Coin-Operated Machines (24 page)

PUNISHMENT

Willy kept his distance from the foot of the staircase and the box containing the wooden head of his uncle.  While footsteps kept coming down the stairs, the mechanical machines started working again; their lights flashing, their mechanisms working on their own.  Voices of the dead, the hushed, the accusing, the vile cursing, the berating, the amused kept cycling and recycling.  The words, the voices, they were worked up.  Their energies doubled.  What they had to say was much more important now.  The walls leaked black oil.  The oil kicked up steam as the black clotted rivulets of foulness sweated down the walls.  The reek of death was pungent to the nose, yet the sight of the people walking into the room from the staircase was much worse to take in. 

There were fourteen individuals who walked down the steps
one at a time like automatons.  Their legs and arms were stiff the way they couldn't bend very much.  Their faces were clenched as if fighting a force that was making them walk.  Their eyes were wide and ghastly, their mouths crying out to Willy for help.

"
Don't let this happen to us, save us, we're sorry, we're so sorry, they won't let go of us, I can't feel my body, I'm not moving my body, dear God, don't just look at us, do something, do something to save us, he's going to kill us, he's sick, he's crazy!
"

Uncle Tim's box projected garbled rage through the tinny speaker, "
YOU KILLED ME!  I AM NOT CRAZY!  I AM NOT CRAAAAAZY!"

The floors were boiling with pools of the abysmal liquid.  The
room was thick with yellow death fog.  The machine's lights were murky through the reek.  Laughter and voices of the dead seemed to rejoice louder and louder, their decibel level near eardrum bursting.  Willy cupped his hands to his ears, yet Willy could somehow hear his uncle's words project from the box.

"
Each of these people were responsible for my death/they wanted my property for the city interstate project/I refused to sell, and they hired some goons to burn my place down/these people had their helping hand in my demise/I burned to death/the flames ate my body for fifteen agonizing minutes before I perished/death will make them pay/death has given the dead the power to see their dreams and ambitions come true/ENJOY THE SHOW, WILLY!
"

Willy watched, afraid to take a step in one direction or the other.  The black oil was a half inch pool on the floor.  The tide neared his feet. 
Willy caught swirls of reds, greens, and flesh tones within the black.  Watching the oil, hearing his uncle rant, and seeing the mechanical machines work, he truly believed this was all the work of the dead. 

There was nothing
Willy could do to stop it. 

Those fourteen people suddenly shifted
stiffly, their bodies working independently of themselves, as if their bodies were made of screws and mechanical joints.  They were like the machines, and what he witnessed next proved that theory correct. 

The rattling against the house occurred in all the upstairs rooms, through the walls, even the windows (which shattered one by one), and the roof.  Through the basement ceiling, the wood splintered and down rained hundreds and hundreds of coins.  The coins were drawn towards the people who were hobbling and resisting their own bodies, but losing the battle as they were each forced to stand in front of a mechanical machine. 

"
Oh God no!
"

"
Noooooooo!
"

"
You're breaking my bones!
"

"
I can't control my body!
"

"
Why are you doing this to us?
"

"
I'm in ag-ony!
"

"
Gaaaaaaaaaaawd!
"

Willy winced as the sounds of bones breaking increased.  Wrists snapped.  Shoulders were dislocated.  Necks cricked.  Legs were twisted backwards.  Faces were wrought in agony as
coins pierced into their bodies right through the skin, but they didn't bleed.  They weren't damaged.  They were compelled. 

One of them grabbed the "Shock Meter" with both hands.  The machine was overcome with coins and cash, the money flying in all directions as it kept raining down from the ceiling and
getting sucked into the machine.  As more coins entered it, the steel grips crackled with electricity, and soon, the woman holding it shrieked until bits of her skin fluttered in the air as sizzling burning meat, then into ashes, as she burned into a crisp black skeleton in less than ten seconds.  The corpse toppled backwards, the crispy exterior flaking to nothing to reveal the steel box hidden in her back. 

An
older man punched the speed bag on the mechanical machine, and when he did, his own face imploded as if hit by a brick thrown at the speed of light.  His head was thrown off of his shoulders, the brain disassembling itself mid-air and striking the wall as splatter.  Willy could only guess that how hard the old man punched the bag ended up coming back to his own head with triple the force.  The shotgun for the "Duck Hunt" game was in a middle aged woman's hands.  She pulled the trigger and out the back of her head shot out bloody quarters, dimes, and pennies.  Two men who looked like brothers were being attacked by the tiny figurine clowns at the circus who'd escaped their box.  Lions were chewing out their throats, while clowns were setting their clothes on fire.  The figurines of the audience whooped and hollered as the two victims met their horrible demise.  Madame Rousseau spoke in her box, the harsh female voice of the bayou making predictions for the older woman in her eighties, specifically how the woman would strangle herself to death.  The older woman did indeed strangle herself with her own hands, but the woman's fingers pressed so hard they broke skin and threaded through muscle until she twisted her own head off.  When the head struck the floor, coins, jewelry, and money overflowed out the neck's stump, out her eye sockets, and ear holes. 

The other victims
were dying, and Willy knew he couldn't save them, but he could save others outside the house from further harm.  Whatever powers compelled his uncle to do these things, the man wasn't sane. Willy did the only thing he could think to do in that moment, standing in the room of dying people.  Willy gripped the wooden tower containing his uncle's head by two hands and threw it down as hard as he could. 

"
Willy/NOOOOOOOOO!
"

The glass
around Uncle Tim's head shattered.  The head rolled out, instantly melting in the oil.  The wood parted to show off gears and pulleys and steel mechanisms at work.  Flames shot out of Tim's wooden head, and then it sank in the oil that kept rising higher and higher from the ground.  The rest of the room became victim to the heat.  The mechanical machines and the remains of the victims sank into the black mess, instantly engulfed and then vanishing as if they'd never existed at all. 

Willy rushed the stairs, only to tip forward and land on top of them in his haste.  His ankles had melted into
the black.  Flames rose up from beneath the stairs, cooking him in moments.  While his flesh was scorched, Willy finally understood what powers possessed his uncle.  Death had its way with his uncle's imagination.  What ideas, hopes, and dreams were stored in the man's heart and soul were taken by the dark forces of the afterlife.  Enough dead people had been committed to the earth that they had gained a certain power and freedom to make their ideas real. 

As Willy watched the flesh from his fingers turn to blackened
and cooked bone, he also learned something else.  Death wanted to play games with the living.  His suffering was their pleasure.  His sorrow their celebration.  Death had fooled his uncle into playing their game of human suffering.  Now they were done with his uncle, as death was finished with Willy.

The spirits of the dead
now had greater ideas and ambitions to exploit.   

The fire weaken
ed the stairs.  Willy crashed through them just like his uncle did all those years ago and burned alive in a scorching blaze of burning black tar. 

The voices floating about the room rejoiced.

Willy's voice joined the throngs of the dead. 

NEAR THE END

Angel was the first to reach the truck in the road.  She screamed, backing up from the driver's side door.  Brock remembered her boyfriend was in the seat, and how his body had been pulped by coins.  He eased Angel aside, though firmly, sensing movement about them in the woods.  The sounds of the dead were at a deafening roar, the words emanating millions of voices strong.  Brock lugged out the flaccid corpse, the poor bastard's sticky blood covering his hands.  Brock placed him on the street. 

Hannah had grabbed Angel
by the arm and lead her to the other side of the truck.  Brock moved to the driver's side, the keys still in the ignition.  He was so grateful there wasn't a steel slot covering the ignition that he cried out in joy, but nobody could hear him over the din of the dead. 

Turning the ke
ys, the truck started right up.  Brock checked to make sure everybody was inside.  Angel and Hannah's face was turned in terrified frowns, eying the blood, overwhelmed and horrified that they had to sit in it.  He too was covered in congealed blood.

He flipped on the
headlights to reduce the darkness.  After driving a half of a mile, it became apparent what they were hearing that was so loud.  In the road, coins, money, jewelry, all of it was magnetized to a house down in the woods.  The coins and jewelry clanged together, kicking up wild sparks.  They could see the house where the change was drawn to.  The roof, the shingles, every inch of the ranch style house was chocked full of holes, as if an entire fleet of M-60 guns had been unloaded into it from all angles.  And the decimation continued.  Wooden boards were see-through to the point walls collapsed as the storm of money continued to filter inside.  The sight was confusing as it was an inspiration to step on the gas that much harder.  

Angel kept watching
in the rearview mirror, and when the money storm calmed and went silent, she turned her eyes from it until a great explosion rocked the earth so strong it almost sent the truck off the road. 

"Look!"
  Brock turned to his side mirror and watched the house literally explode, everything firing up miles high.  There was no fire, no smoke, only coins spreading across the sky, each individual piece sucked towards something nearby, each coin going their own direction. 

"What the hell is happening?" 
Hannah kept mouthing to herself.  "It doesn't make any sense at all."

Brock couldn't instill comfort in either of them, he himself trembling.  It's what Chuck had
warned them about.  The next big thing.  The ideas of the dead were battling to come to fruition, and Tim Hawker's idea was about to conclude with a big ass bang. 

"Keep your eyes open," Brock shouted.  "
Something's happening very soon!"

The first indication things were coming to a head was the black oil billowing
up from pockets of the ground everywhere, as if ghosts had struck their payload, the black crude issuing with geyser ferocity, spitting up head-high and gushing continuously.

"Drive faster!"  Angel
demanded, lowering in her seat and scared to death.

Hannah hugged Angel, and Angel returned the gesture, both of them stealing what comfort they could
from each other. 

That left Brock alone to face the chaos. 

Driving on, new events began to transpire.  The trees, the road, and in the farther distance, the houses in the residential area, the cars, the windows, the roofs, even the corpses, formed new steel slots somewhere on them.  Coin-operated devices, he thought, that's what they were, like machines in a mechanical museum. 

Brock heard the rumble in the air, and then the voices on the air stopped. 

Then it began to rain. 

THE GRAND FINALE

It wasn't raining water when the sky grumbled.  Flashes of copper and nickel came down.  They were sucked into the coin slots that were located on inanimate objects.  The slots devoured the coins.  Escaping the woods and driving into the residential areas, they watched the corpses in the street who'd taken in the coins jerk to life.  This time, they were rotting, their eyes sunken into their bodies, their muscles atrophied and their arms and legs moving at a sluggish pace against rigor mortis.  Black oil oozed from their bodies as if they could burst open with the black stuff at any moment.  Trees renewed by money stiffened in every yard, the wood bending and creaking as their root systems broke dirt and the branches came to life, swinging and batting at the truck, denting the driver's side door, and Brock cried out as one of the tips of the branches sliced across his cheek through the shattered window. 

Slamming down on the gas,
Brock overcame the living tree that chased after him in the rearview mirror.  "Goddamn! Did you see that? 
Did you see that
?"

Before the two
in the back seat answered him, they were staring out ahead of them as every tree in every yard broke free of the earth.  Pockets of the road suddenly turned into potholes, each coin going into a random steel slot causing the street to dent or implode in parts. 

Brock be
came a stunt driver, weaving, turning, slowing down, speeding up, twisting the wheel left and right, guiding them through the deadly concourse to avoid a flat tire, or worse, one of the trees reaching into the car again. 

Watc
hing in gaping eyed fascination through the rearview and side mirrors, Brock caught a series of horrid scenes.  They weren't the only ones who'd survived and were holding onto life.  Many people racing out of their houses and screaming for help were terrorized.  A local man was running out of his backyard with a bevy of tools hovering after him, namely shovels, axes, a hammer, hundreds of nails, and a pitchfork.  Suddenly all the items surged forward with insane speed, cutting right through him like a corer through an apple. 

Another woman,
an older lady, was trying to work her way through an open window, but it had come down on her back, slamming into her spine again and again and again.  The sound of breaking vertebra was accompanied by blood spilling out of her mouth until she fell limp in place, dead. 

A boy and his father were cornered by five trees,
the trees being living animated things.  The trees tipped over one-by-one, going timber, and crushing them. 

A garden hose was strangling a teenager in his backyar
d.  The pressure so tight, the boy's eyes were bulbous and insect-big.  The teenager's girlfriend was screaming in panic as power cables snapped from their posts and wrapped around her up like a mummy's body.  Then the lines constricted, tightened, and she was squeezed to death.  Blood and flesh and fat were rendered between the lines of cable in coagulated pudding. 

Inside his house, a man was being stalked by his kitchen appliances, namely a blender and juicer. 
The kitchen table banged its body towards him and pinned him into a corner as the blender pureed his left hand and the juicer sliced up his other hand until all he had was bleeding pulp stumps.

An open window displayed a man trying to help his wife out of bed
when the ceiling fan broke free of its molding.  The blades were spinning so fast, it sliced off their heads and shot them out the window across the street and into another person's yard. 

The fire
places in many of the houses turned into blazing ovens.  They spewed arcs of fire and turned the havens into thousand degree pressure cookers.  Brock gawked at the dozens of people whose skin boiled from their bodies, popping like grease, until all that was left of them was fleshless and meatless bones.

Gas ovens burst
against the open flames, raising a series of houses, shooting debris up to the heavens. Cars were driving by themselves, disappearing down roads after the others who'd survived, their lights blinking and flashing erratically.  Flowers danced back and forth in their pots on porches, swaying to an unknown song.  Blades of grass shifted to the beat of the same unknown song.  Birds by the hundreds hovered about the sky like a dark cloud, pirouetting and spinning in tandem as if synchronized.  Window shutters clapped closed and swung open over and over again.  Houses dismantled themselves piece by piece and put themselves back together in minute intervals.  The squares of the concrete sidewalk raised themselves up straight like dominos and fell down one by one in a strange show. 

Brock forced himself from the trance-inducing scene once those that had
recently died got back up and were chasing after them, though slowed by their broken bodies.  Black oil oozed from the pores of their skin.  The pursuers were accompanied by trees, vehicles, and random sharp implements. 

Everything was out to kill them.

"They're gaining on us!"  Hannah shouted, staring at the schoolyard with living playground equipment.  The swings moved back and forth, occupied by invisible people.  A baseball bat floated and took a swing as a invisible pitcher threw out a baseball.  The bat swung, smacking the ball into left field.  Catchers mitts floated after the hit.  Kick balls, basketballs, and jump ropes had escaped from the school, spreading out across the blacktop area, the objects playing a game of their own. 

Speeding
through the main stretch of town, cars had lined themselves up in a blockade to prevent their escape.

Brock
gave a start.  "Shit!"

Hannah
panicked. "We have to turn around."

Angel
gave a short shrill of a scream.  "No, they're right behind us!"

"Then what the hell do we do?"

Brock gathered courage.  He was determined to escape this damnable place.  Turning the wheel, he drove up on the curb, driving through chairs on a sidewalk cafe.  He escaped around the wall of vehicles.  The cars, worked up that their rouse had failed, backed up and began pursuing them, blaring bright headlights in their wake and honking their horns. 

Storefronts smashed open behind them, kitchen implements stabbing at the air after them. 
A toy store front spit out living teddy bears and action figures.  Toy tanks shot off tiny rounds from their cannons.  Plastic machine guns were clutched by commandos and military action figures the size of toothpicks, the guns prattling bullets and blue smoke.  They were each demented in how they moved, the plastic alive, flexible, and boasting of killing intentions with the black oil leaking out of their faces. 

The street itself began tipping upwards
like a bridge being raised. Brock pushed the truck on as hard as it could run, all three of them shouting as they were driving up an incline.  Reaching the end of the incline, they were three stories high.

"Brace yourself!"

Flying through the air, they were coming down fast.  Mid-air, they caught streetlights bend with the ear-aching twist of steel to push them off-kilter, though it ended up helping their landing.  They came back down, hitting the back tires on the street first, then the front ones.  The axles protested and the shocks weren't too happy, Brock figured, but the car kept driving.   

Off in the distance, a junkyard was animated with action.  Machines smashed vehicles in their death-grip jaws as other cars too damaged to be serviceable crawled on, trying to escape the beast that was smashing them to death.  They bled black oil like blood as the junkyard became a steel pit of death.

Up ahead a mile, the bridge out of Blue Hills took shape. 

"Drive
faster, Brock!"  Hannah begged him.  "Hit the gas!"

Angel kept staring at the side mirror
to watch the trees, the cars, and the floating implements of death stalk them.  The voices of the dead returned once again, enjoying the terror show.  They were cheering on their demise. 

Brock ignored
everything, even as the trees in the woods began uprooting themselves.  Hawks swooped overhead, encircling them, the coin slots shining in their backs.  Dead corpses were limping towards the bridge, everything and everyone knowing that's where they were going. 

Keep driving
, he told himself,
you can't stop now
.

A flying hammer gouged out the back ti
re, the rims scraping the road and kicking up sparks.  Brock was forced to slow down.  The cars behind them were gaining speed.  Birds pecked at him from the broken window, stabbing his arms with their beaks as he fought them off and continued to keep the wheel straight.  He was struck from behind by a driverless Sedan.  Jolted forward, the wheel shifted in his grip.  Another car narrowly missed striking them, and in doing so, ran itself off the road and into the river below the bridge. 

Brock
kept pounding the gas.  Accelerating despite the flat back wheel.  Suspended like a net above them were thousands of knives and sharp implements and tools collected from town.  They were poised to rain down on them.  To top things off, the overhead steel beams of the bridge bent like fingers to crush them in its fist.