Full Tilt

by Neal Shusterman

Page 5

 

  I spun to face him, feeling his words like a slap. So he did know! But to use his knowledge against me like that—it was unforgivable.

  “Accident?” I said. “No, Quinn. You’re the only ‘accident’ in this family!”

  I regretted it the moment I said it, but it was too late. I couldn’t take it back. Quinn’s expression hardened into hate, and I braced myself for a serious verbal beating. But instead, he broke eye contact, looking down at the mess on the ground. He brushed the cookie flakes from his hand, pulling out the fortune.

  “Hey, don’t worry about me, bro,” he said, waving his fortune. “It says here YOU ARE EMPEROR OF ALL YOU SURVEY. ” He crumpled the paper into a ball and flicked it away.

  I wanted to say something to him. An apology, maybe, but it was like I’d just thrown a stone at a glass house and the shards were still falling all around me. I just had to get out, so I went to my room and lay down on the taut blanket of my perfectly made bed, looking up at the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower and the Kremlin and the Great Wall of China—things that existed somewhere out there in one of the many dimensions I knew I’d never have access to. Things that were all so frighteningly far away.

  Screaming. Spinning out of control. Gripping tightly on to the seat. So dizzy . . .

  I am there again. I am seven, on a school bus, spinning. Crashing through the guardrail, caught on the edge of the canyon now, balanced like a teeter-totter, tilting, tilting. Me, crawling down the aisle, toward the emergency exit at the back. The floor rising like a black wave before me as the front end of the bus tilts forward, and I’m climbing the rising floor toward the back of the bus. Pounding, pounding, pounding the emergency exit door. A teacher screaming, “Open it, Blake. ” What’s her name? I can’t remember. I’m hitting the door, banging, kicking. I’m not strong enough to open it. I’m not strong enough to open the emergency exit door.

  The floor of the bus is a rising wave. The wave hits. It swallows me.

  My eyes shot open, and I shivered uncontrollably until the warmth of my room brought my mind and body back from the nightmare. It was two o’clock in the morning—definitely not my favorite time to be awake. The dream was fading, but something wasn’t right. Strange light flashed through the blinds, casting shifting slits of light on my travel posters. I sat up and looked out of the window.

  An ambulance was parked on our driveway.

  “He was just lying there on the living room floor,” Mom was telling the paramedics as I came out of my room. “I couldn’t wake him up. ”

  It was Quinn.

  They had him on the couch now, but he wasn’t moving. One of the two guys shone a light into Quinn’s eyes and checked his pulse.

  “Accelerated pulse. Eyes fixed and dilated,” he said. “Do you know what he was on?”

  What he was “on”? The question infuriated me. “He wasn’t ‘on’ anything,” I said. They turned to see me there for the first time. “Quinn doesn’t do drugs. ”

  But he does other things, I thought. Things that can get into his bloodstream as quickly as drugs. Things that are just as addictive. He does acceleration instead of speed.

  But I didn’t tell them that, and they just looked at me, not believing me. Not even Mom. She ran off to check his drawers for whatever stash he might have.

  The paramedics lifted Quinn onto a gurney, and as they did, something fell off the couch: a stuffed bear with a lopsided head wearing a yellow shirt with a pocket. I picked up the bear. The pocket was empty. The invitation was gone.

  There was a logical, sensible explanation for that—there had to be—but I wasn’t feeling sensible at that moment. I hurried over to Quinn. His eyes were half open as if he were dead, but he was still breathing. It was as if Quinn weren’t really there. His body was, but Quinn himself was gone.

  I go places sometimes.

  “Where did you go, Quinn?” I said aloud. “Where did you go?” And as I peered into his eyes I got something of an answer.

  Because reflected from the shine of his wide pupils I could see lights—spinning carnival lights, and I could swear I heard the faint echoes of calliope music and screams.

  The paramedics shouldered me out of the way and rolled Quinn out the door.

  4

  True Void

  I’m not the kind of guy to make huge leaps into the impossible. I don’t believe in aliens, I have no faith in psychics, and tales of the Loch Ness monster leave me cold. So I can’t begin to explain what made me believe that Quinn had stolen my invitation and taken some sort of spiritual road trip to God-knows-where. Call it unwanted intuition, but whatever it was, I simply knew.

  “It’s not that we don’t believe you, Blake,” Maggie said. “It’s just that you need to see this from our side. ”

  By twenty past two I was in the Volvo with Russ and Maggie, because I knew I couldn’t face this trip alone. I had driven to their houses and woken them up with long blasts of my horn—woken up half the neighborhood, I imagine—and practically dragged them out of bed.

  “You wanted to go,” I’d told them. “Now you’ve got your chance. ”

  I slammed my brakes at a stop sign. Russ and Maggie jolted forward from the backseat, their seat belts digging into their shoulders.

  “Thanks. That woke me up,” said Russ.

  “This is crazy,” Maggie said. “I mean, you’ve put two and two together and come up with pi. ”

  I floored the accelerator and pulled through the intersection. “You didn’t see Quinn’s eyes. I’m telling you, he wasn’t there. Maybe his body was, but he wasn’t. Don’t ask me how to explain it, but somehow he’s at that freaking amusement park. ”

  “You mean like an out-of-body experience?” Maggie asked.

  “I don’t know! I just know he’s there. ” I screeched to a halt at the next stop sign, then hurled forward again.

  “I think I just had an out-of-body experience,” Russ said.

  “But . . . if he went there in his head,” Maggie asked, “how are we supposed to get there in a Volvo?”

  “All I know is that we had an invitation to an address on Hawking Road. It’s the only clue we have, so I’m following it. ”

  I turned onto the deserted stretch of Hawking Road. It wound through a forest, leading nowhere anyone would ever want to go.

  Maggie put her hand on my shoulder. Russ was too tired to even notice. “Listen,” she said, “we’ll get there, and you’ll see it’s just a carnival. Then we can all drive to the hospital and wait to find out what’s up with Quinn. ” She spoke to me like someone talking to a leaper on a ledge. Well, maybe she was right. The best thing that could happen to me was to prove that I was a deranged idiot. It was better than the alternative.

  We passed a sign that said SPEED LIMIT 45. From habit, I looked down at the speedometer. The pin wavered at 45. That wouldn’t do. I extended my foot and watched as our speed passed 50.

  “Blake,” said Russ. “You’re speeding. ”

  “I know. ”

  “All right. Now I’m scared. ”

  Up ahead a wooden sign nailed to a tree bore a red symbol—a wave intersecting a spiral—just like the one on the invitation. An arrow pointed to the left, down a dirt road, and I took a sharp turn, feeling the car almost lose its grip on the asphalt. The smoothness of the paved road gave way to bone-jarring, uneven bumps. Deep down, I knew this place we were headed wasn’t really an amusement park.

  Am I nuts? Am I nuts to think what I’m thinking?

  “Watch out!” screamed Maggie.

  Suddenly the road took a sharp turn, and a huge oak tree loomed in my headlights. I spun the wheel and stomped on the brake. The wheels lost traction, and the car narrowly missed the tree. We careened through the underbrush until finally the car skidded to a halt.

  I shut my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to pull myself together. Somehow everything around me felt different in some fundamental way that’s
still hard to describe. You know how when there’s a noise that’s so constant, you forget there’s any noise at all? Like the hum of an air conditioner? You don’t notice the sound until it’s gone, and then, for a moment, the deeper silence is so eerily empty, your brain kind of gets thrown off balance. That’s the best way I can describe what I felt as I sat there behind the wheel—only it wasn’t just sound, it was every other sense as well. It was like ripping through the normal fabric of life’s noise into a true void.

  I stepped out of the car. We’d come to a stop just short of a canyon rim. There before us was the old quarry, which had been shut down for years. Only now it didn’t look much like a quarry. The crevasse below was a fog-filled rift, glowing with colored lights. I could smell cotton candy and popcorn. I could hear the sound of grinding gears, punctuated by the ghostly echoes of screaming riders. In the center of the breach I could see the very top of a Ferris wheel rising above the fog, churning the moonlit mist like a riverboat paddle.

  “I think we’ve all gone schizo,” Russ said, holding Maggie tightly, as if she were the one who was unnerved.

  I turned at the sound of nearby laughter. Other kids. Where had they come from? They sifted through the woods, invitations in hand, descending a path down into the canyon. Was this how Quinn came here? I wondered. Was this ridge some interface between mind and matter, and were all these kids actually lying unconscious somewhere? I hadn’t seen any other cars, and this place was too far out of the way to walk. But that would mean . . . No. I didn’t want to think about it.

  With my friends close behind, I joined the other kids in the procession toward the park.

  Russ looked at the narrow, winding path down into the crevasse. “How do you suppose they got all those rides down there? You think there’s a back road?”

  Neither Maggie nor I answered him.

  “I mean, it was a quarry, right? There has to be a road. . . . ”

  We came through the layer of fog. There before us was the entrance to the park. Ticket booths and turnstiles. Pretty ordinary, except for the fact that every theme park I’ve ever been to has its name written on all available surfaces, from benches to soda cups, just in case you might forget where you are. This park didn’t seem to have a name.

  “I’ll need to see your invitations,” a cashier demanded as we came to his booth. He had a little computer console but no cash register. The guy didn’t look too healthy. He was kind of malnourished and crater-eyed. His skin was so pale, it looked like he hadn’t seen the sun in a long time.

  I pretended to check my pockets. “Wouldn’t you know it. It’s in my other pants. ”

  “Sorry,” the cashier said. “No one gets in without an invitation. ”

  I leaned in close to him. “Listen, my kid brother stole it, and I have to get in there and kick his butt. ”

  Suddenly he stiffened, putting a hand to his ear. That’s when I noticed he was wearing one of those earpieces. You know, the kind that the secret service wear. He listened to something in his earphone. “Yes,” he said. “All right. ”