by JL Bryan
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.
She leaned against the peeling, crumbling candy-pink boards and eased the dynamite crate to the ground. Ahead, she could just barely see the sawhorses on the edge of the sinkhole, surrounded by thick debris and thorny brush.
From where she stood, the only feasible way to get the dynamite into the sinkhole before Hanover caught up with her was to throw it, one stick at a time, across several yards of debris, and hope each stick landed in the right place.
“Where’d you go, girl?” Hanover shouted in his slurred, angry voice. “Come on back here now, you sneaking little bitch!”
Victoria raised one stick of dynamite in her left hand, since her right side burned with pain and she didn’t want to move that arm. She took aim as best she could, then lobbed the first stick over the high pile of debris separating her from the sinkhole.
It flipped end over end until it dropped out of sight. She heard a soft thud...then the decayed old dynamite ignited with a bang and a flash of light.
The pile of debris exploded, bombarding her with chunks of old tree limbs and burning trash. The Throw-A-Shoe game booth took a lot of the blast, and it collapsed forward into the plaza, its boards on fire. The crumbling old horse head on top broke into chunks of rotten wood.
With the booth down in flames, she could see Hanover yelling and staggering toward her. That meant he could see her, too.
She flung the second stick of dynamite at the sinkhole. The first blast had opened up a more direct path to the gaping hole, so she had less trouble aiming this time.
“Hey! Hey, give that back!” Hanover stumbled toward her over the broken asphalt, waving his gun in no particular direction.
A bright flash of light flared from the sinkhole, and the ground rumbled, knocking her onto her back. The rusty Ferris wheel, perched on the edge of the sinkhole for years, gave a rusty groan as it tilted toward the empty space below. It teetered on the edge, its empty cars swinging with rusty squeals among the spokes. Then it broke free and tumbled, crashing and breaking apart, down into the sinkhole, which was more than wide enough to swallow it whole.
Victoria grabbed the next stick of leaking old dynamite and pitched it into the sinkhole. It vanished quietly, not exploding like the others. She followed it with the fourth, while Hanover scrambled to regain his feet. As she held up the final stick of dynamite, he fired the gun in the air.
“Give it back!” he shouted. “That’s mine!”
“You tried to kill my friend,” Victoria said. “I told you he was inside the ride.”
“This is the wrong night to fuck with me, kid.” Hanover leveled the revolver at her as best as he could while swaying heavily on his feet. “This is the night...I finally blow this place down.”
“You can wait just a minute,” she told him. “How long does a ride on Inferno Mountain last?”
“Give back my dynamite.” He blinked a few times, looking drunk and confused. “It’s mine.”
Victoria raised the final stick in her left hand.
“I’ll give it to you,” she said. “Be careful, it’s really unstable.”
She flung it in his direction, but used all her remaining strength to send it flying over his head, hopefully out of his reach.
Hanover tried to grab it, as though he either didn’t know or didn’t care that it would probably explode if it hit his hand.
It tumbled through the air, passing just over his fingers, and he cursed and turned to chase after it.
The old dynamite stick crashed into the side of the wishing well at the center of the plaza. A moment later, it fell into a heap of broken asphalt and exploded.
Hanover, running toward the well, was blown off his feet. He sprawled backwards as chunks of an old park bench rained down around him.
Victoria dashed over to the older man. As he lay there stunned, bleeding from his scalp and half a dozen other small wounds—though his toupee was, amazingly, still attached and in place—she searched for the revolver and found it lying a few feet away.
Hanover groaned, indicating he was still alive, so Victoria left him there, tossed his gun into the sinkhole, and hurried back toward Inferno Mountain. She winced in pain, fighting her brain’s attempt to shut down and black out.
Rumbling and crashing echoed inside the tall volcano, and clouds, of black dust rolled out of the dynamite hole in its side. The glowing red devil face looked down on her, laughing and laughing.
* * *
Carter rode straight down through the flames. The fire vanished, leaving him falling face forward into darkness.
/> The frayed restraints of the roller coaster had torn and loosened, just barely holding him in place now. The wheels rattled against the tracks as the train plummeted straight down in a vertical free fall, picking up more and more speed.
He should have been in excruciating pain from passing through the fire, but instead he simply felt numb. The air grew colder and colder. Instead of rushing into an enormous furnace, it now felt like he was dropping into some kind of deep freeze.
He reached over toward Tricia, but couldn’t find her. He called her name, but the cold, harsh wind swallowed his words. He felt he was moving at hundreds of miles per hour, down into the icy dark, but it was hard to judge his speed when there was no light at all.
Maybe I really am dead, and this is the fast train to Hell, he thought.
He rushed deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the cold ate at his flesh.
After an eternity of falling, he saw a spot of frosty blue light below. It seemed to swell as he approached.
The train rushed into the cold light and twisted upside down. He clung to the freezing cold safety bar. The train traveled through a rocky tunnel full of long, sharp stalagmites of ice jutting up at him from the floor as he rode upside down along the ceiling. Some of them passed dangerously close to his face, and he had to squirm and dodge them as best he could.
In the dim blue light, he could finally see that Tricia was gone. So were the other ghost kids who’d boarded the train. Maybe they’d snatched her away somewhere.
Carter now rode alone on the inverted train, and it was growing even colder around him. His breath ejected from his mouth in thick white plumes as he called Tricia’s name. An icy crust formed inside his nostrils and mouth, then at the corners of his eyes. His blood felt like a cold slush inside his veins.
The train corkscrewed and plunged down another steep hill, slipping from side to side as its wheels slid down the icy tracks.
The ice walls of the steep tunnel closed in around him, glowing with a dim, cold light, just enough to illuminate soft black shapes frozen beneath the surface of the walls.
Then the walls began to move, and he realized they were no longer rock formations but human beings covered in sheets of ice. Their skin was pale blue, their eyes and mouths stretched open and thick with encrusted frost. They reached long, stiff arms toward the passing train, moving slowly, their limbs heavy with rows of long icicles.
They moaned softly as Carter’s train slid past, their tongues thick with barnacles of frozen white slush.
The tunnel widened into an icy cavern, the train rattling and cracking as it twisted among heaps and spires of the frozen groaning people who reached toward him in slow motion. The bodies were stacked dozens high, and then hundreds high as the cavern expanded. They were formed into columns; frozen, intertwining bodies, stretching far into the distance and the vaulted darkness above.
The train shuddered, jerking him back and forth and side to side around the sharp, steep turns. Then it began to break apart. The safety bar cracked and fell open as he banked around a high curve, forcing him to grip the burning-cold sides of the car for balance.
Then cracks spread through the car itself, as if the entire train were made of nothing but breaking glass. As the car flew up and back down a short hill, the sides and floor of the car shattered. More cracks opened in his seat and in the front wall of the car. The rapid shaking of the car clacked his teeth together.
He didn’t know whether he would die from the intense cold or from the final wreck of the roller coaster breaking apart. Part of him thought he’d already died in the fire.
Carter looked at the big red STOP button. Maybe it could save him, maybe not, but he knew the devil hadn’t provided it out of benevolence. Pressing the button meant giving up. It meant surrendering whatever he had left.
He wrapped his arms tight around himself as the train plunged down a final steep hill. Ice formed all over his skin. The tracks seemed to end at a white cliff ahead. The cliff itself, and all the ground beneath the tracks, were now made of thousands of frozen bodies tangled together. Death-blue hands faces rose from the morass, some of them groaning softly.
Either the tracks were about to end, or the train would go over the cliff into one more vertical dive. Carter wondered if he was reaching the final stage of the ride. It felt like he’d been on the train for hours.
The train flew over the cliff. A deep, icy canyon made entirely of frozen human beings opened up around him.
There were no more train tracks.
Carter’s seatbelt shattered and he tumbled free of the train as it broke apart around him.
He fell along with the broken wreckage, past ledges of howling, frozen bodies. The canyon was of such immense size that there must have been millions of people here, heaped up and frozen together over the years, their collective groans of agony fusing together into an endless howling wind.
He fell and fell into open black space.
He finally slammed into hard, frozen ground. It felt as though every bone in his body snapped at once. Bolts, wheels, and other broken machinery from the roller coaster crashed down around him, chipping the glacier-like surface on which he’d landed.
Carter lay prone on the burning cold surface, the wind knocked out of him, every inch of him throbbing in pain.
A fierce, icy wind swept over his body from the shadows ahead. He thought he could hear a low growling mingled with the hissing wind.
When he could move again, Carter raised his head and looked into the gloom. Somehow the fall hadn’t killed him, but every bone in his body shrieked in pain.
He lay in some kind of a vast, dark cathedral of a room that stretched as far as he could see into the darkness ahead, full of slanted columns, sculptures, and staircases, all made of frozen bodies lashed and chained together. Their movements were almost imperceptible, their suffering groans barely audible through the relentless frigid wind.
The floor shifted beneath him. The layer of ice under him did not lie on top of stone or brick, but countless more bodies tangled and frozen together, their skin frosty, pale blues and purples. Their eyes remained open, their faces rigid with permanent expressions of fear and horror. There had to be thousands and thousands of them, and he thought it was probably more than that, maybe a million souls or more piled up over time, stretching out into the darkness beyond the broken columns.
He shuddered as the arms and legs of the frozen bodies shifted again. He forced himself to stand.
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw a dark shape glittering in the shadows ahead, hundreds of feet high. The columns of frozen people seemed to be loosely centered around it.
The longer he stared, the clearer it became—a human form, sculpted on an immense scale and wrapped in ice, exhaling the freezing wind that numbed Carter’s body.
Carter forced himself to step closer, scared that the frozen bodies below would grab onto him if he stayed in one place too long. He stayed away from the columns of lashed-together people who tried to reach toward him, long icicles dangling from their fingers.
The dark, towering shape at the center of the shadowy cathedral was his final goal. He wrapped his arms around himself and lowered his head, squinting against the cold wind as he approached.
The enormous shape’s skin was the gray pallor of cold death. Its eyes opened. They were colorless ice, glowing with an ethereal light that did not look warm at all. Each eye was nearly as large as Carter himself.
The face was bland and dull, with no distinguishing features—a face designed to be forgotten.
“It’s you,” Carter said.
The giant frostbitten lips split open, revealing teeth like crooked marble slabs.
“You see me now.” The figure’s voice rumbled on the cold wind, and the ground shuddered, the columns of twisted-together frozen people groaning in fresh pain, as though the thing’s voice were hurting them.
Carter shivered with cold and terror as he looked up at the figure. Most of its body wa
s surrounded by mountains of ice. Even its massive arms were trapped in a roughly cruciform pose. Icy cliffs surrounded its neck, leaving only its enormous eyes and mouth free to move.
“You’re a prisoner,” Carter said. “Aren’t you?”
“For eons.” A hundred thousand voices groaned in agony as its voice sent trembling shockwaves across the floor of cold, pale bodies below Carter’s feet. The bodies stretched away into the dark distance. They looked like trembling fish caught in a frozen sea.
“That’s why you couldn’t even reach out your hand to stop me,” Carter said. “You’re not really up there, you’re down here. Trapped. Up there, you’re just like a...video game character. A ghost. Right?”
“Do not think me powerless,” the immense thing said. “I can reach inside each of you that lives on the earth. You and your kind offer yourselves to me in a ceaseless tide, though never enough to quench my appetites. That is a portion of my torment, the endless hunger.”
“Am I dead?” Carter asked. “Or dreaming?”
“You stand in your living flesh before the Lord of Hell, in my sanctuary. You may make one request, and then you must depart or die.”
“A request? Like a wish that gets all twisted and monkey-pawed and ends up killing me?”
“If you wish to depart without making a request, you may go now.”
A metallic squeal sounded, and Carter turned to see a plain black door emerge from a column of frozen bodies. Stiff blue fingers clutched a glowing red EXIT sign about the door.
“It is unlocked,” the devil said. “You may leave.”
“Give me Tricia,” Carter told him. “I want her back. Alive. And everybody else you’ve killed, too.”
The enormous face bared its large, rotten teeth. The columns of the frozen dead shuddered and wailed.
