Full Tilt (17 page)

“So am I dead now?” Quinn asked. “Is this what death is?”

“No, you’re just drugged. In this heat it’s always best to keep you alive until we begin work, there being no refrigeration and all.”

Quinn thought about this while Madame Embalmer continued humming to herself, measuring Quinn with some sort of ruler shorter than a yardstick. Maybe it was a cubit stick.

“What are you doing?” Quinn asked.

“Measuring you for your sarcophagus, dearie.” She turned and shouted angrily at one of her assistants. “ACHMED!” she yelled. “Easy on the salt!”

Her gawky assistant, who didn’t look much older than me, had shoveled a mountain of sea salt over an ex-Tut who was already well on the way to long-term preservation. “Yes, ma’am,” Achmed said dutifully.

Madame Embalmer shook her head and looked down at Quinn. “Waste, waste, waste! The way he uses that salt, you’d think the Dead Sea were around the corner!”

That’s when Cassandra showed up, still decked out in her Egyptian glory. I flinched and then realized that
even a flinch could give me away. But I was lucky. No one saw me.

She looked at Quinn and kissed him on the forehead. “I want him put on the fast track,” she told Madame Embalmer.

“Was he a good Tut?” she asked.

“Oh, completely incompetent,” Cassandra said.

I could see Quinn’s eyes getting moist, but his jaw was still set hard. I wonder what he was feeling. Shame? Humiliation? The realization that this truly was the end of the line? Suddenly he pulled against his bonds, but Madame Embalmer was right there to comfort him.

“There, there. Don’t you worry.”

“Wh-What’s going to happen to me?”

The old woman looked at Cassandra for permission before speaking.

“Well, it’s really rather simple,” said Madame Embalmer, taking on a singsong tone of voice, as if she were reading him a bedtime story. “First we disembowel—”

“Disembowel?”

“Yes. We take out your heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—every organ—and tuck them nicely away in their own little jars. Except, of course, for your brain. We pull
that
out through your nose with a hook.”

Quinn whimpered.

“Then,” continued the old woman, “when you’re nice and empty on the inside, we cover you with salt, to dry you up.” At the sound of a nasty
splat,
she turned to her assistant.

“ACHMED!”

Achmed picked up something from the floor and fumbled with it in his arms. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, but it looked suspiciously liverlike. “Sorry, ma’am.”

“Butterfingers!”

Achmed slipped the thing carefully into an earthen jar with a sickening slosh. I closed my eyes and grimaced. Now I had a legitimate reason never to eat my mother’s liver-and-onions again.

There were tears rolling down Quinn’s cheeks. He was afraid, and maybe for the first time in his life he was admitting that he was. “I don’t want to be empty on the inside,” he cried. “Please . . . please don’t do this.”

For a moment I thought I saw compassion in Cassandra’s gaze, but it only lasted for a moment. “Shut him up,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“I’ll go get a gag for him.”

The old woman left, and Cassandra strode down to the far end of the hall, where the mummies could no longer talk back.

This was my chance. I rose from the table where I’d been lying and hurried to Quinn. When he saw me, his eyes bulged, and he opened his mouth to scream. I clamped my linen-covered hand over his mouth before he could make a sound.

“Be quiet, it’s me!” I peeled the mummy wrappings from my head.

“Blake?”

“No, Ramses the Great.”

The temple guard had done a good job of wrapping me up, and we’d gathered enough workers to carry me here and quietly leave me on the table. Of course, getting out wouldn’t be as easy as getting in.

There was a knife strapped to my arm. I pulled it out and used it to cut the bonds on Quinn’s right hand. I was about to cut the other ropes but stopped. Instead, I put the knife into his free hand. He had to do it. I couldn’t do it for him. He had to choose, or we’d just be right back here again tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.

He looked at me almost as if he could hear what I was thinking, then he sliced through the rest of the ropes. “I’m done with this place,” he whispered. “I wanna take my organs and go home.”

He hopped off the table, but as we were about to slip away he suddenly stopped.

“Come on! What are you waiting for?”

He stared at the tray beside the table—the one that held all of his facial rings. It was like his whole life was on that little tray: his alienation and his anger, his auto-destruct attitude.

A few tables away, Achmed had spotted us.

Quinn hesitated a moment more, then reached for the tray, picking out a single ring. A little diamond stud. It was the one that Carl, Mom’s fiancé, had given him. He fixed it in his ear as we ran.

“No! Stop them!” Cassandra ran at us from the far end of the room. Workers grabbed for us, but their hands were slick from the oily balms of mummification. We
evaded their grasps, but Cassandra was much faster than we were. She was almost upon us when Achmed came out from behind a table and hurled a shovelful of salt into her eyes.

“Go on! Get to the seventh ride!” he shouted. We raced out without looking back.

We met up with the temple guard at the outer gate of the palace. Racing down the steps, we caught the attention of guards and slaves, courtiers and warriors. I expected them to try to stop us. After all, part of their jobs was to make sure the ride went smoothly. Instead, I heard murmurs spreading through the crowd as we ran past.

“That’s him!”

“There he is!”

“His sixth ride!”

Something was stirring in these people that hadn’t been here before: a sense of hope! Now taskmasters broke the chains of slaves, artisans abandoned their work, and a great rumbling began to fill the earth and sky. As I looked up at the mottled heavens the sky began to melt, like wax in a furnace.

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure,” the guard said. “I think the ride’s breaking down!”

“What?” said Quinn. But I understood, and I understood why. It’s not walls that make a prison, but the willingness of the prisoners. These rides were built on the broken, resigned spirits of those trapped here; but without them, the rides couldn’t hold.

One more ride,
I told myself. “We have to get to the next ride before this one crashes!”

“This way!” said the guard.

“No, this way’s faster,” I heard a voice behind me say. “I’ll show you!” It was the street vendor. He tossed aside his tray of trinkets and led us through a narrow alley, pointing as we came out the other side. “There.”

It was the Great Pyramid of Cheops, its golden tip glowing against the melting sky. There was a hieroglyph emblazoned on the golden tip, but it wasn’t Egyptian: It was the ride symbol, shining a neon red. To reach it, we’d have to climb the pyramid.

Quinn and I took off across the sands toward the pyramid in the distance, and as I looked around me I realized we were not alone. Dozens ran alongside of us now, a wave of people escorting us, cheering me on to the last ride.

I knew Cassandra was somewhere nearby. I could feel the wild extremes of her soul—the searing heat, the frosty cold. But the wake of excitement created by the ride in revolt protected us and swept us toward the pyramid.

The rumble in the earth grew more violent, and now the entire sky was melting away. Then, as we reached the base of the pyramid, the ground tore open beneath me. Quinn was already up on the first stone block, but I lost my footing and tumbled into the widening crevasse. Sand poured in all around me; steam rose from down below as I fell. I was so close! So close! My hands had touched the pyramid, but I hadn’t moved fast enough.
Now my eyes were so full of sand and steam, I couldn’t see where I was falling, but I didn’t have to see; I knew. I knew because of the sounds around me. The terrible gnashing sounds of gears.

I’d fallen into The Works.

I may forget everything else that happened to me in the park. The memories of the rides may be sucked from my mind by a real world that cannot allow such things to exist. But I will never forget The Works. That will live on in my nightmares. I will feel its grinding metallic teeth every time I see scenes of war, or a plane crash, or some other disaster on the news, too terrible to watch but too riveting to look away from. I will see in those things the dark clockwork that gets built gear by gear out of our dying dreams and our desperate fears. Cassandra did not build The Works. We’re the ones who built it. She just gave it form. I know that as surely as I know that I stood there, and watched the wheels turn.

I fell through the crack in the desert sands and landed with a clang on an iron catwalk in a place so hot and humid, my lungs felt as if I were breathing water. All around me were gears, shiny chrome gears, from the size of a dime to what seemed the size of planets. They all revolved at a fever pitch, turning crankshafts and

pumping pistons in an unrelenting dance that extended downward into a bottomless pit. The chrome cogs were as cold as a glacier, and yet the air burned furnace-hot. Waves of heat and spatial distortion pulsed out from the great machine, and I had to hold on to the catwalk to overcome a light-headed vertigo as I looked down into the depths. Yet that wasn’t the worst of it.

I’d thought at first that whoever was consigned to The Works got ground up in its unforgiving gears like human hamburger, but I was wrong.

There were figures working the machine—hundreds upon hundreds of them. They held levers, valves, and cranks, pushing and pulling in a backbreaking rhythm, but they weren’t really holding the machinery. They were
growing
out of it, their flesh melding into the metal of the gear-work, as much a part of the machine as the cogs, pinions, and rotors. Their muscles bulged, sinewy and strong from the work, but their eyes were vacant and reflective chrome.

The park had absorbed them, as Cassandra had said, but I could never have imagined this.

Closest to me were two figures laboring on alternate sides of a two-man pump—a seesaw device, like an old-fashioned hand-cranked railroad car. They struggled to turn a ratchet wheel that was connected to a larger wheel that turned a shaft running down to the sweltering depths. Their eyes—their souls—had been voided into mechanical numbness.

It was Maggie and Russ.

“They make a nice team,” I heard Cassandra say.

I turned but couldn’t find her. Her voice seemed to come from all around me.

“We’re all part of something larger than ourselves,” she said. “That’s the nature of the universe. And now your friends are part of my machine.”

My revulsion and anger fused into something so heavy, I couldn’t move. There was nowhere to go. The catwalk ended just behind me at a huge wheel that slowly churned the steam. On either side of the wheel was a drop down into the hellish Works.

Cassandra appeared out of the steam on the narrow catwalk, still adorned in Egyptian splendor. This was it. She was coming in for the final kill. She’d won.

What she said next caught me completely by surprise.

“Thank you, Blake.” Her voice was soft yet surprisingly clear over the throbbing of the great machine. “Because of you, I’ve experienced fear for the first time. Your challenge was remarkable.” She put her hands on my shoulders. Something about her touch made the atmosphere of The Works different. Sweat still poured from me, yet I felt chilled deep inside. “You wanted to make a deal before,” she said. “Will you deal with me now?”

And against all my better judgment, I said, “What do you have in mind?”

“Stop now,” she said, “and you can share it with me.”

“Share what?”

“Everything. All the rides and any other ride you can imagine.”

“As your slave.”

“No, as my equal.”

I realized that she was not just holding me, I was holding her as well. Why? If I felt such fury and such revulsion at what she was, why did I hold her? Was it just her beauty that captivated me, or something more?

“This place has always been out of balance,” she said. “It was all that I knew. Now I want to experience the balance you bring.”

Suddenly the slave rags I wore began to shimmer like gold. Jewels grew in the fabric, and I found myself clad in a robe of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds.

“You could be the god Osiris over a new, better Egypt,” she told me. “You could build any world you desire, be its king or its subject; you could experience thrills or tranquility and move freely from one ride to another, just as I do.” She ran her hands down the length of my jewel-covered arms, then clasped my hands in hers. “I am the park’s soul. I want
you
to be its mind.”

Was she sincere, or was it just another trick? I’d become aware enough to see through her deceptions, and this offer felt real. I had brought her something she never had. I was the only one who ever had.

I tore myself away from her eyes long enough to look at Russ and Maggie, laboring across the chasm. “What about them? What about my brother? Will you let them go?”

“I can’t do that. But if you stay here, we’ll create rides for each of them. They can have whatever they want, whatever they need, forever and ever.”

Could that be possible? Would she really put that kind of power in my hands? I imagined the rides I might
design for my friends. For Maggie I’d build a palace of mirrors that told all the truths about herself that were worth telling. How she was kind, generous, compassionate, and, yes, beautiful. Maybe a log flume for Russ! Not a slow, dull one, but one where he could ride down the rapids of an endless river, camping every night at its bank. And for my brother, perhaps a parachute jump that air-dropped food to a starving people. It would open him up to the thrill found in giving, rather than taking.

“Think about it, Blake. This place could be different with you here.”