by Adam Cesare
“Cool,” he said, but he didn’t believe her, she was just trying to get rid of him.
“I’m right there,” she said, pointing to the car next to her. “So I’ll see you later, Chris. Okay?” Her words were sugary now, but there was a condescending tone that he didn’t like.
He reached out and grabbed her shoulder. Outside of when he brushed her hand when they were playing the game earlier, it was the first time he’d ever made a conscious decision to touch a girl.
“You’re already wet, why don’t you just give me a second to say what I’m trying to say?” he asked.
“Please take your hand off me.” Her voice was cold again and he could see that the way she was holding her keys had changed once more. She had three keys clenched in her fist, in between her three middle fingers, forming a dinky version of Wolverine’s claws.
“Whoa, cool it. I’m asking you if you’d like to go on a date. It’s not like I’m attacking you or anything.”
“That’s fine, but please take your hand off me.”
This was all going so wrong. There was no way he was cutting and running, taking his hand away now.
“Don’t tell me what to fucking do. I’m not looking to rape you or something, put your keys down and talk to me for a second.”
She reeled her hand back and punched him, not hard, but quick enough that it caught him off guard. The keys scraped along the thin skin under his left eye, tearing it up. The pain was immediate and vast.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he screamed. It was too early to tell if she’d blinded him. He didn’t wait to find out, didn’t wait to think. The back of his knuckles brushed against her jaw, the tips of his fingers banging against her lips and teeth as he followed through.
Fuck, what did I do? It was the last thought he had before she started screaming for help. Her voice made him feel small, terrible, and insane with anger. If she would have just given him a minute to talk to her.
He looked at her, unable to tell how much damage he’d done by the flickering glow of the light overhead. It was possible that some of the blood on her face was his.
The streetlamp hadn’t been flashing before they’d started fighting. He looked up to investigate what was going on, his adrenaline-soaked mind telling him that it might be a police helicopter.
The light shone unnaturally bright and he wondered if she hadn’t given him a concussion that’d caused him to start hallucinating. The light began to strobe above him and he didn’t wonder anything else.
Since the bolt traveled at the speed of light—faster than sound—Chris Murphy didn’t hear what killed him.
§
The light was the brightest thing Tiffany had ever seen, the flash burning the look of horror from Chris’s face into her retinas in a blue and white negative.
The arch of blue lightning came out of nowhere, louder than a gunshot. Crossing the parking lot, Tiffany had not heard any thunder, but then again her mind had not been on her surroundings, but on the boy following her to her car during a rainstorm.
Tiffany could feel her scalp hum as the electricity in the air struck down through Chris’s skull, down to his boots and then shot out of his face, the overhanging lamppost working like a lightning rod to wick the bolt back into the air.
Chris was able to keep on his feet for a moment after the current left his body, his knees locking up and keeping him upright. Only for a moment, though, then the weight of his smoking head dragged him back down to earth, his body crumpling backwards into a foul-smelling heap.
He was flesh and blood, but he didn’t smell like cooked meat as much as he did burning plastic and fresh-poured asphalt.
She looked at the soles of his feet, the bottoms of his boots were melted strings, some strands still connected to the tarmac. The tips of his fingers were black and singed, two of them had popped, the ends looking like an exploding cigar in a cartoon.
Screaming was her first reaction, getting him help her second. Her third was realizing, looking at the chard holes of his eyes, that help could only come in the form of a priest, if he’d been religious at all.
Chris Murphy was as dead as one could possibly be. Killed by a bolt of lightning that hadn’t even been strong enough to blow out the bulb in the lamppost.
After a second to let her body stop feeling numb, she put one foot in front of the other and walked back toward the arcade.
She didn’t realize she was crying until Jason Day was asking her what had happened.
“We heard you scream,” he said. Her shoulders were dryer now, and the rain had stopped pelting the top of her head. She was inside, with Jason’s zip-up sweatshirt wrapped around her, her sopping wet one staining the carpet at her feet. She didn’t think she’d lost consciousness because she was still standing, but each passing moment became like a half-remembered dream, shifting in and out of her mind as if it may or may not have happened.
Dan was there, too. His face looked even worse when he was frowning, the edge of his mouth drooping unnaturally low. He was wet, must have come in from the rain. “Someone needs to call an ambulance,” he said, his slur heavy enough that it was hard to understand him. He didn’t say why it couldn’t be him that called, everyone knew.
Jason looked behind Tiffany, handing his cell phone to the boy who’d whistled at her less than an hour ago. “Do it, Cal. Dial nine-one-one and tell them there’s been some kind of accident.”
The image of Chris dying under the lamp was burned into her eyes, dimming the world around her with its comparative brightness. Dimming an already gloomy world because the overhead lights in the arcade were off. The only light was the glow of the machines, which was odd because you’d figure that the light bulbs would be more important to keep running than the games.
“What the fuck is going on down here?” a voice asked from beyond the small crowd that had gathered around Tiffany. She’d only ever seen the owner of Funcave a few times, he seemed to spend most of his time behind a closed door that said “Employees Only”, but Tiffany recognized him as he nudged Dan out of the way to get a look at her.
“A kid’s in the parking lot, Eddie,” Dan said.
“There always seem to be kids in the parking lot, Boden.” The fat man said. He wore a stained polo shirt, but instead of the Lacoste alligator or Polo pony stitched over his heart, the Atari symbol stood out white on black.
Dan (or Boden, either his nickname or a last name) tried to lean in to whisper so Tiffany couldn’t hear.
She spoke up and saved him the trouble of having to whisper without getting spittle all over his boss’s ear: “He’s dead. Struck by lightning, I think.”
Jason and his other friend made a gasping noise, nobody must have known but Dan and Tiffany.
Cal had walked to the door to use the phone, but was yelling into it anyway. “Hello. I’m at the Funcave on Route 1. Someone’s been struck by lightning I think, please send an ambulance.” The boy looked and sounded like a hillbilly, even if his diction was straight-laced, polite and tinged with booklearnin’.
Eddie, the owner, spoke next. “There’s a kid out there who’s been struck by lightning and you’re all in here taking care of the girl who didn’t? He may not be dead, you don’t know.”
Dan looked about to say something but Eddie used a hairy arm to knock him out of the way, nearly toppling him. “Someone help me move him inside, he’s gonna fucking drown out there in this rain.”
Tiffany wanted to say more, wanted to describe how deep she’d seen into Chris’s head through his eye sockets, but the thought of it put her out, dragged her under.
Jason got a hand on her before she hit her head, but she blinked out of consciousness before they could place her down to the carpet.
CHAPTER 7
God! It hurt so much. Everything Chris Murphy had been, still was, poured into Robby.
The boy was dead before he hit the pavement, but part of him had held on to the lightning and traveled back into the lamppost.
A b
lack wave of sadness and hate hit Robby as he ran from the scene of the crime. He jumped from car to car, causing engines to roar to life and security alarms to sound, headed back to the safety of his arcade. He couldn’t escape the hate, though, it was part of him now.
The shock from the Ms. Pac-Man machine had only been a precursor to this. Murder. Robby had ended a life. In defense of someone who was innocent, someone he loved, that was true, but he’d still made a conscious decision to kill.
Words he’d never used before, never even thought, bubbled into his mind, a whole new lexicon. Cunt! How could you do this you simp dick sucker? Protecting that little chink cocktease. Pathetic. They were his thoughts, he’d admit it, but the words, the sentiment contained within would never have belonged to him. Robby was still one entity, but he felt new and not improved. His thoughts were base and disgusting. He needed to vomit but had no mouth. No stomach for that matter.
He felt drained and confused, but he needed to keep the power going to his games, they gave him the strength to think better. After the momentary power outage, he jumped from the last car in the lot back to inside the walls of the arcade, bringing the games back with him.
Inside Street Fighter Alpha, he watched as Cal berated his friend Jason. “Now it comes back on, of course it cuts out the one time I was going to get you. Shit.”
Jason shushed him. “Do you hear that?”
Cal and Robby both listened, Robby straining to hear the outside world beyond the screen. Concentrating on something helped him forget the pain, the nausea of having Chris’s hate settling inside of him.
Chris’s feelings and memories were trying to take root, dirt settling to the bottom of a glass of water. Robby was troubled by the pictures, old and new, swirling around his building-sized consciousness.
He could form the images of people he’d never met, places he’d never been. Chris Murphy’s father wiped Steel Reserve from his upper lip and called his son a faggot for spending more time with his Xbox than he did with his truck. Chris wedging an M-80 between the shell of his sister’s pet turtle. Chris crying about it afterwards, burying the pieces. Chris’s mother helping him blow out candles at a sparsely attended birthday party, one that had been held here in this building.
Robby feared that the feeling would last indefinitely. He needed to know whether all of the memories from the boy’s sad, short, brutish life would rerun forever through his mind. The guilt and horror would drive him insane within a day.
Focusing on the sounds from the parking lot helped, if only because he could puzzle out what they were without hearing much of them. Outside, Tiffany was screaming for help.
Jason was the first to leave the machine, his friends David and Cal a few steps after him. Before he left, Cal pinched a quarter underneath the base of his joystick, holding his spot at the machine, still oblivious to how serious the situation was about to get.
From a different angle, Robby could see Dan Boden, also on his way to respond to the screams, albeit much slower than the boys. Super-gimp to the rescue! Aside from Tiffany, Dan was Robby’s favorite person at Funcave. He was a man who’d been knocked around by life, had what he’d loved most taken away from him, but still tried to keep it in his world. Dan was a man to be respected, not mocked.
It was impossible to see into the darkness of the parking lot, not without jumping outside the walls of the arcade, but the first group to arrive back was Jason, Cal and David. Jason and Cal flanked Tiffany, the two taller boys holding her up so only the tips of her toes were moving across the ground. She moved her legs, so out of it that she seemed to think she was walking, not being carried by the two boys.
They came to a halt and set her down, on her feet, her knees and spine drooping low under the restored weight of her body. She waved them off when they told her to sit down.
Tiffany’s complexion had always been pale, but her paleness was now discolored. She’d gone beyond white and was now alternating colors of green and blue. Her lips were dark, shivering like she’d just been pulled out of an icy lake. Jason peeled off his sweatshirt and swapped it for her own.
The sight of Jason’s dark hand touching Tiffany’s pale skin stirred a hatred in Robby that was not his own, a hate that had been passed down for generations in the Murphy family and one that Chris was alternatively attracted to and ashamed of.
Dan came back a few minutes later, his right side looking even more deflated than when he’d left.
Jason waved his phone at Cal and asked him to call an ambulance. Too late for that, Robby thought with something sickeningly akin to pride.
After that, Eddie Harmon appeared, his voice full of bluster. Robby guessed that he was looking for Dan in order to yell at him about the lights. He’d probably lost his internet connection, too. Fat piece of shit pervert.
Only some of those were Robby’s feelings, but he’d never voice them that way. Eddie had not been responsible for his accident, the one that had sent him through the fire all those years ago, but right now it felt like it. He wanted to hate someone, and Eddie’s loud mouth, constant jerking off, and pus-gut made it easy for it to be him.
Robby imagined what Eddie would look like after as much voltage as he’d sent into Chris Murphy, whether he’d pop like a carnival game balloon as the current flowed through him, searching for a way out.
Before Robby had time to react, Eddie and David were out the door going to check on Chris. David threw the hood of his sweatshirt up over his shaved head to protect from the rain. Robby hated them both for what they intended to do, they wanted to sully his arcade by bringing Chris Murphy’s toasted body inside.
Robby imagined flecks of Chris’s blackened skin flaking off of his fingers and landing on the pristine carpet. He envisioned cinders floating into the air ducts, swirling into the lungs of the building and giving his arcade a cancer.
Robby could not allow that to happen.
CHAPTER 8
The metal security gate was farther up than it had to be to cover the doors. Eddie had problems with kids, probably kids that looked a lot like David, spray painting the sign above the door. The sign was custom machined, expensive, and a pain to get repainted, so the solid metal gate stretched four feet up above the top of the door, tall enough to cover the sign.
Right now this security gate was closing with them on the wrong side of it, stuck in the rain.
“You need to hurry up, man,” David said. They’d only introduced themselves a second ago, while on their way to pick up the injured kid’s body, but now the black youth felt comfortable enough with Eddie to call him “man”. Eddie didn’t like that.
The Murphy kid was dead, that was for sure, but Eddie had made such a big deal about bringing him inside they’d had to try.
Eddie felt sweat beading against his balding head, mingling with the steady fall of rain. Even burnt up, the kid was heavier than he looked. Eddie belonged to a gym, had for three years, but only went about once every six months, sometimes less.
“Why the fuck is the gate moving?” Eddie said, puffing with exertion.
“Does it matter? Come on,” David said. The boy held the body by its armpits and tugged at his end to hurry Eddie along, almost ripping the legs out of his grip. Melted kid smudged the sides of Eddie’s pants, soaking through the dead boy’s socks.
Eddie looked up, the sign was completely covered by the gate now, in thirty seconds the motor would press the bottom flush against the ground.
The doors opened to the inside and Dan propped one open with his shoe and waved them in from the doorway.
“Why did you close it?” Eddie yelled, his hands caked with boiled gelatinous blood. He’d gripped the corpse below the knees, but the slime was pushing up through the fabric of the kid’s black pants. It felt good to yell at Dan Boden, normalized the situation.
“We didn’t touch it. The power’s acting weird, hurry.”
David ducked low so he didn’t bump his head on the bottom of the falling gate. With the next step Eddie
took the mechanical grinding of the gate’s gears stopped, freezing the gate on a height with the man’s forehead.
“That was close,” Eddie said, taking another step forward, both Dan and the other black kid helping David take up the load. Their Joe-Bob-looking friend was still on the phone with the nine-one-one call center.
There was a sound like a metal cable snapping and the gate dropped its hundred pound load into freefall.
The gate broke both of the corpse’s legs at the knee and smashed Eddie Harmon’s hands so badly that the joints of his wrists popped like glass bottles in a vise. The elasticity of his skin and tendons was still strong enough to drag him flat to his belly, knock the wind out of his lungs, and trap him under the gate.
Shards of bone sticking through the skin, all because he was trying to do the right thing, Eddie Harmon cried out for help.
The ambulance was still seven minutes away.
CHAPTER 9
Neither Yosef nor Hank heard the commotion going on downstairs.
Hank had noticed the change in lighting upstairs in the classic game room, but was in too deep with his game of Discs of Tron to investigate.
The music had stopped for about fifteen seconds, but had resumed right where it’d left off: Dexy’s Midnight Runners imploring Eileen to come on. Or telling his friends what to do to her. Either way.
Hank could spend days in the arcade, totally would if they kept it open twenty-four hours. There were days that he’d get to Funcave straight from work, then forget to eat until it was closing time at eleven. Those nights he’d stop at the McDonald’s on the way home and binge with two Big Macs, a twenty piece McNuggets and a large Coke. He still weighed only one-fifty, though, so he figured that all the nervous energy he expelled playing games helped him keep off the pounds.
