Coin-Operated Machines

by Alan Spencer

  Ever since she opened her eyes, a craving took hold. It wasn't hunger or thirst. It was implacable, yet she needed to quench it. The sense of need was immediate; if she didn't possess what her body begged of her, she'd be dead, she sensed.

  Hannah's eyes roamed about the room, locking onto walls of tools and the bare walls spattered in old blood over layers and layers of even older blood.

  What she craved wasn't here.

  Unable to move, Hannah watched the hulking man at work, the man taking aim with the drill bit, breathing out hard, taking focus, his eyes shrinking in their dark sockets like magnifying lenses. At that's when it happened. An eruption of blood from five sources spat out across the room accompanied by the dislocation of bones, the sound of bed springs untwisting, and the ripping of muscle tissue, like sheets being shredded. Hannah couldn't shut her eyes to it, it was amazing, impossible, grizzly, and insane.

  The last sound had her eyes gaping wide. Her bodily processes were kick-started, and her limbs were ready to batter forward and scour the ground for her craving with each clang of metal against the floor.

  Cursing in a boiling string of nonsense from his throat, the man bent down around his work table to collect the human limbs that had shot out across the floor and slapped them back onto the table. "I'll have to put this one back together too. Goddamn it."

  Then the man disappeared down the hallway, stomping away in frustration.

  Something else had fallen from the body, and when she saw what it was, she wanted it badly. Able to move, she did so quickly, getting up on all fours to grab the coins, the bloody wads of dollar bills, the random bits of jewelry, the rings with diamonds crusted in blood and hunks of muscle tissue. Everything was wet and glistening, but oh so valuable, she thought, gathering the riches in her grip until she was startled.

  It wasn't painful, yet it was very bizarre. It had her gaping eyed and open mouthed watching the coins sink into her skin. The wads of cash, the rings, the jewelry, all of the valuables worked their way through the skin that opened in slits, puckered wide, and sucked in the rewards.

  A door was thrown open. The man had returned. "I can't keep doing this shit. I'm losing my focus. I'm losing my mind." He threw his head up to the ceiling. "Can't you see I can only do so much? Why can't you see what I'm going through? I've put in too much work already. Will this ever end? Will this ever end?"

  Hannah crawled back to her spot on the floor and played dead. The man stared at the table and the blood trickling down from the edges onto the floor. He rested his head against the wall and groaned under his breath after closing his eyes. The man hadn't slept for a time, it seemed. Who is this guy, she thought, a crazy murderer or a tormented victim?

  The air suddenly turned extra putrid. Hannah could only imagine how many body parts he had dismembered and how many remains of failed projects were in piles about the house. The basement was festooned in wilting, rotting, jellying corpses. The air was getting hotter. The air was becoming visible too. It was a yellow fog. When that fog was at its heaviest, the dead began to speak. The ceiling plaster crumbled, rendering new cracks along the walls, the foundation protesting against the pressure.

  The dead beckoned.

  "Don't fight what you can't understand/this is your duty/or we can find someone else to do your work/many others would find bliss in safety/bliss in escaping death/or shall we torment your wife and kids in hell/if you wish them to ever leave hell you will do as you're told/obey us, obey us forever."

  Digging his hands into his scalp, wadding up his soiled bloody hair, he growled and kicked aside an empty paint bucket. "Fine, I'll get back to work, but you remember your promise. You will release my family from hell!"

  The dead were pleased. The fog suddenly dissipated. The man left the room, locking the door behind him. This was her chance. Hannah shot up to her knees, waiting for his steps to go out the front door before turning the knob of the nearest door. The door was locked. Kicking, pulling, clawing, shouting at the barrier, she realized it was useless until she turned around.

  Power tools were everywhere.

  You can lock the door all you want, you bastard.

  I'm still getting out.

  Scanning the rows of tools covered in cherries of serrated flesh and spatters of blood, she picked up an electric saw, the steel teeth an inch deep. Confident she could use this against the man if he returned, she plugged it in, and when she went about turning it on, she noticed the trigger was underneath a steel shell with a thin slit in the middle. It was just like the phones at that house.

  The tool was useless to her, so she threw it across the room. Her eyes moved about the room, and she gasped in shock, catching the limbless and headless torso on the table.

  "Jesus Christ." Hannah's body, her face, everything her body owned cringed.

  Hannah raced to the other side of the room, hurrying down a short hallway of bloody footprints, and tried the last door in the basement. Hannah clasped the cold doorknob that was wet with blood, wet from where that man had recently touched it. Against her better judgment, and failing to wonder why this door was not locked, she opened the door anyway. Pulling it back slowly, she edged into the room. When she flipped on the wall light, she faced the piled up remains of over fifty corpses.

  ONLY CHANCE

  "Grab it, Brock! For Christ's sake, grab it!"

  Reaching and lunging forward awkwardly with extended arms, Brock dove onto his belly. He didn't know what he was reaching for, but he was catching quick movements of an object along the carpet. Brock pounded his hand flat onto the ground and cradled it in his closed palm like a frog he wanted to catch. Angel kneeled beside him with desperation playing on her face. She shouted, "Don't let it go! Don't you let it go!"

  Both his fists were closed, and Brock didn't know which hand harbored the cherished item. He started to feel something warm and wet in his right palm.

  "Did you get it, Brock? Tell me you got it. Did you get it? Tell me, tell me!" James garbled his questions. He was on his knees, his left arm flexed, his face wrung tight, his right hand pressed over the middle of his forearm. Blood funneled from between his fingers. "Tell me it wasn't for nothing. Say something, Brock!"

  Angel joined in, her voice fierce. "Yeah, did you grab it? Show it to us. Just don't stand there looking like a jackass."

  Brock had no clue what was in his hands, feeling its weight. If he did have the object, he feared opening his palm and the object flying out of his grasp. The way it shifted back and forth, it felt magnetized, pressing against the walls of his palm trying to pound through to the other side of his hand.

  James insisted, "Tell me right now if you have it, Brock. I saw it heading straight for the crack of the door." An wince from his throat, he was fighting tears. "Please tell me you got it."

  Brock undid his balled up hands and revealed the coin. "Where did this come from?"

  James removed his hand over his forearm to reveal a thin sliver of an opening. From the outside, it didn't appear serious, but it was so deep he could see the pink inflamed tissue beneath. New blood kept pooling to the surface in dark red beads.

  "You're trying to keep it for yourself, aren't you?" Angel closed in on him, grabbing him by the neck and squeezing so hard a g-aack escaped his constricted throat. "You selfish bastard! Give it to me. It's mine!"

  Brock escaped her hold over his neck in one wild jerking back motion. "I don't care whose it is, just give me a second to figure out what the hell to do with it!"

  Angel slapped him across the face with an open hand, then socked him in the gut with a meaner hit. Driven to the ground as all the air in his lungs rushed out of him, she jumped on Brock's back, straddling him, and tried to peel his hands open. Nails scraped his skin. Brock lost his balance and fell forward onto his knees. When he landed, she yipped in victory, and before Brock could register anything else, the door was thrown open. Angel bolted out of it and threw it closed behind her shouting, "You guys can go to fucking hell!"

 
; Brock reached out and stopped the door with his hand before it closed.

  James's face was cast in menace. "Your sister's a real bitch."

  "She didn't used to be. Was that a quarter I caught in my hand?"

  James checked the hallway for safety. "Yes, it just shot out of my arm for no reason. Why did it shoot of my arm? It, it really hurts. It scraped bone on the way out. The coin was in there deep."

  Brock dictated what he knew, which wasn't much. "I didn't see it happen. I caught movement, then you both shouted at me to grab it, so I grabbed it."

  "Thank God you did." James looked back at his bleeding arm. "I have to get this wrapped up, but I'm not going back into that room. I'm sure there's something at the bar I can use, a towel or something. It stings. I felt it work through me, from my shoulder blades, down my arm, and out it came, like the coin was drawn out."

  James winced when a new gob of blood oozed from the thin wound. "I think our next move is obvious after I get this cleaned up. We track down Chuck Durnham. The axe man will give us the answers we need."

  They both walked to the lobby and stopped at the bar. Brock stared out the openings of the boarded up windows, trying to find Angel. She was long gone.

  So much for that.

  James washed his arm off in the sink behind the bar, then tore up a towel into slivers and wrapped it tightly around his arm, grimacing through the whole ordeal. "I know where Chuck Durnham lives. It's not too far from here. A mile or two at the most. We can walk there if we're careful."

  "I'm with you. I just hope I find Hannah before he's done anything serious to her. I swear to God if she's not alive, I'll lose it."

  James cut him off. "We'll hope she's okay. I'm glad I found you, Brock. Somebody's got sense around here, finally. I can't believe I didn't go to that man's house, even if just to snoop around and put the pieces together."

  Brock pointed at his arm. "Like why that quarter just shot out of your arm?"

  "Be glad it wasn't you, man. The pain's unrelenting."

  The cloth was tied around his arm. Spots of red were already bleeding through. James smiled at the shelf of booze, the majority of it smashed on the floor or stolen. He did locate a bottle of "Plankwood's Finest" scotch. He noted the twist-cap was steel. A slot for a coin was installed, what could accept a penny or a dime. He tried wedging it off, but it wouldn't budge. Turning his head from it, he smashed it against the counter, and then bashing it repeatedly, he gave up when the glass wouldn't give.

  "Now that's bizarre." Brock frowned, posing his hands to catch the bottle. James tossed it to him. The glass wasn't dented or cracked. "It's just like that door back there, and my cell phone. Whatever's happening, it's picking out more and more things to lock up. We have to pay for the privilege."

  James sighed. "They want us to pay for a drink. They want us to pay to use phones, pay to drive, and pay to use doors." He stared at his arms, and then holding up his hands in front of his face, he went pale. Winded by the blood loss, he sat down on the bar stool to calm his dizziness. "They want us to pay to live."

  Brock had trouble accepting the words he knew to be true. He imagined this was the way detective's felt when they had a murder victim that was senselessly slaughtered, and their initial thoughts being who would do such a thing, and why?

  "Besides Chuck Durnham, is there anybody parading about town harassing and killing people?"

  James thought on it. "The people who are alive out there are fighting to the death. If you succumb to the sleep, it's like a brain dead coma. No thoughts. No living. Just nothing." He guided Brock to the window by the arm and pointed to the body lumped against a blue mail box on the side of the road. The body was curled up like a dead mouse. "If you touched him, he'd be warm. He's alive in that shell, though barely. He's probably rotting. Who knows how long he can stay like that before he won't come back to life. But I have a feeling if we put money into him, he'd come to consciousness."

  Brock said, "It's so unbelievable."

  "You're right about that. I just think it's strange when this shit started happening, it was about us needing money to live, and now, something is taking that money back. The question is what is taking the money."

  Brock stared outside, counting the bodies strewn about the steps of walkways, hunched over bus stops, benches, open patches of grass, randomly laying about the street beached like fish carcasses. Things didn't add up. "So something is changing. Whatever rules you were surviving by are now altered."

  James picked up the scotch bottle and turned it in his hands. "More and more things are inaccessible without money."

  "Well, we're not getting anywhere speculating and hypothesizing. I want answers from that Chuck guy. I'll make him talk. I don't care if he has an axe. I don't care what the fuck he has."

  James gave him an incredulous look. "I'm with you, but your sister had a point somewhere in all her bullshit. How are two old fogies like ourselves going to intimidate a man like that?"

  Imagining Hannah in the clutches of the stranger, or as one of the lifeless bodies in the street, it deepened his determination. Angel had already pushed aside the barricade, so he simply walked up to the front entrance doors and waited for James to follow him. When he finally followed, Brock said, "So let's take a walk to his house and figure it out on the way there."

  PHONE CONVERSATIONS

  Willy peered out of the windows of his uncle's house and saw nobody in the distance. What was he doing here? What was he waiting for? Even considering the horrible things he'd seen today, Willy was growing antsy. Something could be on its way to kill him, and he wouldn't know about it. Indecision kept Willy sitting in the living room chair beside the front window. The grass out front was chocked full of holes, and that steam kept billowing out. Regardless of why this was happening, it was here he stayed. Live now and die later, or die now and stay dead later, he easily chose the best option.

  So long sitting with nothing to do, his eyes began to get heavy. Even the occasional clack of a gunshot far off or a scream that lasted only long enough to be identified as a scream failed to keep him alert. He was exhausted from a long day of running in terror from things.

  Willy slipped into a short-lived sleep. When he did wake, he came to when he felt a weight in his hands and heard the crinkle of a plastic bag. What really woke him was the sound of coins rattling against coins. Once he computed there was a bag of money in his hands, he jerked with a start, dropping the loot onto the floor. Coins rolled across the wooden floor, banging into walls and the legs of furniture.

  Willy spoke the house, the only culprit. "Who's there? Who the hell is there?" He peered into rooms, turning over shadows, flipping on lights, attacking corners, and questioning unknown intruders. "Come on out! I know you're here. You can't hide from me. What's the meaning of this?"

  He was in the bathroom gawking at an empty shower after he pulled aside the curtain when the phone rang. Every series of rings was like a beating. He felt his blood channel faster in his veins.

  What now? What else fucked up is going to happen to me?

  The phone kept ringing. He let it go for ten times before he knew it wasn't going to stop until he picked it up.

  Willy returned to the living room. He swiped the steel fireplace poker on his way to the phone for safety's sake. He stepped on coins as he got closer to the phone that hung on the kitchen wall. He saw his reflection in the face of the microwave. He looked distraught and nothing like himself. It was as if his skin had been shrink-wrapped to his bones and his eyes were as wide as they could be.

  He tried to pick up the phone, but he couldn't pry the phone from the hook. Steel anchors held it in place. Steel covered the digits. On the square of steel over the digits was a thin slit in the middle.

  The coins had woke him up. Something or someone had given him the coins for a reason. The phone had to be the reason. It was a damn good guess, he thought.

  He picked up a coin off the living room floor and shoved it through the hole.

>   The phone kept ringing. The hooks over the receiver released themselves, and he was able to pick up the phone. Willy said, "Um, h-hello?"

  A familiar voice spoke. It sounded like the connection was poor and full of static. "Call someone/dial the number/put a coin in and talk away."

  That ended the conversation. The talker hung up on him. The phone was snatched back onto the hook so fast he didn't see it yanked back. It's as if the hooks sprang forward and took back the phone.

  Willy stood there and watched the phone expecting it to ring again. It didn't. After a time, he walked away from the phone and stomped into the living room. He studied the quarters scattered about the floor. It could've been a hundred dollars in quarters, he thought.

  'Put a coin in and talk away.'

  It was an invitation. The man's voice wasn't threatening. It harbored excitement, the withholding of a bigger surprise. He wasn't getting anywhere standing in place like a fool, and he certainly wouldn't get anywhere running outside to certain death. He was wasting time. His wife probably wondered what the hell had happened to him.

  My wife!

  Willy scooped up a handful of quarters and stuck one into the phone slot. The hooks released the phone, the steel plate came open like a door, and he had access to the digits. Willy dialed his home number. After three long rings, a female voice answered. Through a veil of fuzz, the woman's voice was muddled by the constant wind that rattled in long intervals in the background.

  "Is that you, Willy?" The way she talked, it sounded like he'd disturbed her from a deep sleep. He expected his wife, not this crotchety sounding woman. He waited on the line and didn't answer.

  "It is you, Willy?/you're scared, and I know why/don't be/this is all for you/everything's for you from now on, Chuckles/you were a good boy/he didn't see you grow into a man, but now he can, Willy/now he can/he wasn't done living, and he wasn't done spending time with you/he's got good ideas, and lots of them/that's one thing about the guy/he never ran out of good ideas."