The cannon was a big bastard, but once we got it rolling, we were able to get it moving at a good clip. I couldn’t believe how well this was going until we just about hit the edge of the water. That’s when we got noticed. We heard shouts from a couple of Pirates who had seen us. They were a ways back, but we could see there were about eight of them running in our direction. Immediately, everyone chooses which way they’re going to go. Freckles pulls out her knife and gets ready to fight. Drew looks around for someone to tell her what to do. To Clara’s credit, she kind of stepped up. There was a layer of bricks and a hill separating the ground we were on from the overflowing pond, so Clara Ann looks back and yells, “Push!” and we start pushing as hard and as fast as we possibly could. We got it right up to the edge, and thank God the ground leveled off a bit after the hill, but we couldn’t get the damn thing over the layer of bricks. We tried three or four times. Clara Ann jumps down and starts pawing at the bricks and soon we’re all down there, pulling at them with everything we can while the Pirates close in on us. I get the first brick up because I plunged my hands under the dirt, not aiming at the brick itself, and soon we had made enough headway to push the cannon into the pond.
It was a glorious moment. That second the wheels went past their fulcrum, the barrel pitched forward and the whole thing just went spoosh. It was fantastic. Daniel, the Deadpool leader, he had this giant grin on his face, and Clara Ann actually looked happy for a second. If a fairy showed up today and said, “You need a happy memory to make you fly,” that’s what I’d pick, that stupid fucking cannon hitting the water followed by looking at the Pirates and seeing the understanding on their faces. They looked like little boys who were about to cry. Then they looked like pissed-off men who wanted to kill us. We turned and ran, and thank God we still had enough distance on the Pirates that we could make a few turns and hide. We hid in an abandoned taffy store called Fantaffy. All seven of us were able to run in the back or duck behind counters. We could hear the Pirates looking for us, but they lost interest pretty quickly because they wanted to see if they could save the cannon. Spoiler alert, they couldn’t.
I hid behind the counter and was waiting for the all clear when I heard fighting noises in the back where the other kids were hiding. It was me and Clara Ann and Freckles and that other Deadpool guy behind the counter, and Clara Ann and I jump up and run back there to find Daniel standing over Drew, working on making as big a hole in her neck as he could with a knife. He had grabbed a knife from the back of Fantaffy and … holy shit, it was bad. He had stabbed her in the side of the neck, by surprise, I would guess, and was working to make that hole as big as he could by, like, wiggling it, and apparently it wasn’t cutting and Drew was still thrashing around. Then I hear a noise behind me and Freckles and Clara Ann are going at it, grabbing onto each other and fighting as hard as they could. I didn’t see Kristen, the other girl who had come with us, and the Deadpool guy whose name I never got, he looked as dumbfounded as I did. I remember taking a beat and then taking Cap and taking a good hard swing at Freckles. I hit her right in the back of the head, even though she was wrestling with Clara. Cap’s aim is always true.
So Freckles goes down, and Daniel looks up from cutting my friend’s neck open and runs at me with a knife. I don’t have enough room in the small kitchen to really get a good windup going, but I wing Daniel pretty good in his arm, and by then Clara Ann is on him. She didn’t bring Tetanus with her, but she did have a knife she found in the sporting goods store and she lunged for Daniel, who was holding his arm from where I hit him, and stabbed him through his right eyeball. Or left eyeball. Right to me, left to him. Either way, bad deal for him. He does a sensible thing and runs out of the back room and out the door, yelling. Clara looks at me and said, “I’ll look at Drew. You finish this girl.” She said her name, but I forget what it was.
I hadn’t knocked Freckles out. Not completely. She had half rolled over, and she caught my gaze out of the corner of her eye. She knew it was coming, and I knew I was going to do it and it was this weird … I don’t know, let’s call it understanding. It was like, through her eyes and the look on her face, she let me know that this was going to suck for me, but not as much as it was going to suck for her, and I think I got a little bit of an apology in there, I think. Maybe I’m making too much of it in my mind. Either way, a second after we had that moment, I beat her to death with my metal baseball bat. I didn’t stop until her head was a very different shape from when I started. Blood wasn’t enough. I needed to make sure … I needed … I needed to get it out. The frustration of being trapped in the park and my friend just getting murdered for no fucking reason, I swung and I swung and I swung, and by the time I was done Freckles was a pink mess and fuck her. Fuck her. I was doing this to her but she did it to herself and fuck her.
The guy, the other Deadpool, he had run for the hills by the time I was done. Drew, she was dead. We never did find Kristen. I like to think she ran off and made it out of the park and met a sweet guy, and now they’re married and thinking of starting a family. Something worse likely happened to her, but I don’t know what. I just know something worse happened to me when we finally got out. The girl, Freckles? I was having a really bad day, and I looked her up. I knew just enough about her to find her on Facebook, and wouldn’t you know it, her account was still up. I got to learn all about her. Alllllll about her. I know the name of her pets, I know the name of her boyfriend, I know what she wore to prom. Sometimes I think of her wearing her prom dress, only her head is bashed in. Fuck you, Facebook.
While Clara Ann and I were trudging back to the Golden Road, I asked her, “Why did they do that?” Things had gone really well and we had just given the Pirates a high hard one. No one had to die, but instead there was blood and bodies in the back of a taffy store for no reason. I was on a rant, going on and on about how they had gone savage or how they were hardly people anymore, and Clara Ann yelled at me to shut up. Then she said, “I get it. They killed because they knew if they didn’t, we would.” And I start back up, saying, “You’re crazy, we would have left them alone,” and Clara walked up, really close to me so I could smell her breath and really make out her eyes, and she said, “Well, now you know. Don’t you?” And then she started double-timing it back to the Golden Road.
That fucked me up like nothing has ever fucked me up before or since. What she was telling me is that, if we were never rescued, we were going to keep killing and killing and killing each other until there was just one person left on a mountain of bodies. The tribes would kill each other, and when there was no one left to kill, they would kill their ranks, and Clara Ann had already played it out in her head and was ready. She was right. By this point, with the talk of murderers in masks and that crap in the World’s Circus and the explosion and everything, everyone was feverish, everyone was violent. I thought a lot that night about how we got here. How did we get sick like this? Would we ever get better?
There was no big celebration when we got back that evening. We told the story, sure, but there was no celebration. That night the Pirates came again, this time in full force. They were mostly guys. We fought them. We lost five girls that night, they lost two. It was a bad night, a bloody night, but I was in such shock from what happened in the taffy store that the whole thing was … easier? Is that what I want to say? Easier? I grabbed Cap, and I swung and swung at some Pirates. Maybe I killed one, but I know I hit two pretty good. Maybe they’re both fine right now and are gay lovers in the Caribbean, I don’t know. We never did get raided by the Deadpools. The Pirates came back a few more times, and during one raid, I got a huge gash on my arm. There’s the scar. Just like I wanted. I was really detached at this point. Outwardly, I was all “we are the ShopGirls,” but really, no one else gave a shit about us. Our leader would kill us if she could. Every single group, they’d kill us if they could. It’s one thing to think that and it’s another thing to see your friend getting carved up in the back of a fucking taffy store, a fucking taffy s
tore, by someone you thought was your friend or at least your ally. We had just done great things together. That’s the part that stings. I’m babbling.
I dealt with the whole thing by pulling in. I went through the motions we had set up. I cried in private and Cap and I were strong in public. We got raided, I think, three more times before they finally got us out of there. But if I went inward, Clara Ann, she went out. She was constantly alert, constantly yelling, constantly trying to keep everyone safe and not caring about who she upset in the process. At one point, another ShopGirl came to me and asked if we should start talking about assassinating Clara, and I told her, let her do her thing. Find a way to cope with it and let her do her thing, because she knows more than you about this situation. And she had her moments as a leader.
I only told Scottie the details of what happened to Drew, and she cried with me. She died during the second or third raid, I can’t remember which. I found out because the Pirates lined up the bodies they were able to kill right along one of the far streets, and we had to figure out whether to leave them or do something with them. We ended up leaving them. What the hell did it matter? What would we have done, anyway? Plus, and this is what I learned during my time in the park, collecting the bodies would have just been one more chance for someone to kill you.
INTERVIEW 18: JASON CARD
Retail Cashier.
My daddy took me out hunting every year when I was a kid. I never got a taste for it, but I learned a couple a things. Hunting isn’t about shooting a deer or a quail or whatever you’re hunting. It’s about putting yourself next to the animal so you can shoot it. Most of it is waiting, and when you’re not waiting you figure out where you can go so when you do wait, you come across the animal. You make noise, you move too much, nothing’s comin’ anywhere near you, and you go home with an empty truck. That’s lesson number one.
Once all that bullshit started going down and it started getting dangerous, I decided instead of jumping around and trying to find someone to kill, maybe I’d just wait this whole thing out. My mamma, she calls me a “skinny little fart,” God love her, and I’m not much help in a fight. Found that out the hard way. There’s not a lot of oomph behind any punch I’m gonna throw, so I figured the best thing I could do was find a spot where things were a little calmer and set up camp there. I remember telling myself this was just a storm of a different kind, and if I was smart, I would wait for it to blow over, just like the last one. That’s how I found myself in the Dreamland.
There’s a ton of hotels around FantasticLand, but only four are officially part of the park. There’s the Mighty Maiden, there’s the ElectroLounge which is all future-y, there’s the GetAway, which is more geared toward adults, and then there’s the Dreamland, which is the expensive one. It’s the one that has the walkway straight to the park, like you seen in airports, only outside, and it’s all enclosed, so you step out of the hotel lobby, go on this speedy walkway, and step off at the park. When it was working, it was pretty slick. The Dreamland, it’s the one with the huge main entrance with the chandelier made with all those interlocking pieces of different colored glass. The one with all those big LCD screens and super-fast Wi-Fi that doesn’t matter even a little bit when the power dies? It was the one that started at $450 a night. That one. After things started getting hairy in the park and it was clear the violence wasn’t a one-time thing, that it was going to keep happening, I stuffed everything I thought I needed into a backpack I had and I slogged there in water up to my waist. I had heard that a couple of people had tried heading out to find help, and I’ll tell you that’s a fool’s errand, man. I nearly froze to death walking to that hotel, and you could see it from the front of the park. Also, that water wasn’t what you call clean. It was a nightmare, it smelled like shit, and there was so much gunk floating in it I felt like I was in that scene in Star Wars, the scene with the trash compactor? That’s what the water was like leading up to the hotel, man. Just gross. Highly, highly gross.
Once I made it there and found a way in, which involved some broken glass, I saw the main lobby was flooded and basically ruined, but this hotel was thirty stories at forty rooms a story, meaning I had my pick of soft, comfortable beds and rooms that locked from the inside. I was safe, and if you got used to the smell from the bottom floor, which I never really did, it was comfortable enough. It was definitely comfortable enough if you’re just sitting there waiting for rescue. Plenty of food, too. There were restaurants on the third floor and on the roof, so I didn’t even need to go to the nasty bottom floor unless I really felt like it. And I usually didn’t. A week in I was pissing over the balcony into the lobby whenever I had to go. It was kind of beautiful.
Plus, and this was the big thing for me, no one else had thought of this! No one. I was it, man. I was resident numero uno in this hotel, man. What do they say in church? Alpha and omega. I was pretty tempted to go back to the park and find some other friends of mine and bring them back with me so they could take a piss off the balcony, but it would have meant another trudge through that disgusting water, and after a while I got pretty used to being alone. No lie, I had this “last man on Earth” thing going where I filled my days pretty well with gathering stuff from the kitchens and going through luggage and bunches of other stuff. You’d be surprised how many dildos people bring on vacation, man. I was surprised to find any, but I swear, man, every third suitcase had a vibrator or a big ol’ dick in it. Without fail. I also found, like, weed in one of the suitcases. That came in handy. I found some weapons that I kept in whatever room I was in just in case I needed to fight my way out, that’s what I was thinking. I even found books to read. Tons of books, man. I read, like, fifteen books by flashlight at night because there was nothing else to do once it got dark. I don’t want to sound like no sissy, but walking around a giant, waterlogged hotel with no lights anywhere, that shit is for the birds. Not fun, not doing it. I’d rather stay in a room and read a spy book or something. For a while I was reading a series about a spy, well, he was more of a special agent type who was strong and tough and all but was more patient than everyone, and that’s how he beat them. Those were my favorites. I must have gone through seven or eight of those. I never really had time to read before, so it was kind of a nice change.
Living in a place like that, I got really tuned in to the noises that places made. I knew you couldn’t hear the sloshing of the water in the lobby if you were above the third floor, I knew the smell was worst on one, two, and seven for some reason. I knew how quiet it got. It was really quiet, man. Really quiet. I was kind of thankful because it meant that if something happened, like us getting rescued or some numb-nuts firing off a cannon, that I would hear it immediately. Big noises were like a big shift in my world, but when you’re in there long enough, little noises got to be pretty big, too. When I first heard from my two little buddies, they didn’t talk. Not a peep out of them. They were quieter than mice fucking on cotton, but just because I’d been there so long I knew they were there. I knew.
It was, I would say, about three weeks in when they first showed up. I heard them on the first floor, heard them come in. It was one afternoon, early, and it was just a few splashes outside and a bit of rustling and a few more splashes is all. I swear to you, I heard the splashes and stopped what I was doing and ran out into the main area that overlooked the lobby and I saw two people coming in. I was on fourteen or so when I heard them, so I didn’t get a look at them, but they made that move where they looked up and then looked at each other and even from super high up, I could tell they saw me. There was also something weird-looking about them, so I gathered my gear and hightailed it up to the high twentys somewhere and kind of regrouped. Someone else was in here, and the chances of them being friendly weren’t real good. So I decided what I was going to do was to keep as quiet as I could and try to get more info. I was going to be that spy guy from the books and find out what I was dealing with before I did anything. I was going to be patient, man. I was going to beat them
.
I had been there long enough that I knew the service entrances front and back, so I could keep a pretty good eye on things while staying out of the main areas, but these new visitors, they must have had the same idea I had, man, because they were just as quiet as I was. I figured they’d be loud and bring their friends and I would find a hidey-hole somewhere, but while I was trying to listen to them, I think they were trying to listen to me, too. The thing was, I had been doing it longer. The one girl—one was a guy and the other was a girl—she had a cold or something and sneezed every so often. Even when you try to stifle a sneeze it still makes a little poof sound, you know? Most of the time, when she would sneeze, it would be a few floors down or a few floors up. It was never all that close. I was kind of getting more and more nervous as time went on and they didn’t say anything or introduce themselves. It left me time to think that they had bad ideas about what was going to happen when we finally did meet. I kinda figured they were scared, but as time went on, that wasn’t what was happening. I was looking for them in a huge hotel, and they were looking for me. And I was starting to get scared, man. I don’t mind admitting it. I don’t spook easily but I was spooked, scared, and a little freaked out, even.
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