Smith's Monthly #7

by Smith, Dean Wesley

Now there was something a lot more than money at stake. People’s lives. This was not the time for Poker Boy to break.

  So I stared back at the four machines, daring them to take me down, daring them to get to me or anyone else around me.

  After a moment, I realized I had won. My mind had done its trick of putting things into compartments, just like it did with the fear I felt on the final tables of big tournaments. The force the machines were using to try to draw me to them was now trapped off to one side of my mind. It was still there, but it wasn’t going to affect what I did, how I played this hand.

  Maybe being able to do that was also one of my superpowers. If it was I was going to have to figure out a name for it. Something like my Fear-Away Power.

  I glanced around at the others.

  Johnny and Geneva were also doing fine it seemed, keeping each other level.

  Screamer had a confused look on his face, like he was hearing something in the distance. I had no idea how the pull on these machines would affect his power.

  Patty tried a half-smile at me. It was enough to show me she was fine as well. As Front Desk Girl, I was sure she had dealt with more angry people than I had. More than likely, she had a way of compartmentalizing this type of energy like I had. Maybe her own special superpower.

  Tech was still standing facing the machines, but his look had changed from fear and shock to curiosity. It seemed the fearlessness of youth was serving him well.

  “Ben’s in there,” Samantha said, moving toward the machines like she was a zombie in a bad movie. “I can sense him. He’s trapped in there.”

  I stepped across the front of the machines and took her by the shoulders, stopping her five paces from the machines beside Johnny and Geneva. “What do you mean you can sense him?”

  “He’s in there,” she said.

  Everything about her seemed locked on the machines. She clearly wasn’t aware of where she was at the moment for some reason. She half struggled against me, but I wouldn’t let her take another step toward those monsters.

  “How do you know?” Johnny asked her, stepping up and blocking her from the machines.

  With that she seemed to come back to the warehouse, back to a presence in her own body.

  She turned to face me. “My new senses,” she said, clearly checking in with herself.

  “New senses?” Johnny asked.

  “She’s blind,” I said to Johnny, “so Stan at lunch gave her other senses, some extra power so that she could help us out. She’s just getting used to them.”

  “Stan?” Geneva asked.

  “Long story,” I said, not wanting to waste time right at that point explaining gambling gods to someone who wasn’t going to understand. “Just believe that like you two, she has some special senses.”

  Both Geneva and Johnny again nodded as one.

  “So what did you sense?” I asked Samantha.

  “Still sensing,” she said. “Ben is close. He’s in that machine and very much alive. I can tell he’s confused and a little angry and getting slowly tired.”

  “Is his energy being drained?” Patty asked. She had moved up to stand beside Samantha.

  Samantha nodded slowly. “Maybe. He’s getting tired.”

  Patty glanced at me. “The myth.”

  I nodded, agreeing. The power was more than likely coming from the people inside. And for the first time in some time I had an idea on how to solve this problem. Samantha held the solution to what we were facing. If she could somehow link to her husband and transfer that information to me, I might be able to figure out what to do next.

  “Screamer,” I said, motioning for him to come up beside us.

  “Samantha, you know how Screamer put the images of what Patty saw into your mind?”

  “You want him to put what I’m sensing into yours?” Samantha said.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Anything to help Ben get out of there,” she said, the strength in her voice clear and strong, now that she believed her husband was alive.

  I glanced at Screamer and he nodded his agreement. He touched my arm, then Samantha’s arm.

  For a moment everything went black, as if someone had turned out the lights in a windowless room. Then I realized what I was experiencing was Samantha’s blindness.

  I opened my mind up to the other senses, amazed at how the warehouse around me came back into focus in sort of an overlay with what I was seeing with my own eyes, only vastly enhanced.

  I could see the heat of each person, smell them, hear even their stomach’s rumbling. And all the thousands of sensory inputs were coming together to form a picture without color, yet very clear and accurate.

  I also suddenly knew Samantha’s memories, her fears, everything about her, and I had no doubt she knew everything about me.

  “Can you hear him?” Samantha asked.

  “Yes,” Screamer said.

  I realized there was a person, a presence I didn’t recognize from my own world, yet was very, very familiar to Samantha. I could see what she meant by sensing him. He was there, inside the machine.

  Ben was alive.

  All the people that had been taken were alive. I could sense that as well. They were existing in the wires, in the circuits of that machine. To them it felt like white corridors, forever twisting around on each other, with no exit. Most of them seemed to be walking those white corridors, getting more and more tired.

  Of the four machines, it seemed that only the one on the right had been taking people. They were all in there. I somehow just knew that fact.

  “Can you communicate with Ben?” Johnny asked from a place that seemed outside the world I was focused on. Part of my mind was in the white spaces of the circuits of the machine, part of my mind was still aware of the warehouse, with Samantha’s heightened senses as an overlay.

  I felt Samantha try to contact her husband. I felt her mind call out to him.

  But Ben didn’t respond, didn’t hear her.

  Screamer let go of both of us, breaking the image of the white place where the people were trapped.

  Breaking my contact with Samantha’s enhanced hearing and smells and feelings. It was as if I had suddenly gone from a full color movie to a black-and-white one. It was shocking the difference in attention to other senses rounded out the world around a person.

  “You all right?” Screamer asked Samantha.

  She nodded. “Ben can’t hear us. But he’s in there. All of the people are.”

  I glanced at Screamer and he nodded in agreement.

  “Can you talk to him,” Johnny asked. “Get those inside to shut down the machine?”

  “No,” I said.

  That way was a dead-end. But I was getting a glimmering of a plan.

  “Tech,” I said, “anything you can do to open those things up?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. “But I’d be afraid to do anything unless I was completely sure what I was doing would kick those people out of there.”

  “I agree with you there,” I said. “Your friend Harry seems to be the first to have disappeared in there. If you could talk to him, you think the two of you might come up with something?”

  “Him on the inside, me out here?” Tech said. “Sure.”

  I nodded and turned to look at Johnny.

  “I’ll do it,” both Johnny and Geneva said at the exact same moment.

  “Do what?” Samantha asked.

  “Stick a nickel in that thing and go inside to find Harry,” I said.

  “That’s bug-nuts crazy,” Tech said.

  “Oh, no,” Samantha said.

  Patty just looked pale.

  Screamer shook his head.

  The silence in the warehouse was smothering.

  Chapter Sixteen

  CONTACT AT TWENTY-FOUR VOLTS

  I STARED AT JOHNNY as he watched through Geneva’s eyes what was happening in the casino with the ghost slots. At one point he had shouted “Get her out of there!”

  Th
en he had laughed and explained to all of us standing there staring at him, worried, that an old woman had sat down at the ghost slots. He said that Patty and Geneva and a cop had managed to stop the woman before she got a coin into the slot. His laughing and shaking his head cut the tension a little in the warehouse among the five of us.

  Screamer and I stood next to Johnny, ready to help him in any way we could under the circumstances.

  “Geneva’s sitting down at the machine,” he said.

  Suddenly he was very serious again and I could hear the worry in his voice and see it on his face. He didn’t like this, and I didn’t much like it either, but it had come to be our best choice.

  And our only plan.

  Tech was afraid to touch the machine for fear he would do something that would kill all the people inside. He wanted the help of the old guy I was betting had reset the slots in the first place, Harry Timmer. But Harry was inside the slots, and had been from the start. So someone had to go in and talk to old Harry and relay the information out to Tech.

  The connection between Geneva and Johnny made one of them a natural for the job. I didn’t like it, but none of us could come up with another way of trying to rescue all those people inside there.

  As Geneva said to one of my objections, “You often have to jump into water and endanger yourself to rescue a drowning person.”

  She was right. I knew she was right. I just didn’t much like the pool she was jumping into. And neither did anyone else.

  “She’s put a coin in and pulled the handle,” Johnny said.

  Suddenly he grabbed his head and bent forward, as if he had a bad hangover.

  Screamer was about to grab him to hold him up, but I waived him off. Whatever was happening to Geneva and Johnny, I didn’t want Screamer feeling it as well.

  Johnny moaned a few seconds later, but remained standing, bent over, his hands grabbing the sides of his head like he was trying to hold his skull together.

  Then he screamed.

  It was like no scream I could have ever imagined coming from a big, powerful detective. It sounded like a combination of him and Geneva, high and sharp at the same time as low and guttural. It sent chills up my spine.

  The scream echoed through the warehouse, then Johnny tipped forward onto his hands and knees on the concrete.

  “Help him!” Samantha said.

  “Don’t touch him yet,” I said, waiving everyone away. “We need his connection with Geneva clear.”

  A moment later the slots shimmered into view, bringing back with them the intense desire to go sit down and just try my luck. But of course, putting a nickel in that slot machine at this point wouldn’t have much luck involved. Just stupidity, which was how I often felt about playing slot machines even when they weren’t ghost slots.

  Around us, the gray of the warehouse had changed back to reflected colors and energy from the lights on the machine. Every face, every old slot machine covered in gray dust now had multiple colors as the image of Saturn glowed brighter than any light in the warehouse.

  Being careful to not touch any of Johnny’s skin to jeopardize his connection with Geneva, I bent down and he let me help him to his feet.

  “What happened?” Screamer asked.

  Johnny took a deep breath. “The shock and the pain knocked her out.”

  “Shock shouldn’t have been that bad,” Tech said. “Those machines are run on twenty-four volts.”

  “You all right?” I asked. I could feel his shoulders shaking a little, but with each passing second he seemed to be gaining control.

  He nodded slowly. “I think so, but I’m betting on one hell of a headache.”

  “Is Geneva all right?” Samantha asked.

  Again he nodded slowly. “I think so. She’s knocked out, but I can still hear her thoughts under her dreams.”

  “Okay, now that’s got to be real weird,” Tech said.

  I had to agree with Tech on that one. Listening to a person’s dreaming mind must seem like watching a bad psychedelic movie while being very drunk.

  “Actually, at the moment, she’s dreaming she’s swimming to the surface of a pool,” Johnny said, his eyes staring off into the distance. “Very peaceful, no panic or worries. Hang on. I see what she’s doing. She’s trying to reach the surface and wake up.”

  We all stared at him until he finally nodded and turned to look at me. “She’s all right. She’s awake and she’s in there.”

  He pointed to the ghost slot machine.

  “Oh, wow, cool,” Tech said. “What’s it look like?”

  “White corridors,” Johnny said. “Everything is shades of white, including her clothing, hair and skin. All the colors are gone from everything. She feels normal-sized and very lost in the maze of corridors. Nothing seems to have any corners either, including the corridors. They’re more like round tubes that twist and move off in different directions.”

  “I’ll bet she’s in the electrical wiring,” Tech said. “Have her move until she finds a junction area and then describe it.”

  “She agreed,” Johnny said.

  “Is she meeting some of the others in there?”

  “She is,” Johnny said. “And she’s already asking for Harry.”

  We all stood silent for a moment watching Johnny, who was with Geneva inside the ghost slots. After a moment, Johnny said, “It’s weird, because I’m in there with her, and she’s out here with me at the same time. It’s helping her stay calm being here through my eyes. Also weird that everyone in there that she meets somehow knows they are inside a machine.”

  I had no idea how people trapped as energy inside the wiring of a machine could know where they were. I couldn’t imagine there being windows out of the side of the wiring. But at this point, nothing about ghost slots would surprise me.

  “Tech, she’s at an intersection,” Johnny said. “One corridor into a wide triangle area, three corridors out side-by-side.”

  Tech seemed to think for a minute, then said, “I’m betting she’s at the electrical junction sending power to the wheels. You need to have her turn around and go back the way she came.”

  “You think you might know where Harry is at?” I asked Tech, surprised at how definite he sounded.

  “If I was stuck in there, and knew where I was, I’d be at the solenoid on the reel board.”

  “Solenoid?” Patty asked as she came back toward us down the rows of dead slot machines. “Sounds like she’s in there and just fine.”

  “She is,” I said.

  The relief on Patty’s face was clear.

  I was very happy to see her back from the casino. I felt more comfortable with her beside me on this problem. It was as if I got a “balance energy” from her, keeping my mind clear. Next time I made the final table of a big tournament, I might ask her to come and watch from the stands, just for that energy boost.

  “The solenoid is an electric coil used as a control and switching devise,” Tech said. “Its purpose is setting payouts on the machines built in this period. It’s located on what they called the reel board, the electrical panel area that controls the three reels of the machine.”

  Patty stopped right beside me as I asked Tech the next logical question. “Is that one of the things that would have had to have been changed to make the machines hit jackpots all the time?”

  “The main thing,” Tech said.

  “Hang on,” Johnny said, holding his hands up. “Someone Geneva just ran into knows Harry.”

  There was a pause as we all waited for Johnny’s next statement. Then he smiled at me. “Says he’s been trying to help Harry figure out a way to escape. He’s taking Geneva to Harry now.”

  “Great!” I said.

  I turned to Screamer. “I’m going to need you to hook up Tech and Johnny, so Tech can talk directly to Harry. Make sure he gets everything right. Can you do that?”

  “Easy,” Screamer said.

  “Hang on,” Tech said, “you’re saying that I can talk through Johnny,
then through Geneva, to Harry who is inside that machine?”

  “Actually, through me first,” Screamer said, smiling at the young guy with all the tattoos.

  “A conversation through three heads,” Tech said. “I’m going to be lucky to not need counseling after this is finished.”

  I agreed with him on that. Running around in Samantha’s head earlier had left me unsettled. I knew way too many things about her that I wanted to forget. Too much about her dreams, her fights with her husband, her sexual pleasures. And she knew the same stuff about me, which I didn’t really want to think about.

  I wasn’t sure how Johnny and Geneva had made a constant connection between them work so quickly over the last day, but after my short romp with Samantha’s mind, I now knew that I didn’t want to see what Patty was thinking, or even know how she felt about me. And I didn’t want her seeing my daydreams about her in the shower and me with a bar of raspberry soap. It was going to be a lot better learning about her slowly, blindly, one question at a time, one nude shower at a time.

  More fun, too.

  “She’s almost to where Harry is at,” Johnny said.

  “Ready?” I asked Screamer.

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  I motioned for Tech to come over closer to Johnny while Screamer placed himself between the two. Samantha and I and Patty stepped back out of the way.

  “Here we go,” Screamer said, winking at me.

  Then he reached out and first touched Tech’s arm, right below a tattoo of an eagle, then touched Johnny’s arm.

  Tech’s worry left his face as his eyes sort of glazed over. Clearly he wasn’t seeing the aisle of the old slot machine warehouse anymore. He was inside the slots, inside Geneva’s mind.

  Screamer looked at me, clearly in his eyes and reported what he was seeing. “Harry’s sitting down in there. He seems very, very tired and old. I think the energy drain caused by the machine is almost too much for him.

  “Yeah, it’s me, Harry,” Tech said out loud.

  Screamer smiled and sort of rolled his eyes, making it clear to us that he thought it funny that some people had to talk when thinking to another person.

  “Don’t ask,” Tech said. “I don’t even understand how this works.”