Hazardous Materials (3 page)

“Don't you know it,” Ludwig said. “Told my folks not to vote for the guy. Not sure if they listened.” He looked at the consoles with fresh eyes. “Makes sense why they bricked this place up now, though. Good luck trying to sell off a bunch of arcade games with some politician hollering that they're making kids go all Columbine. Can't even imagine that kind of publicity.”

Jarrod turned his eyes, and his mind, away from the bullet holes, from the bloodstains. People went crazy sometimes. And sometimes they killed themselves. And sometimes when they killed themselves, they took other people with them on the way out. It didn't take a “corrupting influence” for someone to put a gun barrel to his own head—or to someone else's. It didn't take much to pull the trigger. Jarrod knew that better than most. And he'd told himself the same thing many times, over many long nights when questions ambushed him in the dark.

Push it out of your mind. Push it deep like you always do
.
You made a promise
. Jarrod
had
made that promise to his sister, and he'd made it to himself. No use dwelling on what
could
have happened. All he could do was focus on what was right in front of him—twelve arcade games that someone somewhere was bound to pay good money for. It might just be his way out. But only if he spoke up for himself first.

“So . . .” Jarrod said, quietly crossing his fingers behind his back. Crossing them on both hands. “What do we do with the games?”

Ludwig raised an eyebrow. “We?”

“Yeah,” Jarrod answered, willing to grind his nerve to a needle point if that was what it took. “I did find them, after all. I was the one who pulled down the locker—”

“I told you not to funk with the lockers.”

“But I did,” Jarrod pressed. “And if I hadn't, we wouldn't even be talking about this now. I found them, and I figured you'd let me keep a few of them.”

Ludwig lolled his head back theatrically. His eyes followed.

“It's only fair.” Jarrod wasn't giving in. Not this time. “Fair, that's all I'm asking for.”

“Well . . .” Ludwig scratched his chin. “You're right. You did find 'em. Don't want anybody accusing me of not being
fair.
” The final word spilled from Ludwig's mouth twisted with petulance. “I suppose you should get
one
.
How about . . .” Ludwig's hand landed on the console nearest the graffiti, nearest the bullet holes and the blood. “This guy?”

Above the dead screen, the name of the game was spelled out in chunky
Future Shock
letters.

Polybius
.

From
The Pathology of Mass Shooters
by Thomas Fletcher, PhD

Public shootings have become a sadly familiar spectacle in today's America. While it is tempting to portray these acts as a strictly contemporary problem, the specter of such violence has been a part of the social fabric for far longer than many of today's pundits care to admit.

Numerous examples exist in the postwar and Cold War periods alone. In 1949, New Jersey was the site of the infamous “Walk of Death,” where decorated World War II veteran Howard Unruh gunned down and killed thirteen people (including three children) during a twelve-minute walk through his Camden neighborhood.

The exploits of some mass murderers have entered the American mythic consciousness. Examples include infamous teenage spree killers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate—who together murdered eleven people over a two-month period in 1957–58—and Charles Whitman, a former U.S. Marine who killed sixteen people and wounded an additional thirty-two during a shooting rampage from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966.

Other instances of premillennial mass shootings have been largely forgotten by history. A case in point is the 1981 murder of eight people by nineteen-year-old Army reservist Brian Shaw, dubbed the “arcade killings” by the
New York Post
. Shaw gunned down his victims in the arcade room of a roller rink in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. And while largely unremembered today, it remained the largest mass killing by a single individual in New York State until 2009. It has been widely speculated, however, that the arcade massacre was the inspiration for the recent terror attack in Times Square perpetrated by Jarrod Foster.

The fact remains that while the outcomes in the two cases may have been different, the impetus was the same. In each case, the attacker had been plagued by extreme feelings of marginalization and alienation.

THREE

J
arrod sat on his lumpy bed, stirring the bowl of lukewarm ramen nestled in his crotch and staring at his newest acquisition. The Polybius cabinet hogged almost half of his basement studio. But at least it blocked his view of the wall smirk.
A week, tops
, Jarrod told himself as he slurped his salty noodles.
Just get it up on eBay, and it'll be gone in a week.
And with any luck, he himself would soon follow.

He'd done his best to find the going rates for vintage arcade games, looking up what he could on his dinosaur of a smartphone. He'd discovered that prices for cabinets in working order varied wildly, ranging from a few hundred dollars for run-of-the-mill games like
Pac-Man
or
Space Invaders
to tens of thousands for more exotic titles along the lines of
Death Race
,
Aztarac
,
Inferno
,
and
Blaster.

But when he looked up
Polybius
, all he could find was a modest entry about a Greek historian with the same name. The man had apparently had a front-row seat for the Sack of Carthage—lucky him.
Not the most likely candidate to name a video game after
, Jarrod thought.
Maybe the designer just saw the word in a book and thought it looked cool.

Even though he'd promised himself he wouldn't, he also read more about the shooting that Ludwig had described. He found little besides a few archived articles. Most of the information only corroborated and expanded Ludwig's story. Indeed, nine people had lost their lives that day more than three decades ago: two children, four teenagers, and two adult employees of the roller rink, and the shooter himself.

But Ludwig had gotten a few details wrong. The gunman wasn't “some teen”; he was a twenty-year-old Army reservist who worked at the rink himself part-time. And while he had indeed killed himself, it wasn't until later, after he'd surrendered to the police, that he'd hung himself in his jail cell. Survivors of the incident who knew the gunman described him as a quiet, go-along-to-get-along type but said that he'd been acting erratically in the weeks leading up to the shooting, that he'd complained of nightmares and sleepwalking. The
Post
had printed a picture of him. Underneath was his name, Brian Shaw.
The same Shaw who
painted the mural we tore down that second day?
Jarrod wondered.
Possibly. Probably. That mural was definitely the work of someone with loose wiring.

Jarrod peered at the grainy photo. Shaw was lanky, with jug ears made worse by his Army crew cut. He was smiling, and his eyes were bright.
Not the eyes of a killer
, he wanted to tell himself. But he knew better. His brother, Simon, had had eyes like that. And Simon had had that same crew cut. And Simon had been a killer, one sanctioned by the United States Government, if not, ultimately, his own conscience.

Jarrod stood up and dumped the rest of the noodles into the toilet. He needed to focus on getting that game up for sale on eBay or Craigslist or whatever. He wouldn't get any bids without a picture, though. And pics of a live screen would make the game more enticing to a collector—if it worked, that was. It was well past time to plug it in, fire it up, and find out.

Groaning, he squatted down, knees popping. He rooted around behind the game, reaching for the power cord. Stiffened by decades of neglect, the ancient plastic sheathing crumbled away as he jammed the plug into the socket, and—

zzzztttzzz

Jarrod was hit with 120 volts of electricity he could barely afford. He jerked back, biting his tongue to keep from screaming. He pulled his hand from the wall, head swimming in an electric haze, and looked at it. All the fingers were still in place and still in the same order. With that reassurance lightly gluing his mind together, Jarrod plugged the game in again.

He stood up and watched the CRT screen flicker to life with a vacuum-tube whine. A helix of white vector lines swirled in the center, while a copyright credit wiggled across the bottom of the display.
Sinneschlöshen 1981
.

Unlike most games Jarrod had seen, this one didn't have a joystick, just a small wheel and a single button. Above the button was the word
Start
, below it
Fire
. He tapped it once. He heard a metallic
plink
and spotted a quarter tumbling from the coin slot.
Must be a glitch
, he thought. But still, it was strange. It was as if the Polybius itself were issuing him a formal invitation—or perhaps a challenge.

He bent down and picked up the quarter. He walked it across his knuckles for a moment, a trick Simon had taught him. Feeling the metal warm as it slid between his fingers, he wondered how long the quarter had sat in the Polybius's belly. Three decades? More? He wondered who might have been the last person to hold it. One of the eight people who'd faced their own personal Game Over that day, blood and brains splattered across the inside of the arcade? Or maybe, just maybe, this quarter had last jingled in the pocket of Shaw himself.

Jarrod dropped the coin into the slot. Challenge accepted.

Sinneschlöshen 1981
flattened to a line, then shortened to a single white dot. The dot bloomed, lashing out vectors of red and green. They linked to form a cylinder. Jarrod flicked the track wheel, and the cylinder began to spin. A line of type scrolled across the top of the screen:
Prepare to take aim
. A beat after the words appeared, a grating metallic voice repeated: “Prepare to take aim.”

A simple gunlike shape appeared at the bottom of the screen, barrel aimed right down the cylinder. Jarrod hit the Fire button. A burst of light flew down the mouth of the vortex. At the bottom of the tube, a pair of two-legged creatures appeared. Instantly, they began to scuttle up the walls, moving like spider crabs, all angles and points.

Jarrod rotated the cylinder until the crab creatures were in his sights. He hit them easily, and they broke in half. But each half reformed as a new creature. Jarrod fired again and again. With each bull's-eye the creatures only doubled in number. Within seconds, there were too many to count,
far
too many to shoot. They roiled up the inside of the cylinder, heading straight for him. He tried to shake the thought that if the creatures reached him, they would crack the glass and pull him inside, pull him right to the bottom of that swirling vortex.

“Warning,” the voice buzzed, a digitized monotone. “Danger.”

“No kidding.” Jarrod slapped faster at the button, picking off more and more of the creatures. But something tugged at the back of his mind.
What am I doing?
Why am I still doing this? Why am I playing this stupid game?
I just need to take a picture of the screen. I don't need to beat this thing.

But he kept playing, pushing back against the rising tide of creatures until they finally began to recede. Eventually, only a single creature remained. Jarrod spun it into range and fired. The thing came apart, falling into disconnected lines that, this time, did not reassemble. He let out the breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. The cylinder was empty.

“Phase one completed,” the voice said. “Prepare for phase two.”

Jarrod caught sight of some numbers—or maybe symbols—flashing at the corners of the screen. They whipped by too fast to read. A glowing ring rippled the length of the cylinder, catching his attention. He stared at it, and it began to pulse, bathing his face in a cold blue light.

A comforting, familiar light.

JARROD STOOD IN
the roller rink. Things he'd known for sure that they'd demolished and carted away were back in place. Things he'd ripped out with his own hands were whole again. And not just whole; they were new. Things like what he stared at now. Things like the mural.

He narrowed his gaze at it. The colors were bright. The paint fresh. And things, again, were not as he remembered them. Instead of pins, the man leading the children now juggled bones. The eyes of the woman fleeing the satyr seemed full of allure instead of fear. Her head tilted coquettishly, and her hand, once held out in warning, now beckoned. The man kneeling at the pool wasn't simply looking anymore; he scooped the water for a drink. And the mermaids floating lazily around him flashed hungry smiles of needle-sharp teeth.

It's all different
. But of course it was. It was a dream, and he knew that.
Things are different in dreams.

“You
like
that thing?” Ludwig's voice came from far behind him.

He turned to see his boss at the edge of the rink itself. In one hand dangled a pair of roller skates, in the other a smoldering Newport Light. And there was something else different about Ludwig. His eyes were gone. Where they should have been were only dark patches of nothingness. “You can see it?” Jarrod asked, wondering why he wasn't terrified. It was a dream,
he justified. Things were different in dreams. “You can see
me
?”

“I see plenty. Plenty enough, anyway.” He exhaled a billowing cloud of blue smoke. Behind him, the door to the arcade beckoned with a wash of flashing lights.

Jarrod could smell charred mint all the way on the other side of the rink.
No. That's not right
,
he thought.
Can you smell things in dreams?
He wasn't sure.
It doesn't matter. Things are different in dreams.

“Smoke?” Ludwig asked, dropping the roller skates and reaching for his pack. The twin voids of his eyeless sockets seemed to take in everything and nothing at all.

“I don't smoke.”

Ludwig laughed. “You will. You will. And you know what they say.” He drew deep on his cigarette. “Where there's smoke, there's fire. You don't smoke now, bucko, you're gonna smoke later. You're gonna burn.”

“Don't listen to him,” came another voice from his left. A small voice. “You need to be strong. You need to prepare.”

The voice belonged to a little boy, maybe five years old, standing next to him, dressed in zip-front footie pajamas. His eyes were bright with life but tarnished by sorrow. “Who are you?”

The boy simply took Jarrod's hand in his, and together they faced the mural again. “He can't see them.”

“See what?”

“Look.” The boy pointed one small finger at the trees in the background of the painting.

Jarrod leaned close. The shadows in the forest began to move, shifting closer to them. Patches of gloom seemed to coalesce into eyes—eyes and teeth. From the corners of his vision, he caught flashes of figures slithering in the darkness, but when he twisted his head to face them, nothing was there but flat paint. “What are they?”

“Demons,” the boy answered.

“Die demon die,” Jarrod muttered to himself, remembering the graffiti. He peered even closer at the mural. The juggler now juggled knives. The children's eyes had been replaced by hollow blanks the same as Ludwig's. The woman's arm had grown long and boneless. It wrapped around the satyr's neck, choking. And the man was gone. Where he'd knelt at the pool was a growing slick of blood.

“They can change,” the boy said. “The demons. They can make us see what they want. See what
we
want. It was a gift from their masters. A gift for them. A curse for us. A weapon.”

“Weapon . . .”

The boy clamped down on Jarrod's hand. “The end is coming. You need to prepare.”

“The end of what?”

“Us,” Ludwig called from the other side of the rink, laughing. “Us. Them. Difference does it make?” His cigarette dropped from his hand. Small flames sprouted from where it landed on the carpet.

“Don't listen to him,” the boy insisted. “You know what you need to do.” He pointed past Ludwig to the door of the arcade. Through the arch, Jarrod could see shadows flitting back and forth. Behind them was the Polybius. “You can stop them.”

Jarrod felt hot. Sweat beaded his brow. He wiped it away, turning to see Ludwig trying to tie on his roller skates while an inferno raged around him. Smoke choked the air. Fire ate at the walls, taking big, greedy bites.

“Told you you were gonna smoke,” Ludwig said, his head on fire. “Told you you were gonna burn.”

The fire was suddenly everywhere. A million invisible needles tore through Jarrod as the flames climbed his back, coiling around him. He watched his skin blister, turn black, and peel.
It's just a dream
, he told himself.
A dream
. But the pain screamed differently.

Melting flesh dripped from the boy's charred face, his hair now a shock of fire. He turned to Jarrod, eyes accusing. “You can stop this.” His mouth was gone, his face just a leering skull. But the voice was inside Jarrod's head. “You
have
to stop it.”

“Who are you?”

“You know who I am,” he answered. “You know what you have to do.” The boy let go of Jarrod and was lost to the smoke, lost to the fire.

Jarrod raised his hand, nothing now but black bone and raw sinew. In it he held a gun. The barrel shone with a glow that was almost holy. He started walking toward the arcade door.