The Gaming Outpost

Panting, you shove once against the wind, and the plastic wood-grained you now see, door at stair-top half-closes. Flops back open. Your whole arm shivers.

You are weaker than you thought. A thwop-thwop sound of a small police copter that will chase you into your nightmares resounds up the alleyway out the door. It dopplers closer, and feverishly you slam the door with the last of your strength.

You don’t want to, but you sit down trembling at the top of the fake wood stairs down to the Pepto-Bismo plastic floored basement. Outside the door, the copter waits for what seems like hours, but your wristwatch claims is ten minutes.

Five more minutes, and you feel a bit of strength in your arms and legs. Its not like a movie at all. Hit your head going down a set of stairs, and you feel weak all over.

The room spins a bit as you creep down the stairs. But slow and easy does the trick. Past the puddle of oil, water, and your blood, you lean, step, bounce your arm forward until you’re past the nativist art boxes on your right, and to an open doorway to your left. Inside are some more boxes.

One seems familiar.

The brand name is written in fluorescent green on the top.

“Ikea.”

You almost want to cry. You had some Ikea furniture in your college dorm room. The little touch of familiarity almost undoes your tattered self-control.

Opening the top, you see a familiar washing machine’s guts, but you’d never heard that Ikea made washing machines. That was for Whirlpool and Maytag and Kenmore the generic.

Happily there is a cot with a fanciful quilt showing some guys eating or something. You sink on it, and lay back for just a moment. Your head hurts.

You reach up your arm to feel the oozing, and wake stiff. Hours later by your watch. Your left leg is off the cot, and as you begin to move it complains of lack of blood with that old pins and needles feeling.

A need for a bathroom sends you around the room with the cot. Finding what looks like a children’s toilet with a ruffled fringe next to the floor, you take care of your most urgent need.

A second door in the bathroom seems locked so you move on.

Relieved, you then begin to turn your mind as you can to water. You’re dreadfully thirsty, and your mind first brings up the idea of the oily puddle, but you’re not that desperate yet. Still, you’re uncommonly thirsty.

Blood loss, you remember. And check your face. Its tender, bruised, but scabbed over. Hopefully you won’t get infected you decide realizing there is about zilch you can do about that at the moment.

The sinks in the first room have no handles, and no infrared sensors and you stare at them baffled.

Thirsty and getting obsessed and a little freaked you consider the alleyway outside. But surely they wouldn’t be still out there? Who knew? Things were bizarre here. Too little information to reason from. You decide that you have to get more information. After more water.

You sit down in the cot, and feel sorry for yourself. What did you do to get thrashed? Your conscience points out that you did steal an omellette.

Morosely, you stare at the washing machine, and its companion dryer until suddenly an idea about the Ikeas worms its way into your pain-stricken skull. You get up, and check.

Basic push controls. Crossing your fingers, you push on the cold water for the clothes washer.

A flow of clear, cold water pours into the empty barrel of the washing machine. A quick try to turn your head and drink from inside the machine lets you know two things.

One, your head really does not like the extra pressure. Two, you’ve got too many brains to fit inside. So you settle for scooping handfuls of delicious ice-cold water into your parched mouth.

Some time later, you realize you’re now hungry. This presents another conundrum, but for now the cot looks awfully good.

You don’t stumble too much as you walk back to it, and lay down. Sleep comes within a half minute.

Another police copter for dolls. Close. Too close. Not at all quiet. It shouts.

“Hands up. Do not move!”

Yet you cannot stop.

A step right. Bang against a wooden door. Tumble down a set of steps. Wait to be captured as you lay like a broken doll at the bottom of the steps.

See the copter. Like an avenging angel it is highlighted against the doorway. Two. No five. No thirty-two. A fuzzy mass of police copters all chanting in monotone.

“Sank. You. Arab.”

The copters chase you into unconsciousness as your throbbing head receives blood to pound more from your feet lifted up the staircase above your fractured noggin.

The world. Or wherever you are, goes away.

You wake, still life of pain, blood, drool, and tears on a background of damp wooden stairs.

Crawling, after you find the internal memory file that has the schematics for this operation, brings you to your knees and hands in a puddle of oily water overlaying a pale pink floor.

Looking about is a mistake and neccessary. The room spins, and swells, and suddenly you add vomit to oil and water.

In the side of your mind a cool, rational voice that sounds like one of the textbooks you read in college asks a question with no particular urgency.

Isn’t a head injury plus vomiting a bad sign? Not shaking it off because that would mean more vomiting, you find it easy to ignore that problem.

The room is somewhere around twenty yards long, and ten yards wide. It seems to shout in instinctual clues ‘basement’. A number of multi-colored boxes, some sort of art, more nativist and naive than sophisticated and modernist or realistic has pictures of food being harvested and seals being clubbed on icebergs among others less decipherable. Sinks for dwarves remind you of the police copters claiming they had sank an arab or something.

How is it that you understand them, but not anyone else? Perhaps you’re in some dialect heavy area in New York City where everyone speaks Old Country. And dogs smart off to humans.

Hmmm.