Full Tilt Part 16

The worlds of Ca.s.sandra's park were not so resilient. In the end they turned out to be no more substantial than soap bubbles churned out by The Works. All it took to shut the whole thing down was a well-placed monkey wrench. All it took was one survivor.

As I stood at the icy edge of Colfax Ravine, the mangled guardrail beside me, the heavens and earth began to shake. Ca.s.sandra suddenly lost interest in me and looked up with growing dread.

It happened all at once: a sharp tearing of sky and splitting of earth. Gears ejected from the ground. The light of different skies poured into the tearing fabric of the dead gray clouds that covered this scene of my memory.

In the distance the Leaning Tower of Pisa tore a hole in the sky and crashed to the ground. Much closer, a healthy chunk of Mount Rushmore fell from above and took out the road less than a hundred yards away.

As the cracks in the ground widened into fissures, people began to climb out. Freed from The Works, they ran in all directions, delirious with-was it fear or relief? I couldn't tell. Many fell back into the great fissures, unable to escape the park, but many more navigated the hazards to find the falling brick walls and shredding gates that once enclosed the park. I tried to find Maggie and Russ in the crowd, but there were just too many faces.

Did I do this? I had seen Ca.s.sandra's Egypt dissolve, but that was only one ride. This was all of them coming undone, collapsing into one another. This was the entire park dying. A gear the size of a manhole cover exploded from the ground, and I ducked to keep from being beheaded. When I looked up again, there was Quinn, spilling from the barren world of black sky and confused road signs onto the cracking asphalt.

The second he saw me, he ran to me, giving me a cool high five and a less-cool hug. "You made it!"

I was too distracted to see Ca.s.sandra coming. She hurled Quinn out of her way and slid right up to me. Before I could make a move, I felt her hand on my chest, her nails like talons digging into my skin, growing toward my heart. I was frozen. Paralyzed. Quinn tried to grab her, but the power of her searing, freezing extremes jolted him like an electric surge.

"This isn't over," she hissed. "It can't be over. I can't be over."

"Let me go." My voice was so weak, I could barely hear it.

"You'll take me with you." Her other hand was cupped behind my head now, her nails in my scalp.

"No."

"Because of you, I've found fear and have finally experienced loss. Because of me, you've found strength. We've been too much to each other. And so you'll take me with you. I will sleep within you." Her earthen shroud clung to me, dissolving into my flesh, covering me like a coc.o.o.n. She pressed closer still. "Your world needs me. Needs what I offer, needs what I take." I could feel the cold and the heat of her soul beginning a migration into mine. "There's always room for another theme park. There are always more who want to ride."

She wanted a safe haven within me, lying dormant until she was strong enough to build a new park. I would not be a harbor for a spirit such as this. If my will was my strength, I must make mine stronger than hers.

"No!" I said, much more forcefully than before. I still couldn't move my arms or legs, but there was fear now in her eyes. "There's still one more thing you need to feel. One more experience left." It was difficult, but I raised my arms. I fought to grip her shoulders.

"Experience it with me, Blake."

"No," I told her. "You've got to face this alone." Then I shoved her with the full force of my will. She flew from me as if she weighed nothing at all and landed a dozen yards away on the cracking asphalt.

She pushed herself up, but only enough to look at me, eyes locking on mine. A shadow grew above her, but she didn't move. Even from a distance, I could feel the extremes of her soul, but I felt them as something more human: fiery, pa.s.sionate anger joined to a chilling and hopeless longing. But now both extremes were caught in a delicate balance, and she was unable to move as the shadow grew larger all around her.

"Good-bye, Ca.s.sandra," I said as a farmhouse plucked from the plains of Kansas came down on her with a deafening crash.

And Ca.s.sandra was gone. Not so much as her feet stuck out from beneath the house.

"She was a bad witch," said Quinn.

A strange light glowed around us now, hurting my eyes, making it difficult to see anything.

Quinn looked aside, seeing something that I didn't. "Mom?"

In a flash he was gone, and I felt myself tugged backward into the light. It engulfed me, dissolved me. For a moment I could feel myself stretched apart-my thoughts, my feelings refracting into a rainbow, then refocusing into white light.

The white light of dawn. It shone in my eyes, and I had to squint against it, turning my face away.

I was pressed tightly against a pillow, but it wasn't exactly a pillow. I couldn't move.

"We'll have you out in a second," a voice said beside me. I could hear the tearing of metal, like I did when the park broke down.

A fireman knelt just outside the smashed window of my Volvo. He and a second fireman worked with a ma.s.sive pair of pliers. The Jaws of Life. I'd seen those things on rescue shows. I tried to s.h.i.+ft, but I was pinned by the air bag.

A few yards past the firemen, Maggie talked to a paramedic who was h.e.l.l-bent on examining her. "I'm all right, really. No, I don't want to sit down, okay?"

"Where is most of the pain?" one of the firemen asked me.

"I don't feel any pain."

The two rescue workers looked at each other ominously, then one went off to prepare the back board they planned to carry me away on. I wiggled my toes to make sure I wasn't paralyzed. Then I fought down the air bag to have a look at what I had hit.

In front of the car was a thick oak tree. I knew that tree. I had almost hit it before we arrived at the park.

"Lucky that tree stopped you, or you might have gone over the edge."

We were in the woods at the edge of the quarry. I'd totaled my car against that tree.

I began to get angrier and angrier as I considered what it all meant. The park was not a hallucination. It wasn't even remotely like a dream. My clothes still smelled of smoke from the dying park . . . but couldn't that be from the smoking wreckage of the car? I could still feel the ache from Ca.s.sandra's grip on my chest. .. but couldn't that be from the crash?

No. I refused to accept a car crash as an explanation.

"There was an amus.e.m.e.nt park," I told the fireman. "There were hundreds of kids ..."

"I'm sure there were," he said, like I was delusional or something. "You can tell us all about it after we get you out." Well, what did I expect? Did I think he would take my claims seriously? How could he?

That's when the truth hit me, and the truth was so simple, so complete, it was obvious. Of course all these things could be rationally explained. It could be no other way. Like I said, reality bends and twists to make room for anything, but in return, the real world demands an explanation for all things. And when there is no explanation, it's obliged to create one. Reality merely bent itself a little further than usual to leave me wrapped around this tree. I'm sure if I came home with one of Ca.s.sandra's rings clasped in my hand, one of the firemen would just happen to be missing one just like it. Reality prevails at all costs.

The universe was having a little joke on me.

I laughed. The firemen thought I was in pain, and a paramedic arrived, ready to administer triage. "Just another second. Try not to move."

They peeled away the ruined door, and while they hurried to get the back board in place, I stepped out and stood up. They just looked at me, stunned. I suppose people would call it a miracle, walking away from a wreck like this, and I began to wonder if, perhaps, every time someone walked away from a totaled car, they were also subjects of a "reality correction."

Now the paramedic who had been so intent on Maggie came over to me and joined with the others to persuade me that I was gravely injured-no matter how uninjured I felt-and that an observational stint at the hospital was in order. I agreed to undergo whatever mandatory medical attention they required if they would just give me a few minutes to see to my friends.

Maggie stood against a tree, just staring at the wreck, like she couldn't take it in. I went up to her and found myself taking her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

She looked at me, searching for something. I knew what she needed to hear.

"Yes," I told her. "We were there. It happened."

She relaxed and held my hand tighter. There were a million things we could say to each other. But sometimes, when you get the connection right, those things have even greater value when they're left unsaid.

She looked at my Volvo, which had so valiantly sacrificed its crumple zone for us. "Too bad about your car."

I shrugged. "Who needs a car in New York?"

"So you're really going, then?"

I took her other hand. "I'll fly home every few months. If I don't, Quinn might start thinking he's an only child."

At the mention of Quinn's name she began to tremble. "Quinn . . . is he-"

"Out." I said. Simple as that. No explanation needed.

"Good." She reached into her pocket and handed me her phone. "Call your mom. Just to be sure."

I dialed Mom's cell phone, and she picked up on the first ring.

"Hi, Mom."

"Oh, thank G.o.d. I tried the house. No one was home. Where are you?"

"Out with Maggie and Russ. I couldn't sleep."

She went on to tell me how comas are such strange things. One minute you're dead to the world, and the next you're sitting up in a hospital bed playing Scrabble with your future stepfather. Apparently Quinn had woken up a short time ago and immediately asked for ice cream, knowing that kids in hospitals got whatever they wanted.

"The MRI showed a small fatty tumor in his brain," Mom said, her voice trembling. "They say it's benign and totally harmless, but I just don't know, Blake. ..."

"I'm sure they're right," I said before she could break down in tears. "For all we know, it's been there all his life." If it was, it would go a long way toward explaining his early autism. And a whole lot of other things, for that matter.

"Do you want to talk to him?"

I could hear Quinn in the background trying to convince Carl that LedZep was a legitimate Scrabble word. No doubt the Z was on a triple letter score, and Quinn wouldn't back down for the world. King Tut still moved for no man.

"That's okay," I said. "Just tell him ..." I smiled. "Tell him not to ride the hospital bed up and down too fast. He'll get whiplash."

"Very funny."

I told her that I'd see her at the hospital soon, but I left out the part about how I'd be coming in an ambulance.

There was one more person I needed to see. I found Russ sitting on a boulder, looking out over the quarry. I stood at the edge next to him. I couldn't say cliffs and ledges didn't still bother me, but I could stand at one now and not freak out. There was nothing down in the quarry now, not even morning mist.

"You have to take an ambulance back," I told Russ. "If you're a good boy, they might even let you ride up front."

He nodded, making it clear that he would come when he was good and ready. He wouldn't look at me. I had no idea what to say to him, so I just kicked a stone over the edge. We both waited until we heard it hit bottom.

"Listen, I forgive you, okay?"

He laughed bitterly at that. "Of course you do. You'd even forgive Ca.s.sandra if she gave you puppy-dog eyes."

Finally he looked at me. I'm still not sure what I saw in him. Some anger? A hint of the same kind of guilt I had held on to for so many years? Or maybe a lingering memory of the Ferris wheel. He never did tell me what that ride had done to him, and now I suspected he never would. We'd all learned things about ourselves tonight, and I didn't think Russ was too comfortable with what he'd discovered. I could tell he'd been damaged. Not on the outside, but deeper down, where it really mattered. I didn't know if it was the kind of damage he'd ever recover from.

"So. Is there something going on between you and Maggie?" he asked.

"I don't know. Maybe."

He hardened his jaw, looked down at his hand, and clenched his fist until his knuckles were white-although I don't think he knew what he wanted to punch. He held his fist tight for a few seconds, then let it go, shaking out his hand. He returned his gaze to the canyon.

"Don't expect me to write to you at Columbia," he said. But somehow I expect he will.

When I returned to my accordion of a Volvo, two of the paramedics were staring at the smashed front end. I figured they were just marveling at how we could just walk away from a crash like that, but that wasn't it at all.

"Ever see anything like that?" one asked the other.

The other tilted his head to the side and squinted his eyes. As I got closer I could see it too. It was in the crumple pattern of the hood. The way the metal had bent and the way the light hit it, you could swear there was a face in the folds of the metal. Cheekbones, eye sockets, a nose and mouth.

"Optical illusion," said the second paramedic. "A trick of the light, like that face on Mars."

Maybe so. Except that this face was Ca.s.sandra's.

I stared into the shadows of her eyes in the crumpled hood, and her gaze held me there for a long time. I didn't know what I was searching for. I didn't know why I couldn't look away. I knew I had to leave because the ambulance was waiting. My life was waiting. But I kept looking at those eyes in the strange wrinkle of steel until a cloud covered the sun, and her face was gone.

Are you dead, Ca.s.sandra, or just sleeping? Should I mourn for you or curse you for the things you've done? I suspect she'll always be there, somewhere in the scenery, but I can't let that stop me from living.

"Anything you need from the car?" a fireman asked as a tow truck pulled up.

"No, nothing. Nothing at all."

As I headed toward the ambulance with Maggie and Russ, I thought about tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. I thought about leaving for school, and I felt those familiar b.u.t.terflies fill my stomach. But they're no longer a source of discomfort.

In fact, I think I kind of like the feeling.

The limbo-land Everlost is at war. On one side stands Mary, self-proclaimed queen of lost souls, determined to retain her iron grip on Everlost's children. On the other is Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, determined to set the souls of Everlost free.

Everlost will never be the same.

Check out the beginning of the second book in the Skinjacker trilogy Fresh Havoc There were rumors.

Of terrible things, of wonderful things, of events too immense to keep to oneself, and so they were quietly shared from soul to soul, one Afterlight to another, until every Afterlight in Everlost had heard them.

There was the rumor of a beautiful sky witch, who soared across the heavens in a great silver balloon. And there were whispers of a terrible ogre made entirely of chocolate, who lured unsuspecting souls with that rich promising smell, only to cast them down a bottomless pit from which there was no return.

In a world where memories bleach clean from the fabric of time, rumors become more important than that which is actually known. They are the life's blood of the bloodless world that lies between life and death.

On a day much like any other in Everlost, one boy was about to find out if those rumors were true.

His name is unimportant-so unimportant that he himself had forgotten it-and less important still, because in a brief time he will be gone forever.