Inferno Park (52 page)

“But he
is
in there. Can’t you hear the roller coaster rumbling around?”

“Lemme go.” Hanover jerked his arm away from her, which sent him tumbling off-balance. He landed hard on his hip, dropping both the cigar and the dynamite. The objects rolled in opposite directions—the cigar under the running car, the dynamite toward Victoria’s foot.

Victoria snatched up the stick of dynamite. Its surface was rough with nitroglycerine crystals. She saw four more sticks in the old wooden crate, so she grabbed up the crate in her other hand and ran past the car. She now had all the dynamite, unless there was more in Hanover’s car.

“Hey! Hey, you stupid bitch, come back here!” Hanover shouted. “Drop that box!”

She didn’t look back, but ran as fast as she dared toward the open gate in the pitchfork fence. The old sticks of dynamite rolled and clicked against each other inside the crate. She was terrified the corroded sticks would detonate and blow her to pieces. Then she could worry about the drunken fat man.

An explosion sounded behind her, and she dropped to her knees and looked back. Hanover held up a revolver in his swaying hand. He had fired one warning shot into the air, and now he scowled at her.

Victoria made up her mind in about half a second. Staying close to the drunk and dangerous man would almost surely get her shot or blown apart by dynamite, so she regained her feet and ran out through the fence. He fired the gun again, but no bullet struck her, so she kept moving.

She ran up the narrow service drive between Dark Mansion and the Mad Martian Arcade, both of them small, dark, and overgrown with weeds—whatever magic or illusion had made the park look new and full of life was now vanished. She emerged into the dim ruins of the park’s central plaza. Hanover shouted somewhere behind her, his feet thudding on the broken asphalt as he pursued her.

Victoria immediately saw which way to go. If she crossed through the wreckage of Wishing Well Plaza, she could toss the dynamite over the old sawhorses and into the enormous sinkhole. She couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of the explosives before Hanover could take them back from her. He was clearly out of his mind and seemed determined to blow up Inferno Mountain, even after she’d told him Carter was inside the ride.

She crossed the plaza, trying to will her hands not to shake while the corroded dynamite bounced and rolled inside the crate. Another gunshot boomed behind her, and the hot sting of a bullet tore into her back.

* * *

Carter passed through the devil’s jaws and into darkness as the tracks curved away inside the peak of the mountain. Smoldering blasts of hot compressed air hit him from both sides, blowing his hair into a tangle and billowing his shirt. Despite the heat, Tricia’s dead hand still felt like solid ice. Her fingertips stabbed into his palm.

Terrified screams sounded in the darkness ahead—probably recorded, he reminded himself.

The roller coaster twisted sideways and plunged downward. Red lights strobed all around him, creating flicker-flash images of a tunnel of writhing bodies surrounding the tracks, all of them squirming and screaming together, arms and legs and torsos wriggling in a frenzy of howling torment.

These weren’t mannequins or animated displays. Carter could smell their flesh and their sweat in the thick, steamy air. The air reeked of fear. They shrieked and cried as the train raced past them.

Another flash of red strobe lights revealed a snarling three-headed dog that appeared to stand right in the middle of the tracks ahead, blocking the way. Its heads bobbed mechanically up and down, its jaws snarled and drooled as though rabid, its six eyes glowed blank and white.

Carter took a sharp breath at the sight of the oversized, slavering beast ahead. Then the train dipped steeply, ducking underneath the three-headed dog and racing down a long, steep hill into darkness punctuated by strobe-flashes of pale blue light. A cold, foul rain sprinkled over him.

As he swooped downhill through filthy, dripping water, he passed obese human beings who must have weighed several hundred pounds each, their bodies half-buried in the filthy muck walls alongside the steep track. Rivulets of dark water flowed over and between the folds of their pale, slug-shaped bodies. Their eyes were stitched closed, their mouths wide open and chomping at empty air like drowning fishes or starving baby birds. Their massive, meaty arms groped toward the plummeting roller coaster as though searching for a snack.

Behind Carter, the dead children screamed in delight. He looked at Tricia, but she wasn’t moving at all. It was hard to tell whether her hand was gripping his tightly or had simply reverted to the rigidity of death.

Hell
, he thought.
This really could be Hell.

The train began to climb uphill again, clanking slowly upward through a dark, cavernous space.

A steep rocky incline followed alongside the track, crowded with people trying to push their way past each other up the slimey slope. Each one dragged heavy weights and rocks chained to their arms, legs, and necks. They fought for every inch, trying desperately to climb over each other. They reminded him of the ghost of Jacob Marley in
A Christmas Carol
, weighed down with chains and locks for all eternity.

As the train chugged toward the crest of the next hill, Carter looked over at the lead group of struggling, climbing souls, the ones who’d ascended the highest by climbing over the whole mob below.

Abruptly, their chains, weights, and boulders tangled around each other, and the whole group went sliding, tumbling, and screaming back down the steep slope, dragging everyone else down with them, presumably forcing everyone to start all over again at the bottom of the steep hill.

Then Carter saw the goal toward which all the struggling souls had been climbing and clawing: a treasure chamber heaped with gold, sparkling at the very top of the slope. Open chests overflowed with glittering gold coins and polished gems—unlike the pirate treasure they’d passed on the way out of Dark Mansion, these jewels and coins looked real. Golden animal statues bowed toward an unoccupied, gem-encrusted golden throne, waiting for an aspiring soul to claim it.

He glanced back to see little Kylie and her undead friends staring at him with sharp little smiles, probably just waiting for a fun moment to kill him.

The coaster train turned sideways as it twisted through a pitch-dark passage, then emerged into a wider, fire-lit space occupied by a shaggy, goat-horned demon that must have been a hundred feet tall, though he could actually only see its head and one arm.

The train shot directly toward the beast. Its furry, clawed hand, as large as a wrecking ball, lunged at the approaching coaster train.

The tracks dropped away into a steep hill, and the train ducked underneath the demon’s lunging claw. At that moment, a sudden loud blast rocked the building. The wall beside him exploded in a cloud of dust, pelting him with sharp chunks of concrete.

Carter ducked low, pulling Tricia’s cold body with him.

The enormous demon head and arm toppled forward with a sound of wrenching metal. The claw bashed across the top of their car, scraping across his shoulders, then fell alongside the track, trailing sparks, patches of its fur on fire. If Carter hadn’t ducked, the falling machinery could have taken off his head.

The train plunged down the steep hill toward a sunken valley, which held a vast stone city far below, sprawling for miles and coiling inward on itself in a lopsided spiral. Fire poured from the iron-grate windows and doors of squat, asymmetrical rock towers.

The roller coaster was clearly no longer contained inside the Inferno Mountain facade. The burning city below him was larger than the entire amusement park, larger than the town of Conch City, even larger than the cities of Tallahassee or Mobile.

As the track neared the burning stone city, he felt the intense heat and smelled sulfur, burning hair, roasting meat. Screams echoed through the narrow spiral coil of the streets. He saw blackened, skeletal hands banging against the underside of the sewer grates as if desperate to escape. Smoke and flame rose from the sewer grates—there was no sign of water anywhere.

The train curved around the city rather than plummeting directly into it. Decayed bodies hung along the city’s outer wall like grisly ornaments, many of them missing limbs, most of them with gaping holes carved into their torsos. Colonies of flies and worms crawled inside their open cavities.

One man with his jaw missing and a thick mat of maggots covering him from face to his empty, gutted abdomen raised an arm and moaned as Carter rode past. The bodies hanging on the outer wall weren’t exactly dead, Carter realized. Suffering souls were still trapped inside them.

As the rotten-but-not-dead man reached toward them from the wall, both of Tricia’s hands clenched tight on Carter’s arm. She screamed.

Tricia was alive.

At least, she looked more alive than before. Her head was restored to her body, her pale blond hair blowing out behind her, her lips pink with strawberry smacker. All the blood had vanished from her dress.

“Tricia!” Carter said, but the wind swallowed his words as the train shot through the city, spiraling downward toward the dark city center.

They raced past small stone temples, houses, and short towers—all made of unpolished, ill-fitting rocks, through which long tongues of red and orange flame leaked out. Red-hot wrought-iron grates sealed every window and doorway. Screaming, charred faces and hands banged against the grates, desperate to escape the fire-filled stone buildings.

As the train tracks circled toward the city center, the heat became unbearable. Carter felt like he’d been plunged into a furnace. His skin dried as all the moisture baked out of it. His clothes grew scalding hot against his skin. The steel car in which he sat also became too hot to touch, and he had to keep his shoes off the floor so they wouldn’t melt.

The city grew denser as they approached the center. Burning heads screamed from iron pikes alongside the tracks. Pyres of bodies burned in the streets, chained together so they couldn’t escape—souls suffering their eternal torment.

Because this is Hell
, Carter thought.
And it’s going to get worse before it’s over.

The train raced toward the open dark cave at the city center, waiting like the open mouth of some immense underground beast. It reminded Carter of the sinkhole itself. Ahead of him, the tracks twisted into a straight drop into the lightless cave. The tracks glowed red tinged with blue, melting in the unbearable heat.

Carter looked at Tricia again, wishing the train would slow so they could talk—wishing it would stop altogether, in fact, rather than drop them straight into the bottomless, super-hot darkness ahead. She was looking back at him, her face a mixture of shock and fear.

She’s just a kid
, he thought again.

A geyser of white-hot fire erupted from the dark hole as the train approached it. A wave of heat shoved Carter back in his seat. Fire rained down like snow as they approached, igniting his hair and clothes, and he screamed and tried to pat out the flames. They burned him all over, and he couldn’t keep up.

The immense column of fire poured upward from the hole, growing hotter and brighter. Carter could feel himself burning up as the train rocketed toward it. He could smell his own skin cooking against his bones.

He was going to die. If the heat from the twisting pillar of flames didn’t kill him in the next couple of seconds, then he would surely be consumed when the train dove straight into the fire.

The red STOP button was still in front of him. If he pressed it, the entire ride was supposed to end, and Carter would be free to walk away. He didn’t see much choice, because he was only a breath away from riding straight into whatever furnace was creating the hundred-foot geyser of white fire.

He reached for the button, then looked to Tricia again. Time seemed to stretch and slow—maybe impending death had a way of doing that.

Behind him, the ghostly kids rose up, all of them engulfed in flames but laughing, and scrambled forward over the cars toward Carter and Tricia.

I came here to save her, not to save myself
, Carter thought.
Maybe I can’t save either of us. Maybe I was just supposed to die with her.

He didn’t press the button.

The train went over the edge of the giant hole and shot straight down into blinding light. Fire swept in around Carter from all sides, and he heard himself scream.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Victoria stumbled between a rotting pink cotton candy stand and the Throw-A-Shoe game topped with the decayed remnants of an oversized horse head.

The bullet had caught her somewhere in her lower back. The right half of her shirt was soaked in blood. A streak of intense pain burned across her right side, but she was still able to walk, though she definitely did not feel like it. She wanted to collapse and pass out if she could, just to escape the pain, but the crazed Hanover was still stalking her, and Carter’s life was still in danger, so she forced herself to keep going.