sides of the road. It gave off an odor of rotten food and spoiled milk. The wind would kick up in bursts, bringing in fresh air.
I wandered through the Slabs, knowing exactly where I was going, but not caring how I got there, or how long it took. What did it matter? I’d lost the game. I went for broke and failed. I had $14.30 to my name, which might get me a few days of living, but after that, I had no hope of succeeding. In the real world, there were no resurrections, and second chances were as rare as a slab whore having a clean bill of health.
As I neared my destination the trailers became shacks, where plywood and sheet metal leaned together haphazardly to create a space for drunks to crawl under to get out from the rain. Scrap shacks, we called them. One such man leaned against the corrugated metal siding, holding an empty bottle in one hand, his other hand in his pants. As I passed by, he pulled his grimy hand away from whatever it was doing under his stained dungarees and reached out to me. I evaded his attack and ran ahead.
As I got closer to the wasteland, the shacks became more and more dilapidated and trash filled. The wasters, as the slab people called them, were the people who inhabited the area—the lowest of the low. Frank’s crappy trailer seemed like a mansion in comparison.
I walked past
one that had a man lying in front of the threshold of his shack, the thin door shaking in the breeze against his immobile body. I wondered if he was dead, and if I should check, but that wasn’t the culture in the Slabs. Eventually, he’d either get back up, or start to smell so bad his neighbors would send an anonymous note to the sanitary district to scoop him off the ground.
I breathed easier as the man rolled to his side and farted.
Further down the road, a child sat on the edge of the dirt road—a rare sighting in these parts, as kids had fallen out of fashion. They cost too much, and the consensus was they were a burden.
The kid watched me coming from afar, sitting in the dirt and looking as pathetic as he could; a beggar with his red plastic cup sitting in front of him. Probably too young to make a trip to the city, where he might have a real chance of collecting more than a penny.
I approached the kid and peered into the empty red cup. I pulled out my fourteen dollars and stuffed it inside.
The kid looked from me to the cup and back again. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said and walked away.
Sure, I’d told the kid I didn’t know, but that wasn’t entirely true. There was something building in me since the moment Frank hit the dirt. A feeling of freedom. A feeling that I wanted to purge anything and everything I’d made under that roof, including money. I wanted to start over again, from scratch. I’d make my own way this time.
For now, I was heading out of section 7A, toward the least populated part of the Slabs. I’d seen a few promising partially built houses out in section 7B, the Wasteland, where people and businesses who didn’t want to pay dump fees took their discarded goods. It’s where the wasters spent their time, looking for things to take apart, break, reassemble, and break again. During one of my scavenges, I’d found a house with one bedroom and a roof over it.
Was this going to be my life now? A homeless kid in the wasteland? No, this is just a stepping stone for me. I’d be great, and I’d come back to rub it in all their faces. Hell, if I kept telling myself that, I might start believing it.
The fleeting adrenaline made my hands tingle, and the anger that fueled it was replaced with sadness. The doubts crept in, no matter how many lies I told myself. The fact remained; I was a nobody with nothing. Where was I going to go from here?
I replayed the encounter with Trevor in my mind. Maybe if I had moved quicker, I could have pulled off that counterstrike. I grinded my teeth in anger and considered going back there in the middle of the night and stealing it. I hoped they’d gouge him with in-game purchases. If that’s what they even did. Avarice Online was a strange game, in that you didn’t have to set it up for monthly billing. In fact, it didn’t require any money, beyond what type of gear they offered for purchase.
They had seven levels of gear, and I’d purchased the lowest level because the next level blew my budget. I could only imagine the rich people buying tier one gear for a full immersion experience. For me, I’d be getting the real-life experience of a dumping ground.
The waste surrounding the house smelled like garbage water, but I didn’t care. I spent the next few hours scavenging for anything I thought I could fix for money, or use to put in my new home. The wasters were out and about as well, talking about relics of the good ol’ days, thick LED TV’s, radios, and those huge desktop computers that were filled with parts. Wasters who were on the crank for too long often repeated themselves, over and over again, making for a monotonous drone I got used to after a while, like a background noise.
I dug into an untouched area and found an old PSX. I nearly fell on it to hide it from the waster telling me about the current events in state politics and how due process was being considered. I agreed with him and stuffed the PSX up my shirt.
There were a few Sony fans out there who would pay decent money for something like that. It was the tenth edition of the PlayStation system, back before V Corp. took over all gaming with their free VR games. Maybe things weren’t going to be so horrible after all.
Finding something worth some actual money, I rushed back to the house with a handful of goods and a PlayStation flopping around under my shirt. I went into the house with the partial roof, and shut the door.
The other two items I’d found were a throw pillow I’d pulled off a discarded couch, and a blanket from a kid’s clothes box. The smell of baby powder still clung to it. I held it to my neck and it only reached my knees, but it was better than nothing. I didn’t know if it was the fumes, my delusions, or just stupid youthful thoughts, but I felt pretty good about my new home. I could—no, I would make it. Fuck them. I’d be the biggest goddamn thing to ever come out of the Slabs. They’d all see.
Chapter Three
I awoke to a knock at the front door. And for a moment, I had no idea where I was. Then the pain in my side, shaped like Trevor’s footprints, brought me careening back to reality. What the hell had I been thinking, attacking him like that?
Rubbing my eyes and being careful not to touch the tender part of my face, I hopped up and walked to the door. Who the hell would knock on a door out here?
Pulling it open, no one was there, but a brown package sat next to a pile of old electronics. I knew the box. It was the same one Trevor had been holding from me. Had he somehow grown a conscience and returned it to me?
I bent down and picked up the box, inspecting it for my fingernail tear mark, but the box was unscathed. The skies were clear as well, not that a drone delivery would dare come to the Slabs. A crackhead would jump on that drone the second it touched the ground. Not to mention, it would only serve to announce to the world, “Hey, I bought something new! Come rob me.”
“Hello?” I called out, wondering why someone had put this here.
Figuring it was a prank, I closed the door and sat on my bed made from discarded kids’ clothing, and opened the box carefully. It probably contained cobras, or something worse. But inside was just another box with a note on top.
Magoton,
We’ve worked together before, and I have an important job for you in Avarice Online. This is like nothing you’ve ever done before, and we will pay you a lot more than what the hardware is worth. Go to the building listed below and we will have everything you need set up there. Please do not wait. Get there and log in. We’ll make contact in-game. You must use this gamer name for us to find you.
Magoton, my gamer name on several games. The list of who could’ve sent this was large. One thing on the note had my heart racing, we will pay you a lot more than what this hardware is worth. I lifted the white box out and saw the label on the side; BallzD, the finest maker of gaming hardware in the world. This was tier one shit. Worth thousands. I could sell this and start a new life.
But they said they were going to pay me even more . . . and set me up with a place to play this game. Red flags raised, but what the hell? It wasn’t like I was in some kind of freaking safe zone.
I wrapped up the box in some garbage paper and put it in a bag. I stuffed a few more things on top, and made sure none of the BallzD merch showed. Carrying that kind of gear in the open could be dangerous.
I had a general idea of where this apartment was located, so I headed toward the City of Nines. The middle class and rich lived there. A place where the power never failed, the water never smelled, and the internet ran like a balanced premade.
It was about a three-hour walk to the city, and my journey there was like watching the world evolve in slow motion. The Slab’s trailer homes slowly disappeared and actual, completed houses took their places. Some even had lawns. Probably synthetic, but they were a welcome sight of color. It was strange how accustomed to brown I’d become. Dirt seemed to cover everything in the Slabs, including its inhabitants.
The biggest change came when the dirt road turned to asphalt. I made better time on it and liked the way it felt under my feet. A few commercial buildings appeared as well, and some cars even drove down the roads. Another few miles, and I entered the City of Nines.
There, the concrete roads held many cars, trucks, and pedestrians. The buildings were tall and gleaming, with mostly glass covering their sides. I nearly ran into a man walking by because I was so busy looking up.
The man adjusted his suit as if me being near him might have soiled it, before marching down the sidewalk, muttering about homeless littering the city again. I removed the garbage from the trash bag I was carrying, and ditched it in a nearby trashcan.
Using a window as a mirror, I assessed my clothes and tucked in my shirt. Combing back my brown hair with my hands, I tamed it into something that didn’t look so wild. But I couldn’t fix the dirt on my clothes. Too many hours spent rummaging through garbage had given much of my clothes a yellowish-brown tinge. I probably had a smell about me as well. Still, I didn’t think I looked homeless. I was thin enough though.
“You need some help, son? I think I have a few dollars,” a woman asked as she dug into her purse.
I hadn’t even noticed her. “I’m not a beggar, but thanks.” I didn’t want to be an asshole, but the woman just bugged me. I left in a hurry, wanting to get to the apartment and out from under the nose of all these privileged people.
I reached my address in a few more blocks and looked up at the tall, glass building. It must have been twenty stories high and not a hint of dust on the panes of green-tinted glass that covered the building.
“Holy shit,” I murmured. I was going to live here?
“Hello,” the screen on the nearby door said. A digital face appeared, all smiles and teeth. That’s what I liked about the digital world; in games, no one judged me on the real me, they’d see my avatar. What I wanted to project. An epic, bad-ass avatar, ready to kick ass.
“Hi,” I replied, not sure of what to say. “I have a place here, I think.” I checked the address on the note and verified it with the numbers next to the door.
“Hello, Josh Dailey, welcome to Nakatomi Tower.” The door clicked and slid open. A different woman than from the screen walked out, and looked me over, giving me a dirty look.