“Thank goodness,” the bald little guy said. I thought I saw a tear in his eye.
I took a chance and asked, “So what’s the big deal about beating that game?”
The bald guy snapped me a look as if I had just asked the most idiotic question in the history of idiotic questions. He still held on to my arms, which, to be honest, was making me nervous. The guy had a hell of a grip. I didn’t know if that was because he was strong, or driven by insanity. He looked at me in wonder, as if trying to find the right words to answer such a stupid question. He looked to my left arm and asked, “Where’s your loop?”
“My what?” he asked.
“Your loop!” he said, looking at my upper arm. “Do you know how much trouble you can get in for taking that off?” His face lit up as if he’d just gotten a brilliant idea. He asked, “Is that why you’re here? Did you learn something?”
He kept asking questions and I kept not having answers. He let go of my arm and held his own arm out toward me. He had one of those silver bands above his biceps. “Tell me what you know,” he demanded. “Please.”
I realized that this silver band must have been the “loop” he was talking about. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the one that had been at the flume. The guy’s eyes went wide. He quickly grabbed the loop and looked around as if he feared being seen.
“Are you insane?” he seethed. “Don’t flash that around.”
Before I knew what was happening, he grabbed the loop, then took my hand and shoved it through.
“Hey,” I protested, and tried to pull away. It was too late. He shoved the round bracelet all the way up to my biceps. Instantly I felt it tighten around my arm, as if it were alive. I tried to pull it back down, but it wouldn’t move. It rested just above my biceps and clung there.
“Why did you do that?” I shouted.
“I helped you, now you help me” was his answer. “What are your chances? Be honest. It doesn’t matter to you if I know, does it?”
“Chances for what?” I asked while trying to pull the loop down my arm. It wouldn’t move. The harder I pulled, the tighter it squeezed. It felt like there were a thousand tiny needles inside, keeping it in place. I was frightened, and more than a little creeped out. What was this diabolical loop? How could it know that I was trying to pull it off so it knew to cling tighter? And why didn’t it want to get pulled off in the first place? Could it think like the robot- quig-spiders back at the gate? Things were happening a little too fast.
“Get it off!” I shouted to the bald guy.
His answer? He laughed. “I just did you a favor!” he said. “If you were seen without that loop, you’d never see another challenge.”
Before I could ask what the hell he meant by that, I felt the loop tighten on my arm again-on its own. Remember the groove I described that was etched in the circle? It was glowing bright purple. A thin, bright light circled the band that was squeezing the heck out of my arm.
“What’s with that?” I asked nervously.
“What do you mean?” he asked dismissively. “That’s what happens when a loop activates.”
“Activates?” I shouted. “I don’t want anything on me ‘activating’!”
“I don’t understand,” the guy said genuinely. “You’re a challenger. All challengers wear the loop.”
“What do you mean, I’m ‘a challenger’?” I snapped. “What makes you say that?” I had decided to give up being coy. I needed answers. The pulsing, glowing, grabbing ring on my arm was making that all too obvious.
“Aren’t you wearing the uniform of a challenger?” the guy asked, looking every bit as bewildered as I felt.
Uh-oh. It was the shirt. It seemed this red shirt with the black diagonal stripes was only worn by challengers. Whoever they were. I could only hope that challengers were cool people whom everyone loved and nobody ever gave a hard time to.
Yeah, right.
Before I could ask the guy anything else, I heard a tortured scream come from across the noisy room. A quick look told me that unlike the guy who was playing the shoot-out game, the player who was running through the 3-D maze wasn’t having as much luck, game over flashed in big blue letters on his screen. The player had fallen to his knees. He truly looked beaten. His head hung and he was breathing hard. No doubt he had given the game his all, only to lose. I wondered if the reaction of a loser was going to be as dramatic as that of a winner.
I wasn’t prepared for the answer.
This guy had a crowd around him as well, but rather than console him, they slowly backed away. It was weird, as if they just got word that the guy had the plague. They all had dark, pained expressions. Nobody so much as threw him a casual, “Too bad, dude. Try again.” They were taking this loss very seriously. One person did break from the crowd. She ran up to the guy and hugged him. The guy didn’t move. I saw that her eyes were screwed shut and her lips pursed, as if she were holding back a scream. The two stayed that way for a few moments while the others continued to move away. That’s when the loop around this guy’s arm began to glow. Unlike my loop that had given off a bright purple glow, his loop glowed yellow. The woman saw this, gave the guy one last squeeze and a kiss on the top of his head, then turned and ran. Seriously. She ran away. By this time the other spectators had blended back into the arcade, disappearing among the other people. Some pretended to be playing games, others were gone entirely. It was like the guy who lost had suddenly developed leprosy.
I heard a crash come from somewhere. It sounded like a door being thrown open. It made the bald guy next to me jump.
“Dados,” he whispered softly, almost reverently.
I gave the guy a quick look and asked, “What’s a dado?”
He scoffed, as if he didn’t believe for a second I didn’t know. “Now aren’t you glad I put your loop back on?” he asked smugly. The next thing I heard was sounded like quick marching, as if a parade were about to pass through. This seemed to snap the guy who’d lost the game back to life. He looked around quickly. His eyes were wide and scared. I didn’t know if he was looking for help, or trying to see where the marchers were coming from, or choosing the best escape route. Or all three. He ran…
The wrong way. He took only a few steps before he ran right into the arms of two uniformed men who were headed his way. They grabbed him, held his arms, and without breaking stride kept on moving. The guy struggled to break away, but it was no use. They had him and weren’t letting go.
“This was my first try!” he complained nervously. “I’m allowed two tries, aren’t I? I thought those were the rules? If I’m wrong, I’m sorry, but I know I’m supposed to get two tries.”
Obviously he was wrong. Or the uniformed guys didn’t care. They kept marching him away. The guy was near panic. It was incredible. He lost at a video game, and by losing, some police-looking guys called “dados” came to take him away. It really didn’t make sense. What kind of games do you lose, and then get dragged away by the police? These dado guys weren’t fooling around, either. They were both big. I’m guessing they stood about six- foot-four. They had broad shoulders and wore shiny gold helmets. Their uniforms were dark green and looked like they’d just come from the cleaners. That’s how tight and pressed they were. Each guy had a round patch on his upper arm that was bright yellow, with a logo that looked like a “B.” On their hips they each had a shiny black holster that held a golden pistol that seemed to be made of the same material as their helmets.
As scary as all this looked, there was one more thing about these guys that told me you didn’t want to mess with them. It was their faces. I don’t know how else to describe this except to write that their faces were big. And square. They almost looked like cartoon bad guys, with sharp jaw-lines and deep-set eyes. They had no expression. Even as they carted off a guy who was yelling and squirming to get loose. Their faces remained stone blank. They didn’t give instructions. They didn’t tell the guy to calm down. They definitely didn’t say where they were going. They simply kept moving. The guy didn’t have a chance.
They dragged him past two more police guys who were standing on either side of the aisle. They had entered from two different directions to surround their quarry. When the loser guy was dragged past these two other uniforms, I saw that the two new guys were standing stock still, their hands behind their backs, surveying the crowd. Nobody else in the arcade made eye contact with them. It seemed pretty clear to me that they were afraid of these police dudes. Heck, I would be too if I lost at a pinball game and my punishment was to get dragged off by a couple of Terminator-looking guys. I now understood why all the players were so intent on their games. Losing wasn’t a good thing.
The two sentries followed the others. One of them took one last look around the arcade, scanning the room,
