EleMental: A First-person Shooter

Chapter 6: 'Set all: max'

Chapter 6: ‘Set all: max’

Willis arrived at Zeb’s door later that evening, carrying his dad’s overnight bag. He held his Plush under one arm, wrapped in an old sheet.

Zeb let him into a pokey entrance hall with a glass sliding door to one side and a dim corridor on his right. A lean, spent-looking woman stood there – his mother, Willis assumed. Something about her pose told him she’d not been waiting to greet him. More likely, she’d been caught hurrying past. Willis took in her frayed, pink dressing-gown. She held a glass tumbler at an angle and red wine dripped from it. He could see new red stains rolling down the front of her dressing-gown. His gaze kept sliding to them.

‘This is Mum,’ Zeb said.

‘I’m off to bed,’ she said in a dry voice. Her frown accentuated her gauntness. ‘Help yourselves to anything from the fridge.’ She indicated an open door behind her, adjacent to the sliding door. Beyond it, Willis could see part of a dining area.

They both nodded.

She moved off and disappeared through a door halfway down the corridor.

‘She gets tired easily,’ Zeb said quietly, though Willis had said nothing.

There was a scuffling sound and Zeb glanced towards the open dining-room door. ‘And that’s Spud. My seven-year-old brother. He likes to stick in the background.’

Willis couldn’t see anyone.

‘Come on out, Spud,’ Zeb said. ‘I know you’re there.’

A stocky boy with a chop-top haircut emerged from the shadow of the small gap between the dining-room door and the wall. He stood for a brief moment looking at Willis, made as if to nod, but then instead ran down the corridor and through a bedroom door just before a bend.

Zeb’s expression remained blank. ‘Well, that was Spud,’ he said.

Willis gazed after the boy, wondering how it must feel to have a brother, one more person in your family. So it wasn’t just you.

At Zeb’s suggestion, they skipped dinner and headed straight for his bedroom. Willis pushed his hunger pangs to the back of his mind. Zeb’s room was small, with a graffiti-etched wooden bed head, tangled bed sheets, a box with wires and different-sized tools spilling from it, open dresser drawers with clothes hanging out … His gaze rested on a peeling zeeposter on the wall by the bed, displaying a frenzied musician swinging his guitar like a heavy axe. The guitar shattered in a spray of sparks each time it hit the stage’s wooden boards. After each shattering, the poster’s image flicked back and the guitarist swung again. Kerrr-rackk … flick ... Kerrr-rackk.

Beneath the poster – in fact directly beneath the spraying sparks – sat an old console on a plastic crate. Willis laughed. ‘This your DVP? It’s as if the guy in the poster’s smashing it.’

Zeb didn’t say anything.

Willis moved closer for a better look at the console. There was a large gash in its front; tape partially masked it. The name of the console was fixed to the opposite corner: Magnum 50. ‘I didn’t think they made Magnums anymore.’ Too late, Willis bit his tongue. He looked around in time to see Zeb glancing away, gazing out the window.

‘They don’t,’ Zeb said.

‘Well,’ Willis said after a moment, ‘we’ve got my Plush now. Where shall I put it?’

‘Hold on.’ Zeb pushed in front of Willis and grabbed the old console. Bending down, he tried shoving it under his bed with his foot, but it refused to go. Willis could see a lot of clutter under there already. A well-aimed kick from Zeb eventually got it under. Then he pointed to the space left on the crate. ‘There looks like a good spot.’

Willis pulled the sheet from his Plush and carefully set it down. He’d barely stood back when Zeb stepped in front of him and knelt before the white machine, one hand hovering over it. He paused as if savoring the moment. Then he rubbed one side in a circular motion. The console’s tiny lights blinked a few times and a cluster of multicolored beams rose up, laser meters with titles hovering over them: Speed, Tactics, Difficulty, eLusions, Weapons, Sonic capacity, Realtime physics.

‘Set: max,’ Zeb said. The tips of the meters darkened. ‘And while we’re about it.’ He rubbed the console’s surface again. More beams rose from the console. They reminded Willis of a nighttime cityscape. Titles materialized over them: Brutality, Ferocity, Malice, Hostility, Violence, Aggression, Gore, Endurance, Suffering, Deception, Antagonism, Deceit, Desperation, Torment, Agony ... Too many for Willis to read.

‘Set all: max,’ Zeb said. ‘And save settings.’

The tips of the bristling meters darkened and the meters withdrew.

Zeb sat back with a satisfied expression. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s v’game.’