Goose Games

It had been a long week. A long week at the end of a long month. Eighty percent of Marc's paycheck had been dumped into bills, gas, and groceries. The boss was crawling up his ass over a shipment of lawn flamingos that hadn't arrived at its destination on time. (How urgent could lawn flamingos be? Apparently very.) The cherry on top of the shit sundae was that he had failed to compliment Zach's new haircut with the requisite enthusiasm the other day. A grave sin which he would not soon hear the end of. Marc checked his bank account. Two hundred bucks with four pending charges. By his calculations that gave him about sixty to screw around with. But what to do? Sixty was enough for a nice dinner and a couple of drinks, but he didn't really feel like trying to placate Zach with a date. Especially after he'd stirred up an attitude tsunami over something so stupid. You want a genuine compliment? Maybe don't pay three hundred bucks to shave a portrait of Mao Zedong smoking a blunt onto the side of your head. Sixty dollars could get him thoroughly wasted and purchase a burger, but Marc didn't like the sound of spending Saturday in recovery. What he was really craving was comfort. Nostalgia.

Video games.

Just losing the weekend to a new game wasn't enough, though. Marc wanted the whole experience. Going to a game store: the smell of hot plastic and energy drinks, the grimy posters of obscure anime characters, a samurai sword hung up on the wall. He wanted the whole thing. Now, where to go? The search results for "game store near me" read like the obituaries. Permanently closed. Temporarily closed. Survived by his wife and two children. Online retail had hit this town like the plague. However, at the bottom of the page there was hope: Goose Games. Some weird, family owned place that had hermit-crabbed its way into what used to be a Spencer's at the old mall two towns over. Marc lit up a camel and rolled the windows down. It was a good day for a drive.

The mall looked worse than he remembered. The parking lot had been occupied by a tent revival for one of those weird pseudo-Christian deals that claimed Jesus was a car salesman from Minnesota. Church of the holy Volkswagen or something like that. Some of them revved their engines as Marc circled the lot in search of parking, waving at him with too-cheery smiles and eyes bloodshot from the exhaust fumes. No thanks. One of them, a ford focus liberally decorated with crucifixes, peeled off from the group and tailed him to his parking spot. Marc swore inwardly as he put the car in park. Here we go.

"Hey neighbor!" A voice dripping with insane joy echoed towards him across the lot. "Have you heard the good news? If you act now you can get zero percent financing on trips to the Heavenly Dealership!"

"Would this be the one near Duluth?"

"Why, yes indeed brother! May your gas mileage be..."

"Went there already, they sold me a lemon." Marc didn't look back as he walked towards the entrance of the mall, but the silence that followed told him everything he needed to know about the cultist's facial expression. The mall was a ghost town. Snatches of Jason Mraz echoed eerily through the cavernous interior. You done done me and you bet I felt it, bucko. There was an art gallery that was populated by impressionistic paintings of Car Jesus, Rosie O'Donnell and Dale Earnhardt (the church of the holy Volkswagen had canonized both of them the previous year), a store selling components for mascot costumes, a spatula repair place that loudly advertised you could smoke inside and one of those horse stores. Marc shivered involuntarily as he walked past that one.

Finally, Marc's eyes lit upon his goal. Goose Games. It was on the floor below him, right next to the escalator. Marc's ears perked up as he rode down. A strange sound had come to roost in his eardrums and it had nothing to do with Jason Mraz. Honking. The "Goose" part of "Goose Games" was literal. The store looked normal enough: a mostly secondhand place that specialized in classics and rarities. There was an entire set of shelves dedicated to "Untitled Goose Game", though. At a conservative estimate, there had to have been at least a hundred copies in there. There was a poster in the window that caught his attention: "Ask us about our FREE GAME DEAL!" That sounded neat, geese or no.

The cashier mumbled a greeting as Marc walked in. Marc couldn't blame her for her lack of enthusiasm, working in a half-dead mall had to be one of the least exciting jobs on the planet. "Hey, I saw that poster in your window. The free game deal? What's that all about?"

"Oh yeah, you pick a game and if you can leave the mall before the geese get you it's free."

"...What?"

"Yeah, you have to outrun the geese."

"Where are they?"

"That would be giving you an unfair advantage. You pick a game, you run, they chase you. Be warned though, they're ornery as shit and they're fast."

"Uh, I guess I'll take a copy of Odin's Cube. You have that one?"

"Shelf A-4, third from the left. Once you touch it, they'll come after you."

Marc felt his pulse quicken as his hand hovered over the game. He breathed deeply, steeling himself, and gripped it. "HONKUS BONKUS!" Cried the cashier, and there was the sound of flapping behind him. Marc ran, genuine terror gripping at his throat. He didn't dare look behind him as he ran up the escalator, past the horse store, the spatula repair place. Sprinting like mad, he slammed his body against the door of the mall, the ominous sound of flapping and honking practically at his heels.

It was locked.