by Mark Tufo
As the ride started, there was this intense feeling of acceleration and then the dizzying effects of the cart spinning randomly on an ever-changing axis. Add to that the near nauseating effect of rising and falling. For the first minute and a half, I was having a great time, but as we neared the two-minute mark and presumably the end of the ride, I was more than ready to call it quits. I’m sure I could have gone another five without too many problems; Marcus was a whole other matter. He was fumbling with the antacid bottle even as he struggled against the forces applied by the moving machinery. We were hitting the three-minute mark and the ride wasn’t slowing down. The carnie in charge was looking off the way the screams had come. It was looking more and more like something serious may have happened. Maybe a ride failed and someone was tossed off. My mood was souring as rapidly as my husband’s stomach.
“Get us off of here!” I yelled, though my voice was pulled away by the rushing wind and the yells and hollers of the riders on the other arms. The carnie had one arm on the lever that would end the forced vertigo, but his attention was completely on the broad avenue that led straight to the rides. I tried my best to see what he was watching, but the spin of the ride made concentrating on any one point a near impossibility. As far as I could tell, it was just a bunch of people heading this way, fairly quickly. Then I had a new set of worries; maybe people were running our way because some idiot with a gun and an agenda had opened fire, destroying multiple lives of those that just wanted to enjoy an uncannily warm day in December.
People were in full-on retreat mode, and still the fucking carnie would not stop the ride. Marcus had long ago evacuated the wondrous food we had so recently eaten, though I’m sure he would have told you it wasn’t so good the second time around. He had the good graces to semi-stand up and send the bile out the back of the cart, although the cries of protest from behind us let me know that his act of kindness for me did not go unpunished for some other poor person. And still, the damned carnie did not shut the ride down! Even as people streamed past screaming, he stood there, rigid and simultaneously slack-jawed. I’m not normally so judgmental, but this was an extreme circumstance. I truly think the man was too dense to do more than he already was, as if to process what was happening and shut off the damn ride was just too much for him to handle. He stood there. Even as what came running after the fleeing people came, his hand still held the control arm as the first of the zombies bit into him.
All he had to do was fall over backward and we would have mercifully been able to come to a controlled stop. Maybe we could have got out of there before the rest of the horde caught up. Maybe. But no. Calvin the Confused Carnie fell over to the front with three zombies tearing pieces of him away. Instead of stopping, we kept spinning and dipping, as fast as the ride had been designed for…and certainly given its age, much faster than was safe.
“What is going on?” Marcus was green as he burped his question out. I’d always thought it was just an expression, but he really did look the color of split-pea soup. And I’ve never really liked split-pea soup. At the time, I didn’t have any idea of what was going on. All I knew was that people were running from other people. I thought maybe it was a demonstration turned violent, then when I watched some taking bites of others, I thought it might be that weird drug that so many people in Florida seemed to enjoy. I think they called it flakka? Really, though, I don’t understand the appeal of taking something that makes you look like a zombie and makes you want to eat people. So that’s what I thought. It was a drug-induced craze making people appear to be zombies. I never thought for a second they were actual zombies. It didn’t matter much, though. I just knew that Marcus and myself were in danger, but surely the authorities would be coming soon and take care of this mess. I mean, that’s what they’re supposed to do, right? We just needed to wait–to ride this out, literally. I don’t seem to recall ever hearing of anyone dying from staying on a ride too long.
The druggies were everywhere, dragging people down, ripping their faces off, tearing chunks of flesh free with nothing more than their mouths, puddles of blood quickly became pools–and heading straight to a lake’s worth. I don’t watch horror movies for a reason but right now I was living one and no matter how hard I tried I could not change the channel. Marcus was on his third or fourth sick up, the poor man he kept splashing had passed out either from the shock of what was happening or the disgust of having to marinate in my husband’s stomach bile. Either way there was a jealous part of me that wished I could join him–not in being covered in throw up–just the passed-out part. If I didn’t have to infect one more memory with what I was witnessing I could live happily ever after. I hope.
“What’s going on?” Marcus asked. I think he was too lost in his misery to really register the awfulness happening around us. Or he was looking through the world with those rose-colored glasses he donned so often. Little did either of us know how much he was going to wish he had those spectacles on and real soon.
“Help is coming!” I could hear the wail of sirens over the cries of pain, anguish, and fright all around us. Usually I would not feel comfort in the explosive sound of shots being fired, but in this case, the lunatics needed to be stopped at all costs. There can be no rehabilitation once you start dining on other humans, that must tear right through that delicate webbing within our minds, making them forever broken. The many shots were coming closer, but they were being drowned out by helicopters now. At first, it was the news choppers eager to soak in the blood of the story and feed it to those watching at home. Then it looked like geese were flying south for the winter as planes both big and fancy private ones were streaming past. What did they know, I wonder? Then finally the heavy percussion of military helicopters thundered across the sky overhead.
They were showering a torrential pouring of bullets into the crowds of drug users. What was scary was when I realized they weren’t even trying to discriminate between victim and perpetrator. The wholesale slaughter was on. I couldn’t imagine what had happened so quickly that even the local authorities could not contain it and the military had to be called in to deal with it in such a brutal manner. As sickened as I was by what the military were doing, I was bereft when they departed.
“What about us?” I screamed as that infernal ride kept twirling around. That was when I realized that even the police sirens and their firearms had been silenced or moved away. Had they been overrun? Or was it somehow incredibly worse elsewhere?
“They’re coming!” someone on the car ahead of us shouted out, her hand was pointing but we were twirling so I don’t know from what direction help was arriving. It turned out not to matter. It would have been difficult to miss the mass of them, hundreds, maybe thousands. Even in my over-twirled mind, I knew then this wasn’t some drug frenzy. There were women and children interspersed with the men in equal numbers, blue collar, white collar, every race that I could tell. With the government’s rapid response, all I could figure was something had leaked from a facility somewhere. I’d read enough Stephen King to know something like that was possible. Now my fear was what if Marcus thought I looked tasty? Then I was even more afraid it would be the other way around, or both, as soon as the poisonous gas made it to us.
“Please don’t eat me,” I begged my husband.
“If we ever get off this thing, I don’t think I’ll ever eat again.” Impossibly, he let go of more.
We’d been on the ride for twenty minutes with no end in sight. I now knew no help was coming. How long could one ride a ride before medical issues arose? I figured it was far more likely that some of the bolts and connectors would give way long before that became a concern. I was going through the odds of surviving our car coming unhinged, flinging us off into the boardwalk like a leftover pizza crust. The fiberglass housing around us would not afford much protection upon impact. Would we be incapacitated as those fiends began to eat us? It would be better to land skull first and end it quickly than to be just another tasty snack at the park.
&nb
sp; “We need to get off of this thing!” Marcus was trying to lift the safety bar from our laps.
“Are you insane!” I snapped. As much as I wanted to get off, I didn’t think my soft, middle-aged body was going to take the subsequent flight and crash landing all that well.
“We can’t stay here!” he bemoaned.
“Don’t let your stomach do the talking.” I didn’t want to be mean, I was just so frightened I couldn’t even think clearly, much less civilly.
“It’s not only the acid stirring up my ulcers, Laura. Look at the crazies pressing up against the safety fence.”
And I did. There were so many of them the metal brace poles were pushed to an unnatural forty-five-degree angle.
“Once they get through there we’ll be in even more trouble.”
All of a sudden this seemed like exactly the place where I wanted to be. “They…they can’t get us here,” I told him triumphantly.
“Are you kidding me? This ride dips to three feet off the ground! Every time we go around, we’ll be ripe for the picking.”
“Marcus, you know I hate when you’re right!” I screamed.
“If we time it right, we can shoot for a landing on the exit platform. They’re not up there yet and we won’t fall as far. Gonna be tough, though…I’m thinking we’re moving at around thirty miles an hour.”
Just then there was a sharp, pierced scream from the couple directly across from us. The drug-fueled crazies had broken through and their car missed the oncoming rush by inches. Then, as if it couldn’t get worse, it did. We were thrown rib-bruisingly hard into the safety bar just as another one of the cars sent a person flying into the air. His broken body landed some twenty feet away right on a fence that protected the Zipper. I had to keep adjusting my field of vision to watch him as he fell off the fence and somehow miraculously kept moving, albeit at a crawl this time.
“PCP? Is that what they’re all on?” My mind was tenuously holding on to a reality I wished I could justify.
Another impact! My world turned black as the back of my head slammed hard into the all-too-thin cushion behind me, then I snapped back to the light. The hits kept coming as the cars dipped down into the pooling mass of fucked-up humanity, like a giant bobbing for apples we were sending them hurtling away. I had a fleeting moment where I thought this might be the solution we needed; maybe we were the squeegee to the bug-gutted windshield of the world, wiping these pests free from our area. The twenty-five-year-old ride had other thoughts. The car that had made the first hit had begun to splinter, the younger couple on board was nearly wrapped around the bar in the grimmest of hopes that this would somehow save them.
The cotter pin, or whatever was holding them in place, finally sheered in half and the car went spinning wildly off into the air! Their screams were somehow louder than the cacophony around us. The car itself shattered into thousands of fiercely glittering neon green pieces. The woman was still alive as she had landed on the man she was with. The grotesque bulging of his neck was the only evidence I needed to know that he would never stir again.
“Help me….” The woman had lifted her head; she couldn’t have said those words louder than a whisper but I heard her as clearly as if she had said them directly into my ear. She said it again, this time louder.
“Shut up!” I yelled, not because I didn’t want to look at her and think that this could possibly be my fate…okay, so maybe it was a little bit of that, but it was more because the crazies hadn’t noticed her yet. If she just shut up there was a chance she could make it.
“Help us!” she screamed as she finally got enough wits about her to look at the man she had landed on. She was slowly moving, attempting to put as much distance from him as possible.
“He’s dead! He needs help!”
“Be quiet!” I warned her. She paid me no heed.
“I can’t feel my legs! Help me!” She was pulling herself arm over arm away from the crash site. It was too late. I watched from my spinning perch as three crazies, all female, moved to intercept her slow retreat. One of the them got down on hands and knees and began to crawl after the injured woman–almost in a mocking gesture. Another had stepped on the woman’s legs, halting her progress, while the third just fell over like she had tripped. Her face smacked off the back of the woman’s head, driving the poor thing into the ground, teeth-first. There was muffled sobbing that was quickly replaced by the high-pitched keening of someone getting eaten alive.
“My God! What is happening?!” It could have been Marcus that shouted that, though I feel like I might have as well. We didn’t have time to view the macabre event, as the attackers shook pieces of meat from their victim, but it is singularly an event that will never leave me, although, right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to be that much longer. That might be for the best.
The ride was still smacking into people, and Marcus and I were covered in the gore of those we’d crushed. Miraculously, our car was holding together reasonably well. The same could not be said for the one behind us. It was still attached, but only the metal frame remained and the things were able to reach in as the car dipped low. It was worse than flying away. Hair was caught and ripped out, their clothes were becoming tattered, they were scraped up and scratched from head to toe. The man had checked out long ago, but the black, warrior woman he was with kept fighting savagely against the tide of ferocious zombies, shaking off each blow she suffered. I thought, if we make it off of here, I am going to make sure we follow her.
The woman had been standing, making sure her punches and swinging elbows caused as much damage as possible to the crazies. As her car once again dipped down and struck another pile of the zombies, she was sent soaring. For the merest of moments, she did indeed look like a superhero as she flew. Her ending was quick and savage. The ride was falling apart more and more with each revolution. The center housing sounded like rocks in a dryer, and we were starting to wobble violently from the uneven weight distribution on the arms. We were striking the ground hard now with each low swoop. There were three cars left, all in various states of disrepair. The screaming, for the most part, had stopped. What was the point? Nobody was coming to help. Resignation was reigning supreme, all except for Marcus.
“We’re going to make it, Laura,” he assured me. I wanted to believe him–I needed to believe him. The grinding sound grew louder and our warble more pronounced. The only decent thing about the ride breaking was that we were slowing down. The center column began to smoke; a thick, black discharge escaped from it. The toxic smell of burning rubber and plastic pervaded, even over the stench of blood and vomit. Licks of fire began to escape the housing and climb up the center. Of the three cars still intact, we were left with the most advantageous position, our arm was as high as it could go. The second was just at outstretched arms’ reach, and the third, well, they were dragged free from the wreckage and inhumanely butchered piece by piece. The fire was burning intensely now, to the point where we could begin to feel the heat.
“Any ideas?” the scared man in the car further behind us asked. I turned; he was with a teenage girl and a boy a few years younger, I assumed they were his children. Both were hiding under his arms as he hugged them tightly.
“Live.” Marcus moved the lap bar and stood on shaky legs.
I wanted to yell at my husband for saying that so flippantly, it was like telling a starving person to just eat. It wasn’t like they were deliberately foregoing food. Then I realized he didn’t mean it in a dismissive way; he was being serious, like he was actively thinking about how to get us out of this situation. The flames had consumed the entire middle structure. All things considered, I would rather go by smoke inhalation, but the prevailing breeze was not going to allow that to happen. Now the choice appeared to be roasting alive or being eaten alive. I would think those two scenarios warred for top position on nearly every human's worst way to go list.
“What are you doing?” I asked him, grabbing on to the waistline of his pants.
> “I don’t see any of them in the water. If we make it to the ocean...” He trailed off.
“Gotta be three hundred yards from here.” The man below us was looking now.
“Marcus,” my husband said.
“Rollie. This is my niece, Denise, and my son, Derek.” Neither of the kids moved when he said their names.
“I don’t see any other way. We can run from booth to booth, hiding in or behind them until we get to the water.”
“It’s December, Marcus. I know it’s unseasonably warm out here, but that water is going to be frigid,” I said.
“Hypothermia is the least of our problems,” he answered.
I liked this “take charge” version of my husband; it was not what I was expecting after the way he’d acted during the blizzard. He’d seemed so out of his element just with the loss of coffee. Maybe there was some hope. Smoke was billowing from our ride. As it drifted away it joined with other large plumes from things burning all along the boardwalk and further into the city, creating an abnormally thick and caustic fog. Whatever had happened was widespread and sudden. There were still guns firing and explosions from what we figured was military ordnance, but it was all far away and moving farther.
“We still have the problem of getting out of here,” Rollie said.
Denise squealed as multiple hands slapped up against the bottom of their car.
“Can’t we wait them out?” I asked just as the car suddenly dipped a few inches.
“The only thing holding us up in the air is a rubber hose filled with hydraulic fluid. The moment that burns up…” Marcus didn’t finish the sentence; he didn’t need to.
