The crew sat in their rooms, alone and bored. They slowly gravitated to chatting over social media and having demolished girls, football and their usual watering hole, they sank into a space of abject boredom.
Gary decided Assassins Creed was called for and for the next couple of hours they lost themselves in their latest battle. They had a laugh but they were still bored. They needed to get out.
Lockdown or not they just had to go and agreed to meet up down by the boarded up arcade, Gold-mine, on the seafront. Usually the arcade was open and they loved meeting up down there, playing some of the games, popping to the cafe at the back and maybe having a laugh on the beach if the tide was out. Even in the winter the arcade could be relied upon to give some sort of social interaction but not now, not since covid started. Stefano had tried to keep it open but the restrictions were just too much and he decided to cut his losses and close up until the worst was over and people wanted to come back to the coast. Everyone in the small businesses along the seafront prayed for three things; the government opening up the country, the weather to be good and people to just want to spend money on having a good time.
Cold and shivering, they got together and laughed and larked about for what seemed like forever. They needed this, their pent up frustrations escaping in mindless acts; graffiting walls, smashing old bottles, chasing each other with bits of dead rat on the ends of sticks and breaking into their arcade.
Having run a muck inside there for some time one of them bumped into a game console that was still on. Blowing off the dust and clearing the mess away they found the games switch, tried it and amazingly it bust into life.
Their luck was in, and they fought over who would have the first go. The fact no other machines worked didn’t cross their minds. The fact none of them had ever noticed this machine before didn't either. At least they weren’t in their bedrooms under the watchful eye of mum or dad.
Shane managed to bag the first game.
It was about strategy, the aim of which was to kill as many people with one strike as possible. The first strike created two hits and then four and so on, but the targets were blank people at the lower levels, these were the training levels; by choosing the right one out of the crowd they were able to spread their death rays throughout and eventually throughout the continent.
It seemed to be similar to one of the games they’d often played called Contagion, but older and the graphics were pants. Larking about, jostling and shoving each other eventually they each had a go to varying degrees of success but after about forty minutes they got bored and stopped playing choosing instead to take the piss out of each other’s prowess.
The game station was abandoned and they retraced their steps back outside into the dreary weather.
Kicking cans and anything they could find that resembled a ball, they headed down to the canal and larked about throwing things into the canal for no other reason that it was something to do, but hunger caught up with them and reluctantly they had to head back.
At least they’d been out. At least they’d had time together with their mates.
They got shouted at by family for going out but with a customary shrug, it soon passed. Dinner followed by more time spent on the computer leading to sleep and another day of abject boredom.
Again they got out and met up and again they played the games machine and messed around on the canal. They got better at that cheesy game every time they went down until they managed to reach the platinum level where you could name the puppets and try to bump them off.
Ryan chose his maths teacher, science teacher and RE, oh how he disliked that woman. Harry suggested his uncle for reasons he never would say, the English teacher because she was soo boring and Chez his boss at work because he made him work to hard for £25 for a Saturday morning. The others stood around and watched as they bumped off half the teachers at school, the swats and some of the ugly girls who they just added just for fun.
Then the strangeness started happening.
Harry’s uncle was admitted to hospital and was on the intensive care ward for three months. They worried he wouldn’t recover but he did. He had many problems when he came out and to Harry it seemed as though he had lost the will to fight.
Chez was made redundant. His boss had had to sell up. His wife had died of covid recently and he wanted to go back to Denver where his parents were.
Ryan’s school had a massive covid outbreak and most staff and over third of the students who were attending became ill; several died, most of them from the vulnerable group of kids who had attended all the way through the lock downs and had been fine up until now.
An inquiry started and found nothing; no smoking gun, no obvious cause but the maths teacher had a heart attack from covid damage and later died.
The RE teacher ended up having to look after her mother full time
because she was shielding. Mum had somehow contracted the virus, possibly from her daughter's quick visits to the supermarket, there were no delivery slots to be had. The
RE teacher blamed herself and already on anti-depressants she
had just done a second test as she was worried; was she the carrier. How could she look after her mother?
As
time rolled on, the people who had had the targets on their back in
the game, fell ill and Ryan became all the more alarmed at what he
heard. That group of girls he hated because they were swats were slowly ending up in hospital or laid up at home. Not one of them was spared and it turned out they had all attended a revision class at school and spent time together.
He went back to the arcade and moved the boards back; the game still purred away, the contagion was into its fourth or fifth variant and he stood and watched as the screen flickered away slowly killing off or eradicating other nameless people, further and further away from where they lived.
He tried to stop the game.
It flashed up a message; “Thank you for playing and this program will now proceed into random generation”
He
turned and promptly threw up on the floor, what had he done? He called his friends.....