We were so many. Latchkey kids and runaways, hardscrabble children for whom home was a motel or a broken-glass abandoned storefront or a flat patch of dirt under an off-ramp—but also indolent, precious bunny-rabbit boys and girls abandoned to the elements by their wealthy parents. We were immigrants learning English from badly translated video games, and Jersey-born locals destined to never leave the tri-state area. We came carrying hundreds of quarters, or with hands and pockets empty. We came to make money. We came to spend it. We sold drugs, or rented out parts of our bodies for brief periods of time. We lived our lives in a strip mall archipelago a hundred miles long. The arcade children of Interstate 287 were a great and numerous nation.
My mom’s boyfriend from the time I was ten to around when I turned eighteen was a guy named Tomm, and whether the extra “M” in his name was his own doing or the work of an imaginative parent I was never able to discern. Mom told me once that Tomm had made a lot of bad decisions in his life. He didn’t drink, and he flinched when mom popped the top off a can of beer for herself.
I never knew exactly what he did for a living, just that it meant he dropped me off in the morning and came for me sometimes before sunset and sometimes long after. Same pep talk every time, when I got out of the car—don’t talk to strangers, don’t be rude to the staff, always keep an eye on the exits. Same five-dollar bill for food every time; same roll of quarters for keeping me entertained. Sometimes he’d be gone for an hour, and sometimes twelve.
Mom didn’t know what he did either, and didn’t want to. I suspect we both believed it was something illegal, or borderline-legal. I never told her anything about what my days were like, when Tomm “took me to work.” She never asked questions. The poor woman was forever overworked. Tomm took care of child care concerns for a lot less than a babysitter. I came home unharmed each time, and that was probably enough to calm her down. I knew, somehow, that telling her the truth would mean the end of it.
We were the numerically dominant species in the arcade ecosystem, but there were others. Most of them predators. Some sold us drugs: speed or spiderwebbing. Cheap at first, but pretty soon you were selling off pieces of yourself. For many of my fellow feral arcade children, especially the older ones, life was pain. I could see why they’d choose to escape into substance abuse.
Other predators, occupying an ecological niche so well-fitted to the drug dealers that it seemed like symbiosis, gave us the money we might need for drugs or quarters. Some wanted to fuck us; some wanted to get fucked. Some would want it out in the parking lot. Some fucked us in between the machines in the back. Some, the ones with the most money or the oddest hungers, drove us off to motels or homes or undisclosed locations.
I didn’t see it, then. The difference between me and the kids who took those five- and ten-dollar bills.
You want to know about the urban legend. That’s why you’re here, really. You’ve heard rumors, tales told so many times it’s like an endless game of Telephone, and you know better than to believe them, of course, but still.
The mysterious arcade game that kills people. Some kid died, right? Or kids? In Seattle, or was it somewhere down the Jersey Shore? Killed, or just disappeared? Kidnapped, probably. Sex criminals. Russians. Something.
Cops were our apex predator, and they came through all the time. Cracking down on sex work or drug sales, usually, or occasionally dragging out a drug-addled or overdosed or antagonistic adult. But mostly it was us they preyed on. The johns, they barely saw. Too busy cuffing kids. We were so vulnerable, us feral arcade children.
Sex was not some secret world for me. Even before Tomm arrived in that crummy apartment with only one thin wall between their bed and mine, we had lived in a dozen or so spots surrounded by people who lived their most intimate lives very publicly. Women who screamed the obscenest demands through slammed doors at three in the morning. Men who sobbed out the most unnecessarily detailed confessions. Couples fucking in stairwells, who didn’t stop when a wide-eyed, eight-year-old me came stomping down from the floor above.
So, no. I was not ignorant of the fact of sex. It was one more realm of terror that lay waiting for me. One more inscrutable aspect of adult villainy. The one my mother warned me about the most. “Sex criminals” were everywhere. Stranger danger. “Perverts” who waited in every corner for the moment you let your guard down so they could kidnap you and do terrible sex things to you until you die.
Unwashed boy, beer gone sour, spilled soda and ancient cigarettes. Sperm and sweat and lube. By age thirteen, the smell of the inside of an arcade could bring me to an instant pubescent erection. It smelled forbidden; sexy. Seedy. Slothful. So when I first saw Fenn at fourteen, slumped against a Gaijin Ninja cabinet in a dark corner; when he looked up and caught me staring and winked, I instantly imprinted all that eroticism onto him.
Who knew what weird electricity drew me to Fenn, or Fenn to me. He spent a long time scoping me out, I know that. He told me later he’d been watching me before we first made eye contact—Fenn always had his eye on everyone, assessing who was a threat and who had potential, but potential for what I wouldn’t learn for a while. And even after we did lock eyes, he didn’t come right over and say hey. He slipped into the shadows, and I didn’t see him again for a couple of weeks, when he popped up beside me and poked me on the nose and said, “You’re cute.”
Fenn lit me up like electricity, like a quarter slid into the coin slot of my soul. His smile set my pinball flippers flapping; his touch made me clang like a new high score.
Bright blue hair. Barbed wire bracelet. Tall and lean and dark. Brown eyes ringed with green. The third time we talked, he took hold of the hood of my sweatshirt and tugged, pulled me into a corner. Not gently. Pushed me up against the wall. Put his mouth on mine. Slid his studded tongue past my lips. Metal probed flesh. Something unspooled inside of me. Fenn reached into my pants and sex suddenly ceased to be scary, which is probably a way of saying I stopped being a little kid.
After that, I carried sex around with me like a switchblade in my pocket. Every scary situation got a little less scary, knowing I had it. Even if I couldn’t use it right there and then—it was mine, it was waiting for me, it was a reminder that even if we had to be human (and humans were awful), we were also animals (and animals were amazing).
Fenn introduced me to Jenny Ng. A chubby girl from a good home, smart in that way where it was scary. Where you found yourself compelled to either talk too much, to prove you could keep up, or stay quiet so she wouldn’t know you couldn’t.
“Don’t say anything about her name,” Fenn said, when she headed for the restroom. “Apparently it’s not weird at all in Chinese.”
Jenny had a jacket full of markers, all sizes and colors and levels of toxicity. She handed me one, told me to think up a tag for myself, or a slogan.
“The world needs less clean surfaces,” she said. “McDonald’s tabletops, plate glass storefront windows, whatever. Everybody wants to pretend like everything’s clean and happy and perfect. People like us, who know how fucked up everything is, we have an obligation to tell everybody else.”
I nodded. This thought was electrifying, no less than when Fenn pushed me to my knees and unzipped. I was honored that she thought I somehow shared her rebel spirit, when I was pretty much the squarest soul imaginable.
“Ish,” I said, tagging up my palm.
“See?” she said. “It’s perfect. You were made for this.”
“Ron found a black-box game at the Dauphin mall,” Fenn said.
Jenny asked, “Was it one of . . . ?”
“Not sure. He only had a couple quarters. Said he had a headache afterwards, and nightmares. Game was called Destroy All Monsters! I think.”
She made a note in a sketchbook full of graph paper. Her letters were so precise she could have actually been a robot. I wanted to ask to read it, or to know what they were compiling notes on, but we’d only just met.
Black-box games were not such a big deal. Bootleg knockoffs, stolen cabinets spray-painted over. Hacks out of Hong Kong or Hoboken; Mega Pac Man or Pac Man Gaiden or Sexy Pac Man. How were we to know the difference between a legit sequel and a work of piracy? We’d get all excited to start playing, only to pop in a quarter and find a simple color-shifted carbon copy of the original.
And then there were the games that had been slapped together by computer school dropouts or programmers for the mob, soldered and wired together by utter amateurs. Weird shit you couldn’t figure out, where polygons roved and shattered and shrank and it wasn’t clear which one you were, or what each button did, if anything. The video game industry was a much less structured place back then. Anyone with a hundred bucks and a garage full of parts could create a game, and any halfway-smooth talker could get it into an arcade.
So, yeah. There were lots of strange games. Some arcades switched them out on a weekly basis, and other spots kept the same games so long we imagined they’d been forgotten by their owners. And since stories were our stock and trade, the only mass media in a nation served by no newspaper or radio show, members of our tribe were forever reporting on what games were turning up where.
There were other games. That much is true. Ones that were weird in ways that had nothing to do with amateur programming or inept piracy. Monster games. Games we had good reason to be afraid of. I watched one girl stagger back from a black-box game she’d spent five short minutes playing, and saw the blood coming out of her ears.
Fenn had seen worse; so much worse he would not tell me what.
Fenn wasn’t scared. Neither was Jenny. I was, but I let their fearlessness be a safety blanket I could hide beneath.
Fenn pressed his fingers against the screen and shut his eyes. “Come here,” he said, grabbing me by the collar, pushing down my head until my cheek was flush with the console surface, my eyes inches from his fingertips, then he draped his hoodie over my head.
The smell of him was so strong that I swelled to a state of full immediate erection.
“Watch,” he whispered, and I widened my eyes, stared into the musky dark.
My mouth opened, my throat desert-dry with thirsting for it.
“No,” he chided, with a chuckle. “Dirty boy, Ish. But not that. Not right now. Just watch.”
Blue light crackled, lit up his fingertips and the battered plastic buttons. Tiny little strands of electricity stuttered in the air between man and machine. Clicks rattled in the cabinet. A gong sounded, then a shrill high buzz.
Player up! the machine said, which is what it said when you stuck in a quarter, but Fenn had done no such thing. He’d zapped it with his fingers, tricked it with little bolts of blue lightning.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, staggering to my feet, aroused in a whole new way.
Fenn shrugged, and kissed me hard.
One monster arcade game attack was so bad it made the news. Kid ended up in the hospital. Paralyzed from the neck down. No sign of trauma or evidence of damage. News didn’t mention she was an arcade kid. But we saw her, and we knew.
The place was packed when we went there later that week. All the tribes of our whole far-flung nation had sent delegates. The woman behind the counter hadn’t been on duty the night the kid collapsed, but she’d heard. “Wasn’t an ambulance came to get her,” she said, over and over, delighted at all the attention. “Unmarked van. Black and shiny. Brand-new. Two women and three men took her out, none of them looking like EMTs. That was four in the afternoon. She got dropped off at the emergency room at nine at night.”
“What game was it?” Fenn asked, and some people said Destroy All Monsters! and some said Polybius, but most people said Destroy All Monsters!
“Try it,” Fenn said, standing behind me, holding me by the shoulders.
And so I did. Flicked my fingers, tried to summon blue sparks.
And kept trying. For an hour. By the end of it my heart was beating so fast that Fenn giggled when he kissed my jugular, and all I managed was one quick spray of blue lightning tendrils that didn’t give me a free game at all, but did delete every saved high score in the console. Six entries, all identical, a whole long line that said FEN.
“I found it,” Fenn said, one grey Jersey morning near the shore, the sky smelling like fried seafood, and he did not look well. Blue-black circles beneath his eyes; a brand-new furrow in his brow.
“Destroy All Monsters!? Where?” I asked. Jenny was not around. It had been a week since the last time I saw Fenn.
He named a place. “It was gone when I went back the next day.”
“You played it? What was it like?”
He nodded. Locked eyes with mine. Did not look away. He was trying telepathy. He did that from time to time with people. My head filled up with horrific images—children screaming, a white gorilla with fur stained red—but I was pretty sure they came from my imagination and not his memory.
“I know what it is now,” he said. “I don’t know who made it—aliens or evil corporations or whoever-the-fuck—but I know what it’s here for.”
He shivered. Sucked in a long slow drag on his cigarette. He hardly ever smoked.
“What’s it for?”
“It’s here to kill us.”
“I don’t get it,” Jenny said. “If it’s so evil, why do you still want to play it so bad? Why don’t we fucking destroy the thing?”
“Because the only way to do that is to play it. Find your way to its cold wet heart. And beat it.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “Pull the plug on it, pour a couple of cokes into it, zap it a bunch for good measure, and I know you can fry the fucker.”
“It’ll just come back,” he said.
It’ll respawn, I thought. Like any video game villain.
“How do you know that?”
“I saw into its . . . I don’t know. Soul? CPU? Black twisted heart? It’ll keep killing us until we kill it.”
“That’s fucking idiotic,” she said, blowing a bright green gum bubble.
“It’s a monster, Jenny,” he said, his voice going halfway British the way it did when he wanted to mock her for being so brilliant. “Monsters are real. Surely you’re not too smart to see that.”
Mom kept telling me to get a job. Said I was too old to be spending all my time in stupid arcades. That was kid stuff, and I was not a kid anymore.
Tomm tried to shield me, but we both knew he couldn’t do it for long. Sooner or later I’d have to find a fast food joint or mall kiosk, plop myself down in front of a deep fat fryer and be careful I didn’t get stuck there for the rest of my life.
Fenn dreamed of playing professionally. Somewhere, he’d heard, were whole leagues of competitive video gamers with big corporate sponsors. Every game he played he was gunning for that glory, for the day when they’d swoop down and snatch him up.
Hearing him talk about it was the first time I suspected that maybe he was nowhere near as smart as I imagined him to be.
I played along with Fenn’s fantasy. Talked about how we’d conquer the competitive gaming world. With his electric mastery, and once I learned to leverage my clumsy, destructive ability to jinx things for his competitors, I swore we’d swiftly rise to the top of the list of whatever they were looking for.
Turned out I did have a gift, and it was telling stories that were not completely true.
I’d imagined ourselves to be a nation of equals, all the arcade children united in our status of outcasts, but suddenly I could see how that was bullshit. Hearing Fenn talk about his dreams of competitive gaming, I could see how out of touch he was with how the world worked. How for all his wisdom, he was still just as ignorant as I was, only differently ignorant.
We had a hierarchy, the feral arcade children. So wide and extreme that it took me a long time to see myself on it at all. Jenny had a car, had money, had college in her future. I had none of those things, but I had so many things Fenn lacked. And once I could see that, I couldn’t see him—couldn’t see any of it—the same way anymore.
We were not one thing, one united nation. We were so many things. How could there be any hope for us, as divided as we were?
And, sure, Fenn had nothing, but plenty of kids had less. Boys and girls who sold themselves in significantly less safe ways than Fenn did. Kids who wandered through with their eyes full of fear, for whom the measly 25-cent cost of admission was too much, for whom the arcades were one more space full of bright, beautiful things they’d never have access to; a space where the wind and rain couldn’t hit them, but still full of predators both potential and actual.
Fenn went out of his way to befriend them. To show them how to game the machines. To make them magical monsters like himself.
Once, I watched him lead three eleven-year-olds out into the parking lot. He placed their hands against the massive metal pole that supported the sign listing all the stores for that particular strip mall. He shut his eyes, whispered words. They shut theirs.
One of them jumped, stepped back. They laughed, shook it off, put their hands back on the pole.
“Yeeeeaahh!” Fenn cried, clapping his hands.
They grinned, electric. Unstoppable.
Something metal screamed. High above them, the sign burst into flames. Fenn put his finger to his lips and they stepped away, vanishing into invisibility again.
After that, I started noticing blackened, burnt-out signs outside strip malls all up and down 287.
Sometimes I heard him talked about. The kid with electric fingers and electric blue hair. The faggot who can control machines. And once I saw a magnificent, stocky Mexican girl, who said she’d been taught by someone who’d been taught by the electric kid, as she lit up a whole line of pinball machines with nothing but a snap of her fingers, and let an ecstatic gaggle of our fellow feral arcade children play for free all afternoon. I followed her at a discrete distance, my mouth stuck open in awe. She could do things Fenn could not; whatever it was had evolved on its way to her, or been transformed by something special inside of her.
We looked and we looked, and we never found it.
And then . . . we found it.
Destroy All Monsters!, nestled in a corner of one of the weirder spots, down the Shore, a strip mall where half the stores were left empty when summer stopped. And it was at the one arcade where a super hot dude worked, not much older than us, known to rent his mouth out to richer men himself sometimes. Jenny and I meant to go talk to him when Fenn sparked the Player up! chime, see what we could learn about the game and who brought it, but five minutes after he started playing, we could see that Fenn was sweating.
“What?” Jenny said. “What’s going on?”
“Can’t describe it,” he said.
On the screen, his monster stomped through city streets and gobbled up children. Seized them by the fistful, swallowed them whole. Every fifty kids, his hairy, long-armed T-Rex got bigger. A big white gorilla waited for him at the center of the city, which he could challenge when he got strong enough.
Muscles twitched. Eyes flickered. On the screen the game seemed simple enough, but inside his body he seemed to be at war.
Who knows how long it was before the game went black. “Fuck,” Fenn hissed, but none of us could look away from the screen. So it took us a solid forty-five seconds to realize that it wasn’t just the game that had gone out. The whole arcade was dark. Every cabinet was silent. Kids wailed in the distance—their digital lives cut short, high scores lost, hard-earned quarters wasted.
“You okay?” I asked Fenn, and he was trembling, but he nodded.
“I can do it,” he said. “I can see how.”
On our way out, I felt so full of life and power and potential—like we could solve every problem, like the monsters could be defeated, like the mysterious forces of the world could be comprehended and conquered—that I said, “See you tomorrow” to Super Hot Dude, even though his hotness was super intimidating. He flashed a smile full of teeth.
Getting Tomm to take me back the next day was basically the hardest thing I’d ever done. He said “no” at first—and at second, and at third. I had to tell my mom I’d start looking for a job the following week—which put her in a great mood—which made him happy enough to consent to take me back to Destroy All Monsters! And Jenny. And Fenn. And the secrets of the malevolent universe.
Sweat dripped, puddled on the console beneath Fenn’s fingers. Strangled sounds gurgled out of his throat from time to time. Kids came; crowded around. Watched his ravenous creature gobble down children.
Most games were bloodless, scoured clean. This one was not.
“Look at his eyes,” I said, because I had never seen ones so bloodshot.
“You need to stop,” Jenny said.
“No,” he barked. “I’m so close.”
To what, we didn’t know. We were watching the same screen, but I could tell we saw different things. Fenn flinched, tapped buttons in response to apparently nothing. Something about the angle of where he stood, maybe. Or the deeper he went, the more it bored into his skull, until only a very small part of the game was playing out in the console.
He died fast, and often. Kept zapping blue flame at the coin slot. The air stunk of ozone and scorched machinery.
I went to get a cherry soda. Flicked my wrist at the coin slot. Pressed my hand against the glass. Snapped my fingers. Blue smoke spattered, sparked. It took me twenty tries, and when it finally “worked” the machine gave me three diet ginger ales instead. On my way back, though, I saw Super Hot Dude standing at the front door, talking to three cops. And then he pointed in Fenn’s direction.
My heart clenched. My jaw dropped. Super Hot Dude saw it, and flashed me the same terrifying line of teeth.
“See you tomorrow,” I’d said, and wished I could take back the words. Wished I could die.
I’d imagined him to be benevolent, but why? Where had it come from, the possibility of assuming best intentions in strangers? One more difference between me and Fenn, another insurmountable wall. Somewhere along the line, something in my life—maybe my mother and maybe the minimal solid stability of our shitty little apartment—had given me the luxury of mistakenly believing that maybe people weren’t so bad.
The cops stomped toward us. Monkey Fracas kept chanting its chim-chim-chim jingle, synthesized cymbals ominously happy.
“You’ve been playing this same game for three hours,” one cop said. The crowd of kids had scattered. Jenny and I stood there, mouths dry, hands wet, feeling sick with helplessness.
“I’m just really good,” Fenn said, sounding like something else.
“There’s no quarters in this machine.”
“Even if that’s true,” Fenn said, “what is that, like, twelve dollars? You gonna take me in for that?”
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” the cop said, and of course we knew, all of us, that that wasn’t what they’d be taking him in for, but none of us knew what the real reason was. It could have been so many things. For selling himself; for underage drinking; for carrying condoms; for transforming a tribe of feral arcade children into an army of magnificent monsters.
“They were looking for him,” Jenny whispered, as they took a cuffed Fenn out of the arcade. Her hand gripped mine so hard it hurt, and I was happy for the pain of it. “They’ve been looking for him, and the game helped them find him.”
“Who’s they?”
She shook her head. Kids drifted over. I could feel our anger in the air.
Sparks flew. Games spat quarters. Vending machines sprayed scalding soda. We moved towards the exit after them, as one, ready to rain blue hellfire down on all who would harm us.
Fenn saw us, and stopped us with one stern head shake. And maybe it was telepathy and maybe I just knew him, finally, so I could read a whole speech in that tiny motion. We all could.
This is not the moment. Don’t let them know what you can do. Don’t come to their attention.
Not yet.
Keep going.
The whole crowd of feral kids followed them out. We felt way more numerous than we had inside, scattered through the vast, empty, dark space.
Someone picked up a stone. Hurled it at the cop car. A beer bottle followed. Then a solid wall of insults, jeers, shrieks. The officers stared out at us impassively, but Fenn’s smile was huge.
When the cops had taken him away, I looked around. All those kids, faces twisted up, tight, dark, or pale with rage or grief. My pain was like theirs, but I was not one of them. Neither was Jenny, but she had picked up rocks and chucked them every bit as hard.
I hadn’t been able to do that. But this, I could do.
You are one of us, even if you never knew it. Even if you only ever saw us in small clumps or couples, and never suspected what a mighty nation we were. Even if by the time you were born there weren’t any arcades anymore.
“Stop fucking crying,” Jenny whispered, but she was crying too. The Mexican girl spoke in angry, urgent whispers to a small crowd of comrades.
We sat in Jenny’s car for an hour, letting the rain tick-tock against the roof.
I was convinced they’d kill him. Torture him first—take him apart on an operating table, try and fail to figure out how he worked.
Jenny said they’d probably lock him up overnight, and then remand him to foster care. Maybe juvenile detention. Juvie until jail. “Fenn had priors,” she said.
I told Jenny he’d make a new army in there. No matter how different they all were. That’s what an army was, I realized. A bunch of different things that become one thing. Locked up together they’d be able to go deeper, develop their skills, refine and expand whatever it was until they could summon blue lightning bolts out of the sky to slay every evildoer and break down every wall.
Sometimes I’d see our skill at work in the world. Creeps’ cars fried; arcade cabinets that let you play for free forever.
Fenn’s still out there. Somewhere. Maybe he’s still Fenn and maybe that body was already broken, and he’s been reborn in a brand-new body—or, even better, let loose to wander the world unencumbered by the awful ugliness humans are subject to. Doing his thing, far away or just around the next corner. Maybe I’ll find him, and maybe you will.
Jenny sends me updates occasionally. She’s still looking for the robots. The aliens. The Army.
Me, I see the monsters everywhere. They have no need for wicked mind control machines. They have cable company contracts and strip mall parking lots and deep fat fryers, sucking out our souls for minimum wage and sending us home stinking of grease and the flesh of animals even less fortunate than ourselves.
They have all that. But we have the spark. 
Sam J. Miller is the Nebula Award–winning author of Blackfish City. His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year. Sam’s short stories have won a Shirley Jackson Award and been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus awards, and have been reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He’s also the last in a long line of butchers. He lives in New York City.
Illustration: Nicole Rifkin
