The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [104]
She walks past a firing range of pistol games: a couple of black boys do battle with the Vietcong, next to an Asian boy fighting Arab terrorists. Farther down the aisle a stocky boy with olive-colored skin and a polyester shirt, possibly an Arab, fights his way through an army of pale zombies in a haunted compound. The zombies grimace and shriek as the gunshots appear in their bodies. They collapse, unwholesome piles of bluish flesh, dead for a second time. The boy grimaces as well, teeth gritted, face stretched in some places and creased in others. A green, bent-kneed troll drops from the top of the screen, teeth bared and claws extended. The boy jumps back. The screen turns red and freezes, and a countdown begins. Without hesitation he reinserts his game card to preserve his life and resume the battle.
The arcade is much larger than it looked from the outside. She turns and walks down an aisle of racing games—steering wheels and gas pedals, twisting roads and straightaways unfurling from vanishing points on candy-colored horizons. A pack of white teenage boys crouch forward on wheel-less motorcycles, tilting left and right and left again to the sounds of gunning engines as the screens light up their greasy, bug-eyed faces. She turns again and makes her way through yet another aisle, past hand-to-hand combat games on one side and a couple of full-environment machines on the other, roped-off compartments that buck and twist on hydraulic jacks. The largest crowds cluster around these, waiting in lines and watching the ongoing penetration of planetary defense systems on the outside monitors.
She looks for Javier, but all she sees is children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffeine and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hair gel and pimple cream and growth hormone–treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent sublimations. It’s all part of the conspiracy, she sees—all of it trying to convince them that they’re here to be trained for lives of adventure and glamour and heroism, when in fact they’re here only to be trained for more of the same, for lives of plunking in the quarters, paying a premium for the never-ending series of shabby fantasies to come, the whole lifelong laser light show of glamorous degradation and habitual novelty and fun-loving murder and global isolation.
Cadres in training for the Lite Age.
She turns around in search of a way out. There are no exit signs. The crowds press against her. A gauntlet of screens in every direction.
Order
The savage girl always used to be doing things, making things, but now she’s doing less and less. For the last few days her only activity has been chopping the wooden slats off a park bench and then chopping them into campfire-size pieces. Every day Ursula could look forward to another length of bench disappearing, leaving another bare metal ring, shortening the total length of the joined benches and bringing the savage girl, who migrated along with the supply of firewood, a few feet closer to her. In not so many more days—nine, to be exact—they’d have been sitting side by side, and the savage girl would have been forced to acknowledge Ursula’s existence. If she’d continued to resist, Ursula could have tempted her with a basket full of savory savage food—fried tarantulas, maybe, or boiled pterodactyl eggs, a roasted bison haunch. . . . But today she hasn’t chopped, hasn’t moved all day, and now the sun is going