Chapter Seventeen

 

"That big lit-up map directory says the vid arcade is supposed to be down at the end of this corridor past the fruit stand," Dean mused as he and Jak turned a corner past a former men's-clothing store that now served as a combination private residence and produce shop. A few scruffy apples and some dried-up broccoli were in a cart near the proprietor, who sat in a wooden rocking chair with a sleeping child and waited patiently for someone to buy, even at that late hour.

 

As they walked farther down the indicated corridor, both of them noticed increasing numbers of children and teenagers, varying from eight-year-olds to girls in their early twenties. A few openly gawked at the duo, their attention on Jak's milky white skin and fine whiter hair. The albino, used to being stared at, hardly noticed the rude scrutiny.

 

"Whoa, whitey. Hold it. You, too, kid." A tall, wide youth dressed in matching denim pants and jacket about Jak's age stopped them at the arcade entrance. A .44 Magnum blaster was strapped to his right leg. "Don't recognize either of you, and I don't see proper ID. Visitors, I take it?"

 

"Right. What was your first clue?" Dean agreed, already bristling at the young guard's arrogant tone of voice.

 

The sarcasm went unnoticed. "Got friends?"

 

Dean and Jak exchanged brief questioning looks. What a stupe question.

 

"Of course. Lots."

 

The guard looked as though he thought the pair facing him were retarded. "Let me rephrase the question. Got friends here in the mall?"

 

"Yeah, back at the Freedom Center Station complex."

 

"No, no. I mean friends who have played in here before?"

 

"In the vid arcade? No."

 

"Then you don't have memberships."

 

"No, I don't suppose we do," Dean said. "How do we go about getting one?"

 

"You got the jack, you get the membership."

 

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" Dean asked, glancing over at Jak. "Everything in Freedom costs money."

 

The guard nodded. "For a new boy, you wise up fast."

 

"Come on," Jak said, tugging at the hem of Dean's new T-shirt. "Fuck him. We got jack, you see."

 

"We'll be back."

 

"I'll be here. My shift goes on all night till closing."

 

 

 

JAK SAT DOWN on the dirty toilet seat and tried to ignore the pungent odor that had taken up residence in the grimy bathroom located at the far end of the mall corridor past the vid arcade. For all of the technological marvels that were encased and preserved within Freedom's walls, working public toilets weren't among them.

 

"Smell worse Doc," Jak said.

 

 

"Sorry, didn't know you were going to take a dump," Dean noted, holding his nose and backing away against the dirty mirror over the nonworking sink across from the open stall. "Here's a helpful hint, though. I think you're supposed to pull your pants down first and then go about your business."

 

"Smart ass. Keep watch," the albino youth said.

 

 

Dean leaned back against the bathroom door with his full weight. "No one's coming in. The smell would keep them out."

 

"Like you stop them."

 

Dean half watched Jak and half read some of the graffiti scrawled on the back of the bathroom door he was guarding. Most of the comments were sexual in nature involving male-female, male-male, male-mutie and, most disturbingly, male-animal. He was about to ask Jak to voice an opinion on how he'd personally dealt with the subject of interspecies romances back in Louisiana when the albino suddenly earned his full, unwavering attention.

 

Jak had crossed one leg over his other thigh so he could reach out and touch the bottom of his right combat boot. He now ran his nimble fingers along the edge of the boot near the heel until he felt what he was obviously looking for.

 

 

"Feet hurt?" Dean asked.

 

 

Jak's fine white hair swung as he moved his head down for a better look at the sole of the boot. "Not yet," he said. "Will kick shit out you, asking questions."

 

"Hell of a place to do a boot repair," Dean muttered, turning back to reading the pornographic messages on the door.

 

"Boot's fine."

 

"Doc would hate these," Dean mused, gesturing to the door. "Dumb asses can't even spell girl right."

 

Finally Jak got fed up with trying to accomplish his feat by hand, and took out one of his throwing knives from a hiding place in his camou jacket, running the sharp blade along the sole of his right boot, barely cutting back the surface. The layer of black rubber peeled away like a piece of masking tape. Putting the knife back in its hiding place, he took one edge of the tread and pulled back until he revealed a second layer.

 

Hidden between the layers were four thin, flat golden wafers. The pale-skinned albino flashed them at Dean like a hand of playing cards.

 

"Jak! I didn't know you had a stash!" Dean breathed, all of his swagger gone. He was seriously impressed by Jak's revelation.

 

"Weren't supposed know," the older boy replied. "Not much stash, unless kept secret." Jak went on to explain that he'd thought he'd have to give the cash up when they entered Freedom, but Ryan's victory over the sec droid had taken care of all the immediate financial worries.

 

"Have these long time," he said.

 

"More willpower than me. I'd have spent it when I got it," Dean replied.

 

The albino used a fingernail to flick the four wafers into the palm of his other waiting hand, stacking them into a thicker whole. He looked up at Dean and smirked as the gold glinted in the bare white light bulb of the bathroom.

 

"Now, let us in to play," Jak said. "Fuckers."

 

 

 

THE DISPLAY OF THE GOLD was effective. The insolent guard stepped aside and pointed them to a back office, past the many working vid games crowded into the arcade.

 

"Boss is back there. Name's Templeton. He'll fix you up."

 

As true children of Deathlands, both Dean and Jak had never seen anything like the darkened chamber. There was no interior lighting to speak of. All illumination came from the many vid screens. The noise they had heard coming out into the mall passage was busy and louder inside; electronic bleeps, boops, explosions and screams mixed with each machine's dozen digitized soundtracks for a staggering variety with differing intensities.

 

"Used some comps back at school with games, shoot-'em-ups, wag-driving simulations, mystery hunts, but they were nothing like this," Dean breathed.

 

"You forgetseen these kind games before," Jak said, speaking as loudly as he could in order to be heard over the noise.

 

"No way. Where?" Dean asked.

 

"Redoubt. Western Islands. When Trader and Abe still with us," the albino replied.

 

Dean looked at his friend curiously. "You funnin' me, Jak?"

 

"No."

 

Dean scratched his head, eerily mirroring the motion and posture of his father when puzzled. "I swear I don't ever recall seeing a vid arcade in a redoubt. Seems I'd remember a hot pipe like that."

 

"I know. Specially since one game blew asses sky-high."

 

Now Dean was truly perplexed. "What are you talking about?"

 

Jak sighed. He wasn't much for talking under the best of conditions, and the last thing he wanted to do was to try to enter into a detailed description about the past in the middle of a electronic maelstrom like the Freedom Mall's vid arcade. How to summarize one of the stranger redoubts the group had ever visited?

 

The underground installation had been small, tiny even, with only a mat-trans chamber and an upstairs series of rooms containing administrative offices, a small cafeteria, smaller armory, stripped-down living dormitories and secured nuke power plant. No elaborate maze or top secret labs, just enough in the way of supplies and room to house a staff to keep the mat-trans gateway open and properly functioning.

 

The redoubt's setup didn't even possess the usual military design. There was no sense of permanence in the evacuated rooms.

 

Adding to Doc's voiced theory of rotating shifts in charge of operating the redoubtwith living quarters located somewhere outsidewas an amusement center, filled with a dozen sophisticated arcade-quality video games. Jak remembered Dean being so excited, the boy had to be physically restrained by Ryan when the arcade was first discovered.

 

In fact Dean and Ryan both were as physically and mentally exhausted as could be at the time, what with having to endure three mat-trans jumps in a row

 

"That's it!" Jak cried.

 

"What?" Dean replied, struggling to make himself heard over the noise.

 

"You and Ryan took triple jump. First, all came to Western Islands from Maine. Then you stuck in chamber, door accidentally closed. Activated cycle. Jumped back to Maine. Ryan used LD button, went after you. Then, both jumped back to Islands. Triple-fried brains, make you forget arcade. Memory loss caused by jumps," Jak said excitedly.

 

"Makes sense, I guess. I do remember something about jumpingand Dad coming back to get me. Yeah, you're probably right, Jak. Good thinking."

 

The albino was pleased. "Thanks."

 

"Still don't explain how our asses almost got blown out of our britches," Dean added.

 

Jak had an answer for this, as well. "Happened later, when you and me went to play gamesjust like this time, only nobody else in arcade."

 

The games in the redoubt had been set up for quarters, twenty-five cent pieces, not game tokens. Luckily some of the brightly decaled consoles had several spare quarters in their coin-return slots. What appeared to be a broken paper roll of coins had been dropped on the carpet. Dean's eyes fell on a garish oversize console half-shaped like an Indy racing car molded out of brilliant crimson plastic.

 

"Grand Prix," Dean read off the brightly lit glass housing, pronouncing "Prix" as "Pricks."

 

"Some kind porn game?" Jak mused, until he realized it was a race-wag simulation.

 

"Never been behind the wheel of a souped up wag like this," the younger boy said.

 

"Never been behind wheel of wag at all."

 

"Want to give it a spin?"

 

"Okay."

 

After an unsatisfying racing adventure that resulted in their crashing of the comp-generated automobile, the two boys quickly went through the other games. While Dean enjoyed each of the challenges, finding the situations both challenging and fun, Jak became less and less enchanted as they took turns trying the systems out.

 

By the time they reached a gaily decorated red, white and blue console emblazoned with a banner announcing Shield Of Freedom, Jak totally lost interest in make-believe and was sitting by the console on the floor, leaning his back against the wall and idly watching as Dean carefully read the game instructions.

 

Jak turned his head to stifle a wide-mouthed yawn when he saw that the lower panel of the back of the machine had been removed, and wired into the game's starting mechanism were two scarlet-and-blue implosion grenades.

 

Two implode grens in a confined space. A booby trap, left behind in the redoubt for the supposed Russian invaders to come after the holocaust. The soldier or self-appointed patriot who'd set the trap up had indulged a twisted sense of humor by placing the bombs inside a patriotic, flag-waving type of game.

 

The albino moved in a white blur, his fine hair swirling out like a wispy fan as he leaped to his feet and snatched Dean away, pulling the boy behind him and out of the constricted interior of the game room, pulling the boy from the vid controls even as Dean pushed down on the red Start button to begin playing.

 

A startled "Hey!" was all Dean had a chance to utter as they half jumped, half fell out of the room and into the corridor outside the arcade. As they hit the floor, the interior of the redoubt's game room flashed once with a bright artificial light, and gave off a muffled crumping noise as the dual gren implosions tugged at their clothing and tried to pull them back inside the vortex.

 

Both were lucky. Jak's forehead was cut by a piece of flying glass from the vid game's shattered screen, while Dean suffered from a brief bout with temporary deafness when his eardrums were injured by the blast.

 

"Damn," Dean said after Jak related all of the particulars of their previous encounter with arcade games, "I don't remember any of that. Not even being deaf."

 

"It happened," Jak said firmly.

 

"Don't doubt it," Dean replied. "Dangerous stuff."

 

"Dangerous enough to stop playing more vid games?" Jak asked, half-hoping to get back to their room before it got much later. Doc would be sleeping, and his slumber was usually deep.

 

"Hah! I don't think so," Dean retorted. "We had some creaky old stuff on a Commodore 64 back at Brody's. Educational shit mostly, but there were some okay arcade simulations. Still, they were like fighting with wooden sticks instead of hand blasters compared to these games."

 

As the boy tried to make a decision among the few unoccupied games, Jak decided to make the best of it. The albino went directly to a three-dimension target console with the unlikely name of Bloodhunter in Dimension 2000. He gripped the stock of the rifle bolted to the control console of the simulator and sighted a phosphor-dot target.

 

He looked down for the coin box, but the front of the console was smooth. He decided these games didn't need jack to function.

 

"Don't work," he announced after a moment of pulling the trigger and examining the rifle. "Sights off, too. Not shoot shit with this blaster."

 

"Push one of those buttons. The one that says Fire," Dean suggested.

 

Jak did so. "Nothing. Game busted."

 

"It's your brain that's busted, dickwad," a new voice said. "You need tokens to play."

 

"Good one, Brack."

 

A boy all of twelve years old, with close-cropped blond hair and an orange-and-brown pullover knit shirt and jeans, was standing behind Dean and Jak. At his side was an older boy, closer to Jak's age.

 

The older of the two was dressed in a pair of green cutoff denims with a yellow shirt. Long, lank black hair hung down across his eyes. His sartorial splendor was topped off by a yellow-and-purple baseball capworn backwardswith a patch on the front that read Pac-Man Fever.

 

"Tokens. Right. We need to get them back in the office, like the guard said," Dean stated.

 

"No slots," Jak protested, glaring at the boys who had broken into their conversation,

 

"Yes, slots, on the side, not on the front, see?" The older boy pointed at the side of the controls.

 

Jak looked and indeed, the console had the activation controls on the left side instead of in the front at crotch level like the vid games he'd encountered in the redoubt.

 

"Different. Not on front," the albino said.

 

 

"No shit, genius. Now, if you're not going to play, move," the twelve-year-old said. "Dex and I got better things to do than stand and watch you and your little buddy figure out how to put the tokens in the games."

 

"You got a mouth, don't you?" Dean retorted.

 

 

"So do you, and you can use it to kiss my ass if you keep bothering us," snarled the older one identified as Dex.

 

"How about I stomp head?" Jak asked. "Not take long."

 

Neither of the boys appeared impressed. "Big talk, Spooky. Try it, and mall sec men will show up and kick the shit out of you," the younger boy said. Jak spotted a telltale bulge under Brack's shirttail. The boy was heeled, a blaster close at hand.

 

Jak had his own Colt Python, but left it holstered. "Might be worth it," the albino said, considering the risks and developing a mental picture of the pair of snide punks on the ground, broken and bleeding.

 

"I ain't scared of you," Brack said.

 

"Me, neither," Dex agreed.

 

Jak abandoned the mock friendly tone. Playing nice wasn't in his nature anyway. "Should be. Should piss pants right now."

 

Dean took Jak's arm. "Smoke it, Jak. You're supposed to be keeping me out of trouble, remember?"

 

"Next time talk shit, chill you," Jak said to the insolent pair, his ruby eyes blazing as he allowed Dean to lead him away. To their credit, Brack and Dex kept their mouths shut.

 

The door of the office was open. Dean and Jak walked in and waited for the seated figure in the dress suit to look up. That was, if he could be bothered to stop his rapid writing of numerals in a thick ledger book to notice their presence. The man was doing his mental computations in pen, and by the light of a single oil lamp.

 

"What?" he barked.

 

"You Templeton?" Dean asked.

 

"That's me. Who are you?"

 

"Clients, I guess. Need memberships and tokens. Guard said you'd take care of us."

 

"Prices are on the board." The jowly man pointed at a chalkboard hanging on the wall behind him. Prices were listed in different colors of chalk inside a preprinted grid. The numbers were hard to read in the low lighting, but not impossible.

 

"Why do you keep it so dark back here?" Dean asked.

 

"Saves money," Templeton replied. "Juice costs jack. Vid games take a lot of juice. I can use candles and oil lamps ten times cheaper."

 

"What do you think, Jak?" Dean asked softly, wanting to know what his friend's opinion was of the prices on the board. Since Jak had the gold, he'd be the one paying for the entertainment. The least Dean could do was to get his input.

 

The albino shrugged. "Don't know. Not good with figures."

 

Dean studied the board some more, calling up his own knowledge of mathematics from both his time spent in school and what his mother had taught him at night when he was still a toddler. A handy mall rate of exchange with the official silver logo of The Bank of Freedom printed on top was also thumb-tacked next to the cluttered blackboard.

 

"What do your gold wafers weigh, Jak?" Dean asked, doing computations in his head.

 

The albino stuck a hand in his pocket and caressed one of the pieces. "Tenth ounce, mebbe."

 

"Don't let him know you've got more than one," Dean whispered. "The way this chart reads, we should be able to get out of here with a membership and ten free vid games each. Mebbe more games if he's really honest, which I doubt."

 

"You two ready to deal, or what? We don't like loiterers in here," Templeton said, looking up from the book where he was scribbling in more numbers. "Get enough of that outside, people waiting, watching. That's why we have the membership fee. Keeps out the riffraff."

 

"What's hurry?" Jak said, taking out a single golden wafer, just as Dean had suggested. "Here's jack. Buy us membership and games, right?"

 

"Let me see that," the owner said, reaching out a chubby hand. Jak dropped the light piece of metal into the fat man's palm and waited. Taking the golden wafer, Templeton weighed it, deciding by feel and texture how much gold was there. He then held it between thumb and forefinger up to his face and surprised the two friends by sticking out his tongue and licking the surface.

 

For a brief second, both Jak and Dean feared the man might decide to swallow the gold, but as a finale, he followed up the oral caress by biting down gently on the wafer and removing it before nodding his approval.

 

"Slice it thin, don't you?" he asked pleasantly.

 

"Last longer that way," Jak told him. "Still enough to buy you new suit."

 

"What's wrong with my suit?" Templeton asked as he put the wafer on the desk, where it glinted in the lamplight. "Your metal, boysit feels real enough."

 

"Is real."

 

"So you say," the arcade owner said.

 

"How'd it taste?" Dean asked.

 

"Tasted good."

 

"So, is there a problem?"

 

"I don't know," the vid arcade owner replied. "Is there?"

 

"Think we try cheat you?" Jak asked with a hint of annoyance, beginning to reach out for the thin piece of gold on the desk. "Mebbe go elsewhere."

 

Templeton moved incredibly fast for a fat man and snatched up the gold. Dean knew Jak had purposely let him do sono one on Earth was faster than the long-haired albino when the teen put his mind to speed.

 

"Hell, boy. Nothing personal," he protested. "I think everybody under thirty tries to cheat my ass. You wouldn't believe some of the kinds of counterfeit jack punks your age have tried to pass off on me. Thick or thin, coins or nuggets, paper currency or fake charge chits. I've seen more bootleg precious metals than you'll ever know. More fake jack floating around Freedom than the real thing."

 

"What's your deal?" Dean asked.

 

"A good one. Your gold tastes right to my teeth and tongue, so I'll give you what you need."

 

He took out two red lapel pinback buttons and held them out to the waiting Jak and Dean. They took the offered pins and looked at them with puzzlement.

 

"Wear these at all times while in the arcade. If you lose your button, you have to ante up for a new one. Buttons are coated with some chemical. I've got a sec screen that can read it. You won't be able to get in my arcade without wearing the pins, or an alarm goes off and you're escorted to the front to leave or to the back to pay."

 

"What about the tokens?" Dean asked.

 

"I'm getting to them." The man reached down to a silver device attached to his wide leather belt and pressed a thumb trigger rapidly, releasing a series of small, flat, round metal coins.

 

"Ten tokens each," he said with a flourish.

 

"Bullshit." Jak said, stressing each of the syllables.

 

The token salesman shook his head. "There you go again. You albinos make it hell to do business with any sort of wit."

 

"Want twenty," Jak said, gesturing to himself and Dean. "Each."

 

"Don't try and rogue us, mister," Dean added, wanting to know where Jak was going with his request to double the deal, since he knew they'd already decided that an offer of ten tokens and membership was fair.

 

The larger man shook his head with a pained expression. "Damn. A haggler. Christ save us all from hagglers. Okay. Fifteen. Each."

 

Dean glanced over at his friend, ready to back the play if things went south.

 

"Eighteen," Jak countered.

 

Templeton looked as though he were about to succumb to a heart attack. "Goddamn, boy, this ain't no roadside carny! Things are more cut-and-dried here! You want deals, go to a ville flea market! Find a street peddler! Dig in the graveyards! But don't hassle me with trying to skim a better deal than retail price!"

 

Jak didn't reply. He just waited.

 

Dean decided to play along. "When he gets like this, mister, he'd rather cheat himself out of having a good time than spend extra jack on entertainment he thinks is a rip-off."

 

"No refunds," Templeton said icily, wrapping his hand around the gold.

 

"What you think." Jak allowed himself to smile a feral smile, his lips peeling back and revealing his sharp canine teeth.

 

The owner frowned. "Seventeen. My final offer, otherwise we can get as nasty as you want to be, son."

 

Jak turned off the evil disconcerting grin. "Deal."

 

"Excellent!" Templeton crowed, and thumbed the coin changer at his side rapidly, spitting out the rest of the needed tokens to activate the vid games.

 

Jak and Dean left they way they came and entered the arena of noise and light.

 

"Didn't know you knew how to haggle, Jak," Dean said.

 

"Sure. What first?"

 

Dean looked around carefully. "We wait."

 

Jak shot him a look of sheer exasperation.

 

"Hang with me, Jak. If we play some of these games nobody else is on right now, we're wasting tokens. I got a theory. See, they're punk games. Shit vids that regulars stay away from. I think the most popular games are the ones you have to wait a turn on."

 

Jak nodded. "Makes sense. Which one you want wait for?"

 

"That red-and-black game," Dean said firmly. "The one called Mortal Kombat." Brack and Dex were playing MK. They had their backs to the two newest members of the arcade as they busily worked the joysticks and buttons to the game Dean had pointed out.

 

"One of assholes from earlier messing with?" Jak asked.

 

"Uh huh."

 

The albino grinned. "All right."

 

Dean and Jak stepped past Mortal Kombat and stood behind another game, but that one hadn't even earned a passing glance from any of the young people in the busy arcade. The game was called Space Invaders, and even to Jak's untrained eye the unit's graphics and controls looked primitive.

 

"Rather wait for something good than rush into a bad game." Dean said.

 

"Uh-huh," Jak replied, tuning out the racket of the many games and voices as best he could, while thinking to himself that Doc's verbal jousting might not be so bad after all.