Full Tilt Part 4

She held my gaze for an instant, then turned, sauntering through the parting crowd toward the carousel, as if daring me to follow.

I took the dare.

"Blake. Don't!"

I felt Maggie's hand on my shoulder, but I pulled away, making my way as fast as I could to the carousel. I hit the turnstile. It snagged me painfully at the waist, not giving way. I pushed at it again until I realized why it held me back. I looked at my hand. The red symbol was glowing white-hot; I could feel its heat on my skin. I ran my hand across the scanner, and the glow faded to a smoldering crimson. The turnstile let me through. Ahead of me the carousel had already begun to move.

"Ca.s.sandra!"

I jumped on the ride, grabbing a pole as the carousel animals slowly began to rise and fall. She was standing on the far side of the platform, still scrutinizing me. I caught a glimpse of her smile and then lost sight of her among the riders and the herd of brightly painted animals. And what strange animals they were. The carousel had every nature of beast painted in loud, unexpected colors. There was a purple and yellow wolverine baring its teeth and a green and yellow ram, its wooden head down and ready to charge. I saw what looked like an anteater, blue and gold, looking absurd as it rose and fell with the rhythm of the ride. And yet, as strange as these animals appeared, they were also somehow familiar.

At the core of the ride was an array of mirrors. I felt if I could focus on any one of those mirrors long enough, I'd see Ca.s.sandra staring out at me. The carousel picked up speed, and when I came around near the turnstile again, Russ and Maggie leaped on.

"Let's just grab Blake and get off," Russ told Maggie.

But I wasn't looking at Russ. I was looking at the purple and gray tiger behind him, at how its wooden eyes appeared to track his movements. The creature right in front of me was a menacing lion painted bright blue. Was it my imagination, or was its snarling mouth an inch wider than it had been a moment ago? The ride picked up more speed. The tempo of the carnival music accelerated, rising to the highest octaves. I could feel centrifugal force pushing me outward and-what was that I saw? Were the legs of these painted animals actually beginning to move?

All at once the wooden floorboards began to buckle and give, revealing a rocky terrain rushing beneath us.

"Grab on to something!" I shouted. "It's coming apart!" As the floorboards fell away I leaped onto the animal closest to me, the blue lion. Maggie took the green and yellow ram, and Russ found himself an oversized gray and blue peac.o.c.k. I gripped the pole, but the pole disappeared between my fingers. The last of the floorboards disintegrated. My blue lion opened his mouth, releasing a thunderous roar that resonated up my legs and into my chest. And finally I realized where I'd seen all these creatures before.

They were all college mascots.

Now the last thread that held the world together unraveled, and I plunged through its shredded fragments into a wholly different place. The ride had come undone-it had unfolded-into an endless rocky plain beneath a red sky and an eclipsed sun. I was riding through this unearthly landscape, clinging to the mane of a blue lion, surrounded by hundreds of other beasts. Some creatures had riders. Others didn't. But every single one of them was a mascot. I knew them from sports and from TV, but mostly I knew them from the endless applications I had filled out to dozens of universities far from home.

It was all I could do to stay on the lion, for although it now moved with the agility of flesh, to the touch it was still like slippery, painted wood. All of these animals were a strange melding of wood, paint, and flesh.

Who made this place?

Beside me I pa.s.sed an unfortunate boy desperately trying to get some speed out of the banana slug he rode. From behind him, what could only be described as a Fighting Irishman grabbed him by the scruff of his collar.

"Outta me way," the Irishman said, and hurled the kid off his slug so far out of sight that I had no idea where he landed.

It's only a ride, I told myself. It's only a ride.

I caught up to Maggie on her ram. She was experienced on horseback and had taken to the shape and rhythm of her new mount. The look on her face wasn't fear; it was something slowly creeping toward ecstasy.

"This is wild!" she said as I pa.s.sed her.

My lion leaped over a rock, and I rose off his back, coming down on his haunches, practically at the tail. I had to throw all my weight forward to keep from falling off.

"You'll never make it if you ride like that."

It was Ca.s.sandra. She rode a huge beast the color of blood that matched pace with my lion. It was a razor-back, but it was more dinosaur than hog. Ca.s.sandra wasn't dressed in the clothes she'd worn before but was in some exotic safari outfit. And as I looked at myself I saw that I was wearing the same thing. In fact, everyone was. It was as if costumes were part of the deal here.

"None of this is real!" I shouted to her. "It can't be! I'm getting off!"

"Bad idea."

As I looked ahead of me I saw what she meant. There was a kid on an orange longhorn bull who was having as much trouble as I was. I heard him scream as he slipped off the bull, but his screams were silenced under the trampling feet of the stampede.

"You could call this the weed-out course," Ca.s.sandra said with a dry smile.

"Okay," I said, hugging the neck of my lion. "Okay. I get the idea. You can stop the ride now."

She laughed at me. "The ride doesn't stop. Find your way to another ride. That's the only way to get off."

Another ride? That implied surviving this one. Had Quinn been through this? He would have loved it. He would have died loving it!

"Where's my brother?"

Instead of answering, Ca.s.sandra tugged on the ears of her razorback. It turned its head, opened its ma.s.sive jaw, and dug its tusks into my lion, shredding its neck.

"Bad piggy," Ca.s.sandra said, but it was clear this was exactly what she had intended to do. Maggie came up behind me. Her ram reared and threw her to the ground. My lion roared in pain, wood splintering in all directions. It collapsed, and I tumbled off just as the huge razorback chomped down on my lion, lifted it up, and swallowed it whole.

"Survival of the fittest," Ca.s.sandra said with a wink. "Looks like your lion didn't make the grade." Then she rode off, leaving me and Maggie standing in the middle of the stampede.

"We're toast," Maggie said.

By now I'd seen more than one kid trampled into dust. What happens if you die here? I wondered. Is it just the end of the ride, or something worse?

"Come on!" I grabbed Maggie's hand and wove us through the stampede. Somehow we managed to sidestep every animal. I turned away from the kid being swallowed by a crimson alligator and another who got speared by a maroon and gold Trojan warrior. We fought our way past a host of horrors until we came out into tall gra.s.s. I was exhausted, but I felt I could run forever to get away from this place.

"Wait! What about Russ?" Maggie said. We'd completely forgotten about him.

I turned back, fearing the worst. But he, too, had broken away from the stampede-only he hadn't left his mount. He still rode the back of that gargantuan peac.o.c.k, which now ran AWOL through the gra.s.s.

"Help!" Russ yelled. "Get me off this thing!" As big as he was, he was at the mercy of the ridiculous bird.

Maggie and I ran toward him, just as his bird reached the edge of a gully and lost its balance. It tumbled, disappearing down the ravine along with Russ. By the time we got to him, Russ was already picking himself up out of the dust. He was fine, but the peac.o.c.k wasn't.

"I broke my bird." It lay in splinters around him. The bird's wooden head and neck were still intact, pecking at Russ's ankles. He kicked it away in disgust.

Now that the ride was over, my legs gave out, and I had to sit down on a boulder. I looked at my hands, my feet, the ground around me. I looked at the boulders and at the bright red sky. Nothing I had experienced before stepping on that carousel had prepared me for this. I knew it couldn't be happening, and yet it seemed so real-more than real. There was a heightened sense of reality to everything around us, as if this place truly was made up of whole new dimensions beyond the three that filled up the rest of our lives. My senses were so unaccustomed to it, I didn't know whether to feel wonder or terror.

Maggie came up beside me. "You okay?"

"Why are you asking him?" said Russ. "What about me? I'm a wreck! I want to go home! I didn't sign up for some weird, communal acid trip."

But Russ was wrong to call it that. This was the exact opposite of some drugged-out experience. We still had our senses. Our minds were sharp and clear. It was the rest of the world that had gone crazy.

"The rules have changed," I told them. "We've got to accept it and learn to deal with things the way they are now."

I stood up, feeling my strength return and feeling my senses adapting to the dimensions of this new reality. "It's kind of like learning to swim. The first time you were in water, it must have felt like this."

"So we've got to learn to swim through this place?"

"Either we make all the right moves, or we drown."

Russ shook his head quickly, nervously. "No. No. We've just got to stop this."

Maggie ignored him and turned to me. "Who was that girl on the killer pig? You talked to her like you knew her."

"You know her too. She ran the ball-toss booth. She was the one who gave us the invitation."

"Gave you the invitation," Russ said. "I wasn't invited. I should get to go home."

"You heard what that guy at the entrance said," Maggie reminded him. "We can't get out until we ride seven rides."

Russ started pacing in circles like a gorilla in a cage. "I don't get this ride, anyway. I mean, what's with these weird animals?"

"I don't think you're supposed to get it," I told him. "I think ..." I hesitated. "I think it's for me. You're just along for the ride."

"What? How could they make an entire ride just for you?" Maggie asked.

"Not they-her. Ca.s.sandra." The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that she was at the bottom of it all. "It's like she gets inside your head somehow. She takes what she finds there and whips it up into this."

The thought stopped Russ in midpace. "Well, dude, maybe I don't want some witch-chick picking the corners of my brain."

I forced a smirk. "Why? Y'think she'll find something there besides toe-jam?"

"Hey, you've got rides you'd rather skip, and so do I." He looked up to the red sky as if some rescue might come by helicopter. "We'll find her, and we'll bargain our way out. That's what we'll do."

But I already knew what I had to do. "No. We go on to the next ride."

"You've picked a h.e.l.l of a time to grow some guts," he said. "Do us all a favor and go back to being a coward."

I could have hit him for that. I could have hit him and hurt him; and although he was stronger than me back home, I knew things were different here. This place was different. Here, it seemed muscle wasn't made of flesh and blood; it was made of will and anger. And at that moment I had enough strength to hurl him into the eclipsed sun.

Maggie came between us like a referee. "You know," she said, "maybe I'm crazy, but I sort of liked the ride."

Russ just looked at her. "Liked it?"

"It's an amus.e.m.e.nt park, right? Maybe we should try to enjoy it."

Russ strode over to a slim boulder about as tall as he was. "Really? Why don't you ask this guy if he's enjoying it?"

"What do you mean?" Then, as I looked at the boulder, I understood. It wasn't exactly in the form of a person, but the boulder did seem to have sagging shoulders and smooth indentations that could have been eyes and a mouth, if the light hit it just right. In fact, all the boulders around gave us the uncanny impression of human figures hunched by the weight of the granite.

"Somehow," I told my friends, "I don't think any of this is for our amus.e.m.e.nt."

"All the more reason to cut a deal with the Queen of Mean and get out," Russ said.

"You do what you want, but I'm finding Quinn."

Russ threw up his hands. "What is it with you that you've got to save his b.u.t.t before your own?"

"He's my brother."

Then Maggie looked at me. "I think it's more than that, isn't it?"

I hesitated for a moment. Was it more than that? The thing is, I was the one who had pushed Quinn over the edge. I'd called him a human accident, knowing how much it would hurt him. If I hadn't said it, would he have come here? Maybe, maybe not. But I couldn't live with that, and I also knew I didn't want to live without him-not as long as I could do something about it.

I looked at the back of my hand, recalling how the symbol had glowed as it got close to that first turnstile. Then I stretched out my arm and spun in a slow circle, turning myself into a human compa.s.s. I stopped turning when the symbol began to glow just the tiniest bit brighter. "The next ride's this way."

I climbed out of the gully, and Maggie was quick to follow.

"Are you coming or not?" I asked Russ, and he reluctantly came along. For once I was the one pushing us full tilt toward the next ride.

6.

Road Rage We followed the growing glow on the backs of our hands until we came to a shiny black pond. Only it wasn't a pond. In fact, the surface was like smooth black gla.s.s. Objects moved across the obsidian face like huge, scurrying beetles-four feet long and waist high-but it was difficult to get a bead on what they were, because they weren't exactly . . . there. They kept shifting in and out of phase, appearing and disappearing, as if moving in and out of holes in some Swiss cheese dimension. It was Maggie who realized what they were.

"b.u.mper cars," she said.

As she said it I could swear I heard my brother's maniacal laugh amid the squeal of spinning tires.

Two b.u.mper cars, one forest green, the other navy blue, appeared at the edge of our vision, and when we turned our focus toward them, they didn't dart off into oblivion. Instead, they remained empty and still. They were waiting for us.

"Only two?" said Maggie.

"Hey, you and me are a team," said Russ.

Maggie darted me a glance, but I looked away.

"I drive," Maggie said.

Russ guffawed, like it was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. "Not in this universe. I'll have you know I am the b.u.mper car king."

"I'm still driving."

Russ grabbed her around the waist in his boyfriendly way. "Never mess with a guy and his wheels."

My ears flushed as I watched them. Maybe I was still mad at Russ from before. Maybe it was something new. Or maybe it was something that had always been there, filed neatly away. Well, it was time to do some refiling.

"I'll let you drive, Maggie. You can come with me," I said.

Russ was so surprised that he loosened his grip, and she eased out of it. He looked at me-not angry, but confused. "Why would she ride with you?" he asked.

"Because I'm not you," I told him. "Because I don't always have to drive."