fiction
Armageddon - A Welcome to Funland Story
Billy pressed the button. ‘Game Paused’. He was facing oblivion. If the game’s forces held off his attack for another minute or two, his troops would be neutralised and all his gains lost. He kicked the machine and contemplated smashing the screen with his fist. If he could not see the garishly lit vista advertising his failed gamble, perhaps he could persuade himself that it did not exist.
His egocentric mania won the battle with his petulant rage and he considered his options. He’d take no advice from the arcade’s other players. Asking them for guidance would be worse than losing his position as the game’s High Score holder. Kev had approached him in search of a pound coin and Billy had told him to fuck off, shielding the display screen with his body in the desperate hope that Kev had not seen the pulsating red of his ever-lengthening damage bar. If Kev had not backed off, Billy would have decked him on the spot…probably why most of the others left Billy alone when he was playing.
When the bank repossessed his parent’s home, his dad had knocked his mother savagely about the kitchen until her bloodied body lay comatose, propped up by the washing machine as it completed its last cycle. Later that week, Billy and his mum awoke to find themselves alone and the car gone. Billy’s dad had done a runner, leaving them to face the bailiffs and the bank alone. Within a month, they been relocated by the council to the first of the many squalid hovels they would be forced to call home.
Billy hated the bank, his indignant rage an unseen cancer spreading through the tissue of his consciousness. He imagined the men in dark suits gloating over their wealth and laughing at the misery they had inflicted upon him and his mother. With no understanding of his own father’s financial recklessness, gambling habit and expensive penchant for whores, he had little understood the causative factors bringing about his own impoverished woe.
Petty crime had been his salvation. Taking what belonged to another seemed entirely rational given that the bank had stolen what had belonged to his parents. His sense of impotency fed his two compensatory cravings. Violence and gaming at the arcade. Whilst his mother relied upon the state to fund her own cravings, Billy used the proceeds from his ill-gotten gains to purchase expensive trainers and a garish range of ever more costly baseball caps. When necessary, he topped up his cash reserves with greedy visits to his mother’s hidden jam jar.
Billy had learnt that if the other kids feared you, had no doubt that you would go further than them in a fight, they would be more likely to support your goals, than challenge them. He’d made an example of Kyle, punching him repeatedly until the boy pissed himself in front of the other players. Billy had held out his hand, saying he’d made his point. As Kyle timidly reached up for the same hand that had just knocked him down, Billy had delivered a brutal kick to his victim’s balls and turned around to share his smile with the shocked, but passive onlookers. Vacillating between alarm and self-preservation, they cheered with feigned delight.
The arcade had banned him for a month. He’d been banned several times, however his obsession for Armageddon and coke always encouraged the manager to let him return. Billy fed the machines and if a few low spending kids got beaten up along the way, so be it. These half-hearted restrictions on Billy’s use of the arcade had little impact upon his thinking, or behaviour. Inconvenient at worst, he knew he’d be back with his grubby hands on a joystick soon enough.
His thoughts ran to his status as Armageddon’s High Score holder. He’d ruthlessly grappled his way up the display ladder, his success measured in the volume of blood his armies had spilt. Having a legacy of such success had given him an unshakable sense of entitlement. Billy was devoutly convinced that he rightly deserved to have his initials emblazoned in the flashing lime green neon denoting his triumph.
His uneclipsed score soothed his repressed demons and bitter insecurities, mitigating or at least lessening his many other losses. Most of all, his status as undisputed Highest Score holder seemed to validate his own deep-seated sense of superiority over others, advertising the fact for all to see.
His forces needed to break through to the ammunitions dump. If he could reach that heavily defended zone, he’d be able to replenish his arsenal and restore his army to full strength. From the dump, he would advance and take full control of the conflict zone.
Lying immediately ahead of the tank division he’d supported with helicopter attack units, was a well defended POW camp. Two divisions of his own forces had been captured, along with the civilian population they had been protecting. Sitting at the confluence of two rivers, the camp was perfectly positioned to control most of the territory around it. In such a strategically compromised position, he found his forces effectively neutralised and being efficiently picked off by relentless raiding parties. If he did not take the camp and do so quickly, he’d see his chances of dominating the score board diminish with horrifying rapidity.
Billy calculated the pros and cons of his strategy. He pressed the ‘Resume’ button and proceeded. He positioned his three armoured missile launchers and selected the ordinance most likely to destroy the entire camp, removing the enemy’s advantage at the cost of permanently removing many of his own assets from the game in the process. He’d lose a huge number of points for inflicting mass civilian casualties and also lose a raft of in game privileges; however the strategic benefits outweighed the immediate sacrifice.
If the machine deducted all his points, he’d be ignominiously wiped from the score board. Without the insanely callous action, he’d be sure to lose, and the thought shook his being to its gelid core. It was a risk worth taking, and a simultaneous two fingered salute. Billy made his final preparations for the strike. The game sounded a loud warning klaxon, reminding him that his tactical victory would have potentially devastating consequences on his score.
He momentarily paused reminding himself that failure to execute his plan would lead to a humiliating, and very public defeat. The bankers had won, the machine would not. Billy thought of his drug-addled, alcoholic mother, the headmistress who had expelled him and the girl who had contemptuously laughed when he tried to kiss her. He imagined the face of the arcade manager telling him to fuck off for a month.
He recalled the time the two police officer’s had cautioned him, before the bigger one had roughly pushed him over, sending him face first into a pile of festering dog shit. He remembered the feeling he’d had when he’d felt his foot crash into Kyle’s unprotected nuts, and the adoration he had bathed in as the others cheered him on. Billy aimed three Satan V-73a rocket launchers at his target and defiantly smiled, before depressing the fire button. Game over.