by JL Bryan
He ran as fast he could through the dark space, hearing his own breath puff in his ears. He kept his eyes on the cloudy, grimy light coming from the cracks in the front door. He wasn’t looking when he banged his shin against a broken table. He toppled and crashed face-first into the dark, sticky floor.
Heath struggled to regain his feet while his leg throbbed. The man approached him over the rubble, the broken wooden furniture cracking and crunching under his heavy boots. He was only a few steps away.
Heath limped as fast as he could toward the front door, but when he got there, it was closed and locked tight, with grimy light seeping in through the window in its upper half. He slapped the thick glass, then grabbed a broken table leg from the floor.
He’d meant to use it to smash the window, but Pork Belly caught up to him, still wielding the big roasting fork in one hand.
Heath swung the table leg like a baseball bat. It slammed into the man’s face with a loud crack. He pulled it back and swung again and again, as if still playing the Whack-A-Frog game. Pork Belly grunted and fell to his knees. Heath hit him again, and he toppled over.
“There,” Heath said, catching his breath. He turned and struck the window. It didn’t shatter, but a jagged diagonal crack appeared. He hit it again, spawning a few more cracks.
He drew back the table leg a third time, ready to put all his strength into breaking the window, but it was snatched from his hands.
Before he could turn around to look, a pair of sharp blades stabbed him in the upper right corner of his back, just below the shoulder. The impact drove his whole body forward, smacking his face against the cracked window.
He could smell the man behind him, reeking of smoke and rotten meat. Flies crawled on Heath’s ear and scalp.
Pork Belly drove his roasting fork deep into the meat below Heath’s shoulder, and Heath screamed in agony.
Using the fork, Pork Belly turned Heath around to face the glowing red light again.
“Walk,” Pork Belly commanded. Heath hesitated, and the man twisted the fork, creating an intense new explosion of pain.
Heath screamed, and he started walking. The man drove him forward, heedless of how Heath kept tripping and stumbling on the barely-visible broken furniture littering the floor.
He prodded Heath all the way back to open door of the smoker, while Heath wept in pain and confusion.
“I’m sorry,” Heath blubbered through his tears. “I’m sorry, just please just let me go, I won’t do it again—”
The man released the fork, leaving it buried deep in Heath’s back, and instead grabbed Heath’s right wrist with his thick, hairy hand.
He stretched Heath’s right arm toward the open smoker door, toward the grill over the red-hot fire.
“No!” Heath screamed, doing his best to pull back, but the man was much stronger than he was, and Heath’s right arm felt unusually weak.
“Meat for meat,” the man grunted.
He jerked Heath forward, then pressed Heath’s right arm down onto the grill.
Heath howled in pain, but couldn’t break away. The man held Heath’s wrist in his place with a bare hand, heedless of how the heat scorched the hair from his own knuckles and blackened his own fingers.
Pork Belly drew the carving knife from his belt and lay the blade in the crook of Heath’s elbow.
“No!” Heath begged. “No, please, don’t—”
Moving with a butcher’s expertise, the man sliced through Health’s elbow joint and cut off the lower half of his right arm, leaving it sizzling on the grill.
Heath cried out again as he fell, the pain almost knocking him unconscious, but not quite. He toppled over the old rocking chair. The stuffed reindeer tumbled into his remaining arm, and Heath hugged it close, weeping, too weak to stand up.
Pork Belly used tongs to flip Heath’s arm on the grill, and Heath shivered with horror when he saw the grill lines burned into his fingers and wrist.
“Stop,” Heath whispered. It was all he could manage to say. “Stop, please, stop...”
Pork Belly ignored his pleas. Heath made one last effort to stand, though he could feel himself blacking out from pain and blood loss.
This got the man’s attention. He put his tools aside and lifted Heath in his bare hands, hoisting him up as if he were as light as a bag of flour. He looked up at Heath, and his eyes were as colorless as a dead man’s.
“You don’t steal from Pork Belly,” the man grunted.
Then he pitched Heath into the smoker, right onto the grill, and slammed and latched the heavy door behind him.
The pain was excruciating, and death came as a relief.
Chapter Eighteen
Derek yelled for Finn to come back down, but Finn ignored him. Derek watched the three Old West hooker girls draw Finn back through the pink curtain into their brothel. The sign said “Heart of Gold Hotel,” but the place obviously offered a little more hospitality than the Holiday Inn.
“Finn!” he yelled again, but it was useless. Finn was an unrepentant horndog, and he wasn’t going to turn down sex to listen to Derek. The red-haired idiot had already forked over a handful of gold coins to the women.
As they led Finn through the curtain, one of the hooker girls looked back over her shoulder and winked at Derek, as if to say You’re next.
No, thank you, baby, Derek thought.
When they were out of sight, Derek waited impatiently, wondering how much gold the girls would steal from Finn’s pockets while his pants were off. His buzz from several cups of free beer was wearing off, leaving him with a headache. He felt cranky and impatient. He wanted more beer, and he wanted to get the hell out of the park before the rest of their group learned about the gold and demanded a share of it. Greedy bastards, Derek thought.
He heard Finn screaming and rolled his eyes. Then Finn’s voice screamed Derek’s name, startling him.
Before Derek could act, Finn came barreling out through the pink curtain and the curvy batwing doors carved with the heart shape.
Finn flew over the boards of the wooden walkway in front of the brothel, crashed right through the railing, and landed in the sawdust at Derek’s feet. Gold coins spewed from the pockets of Finn’s bloodstained jeans. Every inch of him had been flayed open, turning him into a shapeless bloody heap. Derek wouldn’t have recognized him if he didn’t already know it was Finn.
“Holy fuck!” Derek said. He looked up at the glowing pink curtain. There was no sign of the three women. Apparently they were staying inside the brothel for the moment.
Derek knelt next to his friend. A wheezing, gurgling sound burbled in Finn’s throat. He was still alive, but just barely, and not for long.
Derek opened the wooden box and scooped up the coins that had spilled from Finn’s pockets. No reason to let that gold go to waste. Derek didn’t think he could do much to help Finn, but he could save his own ass and keep all the coins for himself.
He stood and hefted the box, now heavier than ever, and jogged as fast as he could out of Fool’s Gold.
When he emerged onto the midway, he saw Heath farther down, absorbed in the Whack-A-Frog game. Derek glanced at the park’s front gates, saw they were still chained, locked, and overgrown with thorny vines, then hurried across into the water-ride area called Pirate Island.
Derek jogged under the big, wide slide of Crashdown Falls, toward the spot where they’d entered, but he must have remembered wrong because the opening in the fence wasn’t there.
He walked in the mud under the ride, searching the overgrown fence, but he couldn’t find the way out—it was all solid chain-link, thick with the thorny vines and topped with coils of barbed wire. The box of treasure seemed to grow heavier and heavier as he searched, and his arms ached.
Derek swore several times, then gave up. The side entrance was gone, but that was hardly the only insane, inexplicable thing that had happened tonight.
The back, he thought. There has to be some kind of gate at the back.
He
didn’t want Heath or anyone else to see his gold, so Derek cut behind Jungle Land to emerge into Haunted Alley, in the shadow of the tall, black mass of Inferno Mountain, which was still closed and dark.
He crept out across Wishing Well Plaza, the dead center of the park lined with bright, flashing concession stands and games blasting music and neon light. He continued north along the midway. The space-themed rides of Space City glowed on his right. He smiled when he looked left and saw Tyke Town—the Funtime Firehouse, the Tick-Tock train on its flat track that curved through a fake little mountain range before circling back to the clock-tower boarding station. The round face of the locomotive was fronted with another clock, its hand spinning wildly as the train chugged along.
The archway into the Storybook Maze looked like it was made of gumdrops. Through it, he glimpsed the fake brick walls of the maze’s first corridor, lined with false windows and plastic flower boxes like an alleyway in a cheerful fairy-tale village.
The Storybook Maze was particularly special to him. When he was ten years old, he’d had the idea to hide behind the gingerbread house deep inside the maze, just ahead of the arched fairy bridge. When kids walked by, he would jump out screaming “I am the troll king!” and demand all their money. If they refused to pay, he would wail on them with his fists until they changed their mind.
Most of them just forked over the money without a fight, though. He’d been amazed by how few resisted. That day, Derek had begun to figure out that jobs were for suckers. His own dad had worked a crappy construction job he hated, getting up early every day to go and break his back for the foreman, and what did he have to show for it? A measly, pathetic paycheck.
The security clowns had eventually caught Derek, thrown him out, and banned him for life from the park, but not before Derek had made almost ninety dollars from the cash-heavy tourist kids.
He was tempted to go inside and check it out, just for the memories, but his arms were straining to hold the wooden box full of gold. Derek hustled down the midway toward the final row of game booths and concessions at the back. Behind these, if he remembered correctly, was a high wooden privacy fence concealing the park’s backlot area—administration, first aid, maintenance, and storage. A big EMPLOYEES ONLY sign was posted on the gate, and a security clown used to sit near it, watch for trespassers.
Someone giggled behind him. It sounded like a little kid. As Derek turned to look, he heard a clattering, rattling noise, and then his feet shot out from beneath him and he landed hard on his ass on the concrete walkway. Someone had pitched a big handful of marbles at his feet, and he’d stumbled right over them.
He released the wooden box and reached out his hands to catch himself. The box fell open in midair, raining down gold all around him before cracking into his scalp. The corner of the wooden box gouged into his forehead, stunning him and drawing blood.
“Goddamn it,” Derek whispered.
“He’s down!” a little girl squealed behind him. “The troll king is down!”
Giggling, laughing kids, five to ten years old, swarmed around him.
“Go away!” Derek shouted, swinging his fists at them.
They kept laughing, even when he hit them. Each kid grabbed a handful of gold coins and ran away into the Storybook Maze.
“Hey!” Derek shoved himself to his feet, yelling after them. There were more than a dozen kids, and they’d left him with nothing but an empty box. “Bring it back!”
The last of the kids, a little blond girl with pink ladybug barrettes, laughed at him over her shoulder as she dashed away under the arch.
Derek ran after them.
He passed through a pastoral scene where Little Bo Peep, with her bonnet and shepherd’s crook, scratched her head. Bo Peep was apparently unaware that her fiberglass sheep were just across the path, playing cards at a table with a heap of poker chips in the middle.
The light grew dim as he advanced into the maze. The only light source was a smoldering red glow in the windows of the gingerbread house, which stood about half his height.
He heard kids giggle behind the closed door.
“Are you little brats in there?” Derek leaned down and knocked on the plastic graham-cracker door. It was locked, and he knew it had been for years, ever since the park’s owners discovered that middle-school kids used the gingerbread house as a make-out spot.
“Open up!” Derek shouted. He kicked the door, which only brought more snickering from inside.
“He’s here,” a little girl’s voice whispered in the darkness behind him. “The troll king is here.”
“Give me back my money.” Derek turned around, but he didn’t see anyone on the shadowy path behind him. “Where the hell are you?”
“Where in Hell am I?” the little girl’s voice giggled.
Derek heard a small splash. He turned to see small, shadowy kids climbing up over the railing of the fairy bridge ahead, at least four of them, blocking his path. They advanced slowly down the gently arched bridge, their footsteps barely audible.
Closer to him, the door to the gingerbread house opened with a creak, and three more kids stepped out, their dark profiles outlined against the dim red light that glowed within the toy house.
“Give me back my gold,” Derek growled.
“He wants his gold,” the little girl’s voice whispered. “Let’s give it to him.”
Derek turned again, and this time he did see the little girl, flanked by four more little kids. They looked smeared in dark mud from hair to shoes, as though they’d been wallowing in it like demented little pigs.
The kids shrieked and charged him from all sides, surrounding him. They knocked him to the ground and pinned his arms and legs with their damp, ice-cold hands. Under the mud, they were pale and stiff, like walking corpses.
An icy hand pried his jaw open, and another one reached into his mouth. Derek tasted mud, then cold metal as the kid dumped a handful of gold coins down his throat.
Derek gagged and lunged against his captors, but they held his limbs to the ground. He turned his head and tried to cough out the coins, but one cold little hand grabbed his hair and turned his face back up toward the sky, trapping the gold inside his throat.
Another hand shoved gold into his mouth, and then another. His windpipe was thoroughly blocked, and his throat began to spasm. His head seemed to grow tight, building up an uncomfortable pressure while his brain starved for air.
Stop it! Derek thought, since he had no air with which to scream.
They kept shoving coins and mud down his throat, one handful after another, stuffing him with gold.
His whole body jerked and twitched, his hands and feet struggling with their last bit of strength to get free.
It’s so easy to die, he thought. It’s so easy to get killed.
The girl with pink barrettes knelt on his chest, her sharp, scabby knees digging in as if to crush any remaining air from his lungs. She giggled, and he saw her eyes were colorless and dead, her little face white as ash and hard as porcelain.
“Look at the troll king,” she whispered. “He’s not so scary now.”
She stuffed one last handful of gold into his mouth, then shoved his jaw shut.
The world turned red, then dark, and Derek’s body gave one final lurch, an attempt to vomit out the choking coins, before he laid still and died.
Chapter Nineteen
Elissa stood at the back gate of Starland, pulling her hair.
She was wet with Tamara’s dying blood. She was also soaked with sweat from running up and down the midway looking for help, and she was hoarse from screaming for Finn and Jared and everybody else. Nobody had come to help her.
Her lower half was slick with fresh mud from scurrying around in the muck under Crashdown Falls, looking for the opening in the fence through which they’d entered. She’d never found it, as though it had been sealed up and overgrown with vines in the short time they’d been inside.
Now she’d found her way to the very back o
f the park, an area with trailers and little metal sheds, walled off from the rest of the park by a privacy fence.
The back gate was much larger than the little customer entrances at the front. If it were open, it would be wide enough to drive an eighteen-wheel truck inside.
It wasn’t open, though. Chains coiled between the two wide sections of chain-link gate, their padlocks somewhere on the other side of the gate. She couldn’t even try to reach them. The gate, like the rest of the fence around the park, was so overgrown with tough, thorny vines that she couldn’t even see the world outside.
She was trapped in the park, her best friend was dead, and everyone else had deserted her.
“Fuck!” Elissa pulled her wet hair and stomped her feet. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
She explored the area around the buildings quickly, but she found no other way out. She noticed a faucet on the side of the maintenance shed and cranked it on, then splashed her face and hair with cold water. She rinsed blood and mud from her hands.
“I have to get out,” she whispered to herself, hoping the words would straighten out the crazed chaos in her mind.
She walked back up the midway, past the warm, inviting glow of Tyke Town. She slowed as she approached the central plaza of the park. She looked into the wishing well, feeling crushed by guilt, knowing her stupid, self-centered wish had killed Tamara.
Then she saw him. He stood not far from the wooden walls of Fool’s Gold, his arms crossed and his candy-striped hat tilted forward, looking into the Old West town as though something interesting were happening in there.
He turned and started walking directly toward her, in no particular hurry. His pale eyes found hers.
Elissa turned and dashed off the path, right back into Space City, where the Moon Robot was still rotating. She tried not to think about Tamara’s body up there in one of the cages, getting slung around and around.
She ran among the attractions. Every corner of Space City was lit by countless colored flashing lights, leaving few shadows and nowhere to hide.
She noticed one of the metal double doors to Professor Atomic’s Brain-Scrambler was ajar, and she hurried past the tall big-brained statue out front, who looked as fascinated as ever by the lava-lamp fluid flowing inside his giant flask.
