Full Tilt (14 page)

Last year I did a term paper on cancer. Cancer is such a sneaky disease because it starts inside, hiding in the body, turning the body’s own cells into the enemy.
Insidious
—that’s the word for it—sneaky and subtle and evil all at the same time. It just keeps growing and growing, because the body doesn’t know how to wage war against itself. That’s the way the park worked. It dug into your thoughts and pulled these worlds right out of them. Your own mind became the enemy, and how can you fight your own mind? The only difference is that cancer doesn’t have a soul. I don’t know which was harder to face: the soullessness of a tumor, or Cassandra, the spirit of a malignant park.

She’d done her best to take me out on the Kamikaze, and had almost succeeded, but I was still standing. Well, actually I was floating, with a parachute above me and the lights of the amusement park below me. I thought that after ejecting from the Kamikaze, I’d have to swim the South Pacific to find the next ride. Instead, I’d been sent back to where I’d started: the crossroads of all the
rides—the place where my world met Cassandra’s. I wondered why.

I landed in the midway, hitting the ground hard and feeling the pain of the impact in my joints. The chute settled down around me, and I had to fight my way out of it, pulling back on the silk. As I tried to pull the shroud of the parachute away, I saw a second figure moving toward me in the billowing fabric, like a ghost. Had I come down on some other rider? Was it Cassandra?

I pulled the parachute away. It was Russ. I didn’t know who was more relieved, him or me.

“You’re alive!” he said. “This place hasn’t chewed you up!”

“Well, I kinda keep kicking it in the teeth whenever it tries.”

The relief in seeing him faded quickly when I thought about Maggie and how he’d run from her in the maze.

“So where’s Maggie?” I asked, just to see if he’d squirm.

“Lost her,” he said.

Should I confront him about it right here?
I decided against it. I looked at the amusement park around us. There were still some riders milling around, latecomers seeking out their first ride, but the crowds had been absorbed by the attractions.

“Until now the rides have all connected to one another,” I said. “So how come we’re here and not in another ride?”

“Like I know?”

There was something strange about Russ. A kind of fear in the way he looked at me. A twitch in his cheek. The rides had stressed me almost to my breaking point, and when I last saw Russ, he was already pushing his. Funny, but I always thought Russ could take care of himself.

I checked my watch: 4:40. Only two rides to go, and time was running out. Maybe he’d abandoned Maggie, but I didn’t have it in me to abandon him. “We’ll stick together,” I told him, “and make sure we don’t separate again.”

“Okay, fine.”

“The rides are tough, but we can be tougher.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Remember that there’s a way off of every ride.”

“No problem.”

He was so agreeable, it was sad. This place had whipped him, wiped him, and hung him out to dry. I led the way, trying to second-guess what the rides around us might be. “Do you think we should try—”

A sharp explosion of pain on the side of my head. I was on the ground before I knew what hit me, clapping my hand to my aching ear. It was swelling, but my ear had cushioned the blow, protecting my skull. I looked up to see Russ holding a steel pole. It looked like one of the levers that operated the rides.

“I’m sorry, Blake, but I gotta do what I gotta do.”

There were tears in his eyes, but they didn’t stop him from swinging that pole again. I dodged, and it caught my upper arm; the bone didn’t break, but I could feel the
pain of the blow from my shoulder to my fingertips. I scrambled away, but Russ still stalked me.

“She’s gonna let me go.” Russ’s face was red from anguish. “You understand, right? I gotta do this, so Cassandra’ll let me out of here. She promised.” Russ swung again, but this time he missed. It gave me the time I needed to get to my feet and bolt.

My head was still reeling from that first blow. I couldn’t think straight, and I didn’t know which way to run, so after rounding a corner I ducked into one of those automated photo booths—the kind you squeeze into with your friends, when they’re not trying to kill you. I pulled the curtain and peeked out, hoping I could throw Russ off the track long enough for me to recover physically, and mentally. Through the curtain, I saw him wandering the midway.

“Blake! Don’t make this harder than it has to be!”

I took a few deep breaths as I came to grips with the situation. At home Russ lacked the conviction to do much of anything but hang out and wisecrack. But when it came to killing his best friend to save his own hide, he suddenly found deep motivation.

“You know I’ll find you, Blake. You won’t get away. But I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry about this.”

Was it really Russ? I tried to tell myself that it was a false image of him, like Carl and the whale with my mother’s eyes. But who was I kidding? This was no false image. This was Russ through and through. The place had gotten to him.
She
had gotten to him. The next time he passed the booth, I leaped out suddenly, knocking
him down. The pole clattered to the ground, and I grabbed it. Now it was me standing over him with the pole in my hand.

“Don’t. . . move.”

He froze and stared at me, waiting to see what I’d do. I wasn’t even sure myself. I was so furious. I was tempted to smash him, just as he’d smashed me, but then he put his head in his hands and started crying like a baby. Still I hung on to that pole, not knowing how to feel.

I’d once read about a type of crime called “depraved heart murder.” Few people ever get charged with it, but in the story there was this guy who was on a sinking boat. He couldn’t swim, so he panicked and ripped a life vest away from a seven-year-old girl. The little girl drowned.

Depraved heart. He got twenty to life.

What do you feel for a coward like that? What should I feel for someone who would kill his best friend to save his own life?

“I’m sorry, man . . . I’m sorry,” Russ said through his tears.

I found I had no response to that.

“Cassandra promised she’d let me out. All I had to do . . . all I had to do . . .”

“Was kill me?”

His face went an ugly shade of red.

“You didn’t ride the Ferris wheel!”
he screamed. “You don’t know what it does to you! I can’t take another ride! If you rode the Ferris wheel, you’d know!”

But I couldn’t imagine any ride that would make me
slam a pole through my best friend’s skull. They say you never know who’s the real hero and who’s the real coward until you’re looking death in the face. I’ve always been afraid of plenty of things, but fear isn’t what makes you a coward. It’s how depraved your heart becomes when fear gets pumped through it. I would never climb over the backs of my friends to save myself.

Russ looked around nervously, as if Cassandra might swoop down out of the sky and swallow him whole. “I’m not letting this place get me like it got Maggie.” He started to take off.

“Russ, wait!” I don’t know why I tried to stop him when I really just wanted him out of my sight. I guess I’m a pathological fixer. I can’t let anyone or anything just be; I’ve got to try to make it better. “Where do you think you’re going to run?”

“This place has to have a way out! We’re not stuck in a ride now, so we’ve got to be closer to getting out!”

“What do you think, you’ll just find the back door and skip through?”

“I won’t get on another ride!” He pushed me away, and then he looked down one of the many connecting aisles of the park. “Do—do you see that!”

It was a revolving door with a big happy face above it, and stamped on the happy face’s forehead were the words:

E
XIT
C
OME AGAIN SOON
!
T
ELL YOUR FRIENDS
!

Russ ran toward it without a second thought. But there was something wrong. It was too easy. . . .

“Russ, wait!” I tried to catch him, but I hurt so much from the beating he’d given me, I couldn’t move fast enough.

Russ never saw it coming. He had no idea.

The dusty ground of the park fell away beneath him as a trapdoor opened with a loud bang. He screamed and dropped down into a hole. I got there a moment too late, but not too late to get a look. The hole had opened into a vast pit full of shiny chrome gears, cogs and pistons, thrown together at weird, impossible angles, all cranking in overdrive.

The Works.

I felt that if I looked too long, I’d fall in too.

Rising heat singed my nostrils, and the smell of burning grease made my throat close up. I couldn’t see Russ anymore, couldn’t even hear his screams over the grinding of the massive machine. It was as if he’d been ground up in it, his essence becoming oil for the gears.

The trapdoor sprang closed. When I looked up, I saw two park workers grab the “exit door” and roll it away, revealing a brick wall behind it. It was just a facade.

“Gets ’em every time,” Cassandra said.

I whirled on her. “You couldn’t take me on yourself?” I screamed, my teeth bared like a wild animal. “You had to bring Russ into it?”

“I needed a champion to defeat the dragon. I chose him.”

“And I’m the dragon?”

“So it seems.”

“You
were the one who destroyed him. Not me.” I took a good look at her. She stood so casually in the middle of the midway, dressed in simple jeans and a blouse—the way I’d first seen her when she gave me the stuffed bear and my personal invitation. But was I imagining it, or was something different about her now? She looked . .. wary. Could it be apprehension? Uncertainty? It wasn’t just her, but the park as well. I could suddenly hear it in the calliope music all around us, which sounded just a little flat and off-key, like it was slowly winding down. The park seemed to be losing some of its integrity and coherence.

But why? It couldn’t have been because of anything I’d done. All I’d done was make it through five rides.

Five rides. With only two left to go. Then something occurred to me....

“No one’s ever made it this far, have they?”

Cassandra didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. I knew. I was the first one to get this far! What was it she had said before my Zero crashed?
It was worth the risk to bring you here.
The risk of what?

“What happens if I make it through all seven rides?” I asked, moving toward her. “Is this place like a video game that shuts down when somebody beats it? Is that what happens?”

She couldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t know what happens.”

I was face-to-face with her now. “What you’re feeling now,
that’s
fear,” I told her. “Is it all you imagined it would be?”

She pulled back, speechless. I was more than a challenge to her now. I was a threat—perhaps the only one she had ever faced, and I still couldn’t understand why.

Her eyes clouded with hatred. “You really should be dead, Blake.”

“Maybe your rides are just too easy.”

“I’m not talking about the rides. I think you know that.”

And there was a part of me that did know.

I should be dead. I should have been dead a long, long time ago.

I thought back to the bumper cars, and finally something clicked. It was no coincidence that Cassandra had seemed so familiar to me when I first saw her, and that vision I had gotten of an orange sports car when she had sped past me in old Chicago wasn’t a hallucination. It was a memory.

“You were there!”

Cassandra smiled.

“You—You drove a sports car! You pulled in front of our bus, cutting it off, and that’s why the driver lost control. You made the bus crash!” My heart began to out-race my brain. I didn’t know which would explode first.
“You’re the one who set the whole thing in motion!”

I didn’t know how it could be, and yet I knew that it was true.

Cassandra’s fear was all but gone now. “What I want to know is how you managed to survive.”

I couldn’t look at her, so I looked down at the ride symbol on the back of my hand. It had all started ten
years ago. Cassandra hadn’t singled me out tonight, I’d been on her list since the day of the bus accident.

Because I had survived when I wasn’t supposed to.

I knew what I had to do.

“Get out of my way,” I told her. “I’ve got two more rides.”

As I pushed past her my arm brushed hers, and I got another impression of her true form—that strange sensation of intense heat encased in intense cold, the living embodiment of two opposing extremes—and it finally occurred to me why I, of all people, was able to battle her!

Perhaps I am the balance!
Maybe I was the one human being smack in the middle between her two extremes. And if there was anything that Cassandra could not abide, it was balance.

There was no easy choice as to which ride to take next. The ones that seemed to lure me were the ones most likely to trap me. On the other hand, the rides that gave me the worst feeling must have made me feel that way for a reason. I finally settled on the Wheel of Ra as my next ride, mainly because I had no feeling about it either way. It was what you would call a “vomit ride.” You know the kind—you get inside what’s basically a big drum that spins you around and around, gluing you up against the wall with centrifugal force and making you so nauseous that you end up puking things you probably ate in previous lives.

The wheel itself had an Egyptian theme: There were pictures of guys with their shoulders turned sideways and hieroglyphics adorned in gold.

As I approached the turnstile my feet felt heavy. It was hard to move forward, as if a wind were pushing against me, but the air was dead still. I figured it was just the park trying to slow me down and prevent me from finishing my sixth ride. My arm on the turnstile felt like
lead; I could barely lift it. I fought gravity, got my hand high enough to slide it across the scanner, and forced my way through the resisting stile.