Otis Fuqua

Apoc Sim
            
           Through the forest, the flight attendant. A can of ginger ale. I run across the center of the
map, through the Rivers of Blood and the Valley of the Damned. The other survivors are easy to
outsmart, low-level teenagers caught up in apocalyptic bloodlust, psychokillers living out their
dreams in their parents’ basements. The neurocontroller in my mouth tastes like lemon-lime. I
think my actions, and my tongue makes it so.
            “I only ever drink ginger ale on airplanes,” my dad says, wiggling his eyebrows from the
middle seat.
            I give him a withering look through my Second Life Contact Lenses. He scratches at the
rash on his neck, red and Australia-shaped and threatening to become infected.
            "We should go to a soda factory,” he says, crunching an ice cube between his molars.
“See how the sausage gets made.”
            Some kid in a gillysuit, JMarsh420, throws a knife at my head and misses. I chase him
through the jungle, machete-ing through vines. He is level 1, and without the knife, weaponless.
At level 20, I am a god of the apocalyptic waste. When I catch him, he inputs command Warrior
Death, and kneels before me, waiting. I input command Strangle Kill. It’s slowest.
            “Syd. You answer when I speak to you.”
            I blink at my dad, blood-and-wire overlaid on his face. I say “what,” but as an accusation.
            What is wrong with you. What is up your butt.
            “What?”
            “You’ll call your mother when we land, yes?”
            Yes, I nod. As previously stated, multiple times.
            ​“This isn’t her fault, you know.”
            I rest my head against the airplane wall and let the plastic rattle my skull and check my
six and scan the treetops. The key to being level 20 is to never drop your guard. Strangle Kill
takes both hands for a full minute, which makes you vulnerable to attack. I drag JMarsh420 into
the bushes. His body flops around like a fish.
            “You can’t blame her for this.”
            ​Gak. The first sob my father lets out sounds like a dying salamander. Gak. I turn to him--
horrible babyish forehead crease, obsolete wedding ring tapping on the tray table—and make a
serious pull-it-together-man face. The stranger in the aisle seat, a graying, dead-looking woman,
presses her lips together and smiles at me with something like embarrassment and joy.
Radioactive ash rains from the sky. YOU KILLED JMARSH420 blinks at the top of my vision.
            ​I pull my knees to my chest and stare out the window.
                                                                                           ...

            Once a year, my mother flies me to Manhattan for a ritual she calls Mother-Son Time.
She greets me at the door to her apartment on the upper east side in a nightgown and pearls.
            ​“My baby,” she says, bouncing the emphasis back and forth between the words. “My
baby. My baby.”
            I ask about the child support check, per dad’s instructions. I go with her to the museums
and restaurants and shops, saying the things I need to say to keep her from exploding like a little
glass ball. I ask about the check. I act surprised when she buys me things I don’t want or have
room for in my suitcase—snakeskin boots, hat boxes, a credenza. She doesn’t really mean for
them to be gifts. The napkin rings she bought me last year are on her table this year. The
credenza will never leave her entryway. I ask about the check.
            At the end of the week, when my mother is tired of trouncing around the city, she calls
her friends over and “shows me off.” The apple of her eye (rotten, with worms).
            “A bike mechanic, at his age, isn’t that impressive?” She says, gesturing with a flourish
to her friends. Rob the lawyer, Rich the banker, and Dick the doctor, or something like that.
            “Oh yes,” they say, nodding into their whiskeys. “When I was your age, blah blah blah.”
            I stomp off to the edge of the map, to the Alpine Abyss, where only the pacifists go, the
people who treat Apoc Sim like a sandbox game. I trek up and down the mountain ridges,
snapping leaves off trees, picking flowers. I fill my pack with foraged mushrooms and fish. I
birdwatch.
            ​A hawk spirals down to a tree stump a few yards away. I input command Befriend
Animal, extending a strip of gamey meat. He flies over to me, broad and grim and fluffy, and
perches on my arm. His beak hooks downward, like he’s kind of sad. He offers me the bird
equivalent of a bow, his plumage rusty and bronze. I name him Chuck.
            “Syd? Are you listening?” My mother says, an icy hand on my shoulder.
            I nod and smile at the floor. “Yeah, bike mechanic. Colorado. High school. That’s the
Syd update.”
            Rob and Rich and Dick laugh heartily. Through my lenses they look like part of the
forest, strange, well-dressed trees that press in on me with vaguely evil intentions. Snatch out
your eyes. Gobble you up. I hurry into the underbrush, seeking out the shadows. The darker the
lenses, the less Rob-Rich-Dick. The less mother.
            My mother and her friends spend a long time talking about problems. The tax problem,
the scaffolding problem, the problem with price-gouging reupholsterers. I slouch in her leather
sofa.
            I input command Summon Enemies, which shoots a flare above my location, and wait in
the bushes. Chuck alerts me to each enemy’s approach with a screech. Glambandit2. In$tantFun.
ElJefe69. I kill them one by one. I am a flash of bloody metal in the shadows. I am the killer of
killers, the godless master, terror of the earth. I am level 21.
            “What’s your take on that, Syd?” Rich says.
            “Uh, that’s the world we live in I guess.” I pull my knife from the chest of StacyKid07.
            “Wow. Still waters do run deep,” Dick says.
            By the time my mother says goodbye to her guests, night has fallen in the hellscape. I
roast a squirrel over a fire, watching for threats in the trees.
            She wants to know what I think of them, Dick in particular.
            “They’re cool, right?” She says.
            I shrug. “I don’t know. They’re adults.”
            “You’re always shrugging,” my mother says, “is your father feeding you enough?”
            I nod and squeeze the slight pudge of my stomach.
            “Rob’s a corporate lawyer, but he began his career in family law,” she says.
            I listen, but don’t listen, as my mother falls headlong into a thought-spiral on divorce law,
never quite saying what she means to say: your father’s a problem, I’m paying him too much,
you’re not helping.
            I input command Eat Squirrel. It gives me plus two health points for meat minus one
point for radiation. I watch the fire. Sparks drift across the sky, commingling with the summer
stars. The flames lick my mother’s face.
            “Poor thing. I don’t know how you handle living with him.”
            I focus on the irradiated wasteland.
            At the edge of the clearing, a metallic glint gives away an enemy’s location, watching me
and my fire. They wave. I sic the falcon on them. YOU KILLED JMARSH420 blinks at the top of
my vision. Chuck comes back bloody.
            “Are you, okay, Syd?”
            I give my mother a thumb’s up. Two thumbs up. Two thumbs way up.
            When the week is over, she puts me in a cab and tells me to tell my dad that she told her
lawyer to tell the court that she wants to countersue the divorce settlement. “He’s making more
than enough at the bike shop. And you can tell him I said that.”
            The last I see of her is a peace sign, held imploringly over her head. Make peace not war.
Don’t hate me, baby.
            I play Apoc Sim all the way home.
                                                                                         ...

            When I get back, my dad is watching football on the couch, five beers into a six pack.
Broncos Jets.
            “Welcome home.”
            “How’re they gonna run the ball on third and long?” I say.
            “Do you have the check?” My dad scratches at his rash. It’s climbed up his jaw, a pink
tendril reaching for his mouth.
            I take the envelope out of the special pocket in my bag. I don’t tell him that my mother
said to call it extortion. I slide it across the coffee table, careful to avoid the drops of beer, and
slump in the old rocking chair. I pretend the football commercials are the most fascinating thing
I’ve ever seen. Maybe I should consider bundling my home and auto insurance. Online sports
betting, power tools, pizza with hotdogs in the crust. What is life?

            “This is only half.”
            I shrug. My stomach clenches. Back from commercial, the Broncos lob the ball deep
down field. The receiver leaps, catches, and two defenders smash into him like buses headed in
opposite directions: one to his chest, one to his knees. He spins in the air like a crashing plane
and hits the ground in a puff of AstroTurf.
            “Syd, she only gave us half.” Already dad’s voice is catching.
            The receiver doesn’t get up. A group of trainers gather around him, patting and prodding
his legs. It looks like maybe he’s yelling.
            “You were supposed to check the amount before you left. What did I say? What do I
always say? Check the amount before you leave.”
            ​They show the replay in a slow-motion loop. The receiver looks like he’s made of Jell-o.
            “What a hit,” I say.
            My dad stands, wobbles a bit, and fishes his phone from his pocket. “You need to call
her.”
            I blink at him. “Why me?”
            He drops the phone into my lap. From the notifications, I can see he ordered a pizza
earlier. I wonder if it had hotdogs in the crust.
            “Look at me. I’m drunk. It’ll just go better if it’s you. She likes you.”
            “No she doesn’t.”
            “Just. Please.” He turns his back on me and watches the TV. “What a hit.”
            I leave him there. In my room, I pop a fresh neurocontroller into my mouth. Watermelon.
I call my mom. It goes surprisingly well. I say the words my dad asked me to say into the phone.
My mom says some stuff back. She sounds upset. I stroll through the sweet, sweet apocalypse.
27 kills. I am level 23.
                                                                                          ...

            On a sunny morning I wake up angry, having dreamt of eating bowlfuls of live baby
birds, cheeping in confusion.
                                                                                          ...

            Twice a year, my father takes me bowling, as part of a ritual he calls Father-Son Time.
He asks me his proprietary blend of father-son questions: Any girlfriends? Working out? How’s
school? These three things, always in the same order: dick, body, brain. I say the things I have to
say to convince him all three are fine. I don’t tell him about the killing dreams. I don’t mention
my mother.
            ​My dad beats me, in bowling, every time.
            “With one hand tied behind my back,” he says.
            I shrug. I spend the whole game slitting throats and looting bodies. I am level 24.
            ​“Your mother and I are worried about you,” he says, “The ‘D’ in English has us
worried.”
            I tell him I don’t want to go to college, I want to keep working in the bike shop with him.
“Does anyone really give a shit if I’ve read The Great Gatsby?”
            My father nods and raises his eyebrows, the touché of the face. “Well, your mother
does.”
            I bowl a gutterball and say, “does she? Does she really?” The ferocity in my voice
surprises me.
            “Easy,” my dad says, grinning, “easy.”
            On the drive home, Chuck leaves me. He circles higher and higher until he disappears
into the sun, and when I input command Retrieve Falcon, nothing happens. I stalk the hellscape
in search of my bird. The Toxic Marsh to the Abyss. I do not find him.
                                                                                          ...
            I peel a fresh neurocontroller from the pack, blue raspberry, and suck on it through the
Sunday shift. Polish frames, replace flats, sweep, repeat. An eight-hour shift is an eternity. The
click of the socket wrench marks the time. My dad plays classic rock through the speakers. The
same 20 songs, over and over again, all about the same vague woman.
            At level 25, everyone is too scared to attack me, so I seek them out. I hunt the runners
and the hiders and rip the life from them with the same motion I use to yank old brake lines from
the neck of a badly rusted 10-speed. Why people even bother repairing these old bikes.
            ​But eventually, there is no one.
            I input command Summon Enemies, flare arcing over the snowy ridge, and no one comes
for me, blades drawn, guns cocked. I check the streams, the mesas, the abandoned cabins, the
acid lake. Suspiciously still in the apocalypse.
            “You’re polishing the paint off,” my dad says. He places a gloved hand on my arm. “You
OK?”
            I throw my rag onto the work bench and sit on it. I run a greasy hand through my hair.
“I’m fine.”
            “You look sick.” My dad takes his gloves off and feels my forehead. I push his hand
away. The light in the shop mixes with the light in my lenses to make the world look dim and
gray. My father looks like an old man, held together with duct tape and string.
            “I’m fine.”
            “Are you sure?”
            I try to say something. I stand, stagger. My dad moves to catch me, but I have already
caught myself. He couldn’t have supported me anyway.
            I’m good.
            I say, “I’m good.”
            I’m good.
            A falcon appears before me like an angel of the apocalypse, preening himself on a stone
at the marsh’s edge. He considers me through his glassy black eyes and bows his pointed head.
He scrapes the blood and guts from his beak, glides over to the clearing I stand in, and looks up
at me, cocking his head.
            I clear my throat and say in a raspy voice that surprises me, “is this it?”
            I input command Befriend Animal. I kneel before Chuck. As I kneel, an ambush springs
from the trees in an explosion of gunfire and flying knives and charging killers. Bullets explode
from my chest. Knives impale me. My lenses flicker red with damage.
            My father wraps me in a bony hug. “My son,” he says, “ah, my son.”
            ​I input command Warrior Death, but it’s too late. A blade has opened my throat. YOU’VE
BEEN KILLED BY JMARSH420 flashes across my vision, and I spawn in a snowy field with the
clothes on my back, a half-full canteen, and a rusty knife. I am level 1.

---

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Otis Fuqua is a fiction writer from Boulder, Colorado, living in New York City. His work has appeared in Calliope, Capsule Stories, Arkansas Review, and The Green Silk Journal. He holds a degree in Creative Writing from Brandeis University, and is, presently, typing around his cat.