18+ Only. Play Responsibly.
The Red Wheel stopped at x80, and the bull skull looked pleased with the number of pistols.
Five of them occupied the highway.
One pistol in every position.
Purple grips.
Black barrels.
Each weapon had a green Power Clamp hooked over the top, so the entire road appeared to have been fitted with industrial handles for easier removal from civilisation.
The woman sat behind the reels in a battered car.
Purple hair tied into two violent little tails.
Goggles on her head.
Shotgun across one shoulder.
A grin normally found on people who had located petrol, ammunition or somebody else’s petrol and ammunition.
She leaned through the open window and pointed at the wheel.
Chains jumped across the red metal.
x30 passed.
x50 passed.
x100 approached with enough heat to bend the checkpoint sign.
The pointer struck x80.
All five pistols lit.
The skull lowered its horns.
The clamps tightened.
Eight hundred euros hit the road.
The woman slapped the roof of the car.
The toll barrier lifted by itself.
It had taken the end of the world to produce exact change.
I had been watching the checkpoint from the DSF desk since the road still contained mostly letters.
A.
K.
Q.
Battered metal plates painted in colours that might once have belonged to shops, buses or warnings.
Nobody remembered.
They arrived across the five-position lane beside fuel cans, pistols, masked raiders and portraits of the woman driving the car.
There was only one row.
No upper street.
No lower route.
Nothing hiding behind another symbol.
Every object entered the same narrow strip of road and had to stand beside the rest of the apocalypse.
Three matching objects anywhere were enough to become a convoy.
They flashed.
The clamps descended.
The matching symbols were pulled out of the lane.
Fresh wreckage collapsed into the empty positions as though the wasteland had a warehouse directly above the tollbooth.
I started at €1.00.
The woman parked beside the barrier and left the engine running.
Smoke came from the bonnet.
Smoke came from the city.
Smoke came from somewhere inside the passenger seat.
She did not investigate any of it.
Her attention stayed on the multiplier wheel mounted above the reels.
The thing had been built from red armour plate, chains, scrap metal and the skull of a bull that had apparently died still expecting promotion.
Three coloured sections waited inside it.
Green.
Purple.
Red.
The skull guarded them from above.
A warning sign hung beside the booth.
DO NOT PLACE HANDS NEAR POWER CLAMPS.
The woman read it.
Then used one clamp to pull the car door shut.
The ordinary traffic moved through the checkpoint as one long salvage spill.
Three As met across the road and were dragged away.
Fuel cans gathered, vanished and allowed a gas-mask raider to fall into the gap.
Pistols formed pairs, then received a Q in the remaining position, forcing the weapons to travel beside an alphabet that had already lost several letters during the collapse of government.
Masked raiders appeared repeatedly.
Round filters over their mouths.
Red hoods.
Eyes hidden behind dark glass.
Every one looked prepared for poison air and deeply surprised by the toll.
The first placed a fuel can on the counter.
The second offered a pistol.
The third had coins, although the green glow around them made exact change feel less important than distance.
Three matching raiders eventually entered together.
All three carried Power Clamps.
The green hooks tightened over their hoods.
The symbols flashed.
The men vanished from the road.
Above them, the Green Wheel woke.
Chains lifted.
The bull skull opened its mouth, although there was no lower jaw and therefore no useful direction for the gesture.
The wheel spun.
x2.
x3.
Level Up.
x10.
Then x5.
The pointer stopped.
The raider win became €15.00.
The woman cheered from the car.
One of the missing gas masks dropped out of the wheel and landed on the tollbooth roof.
That was when the checkpoint’s survival policy became clear.
Three matching travellers were not allowed through.
They were fed to roadside arithmetic.
After that, every Power Clamp looked alive.
Green hooks hung from fuel cans.
Pistols arrived with metal jaws attached to their sights.
Letters carried clamps despite having no obvious towing point.
One Q entered with a hook fixed through the top and spent the entire spin leaning sideways under the weight of emergency equipment.
Most of those clamps achieved nothing.
Two clamped pistols stood together while the third pistol arrived unclamped.
A fuel can with a green hook met a second can and three unrelated letters.
Four identical raiders appeared, but only two carried clamps, leaving the wheel asleep while the masked men occupied the road like a committee formed entirely around breathing difficulties.
The woman watched each arrangement through the windscreen.
Whenever the count reached two matching clamped symbols, she leaned forward.
When the final position delivered something useless, she dropped back into the seat and struck the dashboard with the shotgun stock.
A small plastic saint fell from the mirror.
So did a live round.
From my side of the screen, I moved the coffee farther from the keyboard.
The road grew hotter without becoming richer.
Winning groups were hauled away.
Fresh cargo dropped in.
The woman’s portrait occasionally matched across the lane, producing several copies of the same driver while the actual woman remained parked behind them.
Five versions of her once occupied four positions and the car window simultaneously.
The wheel stayed silent because the portraits carried too few clamps.
She looked at the copies.
The copies looked at her.
Every version had the same grin.
The wasteland had achieved cloning before repairing the road.
Fuel began taking over the convoy.
Cans arrived olive green, dented and marked with symbols nobody at the checkpoint wanted to translate.
One leaked across the second position.
Another sat beside a pistol.
The road shimmered with enough fumes to erase the distinction between infrastructure and explosion.
Then four fuel cans landed together.
Each one carried a Power Clamp.
The hooks closed.
The cans glowed.
The Purple Wheel opened above the road.
The woman turned off the engine.
That was the most frightened she looked all evening.
Purple light crossed the chains.
The bull skull lifted against the frame.
The pointer moved past x10 and x15, climbed toward x20, then struck Level Up.
The wheel changed colour.
Purple plates folded backward.
Red metal opened underneath.
Chains tightened across a wheel containing x30, x50, x80 and x100.
Four cans of petrol had been promoted to a national emergency.
The Red Wheel spun.
The woman put on her goggles.
The pointer hit x30.
The clamped fuel cans paid €60.00.
Gold light crossed the lane.
The cans vanished.
A fresh row collapsed into place.
One A.
Two pistols.
A raider.
The woman’s portrait.
Nothing matched.
The checkpoint had multiplied the petrol, removed the petrol and replaced it with enough armed strangers to begin another government.
The €60 rescue brought the session back within sight of safety.
It also convinced the woman that the bull skull understood her.
She climbed out of the car.
Walked beneath the wheel.
Placed one boot on the toll barrier.
Then spoke to the skull for several minutes.
From the desk, I caught the words fuel, destiny and maximum.
The skull gave no answer.
It had been dead longer than the city.
The woman nodded anyway.
From then on, the session belonged to the clamps.
Not the wins.
Not the symbols.
The clamps.
Every new lane became a search for green metal jaws.
A normal pistol looked unfinished.
An unclamped fuel can seemed to have arrived without luggage.
Three matching letters could pay, collapse and disappear, but the woman barely watched unless the roadside machinery had attached itself to them.
The Power Clamps turned ordinary objects into potential hostages.
The wheel waited above them with the patience of something that knew everybody eventually brought enough cargo.
The road moved through one long doomsday procession.
Raiders came and went.
Fuel cans rattled against pistols.
Letters collapsed into portraits.
Portraits collapsed into ammunition.
The woman climbed onto the car roof and began sorting loose shells by whether they matched the colour of the wheel.
The balance started slipping again.
The Green Wheel returned once and landed x2 on a small group of clamped letters.
The woman did not celebrate.
After seeing the red sections, green multiplication looked like bottled water offered during a petrol fire.
The checkpoint moved toward sunset.
The ruined city behind it turned orange.
Smoke columns became black silhouettes.
The tollbooth shutter began lowering by itself.
The coin drawer slid closed.
A faded packet of biscuits sat behind the glass, apparently classified as emergency equipment.
The woman remained on the car roof, watching the lane.
Then the first pistol arrived.
Clamp attached.
It landed on the far left.
A second dropped beside it.
Also clamped.
The woman stood.
A third pistol entered the centre.
Green jaws over the barrel.
The bull skull seemed to lean forward.
The fourth pistol fell into the next position.
Clamped.
Four matching weapons.
Enough for the Purple Wheel.
One position remained.
The final space slowed through a raider.
Fuel can.
K.
Woman’s portrait.
Then the fifth pistol struck the road.
Its clamp snapped shut before the symbol had fully settled.
Five matching weapons filled the highway.
Every pistol carried a Power Clamp.
The Red Wheel opened immediately.
No green warning.
No purple negotiation.
Straight to the colour usually reserved for fire, blood and decisions made from the roof of a moving car.
The woman jumped through the driver’s window.
The engine started.
The half-lowered shutter reversed.
The wheel spun.
x30 crossed the pointer.
x50 followed.
The car shook under the sound.
x100 came around the top.
For one moment, the pointer travelled beside it.
The woman gripped the steering wheel.
The five pistols burned across the lane.
Then the chain struck x80.
The weapons paid €800.00.
The checkpoint filled with gold.
Coins hit the windscreen.
The toll tray overflowed.
The barrier lifted and continued rising until it detached from the hinge.
The woman drove underneath.
The five pistols were hauled upward by their clamps and disappeared into the wheel.
Fresh symbols collapsed onto the road behind her.
Letters.
One fuel can.
Two raiders.
Nobody cared.
The payout had turned the night into an escape fund.
The woman stopped beneath the bull skull.
Five Power Clamps dropped from the wheel and hit the road around the car.
She collected them immediately.
One clamp gripped the left side of the multiplier wheel.
Another took the right.
Two were chained to the car’s rear frame.
The fifth attached itself to the fallen toll barrier.
She climbed behind the wheel.
The engine roared.
The car moved.
The clamps tightened.
The entire multiplier wheel tore away from the checkpoint.
Chains snapped.
Red armour folded.
The bull skull left the roof horns-first, still guarding x80.
The barrier followed for twenty metres before striking a road sign and remaining there at an angle normally associated with surrender.
The woman drove toward the burning city with the wheel bouncing behind the car.
Sparks crossed the highway.
The bull skull spun in the dust.
Power Clamps held everything together.
Gold coins escaped from the mechanism and followed her into the smoke.
The game settled on the empty checkpoint.
One booth.
One torn roof.
One road leading into fire.
The only sign still attached read EXACT CHANGE ONLY.
The car vanished beyond the ruins.
The highway went quiet.
I stopped with the €800 hit secured.
Doomsday had taken the city.
The woman had taken the car, the multiplier wheel, five industrial clamps and the payout.
The tollbooth kept the rule.
I tried to uninstall Breaking Bad Cash Collect & Link. It installed anxiety instead.