Wild Ride (2 page)

Drunk Dave's mouth dropped open, making him look even more slack-jawed than usual.

“Go home, Dave, the park's closed,” Glenda said.

“Okay,” Dave said, and staggered on.

“Come down, Mab, and we'll walk you back to the Dream Cream,” Glenda said. “It's not safe for you to wander around alone.”

“I've been walking around this park alone for months, and now you tell me it's not safe?”

“Well, there's Dave.”

“I can take care of Drunk Dave with one hand wrapped around FunFun.”

“And there's danger.” Glenda waved her cigarette around vaguely. “It's . . . October.”

“Right. The dangerous month.” Mab shook her head, which made the light from the lamp on her hat swing wildly, and then she crawled back up the striped metal roof. The park people were just odd; that was all there was to it. It probably came from living on the grounds. You lived full-time in Dreamland, you got strange.

“Mab, get down here right now!”

“I'm
coming
!”

She fastened the flap on her work bag, made her way back to the ladder on the opposite side of the carousel, and climbed down to the flagstones that covered most of the park. Tomorrow she'd come out in the daylight and see the wood FunFun in all its finished glory, and then she'd move on to the Fortune-Telling Machine—

Something hard ran into her, and she lost her hat as she went down and smacked her head on the stone. “Ouch!” she said, and grabbed her hat and put it back on so that the light on it would stun the moron who'd knocked her down. “Damn it, Dave—”

Huge turquoise eyes gleamed down under iron-hard red-orange curls. A stiff turquoise striped coat loomed over her, metal protesting as it bent. Then the thing brought its red-orange lips together slowly and ground out “Mmmm” and then spread them apart with the sound of rending metal to say, “ab,” its smile widening and its cheeks splitting as it jerkily held out its yellow iron-gloved hand to help her up.

“FunFun?” Mab said faintly.

The thing nodded, its head moving slowly up and down with a metallic squeaking sound.

Mab screamed.

 

E
than John Wayne stared across the causeway at the locked iron gates that led to Dreamland as the sound of his taxi faded into the darkness. Something was missing on the other side of the gate, but it had been a long time since he'd been home, and he couldn't figure out what it was. Well, maybe they'd moved something. A lot of things changed in twenty years.

He rubbed his chest, feeling the scar that covered the Taliban bullet pressing on his heart. Dreamland was as good a place to die as any, and he had family here, which counted for something. What, he wasn't quite sure.

He dropped his rucksack to the ground, pulled out a leather flask, and took a good, long slug. Then he put the flask away and squared his shoulders to go back into the park. It wasn't much of a home, he thought, but at least it was peaceful, no people around to—

A scream rent the night. Ethan threw his vest on, grabbed his .45-caliber pistol from the pack, and sprinted for the entrance. He leapt as he reached the ten-foot-high wrought-iron gate, free hand reaching for the crossbar just below the top, and fell right onto his butt.

Cursing, he got to his feet and approached the gate, factoring in his inebriated state.
Mission planning, sir.
He tucked the gun inside his Kevlar vest so he could use both hands. It took longer to climb the damn thing than it should have, and when he got to the top of the gate, he tottered and almost fell again, but then he lowered himself and dropped the few remaining feet to the ground, narrowly missing the line of golf carts parked there. He drew his gun and ran across the causeway and down the midway toward the carousel, where he could see three people gathered.

He came to an abrupt halt when he saw his mother standing with her arm around a woman dressed like a bag lady in a long, bulky, paint-splotched coat and a yellow miner's hat.

“What's going on?” he demanded.

His mother turned, and her face lit up like it was Christmas. “Ethan!” she said, and flung herself at him, hugging him so tight that he couldn't get a breath. “What's this?” She pulled back and knocked her knuckles on his chest, testing out his body armor and making him wince, since she was banging right over his bullet. “Oh, I don't care, you're home!”

She flung her arms around him again, and Ethan patted the back of her fuzzy sweater and looked over her shoulder to see Delpha staring at him, with Frankie on her shoulder staring, too. “So you have returned,” Delpha said. A flicker of a smile touched her thin lips, gone as quickly as it had appeared, but for her, it was like Glenda's bear hug.

“Yep,” Ethan said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw old Gus come limping up from the back of the park.

“ 'Bout time you came home,” Gus said gruffly in an overly loud voice, but he pounded Ethan on the shoulder just the same. “Good to see you, boy. You're just in time.”

For what?
Ethan wondered.

Glenda raised a tearstained face. “How long can you stay? You have to stay a long time.”

“I quit the Army. I'm staying,” Ethan said, and Glenda looked startled, but then she must have decided not to look a gift son in the mouth because she let go of him and patted his chest again.

“I'm so glad.” Her eyes welled up again. “Oh, I'm so glad. We even have a job for you! You can help Gus with security!”

“I don't want a job, Mom. I just want some peace and quiet.” He looked around at them. “Who screamed?”

“I did,” the bag lady said. “Sorry. Usually I'm very calm, but I got run down by a clown.” She touched the back of her miner's hat gingerly. “I hit my head.”

“Someone hit you?” Ethan said, feeling something that would have been outrage once. “Where is he?”

“No, it ran into me. . . .” She stopped, taking her hat off. “I think there's blood.”

“Which way did he go?” Ethan said, and she said, “I don't know” at the same time Glenda said, “Let it go, Ethan.”

Ethan started to speak and got one of his mother's famous Don't Argue looks.

“She hit her head and
hallucinated
the clown,” Glenda said, enunciating each word clearly. Then she turned to the bag lady. “You
hallucinated it.
”

The woman blinked at her and then said, “Yes. I did.”

“Okay,” Ethan said, and reached toward her. “Let me check your head.”

She stepped back. “I'm gonna say no on that.”

“Mab, Ethan has been in the military,” Glenda said proudly. “Ethan, this is Mab, she's restoring the park.” She looked from Ethan to Mab and her smile faded. “You look . . . so much alike,” she said, and then shook her head. “Never mind, I'm just so glad you're here.”

Ethan looked at the bag lady. If he looked like that, he was closer to death than he'd thought. He said to the woman, “I'm trained in first aid,” trying to move the whole thing along before he passed out from exhaustion and alcohol.

“No, thank you,” she said.

Ethan circled around her to look at the back of her head. Her hair was a thick, red-brown choppy tangle—it looked like she hacked it off with a knife—but he couldn't see much blood, so it was probably just a scratch, not a scalp wound or else it would have been a mess. Scalp wounds were bad, hard to stop the bleeding. And then if the bullet hit bone . . . Ethan closed his eyes for a second.

“What are you doing?” the woman said, turning to look at him.

“You'll be fine. Who hit you?”

“A FunFun ran into me.” She looked up at the carousel roof. “I was working on the FunFun up there, but he's still there, and anyway he's made of wood. The one that ran into me was a big metal-covered one, like the iron one by the gate. Did you see it when you came in?”

“No,” Ethan said, now realizing what had been missing. The damn clown statue.

“Then it was probably that one. Of course, that's insane. I'm not insane.”

“Right,” Ethan said, glancing at his mother, who looked sane but worried.

“I told her to get off that roof,” Glenda said, as if he'd accused her of not helping. “I
told
her to stop working.” Whatever had rattled her before was gone, possibly because she'd gotten a grip and realized they didn't look alike.

Gus grabbed his arm and his attention. “Come on, I'll show you how to do the Dragon run. Now that you're here for good, you can take over.”

“See,” Glenda said to the woman, patting her arm. “Everything's fine now. Gus is going to do the midnight Dragon run, just like always. Everything's normal. No big iron, uh, robot clowns.”

“Robot clowns?” the woman said. “This park has robot clowns?”

“No, no.” Glenda patted again.

Patting, Ethan realized, was his mother's main form of communication. That and a wide array of looks.

“I'll take you back to the Dream Cream,” Glenda told her. “We'll get that blood cleaned up, make you a cup of tea, you'll be good as new.”

She gave Delpha a look, and Delpha nodded at her and then faded away from the carousel.

Glenda smiled at Ethan. “As for you, young man, you come right to my trailer when you're done with Gus. Tomorrow I'll get Hank's old trailer cleaned out and made up for you. You'll have a place of your own.” Her eyes welled up again. “I'm so happy you're home, Ethan.”

“Right,” Ethan said. “Don't clean up the trailer, I'd rather sleep in the woods. Are you sure you're all right walking around here? If somebody's in the park—”

“We're fine,” his mother said firmly, and he thought,
She knows who it was
. “I'm so glad you're back,” she added.

“Me too, Mom,” he lied, and made plans to get whatever the hell was going on out of Glenda once they were alone.

 

O
nce he was away from the carousel, the park seemed darker than Ethan remembered it, and he realized it was because there was orange cellophane over the streetlights for the park's Screamland weekends, the reason for the skeletons somebody had strewn around along with—

A ghost flew in his face, empty-eyed and openmouthed, and he held off on drawing his gun as the pulley it was on yanked it back into the tree he'd just passed, not a ghost, just a skull beneath some white stuff that looked like fog but was probably cheesecloth.

“Geez,”
he said to Gus, and Gus nodded.

“Mab knows how to make a ghost,” Gus said, and Ethan thought,
I know how to make ghosts, too
, as he relaxed his grip on his pistol.

He looked closer at the fence and saw the flickering red light of the infrared beam that had tripped the ghost, the same thing he'd seen in Afghanistan trip explosives. He shivered.

“Mab's uncle got her the job,” Gus said as they headed down the midway to the back of the park. “Glenda wasn't too sure about her, since her uncle's Ray Brannigan, and you know them Brannigans, but once Mab got here, it was fine. Hard worker.”

“Brannigans?” Ethan said, keeping an eye out for more trip-wire ghosts among the skeletons and giant spiders, which wasn't easy, given his current alcohol content.

“Yeah, you know, that crazy family, always trying to shut us down.”

Ethan bumped into the fence and another ghost flew at him. He batted it out of the way as its pulley yanked it back into the trees. “Of all the times I could have picked to come home, I had to come for Screamland.”

“What's that?” Gus said, cocking his head.

“I had to come home for Screamland,” Ethan said in a louder voice.

“ 'Course you did,” Gus said. “Big party planned for Halloween 'cause that's when the park's gonna be all restored. We got media coming in Friday after next, get it on the news so a lotta people'll come.” He sounded proud, like he talked about the media all the time.

“Great,” Ethan said in a normal voice and noticed that Gus didn't hear. Well, he was old, and running the damn Dragon Coaster couldn't be easy on the ears.

The good news was the park would close after Halloween and stay closed until spring. He could stand two more weekends of the park full of screaming people and cheesecloth ghosts to spend whatever months he had left in solitude and quiet.

They passed the paddleboat dock. A figure moved in the shadows out
there, watching them, and Ethan's hand again went toward the gun tucked into his vest.

“That's Young Fred,” Gus said.

Ethan relaxed. “Related to Old Fred?”

“Grandson. Old Fred died 'bout seven years ago. Young Fred took over. He was only fifteen, but he stepped up.” Gus raised his voice to call out to the boy on the dock. “What are you doing out here?”

Young Fred shrugged as he came closer. “Heard the commotion from upstairs. Everything okay?”

“Mab fell down,” Gus said. “We gotta go run the Dragon.” He jerked his thumb toward Ethan. “This here is Ethan, Glenda's boy.”

On that, Young Fred came all the way down to the beginning of the dock. “I heard about you,” he said to Ethan, admiration in his voice. “Big military hero. Navy SEAL.”

“Special Forces,” Ethan said, taking a dislike to Young Fred.

“Huh?” Young Fred said.

“Green Berets,” Ethan amplified.

“What are you doing here, man?” Young Fred said, dismissing that. “You got out of here. Why would you come back?”

“He came back 'cause this is his home,” Gus said, sounding peeved. “We gotta go. You get on up to your place now.”

Young Fred took a last incredulous look at Ethan and went back to the boat dock house.

“He lives up there,” Gus said. “Keeps an eye on the place. Good boy.” He sounded doubtful on the last part.