Full Tilt (13 page)

As with all the other rides, there were a dozen or so kids weaving through the maze of the line. They didn’t see each other, didn’t see anything but the ride. It filled their minds and spirits. They were already owned by this place and didn’t know it.

By the time I reached the front, the train was full. The ride operator was standing in front of a huge lever that grew from the ground. He had a sick leer on his face, like he’d just done something he wouldn’t tell his momma
about. He also had only one arm—his left one—which was strong and muscular, I assume from working this lever since the beginning of time.

“Room up front,” he said to me, and let out a noise that was something between a giggle and sucking up snot.

I took another look at the train. Like I said, it was completely full.

“Sorry, Lefty. Guess I’ll have to ride the next one.”

The guy looked at the kid sitting in the first car and grabbed him by the front of his shirt. With a single tug, he launched the kid skyward. I never actually saw that kid come down.

“Room up front,” Lefty said again, and smiled that I-got-bodies-in-my-freezer kind of smile.

“Yeah. Funny I didn’t notice it before,” I said, and took my place.
Okay, I’m ready for this,
I told myself, as if thinking it would make it so. Just a few minutes ago I was full of piss and vinegar, as my mom would say. But now I was just about ready to let loose some of the first ingredient in my jeans. Did it
have
to be a roller coaster?

I pulled down the safety bar, but it kept popping right back up.

“Hey, wait a second!”

Too late. Lefty grabbed the huge lever, hauled on it, and away we rolled, cranking up the insanely steep climb toward a windswept sky.

It took at least ten minutes to reach the top. My hands were freezing as I tugged on that stupid lap bar, which still refused to stay down. The peak rose above the
clouds, and beneath it a massive lattice of wood dropped out of sight to the ground, which looked like it was a mile or two below us. In the world I came from, no one could build a structure like that, but here in Cassandra’s worlds there were all sorts of mystical feats of engineering.

My heart sped up, aching in my chest. What would the ride become once it began its first drop?
Maybe it’s just a roller coaster,
I tried to tell myself.
A really BIG roller coaster.

As we reached the peak I turned to see the kids behind me putting their hands up in the air. That’s when I noticed the clouds below weren’t just random shapes. There were faces in them.

The drop came into view as we crested the peak. And then the train began its fall.

My teeth rattled in my skull, and my brain felt like it would come loose in my head. We were not just being pulled by gravity, we were accelerating faster than gravity could possibly pull us. I felt the skin on my face stretched by g-forces as we dove into the clouds. And then things began to change. The ride began to take on its true form.

The little space for my legs stretched as it had in the bumper cars, but the dashboard in front of me didn’t expand into the dashboard of a car. It became an instrument panel with dozens of knobs, buttons, and screens. A glass canopy grew over me, sealing me in, and the clatter of the track changed pitch, becoming the whine of an engine.

A stick with two handles grew from the floorboard, and when I looked to the side, I could see wings stretching out from under me: wings with a bright red spot painted on each one.

This was a plane, and I was flying it.

I tried to crane my head around to see the kids behind me, and I saw enough to know that the train had broken apart into twelve separate cockpits. I was alone in my own propeller aircraft—the first in a line of a dozen planes plunging down through the clouds.

I flashed on an image of my American Airlines ticket to New York tucked so peacefully away in my desk drawer back home. All of a sudden an airline meal and an in-flight movie didn’t sound so bad.

Okay . . . okay,
I told myself, trying to rein in my panic.
So I’m flying a plane. I can do this. So what if I’ve never flown a plane before? So what if hundreds of people die every year in air disasters? I can figure this out, right? I can read all the markings on the instruments and figure out what they all do, right?

Well, maybe not. Because everything was labeled in Japanese.

That’s when it occurred to me exactly what kind of plane had big red spots painted on the wings. And why the ride was called the Kamikaze.

I’ve got a Japanese Zero in my room—or at least a model of one, perfectly glued and painted. Just like the real thing, with one big exception: The Zero in my bedroom wasn’t about to kill me.

My Zero shuddered violently as I dove down into the
cloud bank, the other planes trailing behind me. A few seconds later we were through the clouds. The ground came into focus. . . . Only it wasn’t ground at all, it was ocean. More specifically, the Pacific Ocean, and I was headed toward a little cigar-shaped gray thing in the water.

It only took a moment for my brain to get up to speed and adjust for scale. That little gray thing wasn’t so little after all. It was far away but getting closer. It was, in fact, a battleship. As I recalled from my old Battleship game, it took four direct hits to sink a battleship. As I recalled from my World War II history, countless American ships were brutally disabled by pilots of the “Divine Wind” making suicide runs, crashing their planes into battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and even aircraft carriers.

I knew enough from Quinn’s flight-simulator games to know that you pull back on the stick to make the plane go up, and so I grabbed both grips and pulled. The stick shuddered and resisted, as uncooperative as that stupid lap bar had been. The other planes buzzed behind me, and all at once I realized I was not just one of a dozen planes, I was the squadron leader. They were all following me to their doom.

Once more this place had tapped into my secret fears. Fear of flying, fear of falling, but even worse than that, the fear of taking everyone down with me.

The battleship swelled before me as I dove toward it. Now I could see sailors scrambling on the deck, manning their big guns, and firing in my direction.

They say when you’re about to die, your life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not quite right. It isn’t the flickering of life’s events that strikes you; instead, it’s the sudden realization of what your life has
meant.
Your whole life is captured in a single image that tells you who you’ve been. The image that came to me now were those stupid models hanging in my bedroom. The Zero, chased by a P-40, frozen in a pretend dogfight dive.

That was my life.

I hadn’t lived a real life—I’d had just a
model
of a life. Everything I did, everything I
thought,
was suspended safely by strings, too high up for anyone to damage. Zero contact, zero risk. Now those strings had been cut and I was going to die, never having had a chance to live without them.

A blast exploded to my right as the battleship’s guns tried to take me out. The shock wave rattled my plane. I could see the bridge of the battleship now. Crewmen inside were running for cover.

There was little time left if I was going to survive this ride. I had to put away thoughts of life and death and focus on this moment. I had to live through this moment so there could be a next one. I had the strength to do that much.

I will not crash,
I told myself.
I will not go down in a burst of flames. I won’t go down at all!
I pulled back on the steering column with the strength of that conviction, and finally it began to move. Before me the battleship fell away as my plane, and all the planes behind me, pulled out of the kamikaze dive into a parabolic arc. All
the planes, that is, except for the last one. The last plane just kept going and hit the battleship, detonating in a fireball. I felt sick.
Don’t be Quinn,
I prayed. It would be just like him to crash on purpose, just like he did on his flight simulator back home.

Then, above me, as I climbed away from the battleship, I saw a new cloud billowing up. A face appeared, eyes locked in shock and disbelief. A face that wasn’t Quinn’s.

No strings,
I told myself. I was flying with no strings, and I was no longer afraid. Like it or not, I was in charge, and there was no room for fear. I tried to get control of the plane as it lurched and spun, and I imagined the planes behind me following my motions, like they were still on a roller-coaster track, but I was the one determining the path.

Suddenly the control stick flew out of my grip and forced itself forward. The ride had taken control again, and we had started another dive. This time we were headed toward a destroyer. It began shooting at us. One of its shells took out a plane behind me. I watched it spiral a flaming path to the sea.

I fought the controls, my will straining against the will of the ride. Once again, I was able to pull up, gaining altitude at the last second, climbing away from the destroyer. Once again, the last plane didn’t pull up in time and detonated on the deck. In an instant we were back in the clouds, but by now I’d gotten a feel for the controls. It was kind of like driving a car with really bad steering. Well, okay, it was more like
skydiving
in a car
with really bad steering, but at least I could make the thing move the way I wanted it to.

I heard another explosion and looked out of the window to see one of the planes in my care fall in flames. That blast hadn’t come from below.

Another plane pulled up beside me, matching my speed, its wingtip almost touching mine. It was the American P-40 from my bedroom, with the face of a shark painted on its air intake. Its pilot waved to me.

“A great day for flying,” said Cassandra’s voice over my radio. I should have known.

“Nothing like the friendly skies,” I radioed back, then I jinked to the right, into a corkscrew, with all the planes behind me still following my lead. Cassandra fired at me. I felt more than heard her rounds tear into the tail of my Zero, but I didn’t lose control. The ride hadn’t taken me down, so she was going to do it herself.

A tight bank, and I was able to position myself right behind her. It didn’t take a Columbia scholarship to figure out how to fire my machine guns. I let them rip, tearing into her wing. The damage wasn’t enough to take her down, but it was enough to let her know I wasn’t going out without a fight.

“You’re shooting at an American plane,” her voice crackled over the radio. “How unpatriotic.”

“Sorry, I don’t speak English,” I told her. “I’m a Japanese pilot.”

She pulled her plane out of sight, and I wasn’t sure where she was until I heard her machine gun fire. The plane right behind me fell away, plunging to the sea,
trailing a plume of smoke. I dove, banked, and spun to get away, leading the remaining planes out of the path of Cassandra’s guns. She fired again but missed.

“You’re a fantastic squadron leader, Blake. This ride has never been so exciting!” She stormed me from above, leaning on her guns, tearing up my right wing. “You’re a true warrior,” she said. “There’s no greater challenge than a survivor.”

No one had ever called me a warrior before. At any other time I might have felt full of myself, but this wasn’t any other time.

I tried to maneuver, but my plane was too badly damaged. She fired again, shredding my left wing. My gauges dropped suddenly. My engine began to miss, then caught fire, and my plane began a doomed spiral toward the sea.

I didn’t know whether or not the other planes still followed my lead or if I had fallen out of formation when I took the damage. All I could see was black smoke billowing from my engine, but through that smoke, I caught glimpses of an aircraft carrier directly below.

“It’s a noble death,” Cassandra said. “An end worthy of a pilot of the Divine Wind.”

And then Cassandra’s own words came back to me.

There’s a way out of every ride.

Without intending to, she had provided the means of my salvation. My plane was crashing, no doubt about that now. But there was a way out of every ride. Even this one.

The cockpit smelled of gasoline and smoke, and a
bitter taste filled my mouth, like I’d been chewing on rubber. The engine had stopped completely. I looked frantically around the cockpit for a way out of the ride, pounding on the canopy, searching in front of me, below me, behind me. I was disoriented and dizzy from the spiraling of the Zero, but I wasn’t giving up.

“Good-bye, Blake,” and she sighed, as if sorry to see the hunt end. “It was worth the risk to bring you here.”

There’s a way out of every ride
...
a way out of every ride,
I chanted to myself over and over. A hundred knobs covered the dashboard, but I had no idea what they did because they were all marked with Japanese symbols.

Except one.

Seconds from impact, I spotted it. The ride symbol was right there on a little button hidden in a corner of the instrument panel. Ha! I didn’t wait to think about it. I hit the button.

Boom!
The canopy tore away, my seat ejected into the sky, and the plane crashed into the tower of the aircraft carrier. Shrapnel from the explosion shot past me. The heat singed my eyebrows, but I was out! I was out and rocketing skyward. No strings, no ceiling to hang them from. I’d been cut loose, and I was still alive. I
was
a survivor, and nothing had ever felt so good.

Your own words saved me, Cassandra. Who’s the winner now?

A hole opened up in the sky like the iris of a camera, and I shot through, out of the world of the Kamikaze.