FantasticLand

by Mike Bockoven

  Sam Garliek, that little shit, he went around and gave invitations to everyone like he was a princess throwing a tea party. I’m surprised he didn’t include a fancy envelope stuffed with glitter. You know who he reminds me of, especially after we all got out? He reminds me of Wormtongue, from Lord of the Rings. You know that dude? Whispering in the ear of a king with bad idea after bad idea. Only difference is the only king he was whispering to was in his own head. He thought he still had some sort of authority. Nope! No authority at all. Any authority he had disappeared the moment Brock Hockney killed that guy with that stanchion. All bets were off after that, in my estimation.

  When that asshole called his “Meeting of Peace,” we had been there for … God, what was it? It was really hard to tell time in the park because all you had was the pitch black of night and the gray of the day, and they all sort of melded together after a while. Plus there were no clocks other than watches we might have had on, and most people figured early on, what’s the point? It’s not like there was a schedule to keep, plus if you wear a watch for too long in the humidity, you get a rash. Time wasn’t much of a force in the park, is my point. If I had to guess, I’d put it at three or four weeks that we had been stuck. I remember we were all sick of the limited food options, I remember that. I remember it was after we made the mistake of all getting really hammered on the booze from the Muscle Man Grill and when we woke up, one Deadpool girl was missing. Let’s put it at three and a half weeks. In that time, we’d figured out a few things. First, we figured out the Pirates were aggressive, but they weren’t terribly tactical. They always came at us from the same direction, it was always a frontal assault, so we fortified a couple of walkways with some broken glass and nails, and that did the trick. They had never flanked us before the meeting, so even though every day or every other day we got some sort of assault from the Pirates, we were pretty solid on our situation. Everyone else seemed to be leaving us alone, and our threat was to the southwest. If you kept your eyes in that direction, you could see what was coming.

  Second, we had basic first aid. There were two girls who ran a first aid tent near the center of the park but well past the Exclamation Point, nearer to the Golden Road. I really respected those girls for a couple of reasons. They were good, as far as I could tell, but they made a point of saying that they treated everyone and that their medical tent was not a place to fight. The effect was huge. All of us still had nightmares about what happened to Tom, so it was very nice to have someone we knew we could go to for help. We had only lost two other Deadpools at that point. There was the one girl who disappeared after we all got shitfaced and then there was Steven, who was the sweetest guy. He … he got separated. No one was really sure how, but we found him beaten to death and hung over one of the wooden traffic barricades we had put up between us and the Pirates. They laid him out and blew this whistle one of them had. After that, a couple of us, not me but others, actually went over there and took a bunch of their food, and they said they stabbed one of the Pirates in the stomach. I noticed the food was from the Fairy Prairie, but I didn’t say anything. To be honest, there were so many rumors floating around about getting rescued and who had done what and even, like, serial killers on the ground, that you couldn’t believe anything.

  So when we get this invitation from Sam, the consensus was sort of, “Well … it’s worth a shot.” Yeah, a shot. There wasn’t even that much discussion. Riley picked four people she wanted to be there with her, for protection, and that was it. At the time, I was taking a break from college, but I was thinking of going back to be a journalist, so I decided I would lobby to be on the “Council of Peace” crew. I’m not much of a fighter, I’m kind of slight and not too aggressive, so Riley wasn’t having it, but I sort of begged her. I said this was going to be a big part of the story of this disaster, and I wanted to be there. She finally ended up taking me. She said, “You want to record what happens so bad? Then show up, sit in the corner, and don’t say anything. Take notes and stay on our six.” I remember vividly, her saying, “Stay on our six,” and then I could come. I had this diary I had been taking notes in, and I had a bunch of pens, and I was ready.

  Want to know the real tragedy? I had seven GoPro cameras, a bunch of other equipment from the marketing department, and more phones than I could possibly use but no way to charge them. I could have shot this thing from every angle, I could have miked the whole thing, I could have made a documentary that would have made Werner Herzog jealous if I only had a way to charge the equipment. I wasn’t the only one freaking out about this. Every single day someone would get frustrated because if they had a camera they could have gotten a hundred thousand likes or favorites or upvotes or whatever, but we had no way to record what we saw and no way to get it out there. Some people got really mad about it, to the point where they would throw things. Have you ever had that sensation? Knowing you were sitting on a gold mine if you could just get a charge for five goddamn minutes? It’s frustrating as hell. But it was pens and notebooks. It was better than nothing, but not much.

  The invitation Sam had sent said everyone was supposed to meet at noon at the Exclamation Point in the center of the park. Asshole didn’t stop to think that not everyone had a working timepiece, you know? It also said he would serve as the “moderator” and that order “would be enforced,” which was the part that was making everyone nervous. What the hell did that mean? Had cops shown up and we hadn’t seen it? Did he have guns? Was there a bunch of employees who were following him? Was it a trap? Everyone had a theory, but like I said, Riley was convinced this was the way forward. So, on a humid, rainy late morning, as close to noon as we could figure, we all set out for the center of the park.

  We were not the first ones there. Someone had set up a big table with this really fancy white tablecloth with all this beadwork on the fringes. I know it was from one of the restaurants, probably the Fantastic Underground which was ridiculously fancy. It was getting rained on, and I remember thinking how the manager, whoever he or she was, would likely lose their shit if they saw their tablecloth covering a couple of picnic tables or whatever and getting rained on. There was a lot of stuff like that in the weeks after we got stuck in the park. I remember one Deadpool taking apart a lemon squeezer they had in a lemonade stand and putting the spiked squeezer part on the end of a stick and taping it there. It wasn’t sturdy, but he carried it everywhere, like he was a mid-level warrior with a mace. All I could think of was how that lemonade stand was ruined forever. Anyway, someone had set up this long table, and there were people already sitting around it.

  I made up my mind right away that I wasn’t going to stay on Riley’s “six,” and I was going to find a spot where I could hear everything and write down as much as possible. I was going to capture the mood and the atmosphere but most importantly what people said. Over the summer I had been practicing my own bastard form of shorthand, and I was OK at it, so I figured this would be the thing, right? I could tell news people, “I was there, I took notes, and this was what happened.” I looked around and there was no place that made sense to set up until I looked up at the Exclamation Point. Even if you’ve never heard of FantasticLand, you’ve heard of the giant Exclamation Point in the center of the park. I figured it was kind of, I don’t know, symbolic maybe. I would be taking the history of the park from the symbol of the park. Plus there was a service ladder that led to some scaffolding that some of the painters had left up the night before the storm hit. It was maybe twelve feet up. It was the best place to be by a country mile.

  I climb up there and then people really start showing up. The ShopGirls were already there. Clara Ann, I knew her as a friend of a friend, she was already sitting there like she owned the place and had four girls with her. Two of the girls had bows and arrows slung over their backs. I began to see why some people were serious when they said, “Be careful of the Golden Road.” This was the first evidence I had ever seen of their archers, and it was kind of scary. The Robots, Elvis and his cr
ew, they were there when we showed up. They were talking with these guys who were still wearing their maintenance work clothes. I had heard of the Mole Men, but they were really hard to track down, so it was cool to finally see one of them. Later I got to know Stu Dietz a little bit. He reminds me of my uncle. He was standing next to this taller guy who turned out to be Charlie Powers. He was hard to miss because he was bald as bald can be, and tall. You don’t see that combination too often except in horror movies.

  So it was us, the ShopGirls, the Mole Men, and the Robots gathered around the table, and everyone was talking and seemed to be having a good time. Then, like all at once, everyone realized that the only groups left were the Pirates and the Freaks and maybe what was left of the Fairies or Pixies—people called them different names. Once everyone realized that, the mood got darker. We had been fighting the Pirates for weeks, they had killed our people, and the Freaks … everyone had heard stories, and the stories were bad. Like, blood-on-the-walls, guts-on-the-floor kind of bad. We heard the Freaks before we saw them. This odd, tinkling music started playing over some speakers somewhere and then repeated, and the third time we heard it we saw two guys in these fancy dress suits wearing gimp masks walking toward us. In front of them was this guy with this black beard and long hair and a bunch of tattoos. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but if they meant to creep everyone out, it worked. They looked like they had knives hidden somewhere and no one wanted to meet their eyes.

  Chatter kind of stopped after they showed up, and then we waited. And waited. Maybe ten minutes later, Brock Hockney shows up. Just him. He’s dressed in a T-shirt and jeans—he has no hat, no sword, nothing. He wasn’t even wearing boots. He had high-tops on, and he was chewing on what looked like a toothpick. It was the exact opposite of the Freaks, except they sort of looked like they had rehearsed it and Brock looked … he looked confident. Like he was exactly where he wanted to be. He walked up to the table and sat at the far end, away from everyone. So you had the Robots and us and the Mole Men in one cluster with their backs to the Exclamation Point, the Freaks on their own side, and then Brock sitting by himself, and no one within ten feet of him. The Pixies or the Fairies or whatever, no one ever showed. That answered that question.

  Sam, he was there the entire time, too, but no one was talking to him. He kicked it off.

  Author’s Note: What follows is Louise Muskgrove’s transcript of the meeting, translated and edited by Ms. Muskgrove.

  SAM GARLIEK: I want to thank everyone for coming. I know not everyone at this table gets along. Showing up is a good first step. Thank you. [long silence] It’s obvious things have gotten out of hand. There have been deaths. There has been violence.

  (UNIDENTIFIED ROBOT): What the fuck do you know about it, dweeb? [chuckles]

  SG: OK, that was uncalled for. Whoever said that, you don’t think I’ve gone through hardship? You don’t think this whole thing has been tough on me?

  CHARLIE POWERS: It was tougher on that Francis girl in the shelter.

  SG: Shut up, Charlie.

  STU DIETZ: Whether or not you killed that girl, everyone thinks you did.

  SG: I didn’t kill anyone, but … that’s not why we’re here. We’re here so we stop killing each other. This behavior is off the rails, people! What do you think is going to happen to this park if word gets out that its employees were fighting and killing each other? What about …

  [Sam is hit with a rock in the shoulder, to the verbal approval of everyone at the table.]

  RILEY BOYD: Shut the fuck up, you weasel.

  SG: I will not shut up. Stop it! This is important. I don’t care if you don’t like me [Sam is drowned out by shouts of “we don’t.”] … keep going. It can’t keep going. We are going to be rescued any day now and what …

  CLARA ANN CLARK: About that, Sam. What’s the fucking holdup? [More cheers and yelling]

  SG: I have information! I have information. I have a radio that picks up broadcasts. Some of you do too. You hear what’s going on out there, everyone is doing what they can, but this storm is really, really bad. It’s been twenty-five days or so and …

  ELVIS SPRINGER: There has to be something you can do. Some sort of message you can send, man! This is a completely unacceptable situation.

  SG: … look, I can say “any day now” until I’m blue in the face, but you all know they’re eventually going to get around to us. We’re eventually going to get out of here. I want you to think about what happens to you, not him or her or the person you’re fighting, but you when we get out? [Silence] Do you think you’re going back to school? How about going to jail? Huh? How about a cell where you live for twenty years because you killed someone? How about that?

  GLENN GUIGNOL: We’re already in a cell. It’s just a big one.

  SG: That’s a bad attitude, sir. A very bad attitude. I don’t care who you think you are or what you think you’re doing, eventually the cops are going to come. They’re going to be here with guns, and you’re going to have to put your hands up and face the fucking music, people. And the only thing we can do, the only thing we can do right now is to work together and not make this any worse than it already is.

  CAC: He’s right, you know.

  SG: You will be held to account for what you’ve done and not by me, and not by this company, but by the police. Your families will hear about what you did here. Your mothers and your fathers, they will hear about this. You will be brought to justice.

  BROCK HOCKNEY: Justice?

  SG: Because the law is still the law …

  BH: Justice!? [Silence] There is no justice here.

  SG: There will be justice later, is what I’m saying, Mr. Hockney.

  BH: Justice? For who? For the company that brings home billions of dollars off of our sweat? For the suits who haven’t walked the park in years? For you?

  SG: I … I mean, there will be consequences for how you’ve behaved. There will be reports and, and, investigations …

  BH: I wish you could hear yourself. You think you’re any different from us? What about Ms. Francis, Mr. Garliek? What about that poor girl who only wanted reassurance that her leader had her best interest at heart?

  SG: I didn’t kill that girl!

  BH: What about my fucking brother?

  SG: That … that was unfortunate.

  BH: [flipping up the tablecloth] So is this.

  At that point, the loudest sound I had ever heard consumed everything, and all of a sudden I was falling off the scaffolding. The ground was coming at me before I knew what was coming, and I managed to get my forearm up to my face, and the other one underneath my stomach. I landed partly on my feet and then got tossed onto my front, so it could have been a lot worse. Once I hit the ground, I kind of waited for the waves of pain, and boy howdy did they come. My cheek and part of my face hurt like a bitch, and both my knees were screaming, but the most concerning thing was I couldn’t hear. It was all ringing. I thought for a second I couldn’t see as well, but it was just the dust, and when it started to clear … it’s one of those memories that is so clear and I’m so sure of … I’m more sure of what I saw than anything I’ve ever seen in my life.

  The tables were splintered and thrown everywhere. The only part of the meeting setup that was the same was where Brock was sitting, but he wasn’t sitting at a table. It was a cannon. A goddamn cannon, like from a pirate ship. They had shown up early and set a really nice table for everyone to meet at and no one questioned who set it up, and no one looked under the long tablecloth. The Pirates brought a cannon to the meeting and shot straight at the leaders of the tribes. I’ve given this some thought, and even if someone had seen it, would they have said anything? Would they have believed it was a weapon, that it was dangerous and not some sort of prop? Probably not, is my guess, but it’s just as likely no one even noticed the damn thing. Get this straight: I hate the Pirates. I stone cold hate that group, but … what balls. They hid a cannon in plain sight.

  The cannon had been pointed
square at the Exclamation Point, which was why I had fallen from the scaffolding. I followed the path from the cannon to the Point, and that’s where I saw the first body. I don’t know who it was to this day, because their head and a large chunk of their torso were just gone. I saw blood, sure, but I also got to see inside that poor person. I saw rib bones, that’s what I remember most, but there was also, like, viscera. I didn’t know that word until I left the park and heard it on news reports, but that’s what it was. Guts pushed together into, like, a paste, I guess. I remember the blood standing in stark contrast to the gray in the sky because of all the cannon smoke. I looked a little further down the line of fire and Elvis from the Robots, he had taken off his shirt and was holding it to Charlie Powers’ head, most of which was gone. He was trying to stanch the wound of a guy who was missing a large part of his head. I remember, he had one eye and it was rolled up and his mouth was wide open in this gruesome sort of … I don’t even know what to call it. He was dead. Super dead. Deader than dead, but Elvis was holding his shirt to his head like you do in the movies. You know, “keep pressure on it,” that sort of thing. I guess there’s no right way to react in that situation.

  I followed the line of fire the rest of the way to the Exclamation Point and noticed the cannonball had ripped part of the base completely away. There were chunks of brightly colored plastic and glass everywhere, and there were three or four people who had gathered around the base, Mole Men and Robots I would guess, and they were just in pieces. It was just a mess of blood and glass, and I remember one woman holding her head and screaming, but I couldn’t hear her. I was looking at all of this, and I still couldn’t hear, which is why I didn’t notice what was going on around me. The Pirates had shown up and had started killing people.