FantasticLand

by Mike Bockoven

  He finally gets close enough, and he’s got the demo blocks just about in place, and the hole is too small for one of them. He’s working it, very gingerly mind you, and all of a sudden I hear someone yell, “Run” and I start hearing the yells. I shine the light away from Tomas for a second, and I see most of my people running like hell and just a handful of Pirates, maybe four or five of them, beating on the folks they’d been able to catch. I’ve heard a few of those assholes saying they enjoyed the atmosphere of living by an honor code or some such shit, but where’s the honor in holding down a fifty-year-old grandmother and beating the hell out of her in the rain? I’m sorry, I just don’t get it. And, I’ll be honest with you, I got kind of upset. So when one of them came at me I took the butt of my flashlight and bashed him over the head with it and he dropped. The others were too busy with whatever they were doing, so I stomped the kid hard in the face to make sure he’d stay down and turned the flashlight back to Tomas. He about had everything the way he wanted it and nodded to me. I turned back around to see the kid and I caught his feet as he was being dragged away behind a knickknack shop a few feet away. I would have followed up to figure out who was taking him and why, but Tomas had grabbed my shoulders and motioned that we needed to get to the detonator. The fuses were all set, and we were ready to blow this thing.

  Our plan was to run back to the tunnels where we had set up the detonators and blow the thing from a safe distance, with the added safety of being underground. While we were running back, I heard all sorts of things. There were screams, there was yelling, there was even another gunshot. My mindset at that time was “head down, keep moving,” and I was able to do that. Adrenaline helped ’cause I’m pretty sure I covered that distance at a dead sprint. Once we got down there, we were missing a few folks, I think four people were not in the tunnel, but we decided to blow it anyway, because if we didn’t, someone might fuck with the explosives and the plan wouldn’t work, so we went ahead and pressed the button.

  A couple things happened after that you’re gonna want to know about.

  First thing. Big thing. Tomas was thinking these were quarter-pound TNT demo blocks. They were one-pound blocks. Asshole never read the side of the things; he just thought he knew what he was dealing with because that’s what he’d trained on in the army. He had done all the math on destroying the base and not accounted for three fourths of the explosive power he was dealing with. It was right there on the side of the fucking blocks: one pound. He didn’t bother to look, so the boom we were expecting? It was less like a boom and more like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse farting in unison. The tunnel rocked to the point that we thought it was going to cave in, but it held. There was shit falling from the ceiling like you see in movies. We had earplugs in, but it wasn’t nearly enough for how close we were. The shockwave shattered all the lightbulbs, not that they worked anyway, but it’s never fun when sharp glass falls from the sky. Plus, and I don’t want to get into this too much, but we probably killed some folks. I don’t know who, and I don’t know how, but we were amateurs dealing with explosives, and that’s about as smart as kicking a hungry lion in the balls. I honestly cannot tell you who we killed, if we killed a bunch of our people or a bunch of the Pirates or what. Either way, I don’t feel good about it. An explosion is a bad way to die. I still feel really bad about that.

  Second thing. Also a big thing. We were aiming to destroy the base and send the Exclamation Point falling in one direction. That didn’t happen. Basically we blew the base to kingdom come along with a good part of the Exclamation Point. No one saw the explosion and lived to tell about it, so I can’t say for sure what happened, but I do know at the end we had a hole where the base used to be, and about a third of the Point was blown to shit. Just gone, replaced by a million fragments of fiberglass and what not. The only part you could still ID as the Point was the curve of the top, which is the biggest part of the thing. That survived. There were also big chunks, but I’ll be damned if I knew what part of the Point they came from.

  Last thing. The idea was for us to knock the Point over. That way, if someone looked down on the park, they might see the Point on its side and see it as a call for help. That was our intention—to get attention and get rescued. We certainly got attention, but not from anyone we wanted. There was already a big fight after Garliek’s dumb-fuck meeting, but after we blew up the Point and folks saw there were explosives in play, that’s when things took a turn. A bad turn. Like it wasn’t bad enough already, but now we had little armies, and they were starting to panic.

  If history teaches us anything, it’s that armies and panic are a bad combo. A really bad combo.

  INTERVIEW 17: ANONYMOUS

  Author’s Note: For reasons concerning legal liability and possible retaliation, the subject of this interview has requested anonymity. I have been able to clear her credentials as a member of the park staff and confirm several key events through various means and sources. I cannot confirm every detail of her story and usually stay away from anonymous sourcing, but I have chosen to include her interview because it gets at a very important part of this story during a period about which many refuse to talk or were not present for the events described.

  We were holding our own until those idiots blew up the middle of the park. The supplies were holding out, we were able to scare off anyone who came by looking for trouble, and most of all we had each other. We were sisters, and we were ready to fight for each other. That all changed after the explosion. That was the hardest thing to accept, the absolute hardest thing to get over. You, like, put your life in someone’s hands, and you sleep in the same communal area with them, and you believe in them and love them, and all of a sudden they get scared, and no one trusts each other, and it stops being a club and starts becoming an army. That sucks. That really sucks. I killed people and watched them choke on blood and scream, and we stabbed them, and that doesn’t haunt me like Clara Ann haunts me.

  We lost three girls in the explosion, a girl named Hera who was just awesome and fun and another girl we called Sam. Ten minutes after the boom, Clara yelled at everyone to take stock, count heads, check our weapons, and make sure this didn’t get worse like it did at the Council of Pieces. I remember she would yell, “Be ready,” at the top of her lungs, like she was Paul Revere. She would run up and down the Golden Road shouting, “Be ready,” and stepping over Paul and yelling and yelling. Paul? Paul the Puddle. It’s a bad joke. It’s what we started calling the body in the middle of the road—that dude Brock killed, like, the second day—because he was starting to kind of melt. Not melt, but he was wet all the time and part of him was bloating and other parts were just gross and gooey. He was a landmark. “Meet you at Paul in fifteen minutes,” that sort of thing. But Clara, she was in full panic mode, and you could hear it in her voice, and everyone responded. Probably two minutes after she started yelling, we were all at our posts ready to kick ass.

  No one came. We sat there, our ass cheeks clenched, bruising for a fight, and no one came.

  There wasn’t even any screaming or anything. Just smoke from the boom and, after a while, the sound of rain. Rain rain rain rain rain. I swear to God I still wake up feeling wet. Your hair was always stuck to your face, and your feet were always cold, even when it was hot, and it was just terrible. After the boom, Clara Ann made it a rule that someone had to be on guard twenty-four hours a day, on the roofs, waiting for an attack, so there were times standing on that roof was like taking a cold bath with your clothes on. All the girls got coughs, and one girl’s feet got so damp stuff started growing on them. It was terrible, and people started to, like, ask Clara Ann if we could lighten up a bit. No one had to be on the roof at four in the morning. Not even the Pirates were that motivated. But she started insisting, and then when that didn’t work, she started yelling. And things were just about to reach a head when the first raid came.

  It happened right after lunch, in broad daylight. We were eating cheese spread and rock-hard scones because
someone had made just a ton of scones before the hurricane hit, when we heard a screaming sound. All these girls who weren’t with us were running toward the Road with sticks and a few swords, and behind them were three girls pulling the cannon. If we hadn’t seen the cannon, we might not have known who was coming at us, but the hardware made it obvious: these were Pirates and Fairies who had become Pirates. If they hadn’t started screaming before they got to us, they might have made it farther. Hell, shoot the cannon to announce yourself, if that’s the way you want to go, but no. They came at us yelling like they were Vikings or something. It was really stupid if you ask me, and at that point we were so glad to have something else to focus on that we let them have it. They wanted blood? Come and get it, assholes. We were pissed off and sick and bored and itching for a fight.

  Our archers, they were up first; they had thirty-five arrows between them and each of them had a name. We had three archers, and they each had a spot on the rooftops that they could get to in about forty-five seconds on a good day, so it goes like this. We hear the screaming, saw the cannon, we hear Clara Ann yelling “Be ready,” and before the first set of Pirate girls gets to our buildings, the archers are screaming “Simon! Nick! Edgar!” as they’re firing off the arrows and yelling the names of the arrows as they let them go. From there, it’s all screaming and blood.

  We were armed pretty well. We got the arrows from a sporting goods store on the Road, and the rest of us had hockey sticks and baseball bats. You’d be surprised how badass you can be with a tennis racket. We even had, like, armor. Football shoulder pads and knee pads and stuff. All the girls grabbed their gear, and to her credit, there was Clara Ann, right at the front, with a big piece of jagged metal she’d found and wrapped a bunch of tape around it so she could use it as a sword. She called it Tetanus; it was kind of nerdy that she gave it a name, but it was funny when she did it. I remember, I was next to my friend Scottie, and when you have nothing to talk about for hours and hours you talk about what it would be like if you have to run at someone and fight them, like we were sure was going to happen. Scottie always said she thought everyone would run right up to the person they were going to fight and then they’d look at each other and realize how stupid that was. “Maybe we’ll all start laughing,” she said. She was wrong. By the time your legs are pumping and your arms are swinging, any thought or higher brain function is gone. I’ve been a “nice girl” most of my life, but, goddammit, I wanted to get my fight on. I wanted some scars on my skin and some dead bodies at my feet.

  I got them both by the time I left the park.

  I had a baseball bat. It was a metal one, and I carried it everywhere. It was my constant companion, and I started to call it Cap. Like, kneecap someone. Ever heard that? That’s what I was thinking, and everyone seemed to think it was a good name for a bat. I also didn’t wear any guards or pads or anything because I was thinking the best thing to do if you ever got into a fight was move, move, move. I ran it in my head a hundred times before it happened, and I remember thinking, “What would you go for?” Like, if I had to fight someone, who would I choose? I figured I would choose the person who was standing still. Who had no momentum, right? And that, turns out, is totally right. The ShopGirls, we ran into the crowd and it was like, the first person who wasn’t running past you was the person you took a swing at, and the first girl I saw, she had this really nasty scar on the side of her face. Really nasty, like, “she got it in the park and it wasn’t healing right” sort of nasty. She was looking at another set of girls fighting, and I took Cap and without any fanfare just fucking bashed her in the head. I heard it connect … this is going to sound really gross, but you know when you’re hitting a ball and you know you “got all of it”? I got all of that girl’s head, and she went down. Then it was like, great, who’s next?

  The good news was when our archers started hitting the Lady Pirates—that’s what we called them because we thought it sounded like a high school basketball team—when the arrows started hitting the Lady Pirates they lost about a third of their numbers. They ran at the first sight of blood, which makes sense. We spent most of our time on defense, trying to stop people attacking us, so we noticed when things started getting serious, about a third of any group would just stop fighting and leave. Sometimes they ran, but I was on the roof once and it was more casual than that. It’s like, they lost interest and started wandering around. So already they were down to about twenty girls, and we had a lot more than that swinging bats and rackets and other stuff. A few of the smart ones figured out we were going to win and started running, and the last ten girls or so … we laid them out. We knocked them out or we went over and made sure the arrows had done their job … and I remember this really well, Clara Ann walked over to one girl who was yelling and screaming about her arm and stabbed her in the head with Tetanus. Then she, like, twisted the sword around in the girl’s head until she stopped kicking around. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but at the end, there was our fearless leader, bloody sword in her hand, leading us to victory. She never let us forget that.

  They never did anything with the cannon. I don’t even know if they knew how to fire it.

  We ended up killing four girls, five with the one Clara Ann killed, and injuring seven more. The ones we hurt, we showed mercy to them, helped them up and sent back to the Pirate Cove as soon as they could walk. We didn’t lose anybody, but a couple of girls had gashes and stuff that needed medical attention, and Scottie sprained her ankle running toward the battle. That night was the party you would expect within reason, because we were all sick to death of being stuck in the park by then. Clara Ann got up and gave us a speech. She said we needed to send a “don’t fuck with us” message to the Pirates and anyone else who wanted to hurt us. Turns out, the Pirates got it loud and clear, because the next day they tried to hit us with cannon fire. It started in the afternoon when we heard a boom and actually saw the cannonball fly over us and into the swampy part of the grounds past the Golden Road. Then, like, half an hour later, another one was way short. I’m not sure it made it out of the Pirate Cove, and the girl on patrol at that time said she heard a lot of yelling from there. My guess is they fired it at the Deadpools, but I don’t know that for sure. It would make sense, though. I mean, they were right there staring them in the face every day, and we were a bit of a hike.

  That night, one of the guys from the Deadpools, his name was Daniel, he shows up and he asks to meet with Clara Ann. He’s holding Riley’s sword, which was a big deal, I found out later. He and Clara Ann talk, and after about half an hour she comes out and asks me and two other girls to come into her “office,” which is actually just a section of the uniform center. It was me and a girl named Kristen, who I liked, and another girl named Drew, who I didn’t. Clara Ann said she had met with this guy, Daniel, and they both agreed we needed to take out the cannon before the Pirates got too good at firing it and started hitting buildings and hurting people. No one had any idea how to dismantle a cannon, but the idea was to take a small “strike team” and go into the Pirate Cove and then figure it out as we went. I must have had an “are you fucking kidding me” look on my face because Clara Ann started yelling. She yelled about how it was so important to take out this weapon and how I shouldn’t be selfish, and if we were going to survive this someone needed to do this. I remember, clearly, it was the first time someone used the word “if,” not “when.” At that point, though, it made total sense. It felt like we were never leaving and that this was the world we’re dealing with now.

  She pushed me to go with the “strike team.” She pushed hard. Kristen and Drew, they were kind of hesitant too, but we could all tell Clara Ann was going to yell even more if we didn’t do what she wanted, so we said yes. That night the four of us met with Daniel and two other Deadpools and got our weapons together. Immediately, it was clear we were coming at this from different places. One girl Deadpool, I never did learn her name but she had lots of freckles, she was all, “I’ve kill
ed one Pirate and I’m going to kill a bunch more,” and was, like, stroking this small knife she carried with her. Drew and I shot each other a “who is this crazy bitch” glance. The other guy Deadpool was a bit more chill, but you could tell he had seen more than his share of shit. They had a back way to get in to the Pirate Cove, which involved climbing up through the back of the fake town that was the backdrop for the Main Street area. From there, the entire plan consisted of “find the cannon and make sure it doesn’t work anymore.” That was it. Oh, and “kill any Pirate you see,” according to Freckles McStabby. And, even though we’re operating under one of the dumbest plans ever devised, it worked at first. The cannon was right there in the middle of town, completely unguarded, and there isn’t anyone hanging out anywhere we could see. We kind of hang out for twenty minutes or so, and wonder of wonders we don’t see anyone, so we start talking about what we’re going to do. Do we pull the wick out? Do we knock off the wheels? We have no idea. Not one. The best we can come up with is, “Let’s go look at the thing, and if anyone comes out, have them chase us back to the group and we’ll stab them.” Another brilliant plan.

  Freckles and Drew decide they’re the ones who are going to go down there, so they jump down from our hiding place and just waltz up to the damn thing. No resistance, no nothing. They fiddle around for a while and run back to us. They have no idea what they’re doing. They said, “We could take the wheels off, but the Pirates would just put them back on,” and Daniel says, “What are the chances of us rolling it off the main road and into one of the big ponds over there?” The Pirate Cove had a couple of decorative ponds near the entryway and we were, like, a few hundred feet away from one of them. If it sank to the bottom of one of those ponds, they’d never get it out. But it would take all of us. After a bunch of back and forth and arguing, we decide to go for it.