James Axler – Freedom Lost

“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.