"Boot's fine."

"Doc would hate these," Dean mused, gesturing to the door. "Dumb a.s.ses can't even spell girl right."

Finally Jak got fed up with trying to accomplish his feat by hand, and took out one of his throwing knives from a hiding place in his camou jacket, running the sharp blade along the sole of his right boot, barely cutting back the surface. The layer of black rubber peeled away like a piece of masking tape. Putting the knife back in its hiding place, he took one edge of the tread and pulled back until he revealed a second layer.

Hidden between the layers were four thin, flat golden wafers. The pale-skinned albino flashed them at Dean like a hand of playing cards.

"Jak! I didn't know you had a stash!" Dean breathed, all of his swagger gone. He was seriously impressed by Jak's revelation.

"Weren't supposed know," the older boy replied. "Not much stash, unless kept secret." Jak went on to explain that he'd thought he'd have to give the cash up when they entered Freedom, but Ryan's victory over the sec droid had taken care of all the immediate financial worries.

"Have these long time," he said.

"More willpower than me. I'd have spent it when I got it," Dean replied.

The albino used a fingernail to flick the four wafers into the palm of his other waiting hand, stacking them into a thicker whole. He looked up at Dean and smirked as the gold glinted in the bare white light bulb of the bathroom.

"Now, let us in to play," Jak said. "f.u.c.kers."

THE DISPLAY OF THE GOLD was effective. The insolent guard stepped aside and pointed them to a back office, past the many working vid games crowded into the arcade.

"Boss is back there. Name's Templeton. He'll fix you up."

As true children of Deathlands, both Dean and Jak had never seen anything like the darkened chamber. There was no interior lighting to speak of. All illumination came from the many vid screens. The noise they had heard coming out into the mall pa.s.sage was busy and louder inside; electronic bleeps, boops, explosions and screams mixed with each machine's dozen digitized soundtracks for a staggering variety with differing intensities.

"Used some comps back at school with games, shoot-'em-ups, wag-driving simulations, mystery hunts, but they were nothing like this," Dean breathed.

"You forgetseen these kind games before," Jak said, speaking as loudly as he could in order to be heard over the noise.

"No way. Where?" Dean asked.

"Redoubt. Western Islands. When Trader and Abe still with us," the albino replied.

Dean looked at his friend curiously. "You funnin' me, Jak?"

"No."

Dean scratched his head, eerily mirroring the motion and posture of his father when puzzled. "I swear I don't ever recall seeing a vid arcade in a redoubt. Seems I'd remember a hot pipe like that."

"I know. Specially since one game blew a.s.ses sky-high."

Now Dean was truly perplexed. "What are you talking about?"

Jak sighed. He wasn't much for talking under the best of conditions, and the last thing he wanted to do was to try to enter into a detailed description about the past in the middle of a electronic maelstrom like the Freedom Mall's vid arcade. How to summarize one of the stranger redoubts the group had ever visited?

The underground installation had been small, tiny even, with only a mat-trans chamber and an upstairs series of rooms containing administrative offices, a small cafeteria, smaller armory, stripped-down living dormitories and secured nuke power plant. No elaborate maze or top secret labs, just enough in the way of supplies and room to house a staff to keep the mat-trans gateway open and properly functioning.

The redoubt's setup didn't even possess the usual military design. There was no sense of permanence in the evacuated rooms.

Adding to Doc's voiced theory of rotating shifts in charge of operating the redoubtwith living quarters located somewhere outsidewas an amus.e.m.e.nt center, filled with a dozen sophisticated arcade-quality video games. Jak remembered Dean being so excited, the boy had to be physically restrained by Ryan when the arcade was first discovered.

In fact Dean and Ryan both were as physically and mentally exhausted as could be at the time, what with having to endure three mat-trans jumps in a row "That's it!" Jak cried.

"What?" Dean replied, struggling to make himself heard over the noise.

"You and Ryan took triple jump. First, all came to Western Islands from Maine. Then you stuck in chamber, door accidentally closed. Activated cycle. Jumped back to Maine. Ryan used LD b.u.t.ton, went after you. Then, both jumped back to Islands. Triple-fried brains, make you forget arcade. Memory loss caused by jumps," Jak said excitedly.

"Makes sense, I guess. I do remember something about jumpingand Dad coming back to get me. Yeah, you're probably right, Jak. Good thinking."

The albino was pleased. "Thanks."

"Still don't explain how our a.s.ses almost got blown out of our britches," Dean added.

Jak had an answer for this, as well. "Happened later, when you and me went to play gamesjust like this time, only n.o.body else in arcade."

The games in the redoubt had been set up for quarters, twenty-five cent pieces, not game tokens. Luckily some of the brightly decaled consoles had several spare quarters in their coin-return slots. What appeared to be a broken paper roll of coins had been dropped on the carpet. Dean's eyes fell on a garish oversize console half-shaped like an Indy racing car molded out of brilliant crimson plastic.

"Grand Prix," Dean read off the brightly lit gla.s.s housing, p.r.o.nouncing "Prix" as "p.r.i.c.ks."

"Some kind p.o.r.n game?" Jak mused, until he realized it was a race-wag simulation.

"Never been behind the wheel of a souped up wag like this," the younger boy said.

"Never been behind wheel of wag at all."

"Want to give it a spin?"

"Okay."

After an unsatisfying racing adventure that resulted in their crashing of the comp-generated automobile, the two boys quickly went through the other games. While Dean enjoyed each of the challenges, finding the situations both challenging and fun, Jak became less and less enchanted as they took turns trying the systems out.

By the time they reached a gaily decorated red, white and blue console emblazoned with a banner announcing Shield Of Freedom, Jak totally lost interest in make-believe and was sitting by the console on the floor, leaning his back against the wall and idly watching as Dean carefully read the game instructions.

Jak turned his head to stifle a wide-mouthed yawn when he saw that the lower panel of the back of the machine had been removed, and wired into the game's starting mechanism were two scarlet-and-blue implosion grenades.

Two implode grens in a confined s.p.a.ce. A b.o.o.by trap, left behind in the redoubt for the supposed Russian invaders to come after the holocaust. The soldier or self-appointed patriot who'd set the trap up had indulged a twisted sense of humor by placing the bombs inside a patriotic, flag-waving type of game.

The albino moved in a white blur, his fine hair swirling out like a wispy fan as he leaped to his feet and s.n.a.t.c.hed Dean away, pulling the boy behind him and out of the constricted interior of the game room, pulling the boy from the vid controls even as Dean pushed down on the red Start b.u.t.ton to begin playing.

A startled "Hey!" was all Dean had a chance to utter as they half jumped, half fell out of the room and into the corridor outside the arcade. As they hit the floor, the interior of the redoubt's game room flashed once with a bright artificial light, and gave off a m.u.f.fled crumping noise as the dual gren implosions tugged at their clothing and tried to pull them back inside the vortex.

Both were lucky. Jak's forehead was cut by a piece of flying gla.s.s from the vid game's shattered screen, while Dean suffered from a brief bout with temporary deafness when his eardrums were injured by the blast.

"d.a.m.n," Dean said after Jak related all of the particulars of their previous encounter with arcade games, "I don't remember any of that. Not even being deaf."

"It happened," Jak said firmly.

"Don't doubt it," Dean replied. "Dangerous stuff."

"Dangerous enough to stop playing more vid games?" Jak asked, half-hoping to get back to their room before it got much later. Doc would be sleeping, and his slumber was usually deep.

"Hah! I don't think so," Dean retorted. "We had some creaky old stuff on a Commodore 64 back at Brody's. Educational s.h.i.t mostly, but there were some okay arcade simulations. Still, they were like fighting with wooden sticks instead of hand blasters compared to these games."

As the boy tried to make a decision among the few unoccupied games, Jak decided to make the best of it. The albino went directly to a three-dimension target console with the unlikely name of Bloodhunter in Dimension 2000. He gripped the stock of the rifle bolted to the control console of the simulator and sighted a phosphor-dot target.

He looked down for the coin box, but the front of the console was smooth. He decided these games didn't need jack to function.

"Don't work," he announced after a moment of pulling the trigger and examining the rifle. "Sights off, too. Not shoot s.h.i.t with this blaster."

"Push one of those b.u.t.tons. The one that says Fire," Dean suggested.

Jak did so. "Nothing. Game busted."

"It's your brain that's busted, d.i.c.kwad," a new voice said. "You need tokens to play."

"Good one, Brack."

A boy all of twelve years old, with close-cropped blond hair and an orange-and-brown pullover knit shirt and jeans, was standing behind Dean and Jak. At his side was an older boy, closer to Jak's age.

The older of the two was dressed in a pair of green cutoff denims with a yellow shirt. Long, lank black hair hung down across his eyes. His sartorial splendor was topped off by a yellow-and-purple baseball capworn backwardswith a patch on the front that read Pac-Man Fever.

"Tokens. Right. We need to get them back in the office, like the guard said," Dean stated.

"No slots," Jak protested, glaring at the boys who had broken into their conversation, "Yes, slots, on the side, not on the front, see?" The older boy pointed at the side of the controls.

Jak looked and indeed, the console had the activation controls on the left side instead of in the front at crotch level like the vid games he'd encountered in the redoubt.

"Different. Not on front," the albino said.

"No s.h.i.t, genius. Now, if you're not going to play, move," the twelve-year-old said. "Dex and I got better things to do than stand and watch you and your little buddy figure out how to put the tokens in the games."

"You got a mouth, don't you?" Dean retorted.

"So do you, and you can use it to kiss my a.s.s if you keep bothering us," snarled the older one identified as Dex.

"How about I stomp head?" Jak asked. "Not take long."

Neither of the boys appeared impressed. "Big talk, Spooky. Try it, and mall sec men will show up and kick the s.h.i.t out of you," the younger boy said. Jak spotted a telltale bulge under Brack's shirttail. The boy was heeled, a blaster close at hand.

Jak had his own Colt Python, but left it holstered. "Might be worth it," the albino said, considering the risks and developing a mental picture of the pair of snide punks on the ground, broken and bleeding.

"I ain't scared of you," Brack said.

"Me, neither," Dex agreed.

Jak abandoned the mock friendly tone. Playing nice wasn't in his nature anyway. "Should be. Should p.i.s.s pants right now."

Dean took Jak's arm. "Smoke it, Jak. You're supposed to be keeping me out of trouble, remember?"

"Next time talk s.h.i.t, chill you," Jak said to the insolent pair, his ruby eyes blazing as he allowed Dean to lead him away. To their credit, Brack and Dex kept their mouths shut.

The door of the office was open. Dean and Jak walked in and waited for the seated figure in the dress suit to look up. That was, if he could be bothered to stop his rapid writing of numerals in a thick ledger book to notice their presence. The man was doing his mental computations in pen, and by the light of a single oil lamp.

"What?" he barked.

"You Templeton?" Dean asked.

"That's me. Who are you?"

"Clients, I guess. Need memberships and tokens. Guard said you'd take care of us."

"Prices are on the board." The jowly man pointed at a chalkboard hanging on the wall behind him. Prices were listed in different colors of chalk inside a preprinted grid. The numbers were hard to read in the low lighting, but not impossible.

"Why do you keep it so dark back here?" Dean asked.

"Saves money," Templeton replied. "Juice costs jack. Vid games take a lot of juice. I can use candles and oil lamps ten times cheaper."

"What do you think, Jak?" Dean asked softly, wanting to know what his friend's opinion was of the prices on the board. Since Jak had the gold, he'd be the one paying for the entertainment. The least Dean could do was to get his input.

The albino shrugged. "Don't know. Not good with figures."

Dean studied the board some more, calling up his own knowledge of mathematics from both his time spent in school and what his mother had taught him at night when he was still a toddler. A handy mall rate of exchange with the official silver logo of The Bank of Freedom printed on top was also thumb-tacked next to the cluttered blackboard.

"What do your gold wafers weigh, Jak?" Dean asked, doing computations in his head.

The albino stuck a hand in his pocket and caressed one of the pieces. "Tenth ounce, mebbe."

"Don't let him know you've got more than one," Dean whispered. "The way this chart reads, we should be able to get out of here with a membership and ten free vid games each. Mebbe more games if he's really honest, which I doubt."

"You two ready to deal, or what? We don't like loiterers in here," Templeton said, looking up from the book where he was scribbling in more numbers. "Get enough of that outside, people waiting, watching. That's why we have the membership fee. Keeps out the riffraff."

"What's hurry?" Jak said, taking out a single golden wafer, just as Dean had suggested. "Here's jack. Buy us membership and games, right?"

"Let me see that," the owner said, reaching out a chubby hand. Jak dropped the light piece of metal into the fat man's palm and waited. Taking the golden wafer, Templeton weighed it, deciding by feel and texture how much gold was there. He then held it between thumb and forefinger up to his face and surprised the two friends by sticking out his tongue and licking the surface.

For a brief second, both Jak and Dean feared the man might decide to swallow the gold, but as a finale, he followed up the oral caress by biting down gently on the wafer and removing it before nodding his approval.

"Slice it thin, don't you?" he asked pleasantly.

"Last longer that way," Jak told him. "Still enough to buy you new suit."

"What's wrong with my suit?" Templeton asked as he put the wafer on the desk, where it glinted in the lamplight. "Your metal, boysit feels real enough."

"Is real."

"So you say," the arcade owner said.

"How'd it taste?" Dean asked.