OK, the second thing I want to clear up is the fights. I heard, like, over a hundred people died in the park while we were stuck there. That may be true, but not many died in our fights. I can count three that died that way, and one was a freak thing. But the fights, they were awesome. Let me ask you this—have you ever been without your phone, your TV, or anything for longer than, like, two hours? It’s a fucking nightmare! I remember after we all gathered in the Cannon, there was this moment where everyone was like, “OK, now what?” and there was nothing to keep us entertained. I’m not kidding, man, it’s like going through withdrawal. Some people started picking at the grout in the walls and then another guy started talking to the first guy about the grout in the walls. It was literally so boring we were talking about the walls. You can call Brock a monster if you want, but he was one smart dude. He knew everyone was bored out of their gourd, so the third night he started the fights. And this wasn’t like Fight Club where one guy fights another guy and everyone hugs. This was full-on wrestling style, man. He would pick two guys to fight, and if Brock picked you, you had to fight, that was the rule. Then he would start hyping it up. He would go, “This one guy has got a great hook, but this other guy, he’s a madman,” and he’d start playing them against each other, so when you showed up that night after lugging bottles of water and food and shit all day, you were pumped to see this fight. Then a night would pass, and the next night it would be two different guys. Then, later on, we started gathering up the prisoners and making them fight. In some ways, that was even more entertaining, because you were never, ever sure what was going to happen. It could be an all-out brawl or one person beating on someone who was crying the whole time. Either way, it was a show, and we all got really into it.
I’m off the hook now in terms of going to jail, so I can tell you about the times people died, if you want to hear them. Keep in mind, most of us had never seen a dead body yet. The first time it was after we pissed off the Deadpools. Brock had been going on and on about how we had to defend what was ours and pumping us up with his Code of the Blade and all of that, so the first night out when we caught people in our gift shop, we were all really high off it. We found four people and we were going to make two of them fight to join our group, and before the fight could even happen, we brand the one guy and he goes to brand this girl, and it all goes tits-up, and she’s screaming and bleeding and you could just feel the air go out of everybody. This guy, I forget his name, he fucked up this simple thing and everyone kind of trudged back to the Cannon feeling like absolute shit. When we get in there, the first thing Brock does is take off his shirt and just deck the guy hard in the face, and then he said, “Now you know you’re in a fight. To be fair, you get one shot at me,” and the guy starts whining and crying and trying to talk his way out of it despite Brock saying over and over, “This is happening. Start fighting,” and when he wouldn’t Brock just started hitting him. After each punch he would yell, “Are you going to fight now?” just over and over again. Bam! “Are you going to fight now?” Bam! “Are you going to fight now?” and he eventually beat the guy unconscious. Then Brock, all covered in sweat and some blood, just slid the guy into the pool of water next to where we held the fights, and the guy drowned. There weren’t even any bubbles. Then Brock gave this big speech about how this was the situation we are in. The punches are coming, he said, and if you don’t fight back, you don’t deserve to breathe. It was kind of an important moment for everyone. A couple minutes later, we saw all the bubbles come up at once, and we knew the guy was dead.
What’s the Code of the Blade? That’s the rules Brock set forth for the group, and he was serious as hell about them. There was the Code of the Blade, which is about how the Pirates acted, and then the Rules for Survival that came later. He made us all memorize them; in fact, I just said one just a second ago. There were four rules:
1. A Pirate is not afraid in public.
2. A Pirate respects himself and the chain of command.
3. A Pirate does not steal from another Pirate.
4. A Pirate fights for what he has or he does not deserve to draw breath.
That last one, he was super big on that. No one takes what you have, and no one takes what we have. He saw that as an honor thing. He didn’t care if it was a bottle of water or what. What’s yours is yours, and no one takes it. Where was I on the bodies? Oh yeah, number two.
The second one was a little more sad. We had a few people who would come in from time to time because we kind of got a reputation quick. Our whole thing was, “We take what we want, and don’t give it back,” and some people took issue with that, as you can imagine, but most of the park understood that we were strong, and that attracted some desperate types. One day this girl, whose name was Jenny, she shows up and immediately wants to talk to Brock, and he spent a lot of time with her. A lot of time. Then one day, she’s going to fight this dude who we picked up along the Prairie Fairy. She’s got Pirates helping her, getting her ready, and she gives a good show, but the dude just kind of unloaded on her. He was a good fighter, and she didn’t stand much of a chance. The dude, who later became a Pirate, he had ninety pounds on her, easy, and after she was down, Brock and this dude went down there and killed her. We could tell by Brock’s tone that this was a big deal. I don’t know who it was, but someone started chanting the “Pirate Never Quits” anthem from the park, and we all picked it up. It was sad, but at the end of the day, it was one of those really big bonding moments. Everyone remembers that night.
The third one, that was just a freak thing. Kenny Pot, he hung out with Jackpot, but his name was Kenny so we called him Kenny Pot, and he told us he smoked weed all the time before he got trapped in the park, he hit his head really hard on a sharp piece of concrete during a fight, and we had to put him down. It was sad, but it didn’t hurt morale much.
So, what else do you want to know? You want to know about Brock, right? Everyone wants to know about Brock. He’s the goddamn mystery of the media, isn’t he? He’s the puzzle everyone is trying to solve. There’s nothing to solve, man. I’ll tell you the only two things you need to know about Brock. He got us organized and got the rules set really fast, I mean really fast. He had guys on his side from the second he came out of the shelter and the Rules of the Blade and all of that, they were always just there. If you want my “expert analysis” on why so many people joined the Pirates right away, that was it. The rules were clear, the leader was clear, and he was strong, right off the bat. The second thing you need to know about Brock was he was the craziest and the most dedicated and the hardest and the strongest of us. He was built like a brick shithouse, and he could straight up take anyone in the park. He was ripped, he was focused, and he was the best of us. It’s easy to follow a leader who knows what he wants and has a good chance of getting it. There’s nothing else you need to know.
OK, one more thing. Everything he said came true. He said people would start coming after our territory and our resources. They did. He said people would be begging to join us. They were. He said our enemies were everywhere, and you bet your ass they were. He said everyone would be scared of how strong we were, and we were the ones with the targets on us.
We were.
But that’s just it, man. We were one crew against the entire park, and it was like that when it started, and it was like that when we were all sick and there were bodies rotting and the Point went down and created a sea of broken glass. They were always against us. If you weren’t a Pirate, you wanted to kill the Pirates. It was that fucking simple, and because it was that fucking simple we all had a purpose, some of us for the first time in our lives. It wasn’t hard to kill when the person you’re killing has a knife to your brother’s throat, you know? And we were brothers. Even the girls who were in our group, we called them brothers, and no one seemed to mind. I’m going to have a hard time describing this, but a lot of us came from decent families, but that’s different from having brothers. My mom, she loves me, but I would never stand s
houlder to shoulder with my mom and fight someone trying to take my food or my water. It was different than most of us had ever felt before. We worked really hard during the day and sweated with each other, then we cheered each other on in the fights, and sometimes we fought each other in a brotherly spirit, and we slept in the same building and we were bonded tight and that made everything so much better. We were “sewn together out of blood and love,” Brock once said. I was closer to these guys than my own brothers. I still talk to some of them to this day.
Brock’s brother? We never talked about that. Never. In fact, Brock wasn’t that big a talker, but when he gave a speech, you sat up and you listened. I only thought he was full of shit one time and I learned my lesson there. He said he had seen the Freaks in the World’s Circus and that no one was to go north of the Point. He said it was too dangerous. A few of us, Mark and Raoul and I, we thought that had to be bullshit. Nothing scared Brock, and nothing scared us, so one night while we were making runs to and from the Fairy Prairie and taking all their stuff, we stashed our stuff in a building somewhere and went to check it out. Brock had said there were bodies “strewn on the ground.” I remember that because I had never heard the word “strewn” before, and there were murderers around every corner and traps and all sorts of shit. We figured, at worst, there was a body and maybe, like, a net in a tree, so we were cautious about it, but we certainly weren’t scared.
When you come up on the World’s Circus, there’s this big entryway with clowns and elephants and jugglers on it, and when you pass through there, it’s kind of a long way until you get to the first ride. Basically, there’s a big empty space they used for gathering and sometimes for live performances. They had street performers and singers and stuff like that who would stop in the middle of that area and perform and then go somewhere else and perform twenty minutes later. Anyway, there’s this big space after you go through the entryway. We get there expecting to see something, and there’s nothing there. I remember it was late afternoon, so the sun was setting, but it was overcast and raining so there wasn’t a whole lot of light. We were squinting really hard, looking for all this carnage, and there’s just nothing there, man. Nada. And that, that right there, was the eeriest thing I had seen up until that point, because everywhere in the park there was garbage or voices or some sort of evidence that someone had been there, but between the entryway and the first ride, there was nothing. It even looked clean. That was not normal and we started to sweat a little bit.
We didn’t even notice anything all that gruesome at first. The way the section is set up, you go through the big open performance area, there’s a kiddie ride on your right, and then this big circus tent in the center that leads to the other rides. The tent wasn’t lit up, so it was hard to see much of anything. As we got a little closer we started hearing, like, circus music. What do they call that thing … a calliope? Is that it? That thing that goes do do doody do do doot doot doo doo, that thing? We start hearing it, only it’s not the song we’re used to hearing, it’s something in more of a minor key. I couldn’t place it at all, but there were, like, kids chattering underneath it, and that was when we really started to sweat. And then it got louder. At this point, the three of us, me and Mark and Raoul, we were starting to get closer to each other, just out of nervousness, until we were basically touching. That’s when the spotlight came on.
It made this sharp sort of half-swoosh, half-crack noise, and the light was as wide as the big entrance to the tent, and then we could see it. There were two bodies hanging from their necks above the entrance to the tent, like some sort of fucked-up curtain, and there were bloody-looking chunks of I don’t know what hanging between them. Seriously, it was like a dead body curtain and then we could see more stuff inside. I saw a severed head and Mark swore he saw a band saw, like the kind his dad had in his garage, with blood all over it, and Raoul swore he saw someone’s skin stretched out over one of the tents like that one scene in Silence of the Lambs. You know the one, with the security guard who had his skin stretched out like wings? Raoul said he saw that, and his face was white enough to where I believed him.
I have no shame telling you we took off. We ran, man. Got. The. Fuck. Out. Of. There. And as we’re running, we see them. There were two guys, dressed in these gruesome dark masks, there were bones sticking out and stuff dripping off them, and they were both holding machetes. I shit you not, man, bloody guys wearing gross masks with machetes. There were two of them, and they were both coming from one side of the entryway like they were coming back from a hunting trip, and they had a sack. No, seriously, they had something in a sack. That sack had something moving in it, man. Look, I can see from the look on your face that you think I’m exaggerating or something, but no. Not even close. This memory is as vivid as my first blow job, you feel me? These guys were real, and they had real machetes, and they had something in that bag, and all three of us ran like we’d never run before. I ran track in high school, and I left all those records in the goddamn dust, I swear.
Once we were clear and huffing and puffing, we all agreed to tell Brock, to come clean about it. He understood. No punishment, corporal or otherwise. In fact, he told us to tell the others. Spread it around, he said, that there are different kinds of enemies out there—normal people and barbarians. And we did. We told everyone, and a few of our guys went to check it out for themselves, and they all came back with similar stories. That place was condemned, man. If they wanted to fight us, fine, but they were going to have to come to us. We weren’t going to go to them. Not no way, not no how.
So what else? So, the Council of Pieces. You want to know about the Council of Pieces, or, as I call it, our finest hour? All I can say is God bless Johnny Fresno, man. That dude was such a stickler for authenticity that we had real swords and real jails and, most of all, real black powder. I’m getting ahead of myself. I imagine all the others are going to tell you the same thing, but Sam Garliek, in all his glory, shows up one day outside our gate and he … God, this is funny … he’s actually yelling “Parley, parley,” like that fucking means anything. Like he’s in a pirate movie or something. I remember Raoul turned to me and said, “That’s French for ‘I’m a pussy, please don’t stab me.’” He laughed hard about that. Jackpot went out to meet him, and Garliek just kept yelling that word until Jackpot smacked him in the head, hard, but with an open hand, and asked him what he was blathering on about. He said he wanted to talk to whoever was in charge, and Jackpot made an X on the ground with his foot and said, “You leave this spot and we break your face,” then went to get Brock.
They talked for a little while, and Sam handed Brock a piece of paper, and that was it. That night at dinner Brock told us that we had been invited to a summit. He said it was being called, “The Summit of Peace,” and that got a really good rolling chuckle going throughout the group. Then he read the whole thing on this piece of paper.
Author’s Note: Here is the text of the letter, recovered from the Executive Offices.
FantasticLand Employees,
I understand fighting over food and water. I even understand fighting for territory. But murders? Dead bodies? Is this befitting of your position with FantasticLand Inc.? You used to bring joy to children and families, now you’re killing each other? How is this possible? What message does this send?
All is not lost. I would like to call a meeting at 1:00 p.m. tomorrow of all the park sections at the Exclamation Point in the center of the park. I would call this meeting mandatory, but I think we are all intelligent enough to understand this goes beyond your employment. This is about our survival. The best chance we have of being rescued in a timely fashion is to pool our resources, not hang people from the lampposts. Please, this cannot continue. You are destroying this park and any chance at its future operation. We can survive together under one central authority. I believe this. You should too.
Please bring as many people as you see fit. There will be NO VIOLENCE at this meeting. We will figure this out and find r
escue.
—Sam Garliek
Acting Park Manager
That shit was hilarious. So funny. I’ll let someone else tell you about how it went down. I wasn’t so involved with that.
Last thing, the bodies, right? Why did we hang bodies from the lampposts? That was something that just sort of happened. I remembered when a couple of those Robots came around looking for trouble, we gave it to them, and then the Deadpools came at us, and we fought them off too. We were all rallying afterward, and we wanted to just give them a big, fat middle finger, man. We wanted them to see a giant “fuck you” every time they looked in our direction. So we strung up that one woman we killed, and believe me, that did the trick. It was no big thing, really. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t gross. We didn’t feel bad about it. The only problem was later on when she started to leak. She had invaded our space, she had tried to hurt us, and we hurt her. Simple. I honestly don’t know why it didn’t happen more. And when those other motherfuckers killed a Pirate, they started doing the same thing, man, and it hurt, and it was ugly but we understood it. We fought hard, and we drank hard, and we partied hard, and we loved hard, and when one of ours fell in battle, we felt it hard, but that’s what it was about, man. That’s why we were Pirates. We were the kings of FantasticLand and no one could take that away from us.
INTERVIEW 14: GLENN GUIGNOL
Fire Breather in the World’s Circus, Head of the Freaks.
All of this might be my fault.
Not, directly. Heavens no. I’m not a killer, nor did I do any killing during my incarceration in the park. But the escalation, the jump from mild-mannered children of suburbia to little stabby stabby monsters, you could make a reasonable case that I did that. Again, not my intent, but an understandable result. The one aspect of this thing I keep rolling around and around in my mind and can find no clarity on is why, in the name of all that is good and right, didn’t anyone remember that we were coming up on Fantastic Fright Nights?
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