That’s not entirely accurate. The Pirates had shown up and started fighting, but they had the element of surprise, and even though I couldn’t hear, it was clear they were winning. I saw some of the Mole Men scatter in one direction, and the Freaks were running in another direction, and some of the Deadpools, they were straight up hand-to-hand fighting Pirates who were armed with swords. They were using chunks of table and chairs and anything else they could find to block the swords, and it all seemed very desperate. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes other Pirates would knock them off their feet or knock whatever they were holding out of their hands, and the stabbing would start. Once one of the Pirates got their blade in someone, others ran up out of nowhere and would just start stabbing as fast and as hard as they could. I saw it happen three times, three different people just getting stabbed and stabbed, and their faces first being all intense and then rolling into that same death grimace I had seen on half of Mr. Powers’s face.
After the second stabbing, I realized I was in danger, and I was on the wrong side of the park. I couldn’t retreat to the Hero Haven, so I took a long route north and tried my best to keep on the perimeter of it all. I succeeded well enough and actually bumped into a ShopGirl archer who was pretty mad that I threw off her aim. I watched her put an arrow into a Pirate’s leg, and the dude just dropped and started screaming. My hearing had started to come back.
At that point, I was in full flight mode. Once I felt safe enough, I turned my back to the thing and just fucking ran for the common room in the Hero Haven. I was the first to make it back, and I quick told everyone what happened and told them to get off their asses and grab their weapons, the attack might be coming. But of course it never came. No cannon, no horde of Pirates. Nothing. No one. No one came back. Not Riley or any of the four who went with her. It was just … nothing. After a while, when it became clear no one was coming home from that meeting, you could feel the room just totally deflate. Everyone lay down with their weapons that night, but no one slept. Not that night. I forget where and how the “Council of Peace” became the “Council of Pieces,” if it was a bad joke or what, but by the time everyone woke up the next morning, that’s what everyone was calling it. I feel bad about it, but when I was staring into the darkness that night, I didn’t think about the blood or the death or any of that. I was thinking about how I would have killed for a camera. What I could have shot, it would have been legendary.
Before everyone turned in, a group of us decided to go back and at least get a look at the scene before the sun set completely. We weren’t anywhere near the Exclamation Point when we could see the bodies hanging from the wire that had once supported the Exclamation Point.
INTERVIEW 16: STUART DIETZ
FantasticLand Maintenance, Mole Man. Interview 2.
I was sitting next to Charlie when that fucker fired that cannon. I’m lucky. I didn’t get hit, and I don’t remember much. When that sort of thing happens, it doesn’t register right away. I remember one time when I was a kid, I was riding my bike with some buddies, and I jumped over this dirt pile and wiped out and ended up busting my leg. It was a, what do you call it, compound fracture, where the bone sticks outta the skin, and I remember seeing it happen and not feeling a damn thing. The only thing I remember, clear as day, was the feeling that “this is strange and should not be happening,” then I saw the blood and freaked out like you do when you’re a little kid. That’s what it was like after that cannon fired. I remember my ears ringing, and I was blown out the back of my seat, and I landed with my back to Charlie. He took the brunt of it. I … see, I gotta give Hockney credit. He knew what he was doing. The cannonball, that was plenty damaging. That blew some folks clear apart. But it was when it hit the Exclamation Point that it did a bunch of little damage. The Point is a mixture of fiberglass and regular glass and wood and chunks of metal and whatever the hell else they put into it. When that metal ball hit, it was like setting off an entirely separate bomb, right in front of everyone. I couldn’t have planned it any better, that destructive bitter asshole.
I was blown out of my seat and onto the ground, and that spared most of my body from any serious harm. I caught a piece of wood in the shoulder. Nothing serious. That and I had a bit of bursitis before, and now I can barely hear out of my left ear. The guy next to me, most of his head just blew apart. When they finally got me out of that godforsaken park, I had a minor blood infection from my shoulder. Don’t ask me how that happened, and don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways. If He’s up there, I want an answer to that one.
I’ll spare you the gory details of the immediate aftermath unless you want to hear about ’em. What do you need to know, anyway? I sat up, some people had chunks of stuff in them and were bleeding and screaming, and I saw Charlie and saw what was left of his head hanging from a string of skin and muscle on his neck. There. Gory enough for you? I was in that “this is strange and should not be happening” phase I was talking to you about, and what knocked me out of it was when Lucy, she worked in maintenance and was really good at painting, which we did a lot of in the park, she ran up and grabbed me, and she was crying. She grabbed me and cried “help” really loud and I saw she was being chased. This guy had a sword and he was running toward her. Something inside me clicked and it was like going from a dream or something to being really focused. I kicked a metal folding chair toward the guy with the sword running at Lucy, and sure enough it tripped him up. He fell on his face, and the sword went tumbling out of his hand. I looked at Lucy and she gave me a look that said, “I’m OK,” and we both started looking for other guys from our group.
Before Charlie got a cannonball to the face, he was really high on this whole “Council” thing. He was telling us it was our chance to come out of the tunnels, even though we could kind of do that whenever we wanted. We were friends with the Robots and with the Deadpools and even with Glenn and his guys. They had a brilliant thing going, scaring everyone like that. Charlie said if we were friends with three of the five or six groups, then things couldn’t be as bad as everyone was saying. We stayed away from the Pirates because we had seen bodies hanging from the street lamps, and the ShopGirls were their own thing. If you went up to them, you had to have a reason. That was how it worked. But old Charlie, he was convinced this was going to work, and he told anyone who wanted to come up and watch to come up and watch. About fifteen of us took him up on that.
I was kind of Charlie’s right-hand man at this point. He was the one who everyone looked to for the decisions, but me and this guy named Tomas, we were kind of his brain trust. He ran most of the big decisions by us, and we both really disagreed with him on this. He wasn’t the kind of guy who made up his mind and that was that, you know? He was more the “listen to everyone first” kind of guy, but on this one, he wouldn’t hear me or Tomas out. I thought it was a bad idea because that little shit Sam Garliek was leading it. Tomas, he thought it was a bad idea because one group or another was going to show up armed, and that would make everyone on edge, and something bad could go down. Charlie didn’t agree with either of those and told everyone to show up, so when Lucy and I were running back toward the tunnels I was able to see who made it and who didn’t. Nine of us made it, six of us didn’t. I saw two that died in the cannon blast, which meant four of us got caught up in the fighting. I remember we all retreated to the tunnels after it all went down, and I was just muttering over and over “goddammit Charlie.” Just over and over. I knew it was his fault for not seeing something like this coming. I mean, no one saw that cannon coming, but he should have known something like this was going to happen.
As we sat there in the tunnels, waiting to see who came back and who was dead or worse, I remember Lucy and this other lady whose name I never learned, they just both grabbed onto each other and were openly sobbing. After a while it started getting to a few of us because they weren’t calming down or nothing, they just kept sobbing. It became this chorus of “shut ups” and them calming down and someone defending
them, and then they’d start up again and the whole thing would play back out. After a while, I kind of remembered what it was like when my kids would throw a fit and nothing ever got better until someone with a cooler head came in, so I went to them and I crouched down and I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Ladies, Charlie is gone. He was a good guy, but he had the wrong idea. We need to focus on something new. We need to focus on getting us rescued.” That calmed them down pretty quick, and … I don’t know, it just sort of reframed the thing. This bad thing happened, and it happened because we had been doing things a certain way. Now we were going to try something different. It seemed like a good idea, given what had just happened.
That night, back in the commons, we started planning. Everyone stayed up. If they weren’t participating, they were listening and drinking coffee, and I heard people talk that night that I had never heard talk before. Everyone had an idea, and at the end of the thing, we came up with a list of five things we needed to do, and they ranged from really easy, like shooting off all the flares in the emergency kits at once, to really complicated. The biggest one, the one that made the most sense and was going to be the hardest, was taking down the Exclamation Point.
Here was the thinking. The Exclamation Point at the center of the park was about three hundred tons of glass and concrete and fiberglass and other shit. Tons and tons. It was also seventy-five feet tall and about thirty-five feet or so across. In other words, everyone in the park would see it was gone, but so would, like, satellites and Google Maps and all that shit. Someone was figuring out where and how to send aid, and if the Point went down, that was at least a curiosity. That was something that needed a closer look, even if the resources were stretched thinner than a fat guy’s tighty whiteys from fifty pounds ago. Everyone agreed that if we took it down, someone would come, and if someone came and saw all the bodies hanging from the light posts and blood on the Golden Road, then help would come.
It was a good plan, but it had some problems, obviously. Most obvious was how the hell do you do it? It’s not like we could Google “how many pounds of TNT will bring down a national landmark” or anything, even if we could get on the computer. My hope, when we were planning it out that night, was that Brock’s little outburst had damaged the Point enough to where we would just need to give it a little nudge and, you know, timber, which meant we had to go out there and take a good look at it. I want you to keep in mind, we weren’t rough and ready to fight whoever was out there. A lot of us were older and just trying to make an extra buck or two, and next thing you know we were in the middle of this bullshit. There was a large bunch of folks who just wanted to sit in the dark and wait this out, and I can see where they were coming from. In all the time we were in the park, no one bothered us, really. Any problems we had were after we went up and interacted with people. But still, I wanted a look at what happened, so the next day, with no sleep and my ear still hurting like a bitch, I went back out there.
I came up from the tunnels as close to the Point as I could, which was by a family restroom about a hundred yards away from where I wanted to be. I kind of poked my head out and looked around, and the first thing I noticed was how dead it was. No pun intended. There wasn’t a soul out there. Second thing was that it wasn’t raining for the first time I could remember since Sadie cold-cocked us. The ground was still wet, and water was dripping from everything, and it was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining. I figured it was a good sign.
I stayed close to the buildings at all times because I figured it was a bad idea at this point to be more exposed than I had to be. I was really close to the Point, probably twenty-five yards or so, before I noticed the bodies hanging from a wire. A lot of people mistakenly thought that wire was some sort of high-tension deal that supported the Exclamation Point, but that wasn’t true. It was a line they used to hang banners for special occasions. Signage, basically. If they had a corporate event, that’s where they would put up the WELCOME AMERICAN BUTTHEADS LLC sign so they felt good about giving us their money. That’s where the bodies were hanging from. The Point, it was supported by a heavy concrete base and then by various other mechanisms, but not by any sort of wires. I can see where people make that mistake, but the bodies, they were hanging from the welcome sign wires.
I had to walk under the bodies to get to the damaged part of the Point’s base. I kind of forgot my “no exposure” rule because I wanted to see if I knew anyone up there. Turns out, I didn’t. It was a couple of kids. Two of them looked like Deadpools, and I heard later one of them was Riley, who was their leader. I had met her a few times, but the bodies were pretty mangled. I’m not surprised I couldn’t figure out who it was. I’m not a guy who’s been to war, but I’ve seen enough of those History Channel documentaries to know a real body from a Hollywood one. They never get the angles right in the fake bodies. The real ones sort of have this odd, loose angle thing going on where they bend in ways no one is supposed to bend. I remember looking at a couple of the bodies and seeing their arms and other parts bent and thinking, “That’s the real thing.”
One of the kids up there, he was looking pretty bad, like he was going to give way at any second. He was hung by his neck. You, um, you do the math. I remember thinking that if I was this kid’s mom, I would never want to hear about how my son’s head came off, and so I’ll shut up about it. When I finally made it to the part where the cannonball hit, it was the oddest thing. The cannonball had basically taken out a little less than a quarter of the base and kept going into the park. To this day, I don’t know where it stopped. I would guess somewhere in the Fantastic Folks from History ride, based on the big fucking hole in the side of its facade, but that’s just a guess. I took a look, and there was good news and bad news. The good news was that it was pretty messed up from a structural standpoint, but the bad news was that it was not nearly messed up enough. You could have run a truck into the thing and it would have stayed up, which meant we had to move to plan B, which was explosives.
I did a few quick measurements and headed back, but as I was rounding the corner near the family restroom area, I looked back and I saw that this girl had been following me. She was by herself, just standing about fifty feet away from me, and she was armed. I could see she was holding two shotguns, one in each hand, and had an even bigger caliber something or other in a holster on her back. I didn’t know what to do, so I sort of raised my chin up to acknowledge that I saw her. She didn’t move. Not an inch. So I got my ass back underground. I don’t know what that was about either and kind of don’t care to know. A woman with a bunch of guns is usually something I get behind, but I don’t know. Let’s leave it there.
Everyone was really glad to see me when I got back, but I was ready for bed, so I hit the sack. I’m like that. When I’m done, I’m done. It takes an act of God to wake me up. When I finally got up about five hours later, our people had found a few TNT demolition blocks from who the hell knows where. Turns out there were a couple of construction projects slated at the park that needed some minor demolition, and that’s where they found them. I’m not good with explosives, but Tomas had learned a little about demolition in the army. When I told him what we were dealing with and gave him the dimensions, he wasn’t sure it would work. He said we were only able to find so much TNT and we would need so much more TNT and yadda yadda. Some other folks put their heads together and they figured it out, or at least figured it out enough to where they thought it was worth giving it a shot. The idea was we would go out there with whatever equipment we could find, like jackhammers and sledgehammers and such, and make a hole in the base to put the explosives in.
It did not escape us that this would make a lot of noise that would be like ringing the goddamn dinner bell. Plus, it would be kind of an operation. It would take generators for the jackhammers, and we’d be throwing chunks of concrete everywhere, so we had a bunch of discussion about that. We spent a day gathering the materials and then, the second night after that stupid fucking meeting, the wind pic
ked up and started blowing something fierce, and the rains started up again, and Tomas put on a hard hat he had found and said, “It’s time.” And he was right. The wind would cover up a lot of the noise, the rain would discourage folks from coming out, and not a single one of us hadn’t worked in the rain before. It was the perfect time, and we hadn’t even planned for it. The only problem was it was dark, so we’d have to use extra gennies for a lighting setup, which we also had. We did a quick vote, and almost everyone wanted to risk it, and everyone who didn’t kind of got what we were thinking. So we went.
I don’t know if you’ve ever worked construction, but there’s a reason no project has ever been on time or under budget. We get out there, and immediately the bodies scare off a few people, and the generators are working but one of the jackhammers doesn’t like the rain, so we’re down to one, and Tomas is operating that himself. Then the lights went out, so we had to figure out what was wrong there, and when we couldn’t, we just ended up shining flashlights on Tomas as he drilled as best he could. This ended up being a good thing because I heard later on that a couple of Pirates had seen the lights and come out to investigate but couldn’t find us in the dark. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know the longer we were out there, the more nervous I was getting. We were working fast and we were working wet, and it sucked, but we had a plan. It had probably been an hour or so when I heard the first gunshots.
There’s no mistaking a gunshot, not even in heavy wind. I didn’t think there was a gun in the entire godforsaken park until I saw that woman armed to the teeth a couple days before. Then, blam! There were guns, and they were being fired. Tomas heard it too and stopped drilling and kind of looked at me and I looked at him, and he yelled over the wind, “We’ve got to get this done.” And he was right. We had been at it for a long time, I had no idea where to get more gas for the gennies since the filling station on grounds was flooded, and I wanted out of the fucking park. I just really wanted out. So did Tomas. He had a wife and three kids somewhere, and he wasn’t looking after them during a very dangerous time because he was stuck in FantasticLand. So I give him a nod, and Tomas starts drilling again.
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