“Dear god,” she wheezed, her breath snatched from her. There was no stench of manure, sweat, or depression. It was death. A wall of people forced Skid and Brick forward, and they stepped into the first ring of this three-ring clusterfuck to get out of their way. Sunlight pushing through the canvas overhead was the only light in the tent. In minutes, the residents of Peculiar filled the metal stands with pine boards for seats; they’d made no noise, thrown no elbows. They simply filed in and sat down, save for the ones who blocked the exit.
“What the hell’s that smell?” Brick asked, leaning in close.
“Death. It might be us in a few minutes.”
“Huh?”
The audience sat still and silent. Skid loosened the knot on the sleeves around her waist. “Get ready for anything,” she said aloud, not caring who heard her.
The silence grew as if the audience anticipated the show and held its collective breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice echoed in the dim light and golf claps rose from audience. “Welcome to Paradise.”
The golf claps became a full-on come-on-KISS-we-need-an-encore madness. The noise, nearly deafening, stopped as quickly as it started.
Lights high up on poles snapped on, flooding the tent in bright yellow, and Skid almost fell into Brick.
A man, or what could have been a man, stood in the center ring, a microphone in his bony hand. His tuxedo, similar to what Randall Roe wore when he whipped up a crowd, was torn and stained with mold. A huge false handlebar mustache rested under his nose, held in place by a strip of stained elastic. But his face almost knocked Skid to the floor of the tent; strips of rotted flesh dangled from bleach-white bone.
“Don’t look at the floor.” The words were close, but she had a hard time hearing them. She thought they’d come from Brick.
“What?”
“Don’t look at the floor,” he repeated, his face inches from her ear.
She looked at the floor. Scraps and pieces of flesh scattered the ground, and human skulls lined the ring. “I think I’m going to throw up.”
Something moved in her periphery. Her head instinctively turned toward it. Human-shaped figures melted from the harsh shadows cast by the spotlights, some with tattered circus costumes, others nude, bones showing through holes in their flesh.
“What kind of hell is this?” fell from Skid’s slack, dry lips.
A sound, the Gregorian chant of the damned, started low through the stands and grew in pitch until Skid nearly threw her hands to her ears. Then it stopped. The townspeople lifted their hands to their sunglasses and pulled them off as if they were of one mind. A swallow caught in Skid’s throat. She saw what kind of hell this was. The eyes that had been hidden by those dark glasses were black, solid black. No iris, no sclera. Just black—sharks’ eyes.
“We gotta leave.” Brick sounded panicked. “Like, right now.”
“Let’s give it up for our guests,” the dead man in the tuxedo shouted, the microphone booming his hollow voice over the audience. His emaciated arm and fleshless hand picked them out, as if the audience didn’t know who he was talking about. The golf claps returned. “They’re the next brave souls—” The thing’s voice drew souls out for seconds “—to try the Ride of Death.”
Someone shouted from the distance, but Skid couldn’t make out from whom, or where it came from. In the stillness of the thousands of things that looked like people sitting on bleachers in this tent of death, this one flaw, this one outburst, felt wrong.
Brick reached down and took her hand. She let him.
“Aaaand,” the emcee boomed. “What happens if the motorcycle—” He paused, and another spotlight sprang to life, revealing a Laverda American Eagle 750cc not ten feet from them. “—fails to clear the ring of fire?”
On the opposite side of the center ring, a hoop much too small to fit the motorcycle through, suspended by means they could not see, sprang to life. Fire erupted from it in a loud, low whoosh.
Another chant started in the crowd, low at first, then pounding like a drumbeat. “Eat them. Eat them. Eat them.”
The smell, the heat, those dark black eyes hit Skid with fists. “You’re right, we gotta leave.” She grabbed Brick’s sleeve and yanked. “Now.”
“Who’s ready for some action?” the emcee bellowed, and the stands exploded into applause. Two of the skeletal beings shuffled toward the center of the ring pushing a ramp for the motorcycle. There wasn’t another ramp on the other side of the flames to absorb the blow of the landing.
The emcee stepped toward them, its thin body momentarily blocked out a spotlight, throwing it into silhouette as it donned a top hat. For a moment, it could have been Randall Roe.
But she knew it couldn’t be Randall. She wasn’t that cursed.
“It doesn’t hurt that much, does it?” Randall asked Skid as he pushed her wheelchair down the hospital hallway toward the front glass doors. “I mean, you can walk, can’t you?”
“It’s procedure,” the gruff nurse beside him said. She hadn’t been gruff to Skid, just to the man whose motorcycle trick had put a sixteen-year-old girl into the hospital with a concussion, stitches, and broken bones.
“I’m not very good with motorcycles,” Skid said.
Randall nodded, his grin too merry for her tastes. You’re supposed to be sorry, Dad.
“I saw that, kiddo. But you need to do something. You’re old enough now you need to hold a real job because—”
“Responsibility is what keeps the trains running,” she finished for him. “I know.”
The nurse grunted.
Randall glanced at the nurse then snapped his attention back to the hall before him. “What are you good at?” he asked. “You know, circus-wise.”
Circus-wise. Skid knew at that moment in just two years she’d never have to do anything circus-wise ever again. She’d get her GED and drive into the sunset—on anything as long as it wasn’t a motorcycle.
“I’m pretty good with knives,” she said.
Chapter Twelve
Sept-Glitch-in-the-Matrix-ember 7
1
The pistol lay on the floor between the two men. Bud Light Dave ignored it and sat casually back on the office chair. Karl lifted himself from the hard, cold floor, his whole body shaking as Oscar pounded the door from engineering, screaming something over and over. Dave couldn’t tell what his chicken wing–eating friend said. The door and window were designed for noise dampening, and lipreading a Sasquatch was hard. Dave also didn’t know where all this was going, but Karl wasn’t nearly as in control as he thought.
“You looked like a pinwheel,” Dave said, smirking. “You gotta admit that was pretty funny.”
“Shut up, Collison.” Karl flashed him a pained look and moved in a wide arc away from the door to the opposite side of the room, a slight limp in his step. Karl didn’t move toward the pistol; he didn’t seem to remember it was there.
“You’re in no position to be a smart-ass.” Karl reached for a bank of computer terminals and leaned against a monitor, his face drained white by Oscar’s outburst. The hatred from Oscar was palpable even through the thick ballistic glass. “I’m in command here,” Karl shouted, holding up his right hand, index finger out. “I have a—” He looked down. “Dang it.”
It was at this point Dave realized there were two options open to him. Karl would either kill him and this shit show would be over, or Karl’s head would explode on its own. Then he could turn off the machine at his leisure.
“You still haven’t told me why you brought me here,” Dave said, nodding toward the master control panel across the room. “I could just hit the big red button and, boop, this is all over. You’re not yourself, you know? Have you finally contemplated the possibility your actions could strand you in a universe that never invented Cheetos?”
The rage on his boss’s face returned. His skin glowed red as his hands shot o
ut to pull the monitor right off the desk. The government-purchased computer crashed onto the floor in a shattered mess that would require quite a bit of paperwork to replace.
“Stop it.” The words came out in a controlled burn. “I know what you’re doing.” He stood straight and tucked his shirt back in as well as he could. “We’re here for two reasons.” He waved a hand dismissively before starting again. “One, I thought the cockroaches in HR would eat you, but apparently I can’t trust HR to do anything right. Two, since you’re still alive, I want you to see this experiment—my experiment—through to the end. Besides—” He reached into his front pocket and pulled out a large brass key, the key to the control panel. No one could hit the button without that key. “—it’s not like you can just walk over and boop.”
Karl threw his shoulders back and tried to walk like he owned the place, but he’d hurt his leg jumping away from Oscar and instead resembled a drunken sidekick in a 1960s western.
“I really wish you’d look at this from any perspective other than your own,” Dave said, leaning back in the chair and lacing his fingers behind his head. “You’ve altered—” The room wavered and fell in on itself for a moment before reality popped back in an elastic snap. He didn’t flinch. “—the flow of time and have intersected dimensions. These aren’t just paradoxes and temporal causality loops we’re dealing with here. These are—”
A man who hadn’t been there before stepped into Dave’s line of sight. Dave shot out of his chair, sending it wheeling back into the wall.
“Wha—?”
Dave had to give himself a moment to understand what his eyes told him. This handsome man was a clean and freshly shaven version of him except for his short but noticeable sideburns. He also still wore the shoes taken by the homeless guy. An urge to tackle the man just to get his shoes surged through Dave, but he didn’t move; his head was too jumbled.
“You’re me,” he said.
Clean-David ignored Bud Light Dave as he bent and picked up Karl’s pistol from the floor.
“She’s coming,” he told Karl, his voice calm, serious. “We have to be ready.”
Karl leaned toward him over a computer monitor, wincing at the pain in his leg. “Who’s coming?”
“Skid,” Clean-David said. “She’ll be here soon.”
“Who’s Skid?”
Dave sat back down. “Oh, you’ll like her, Karl. She’s a real people person.” He eyed Clean-David, who held the gun like he knew what he was doing. “This is really exciting and all, but you never mentioned I’d meet myself from another dimension when you hired me. I’m going to have to ask for a raise.”
2
The smell of death inside the circus tent was nearly overwhelming in the late-summer heat. Skid swallowed, trying to keep her stomach down where it belonged. The circus master stepped closer and grinned, but she couldn’t tell if it was a real grin. The thing no longer had lips.
“But before we watch our guest daredevils brave the ring of fire, let’s hear it for Madame Zorelda and her amazing chimps.” The crowd burst into eerily synchronized applause as a flap in the tent whipped open and a zombie in bright gypsy clothing lurched into the center ring dragging a chain.
No.
Two hulking, stoop-shouldered figures appeared in the tent flap, emerging from some dank, dark enclosure that had hid them from the audience. Madame Zorelda took two more steps, and the chain grew taut. The gypsy pulled and the pair of male chimpanzees followed her into the ring, swaying back and forth on their knuckles. Swaths of fur were missing from their torsos, and the ribs of one showed through a rip in its gray flesh.
The ring master waved a hand, and the metallic tick-tick-tick of a winch came from somewhere behind the stands.
“As a warm-up for the main event, who wants to see Madame Zorelda’s magnificent beasts, creatures so much like ourselves—” He paused, raising a hand above his head as two human figures were lowered from the darkness. “—tear this nice couple from Wisconsin to ribbons?”
The audience clapped in a drum-like cadence. The couple, their arms held above their heads by ropes, screamed from the sudden movement of the wench, either from the shredding of their muscles or the goddamned horror of it all. The chimps started hooting, a dry, hollow sound from rotting throats. Brick took a step forward.
The chimps, far removed from the beautiful Bandy, shifted their weight on their short, thick, decaying legs, rocking back and forth like a wave. Skid’s own legs had grown weak. She stepped past Brick, wobbly as a drunk. “Hey,” she tried to shout at the ring master, but it came out as a squeak. “Me first.”
The zombie circus master glared at her, yellowed teeth gleaming in the spotlight.
“Yes?” Its voice jagged as rusty steel. It turned toward the audience, spinning slowly on impossibly thin legs to take everyone in. “Who’s hungry?”
The Gregorian chant started again, and Skid realized finally that, like the applause, these people were cheering as one. She felt small. I’m going to die here. The circus zombie snapped its fingers, and the motorcycle roared to life, then the spindly rotting ringmaster stepped from behind the spotlight, face ragged, one cheek hanging in a fold like lunchmeat. Skid flinched. Flies buzzed everywhere.
“I’m sorry, dear, but you’ll just have to wait your turn,” it said, too low for the audience to hear. “Bobo and Bandy need to eat.”
Bandy? Memories of the baby chimpanzee, small, sweet, soft, clinging to her shirt, holding her index finger tightly in its fist like a human infant would as Doc Caldwell smiled at them both. She likes you, Doc had said as Bandy’s momma watched from a nearby cage. Skid looked at the monsters in the middle ring. Neither of them was Bandy.
“You bastard,” she whispered.
Brick bellowed like a bull and shot forward past the ringmaster, pulling the orc sword from his backpack as he went. The master’s top hat slid to one side as it swung at Brick, its bony hand missing him by a foot. Brick rushed the first naked circus zombie and swung, hewing through its chest with the rough blade, its upper half sliding off its lower like in a cartoon. The big man leapt between the chimps and caught one of them in the temple, sheering off its thick skull cap.
The ringmaster stepped in front of Skid, hiding Brick behind its sunken ribcage, its face in a grinning rage. She tried to step back, but her legs wouldn’t let her. The zombie’s face wavered as the bone, the rot, and the flap of skin swirled and smoothed.
“No,” Skid whispered, the strength starting to melt from her knees. “You can’t.”
Before her, in a moldy tuxedo, stood Randall Roe. Her legs buckled, and she dropped to her knees on the rancid, bloody floor.
“Dad?”
The man in the tuxedo chuckled, low and powerful. “Yes, my child,” it said in Randall’s voice.
A sweat broke over her face. Skid hadn’t seen Randall Roe in years, and he didn’t look any different. A wave of doubt crashed against her. Daddy? Are you here to help me? She shook her head to clear it. A fly crawled across Randall’s cheek and disappeared up his left nostril; he didn’t notice.
When she first left home, working her way across the Southwest, waitressing, cleaning motel rooms, late-night clerking, she kept up on the circus, spending free time in public libraries where cards were sometimes free and internet time was short. Then she went north into a part of the Midwest that didn’t intersect with Randall’s schedule. She found comfort, and quiet, and a job where nobody asked questions. She lost track of him. But this—He was here. Her father was here, smiling at her, flies crawling over him. Does he forgive me for running away?
“My child,” the thing said in a voice that was no longer Randall’s and held out its skeletal right hand. A centipede fell from the creature’s sleeve.
She clenched her eyes tight. Motorcycles, clowns, fixed games, living in a trailer, prom, bears. Her eyes popped open, but the illusion remained. Randall R. Roe stood before her
, arm held out in welcome.
You’re not my dad. The thought small, weak, suffocated in a cloudy mental haze.
“Come to Daddy,” it said.
Her right leg twitched, and she began rise. The circus master’s grin grew and a strip of its cheek broke and fell to the bloody, shit-stained ground, shredding the illusion of Randall.
It’s in my head. A voice from deep within her barked, ripping away the cloud that had formed in her brain. That zombie monster is IN MY HEAD. She sucked in breath through her teeth, anger bubbling inside her.
Skid took a deep breath, ignoring the stench in the air. Strength began to flow back into her legs, her arms. A humorless smirk tugged at her face to match the monster who no longer looked like Randall Roe.
“My turn,” she hissed through gritted teeth and pulled the sleeves of the jacket at her waist. It fell to the foul tent floor. The monster’s expression didn’t change when Skid shot to her feet, hands falling to the belt. They came up with her last two four-inch Browning Black Label stainless steel throwing knives. She flipped them into the air and caught both by their tips.
“This shit show ends now.”
With a simultaneous flick, the knives flew from her fingers and twirled in the stifling hot death-filled air. The circus master’s mouth dropped right before the blades buried themselves in its eyes. The Randall Roe face vanished, and the thing crumbled to the ground like someone had dropped its strings.
A scream split the air, but not from the ringmaster, whose muscles had fallen from its bones. A man in the audience stood, tearing at his own eyes. The big top exploded in shrieks. The residents of Peculiar, Missouri, tumbled from the stands over one another, shredding their faces with their fingernails.
“Nooo,” the man from Wisconsin shrieked as the remaining chimp sprang toward his wife, its chain trailing behind it. Brick leaped out of its way, twirling. He brought the great sword down on the monster’s shoulder, severing its long, hideous arm. The zombie chimp dropped and tried to get up, but Brick was there and lopped its head from its thick shoulders before throwing back his own shoulders and howling like an animal. The Wisconsin woman screamed again, or maybe it was her husband. Skid couldn’t tell.
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 25