Full Tilt

I hadn’t lived a real life—I’d had just a model of a life. Everything I did, everything I thought, was suspended safely by strings, too high up for anyone to damage. Zero contact, zero risk. Now those strings had been cut and I was going to die, never having had a chance to live without them.

A blast exploded to my right as the battleship’s guns tried to take me out. The shock wave rattled my plane. I could see the bridge of the battleship now. Crewmen inside were running for cover.

There was little time left if I was going to survive this ride. I had to put away thoughts of life and death and focus on this moment. I had to live through this moment so there could be a next one. I had the strength to do that much.

I will not crash, I told myself. I will not go down in a burst of flames. I won’t go down at all! I pulled back on the steering column with the strength of that conviction, and finally it began to move. Before me the battleship fell away as my plane, and all the planes behind me, pulled out of the kamikaze dive into a parabolic arc. All the planes, that is, except for the last one. The last plane just kept going and hit the battleship, detonating in a fireball. I felt sick. Don’t be Quinn, I prayed. It would be just like him to crash on purpose, just like he did on his flight simulator back home.

Then, above me, as I climbed away from the battleship, I saw a new cloud billowing up. A face appeared, eyes locked in shock and disbelief. A face that wasn’t Quinn’s.

No strings, I told myself. I was flying with no strings, and I was no longer afraid. Like it or not, I was in charge, and there was no room for fear. I tried to get control of the plane as it lurched and spun, and I imagined the planes behind me following my motions, like they were still on a roller-coaster track, but I was the one determining the path.

Suddenly the control stick flew out of my grip and forced itself forward. The ride had taken control again, and we had started another dive. This time we were headed toward a destroyer. It began shooting at us. One of its shells took out a plane behind me. I watched it spiral a flaming path to the sea.

I fought the controls, my will straining against the will of the ride. Once again, I was able to pull up, gaining altitude at the last second, climbing away from the destroyer. Once again, the last plane didn’t pull up in time and detonated on the deck. In an instant we were back in the clouds, but by now I’d gotten a feel for the controls. It was kind of like driving a car with really bad steering. Well, okay, it was more like skydiving in a car with really bad steering, but at least I could make the thing move the way I wanted it to.

I heard another explosion and looked out of the window to see one of the planes in my care fall in flames. That blast hadn’t come from below.

Another plane pulled up beside me, matching my speed, its wingtip almost touching mine. It was the American P-40 from my bedroom, with the face of a shark painted on its air intake. Its pilot waved to me.

“A great day for flying,” said Cassandra’s voice over my radio. I should have known.

“Nothing like the friendly skies,” I radioed back, then I jinked to the right, into a corkscrew, with all the planes behind me still following my lead. Cassandra fired at me. I felt more than heard her rounds tear into the tail of my Zero, but I didn’t lose control. The ride hadn’t taken me down, so she was going to do it herself.

A tight bank, and I was able to position myself right behind her. It didn’t take a Columbia scholarship to figure out how to fire my machine guns. I let them rip, tearing into her wing. The damage wasn’t enough to take her down, but it was enough to let her know I wasn’t going out without a fight.

“You’re shooting at an American plane,” her voice crackled over the radio. “How unpatriotic.”

“Sorry, I don’t speak English,” I told her. “I’m a Japanese pilot.”

She pulled her plane out of sight, and I wasn’t sure where she was until I heard her machine gun fire. The plane right behind me fell away, plunging to the sea, trailing a plume of smoke. I dove, banked, and spun to get away, leading the remaining planes out of the path of Cassandra’s guns. She fired again but missed.

“You’re a fantastic squadron leader, Blake. This ride has never been so exciting!” She stormed me from above, leaning on her guns, tearing up my right wing. “You’re a true warrior,” she said. “There’s no greater challenge than a survivor.”

No one had ever called me a warrior before. At any other time I might have felt full of myself, but this wasn’t any other time.

I tried to maneuver, but my plane was too badly damaged. She fired again, shredding my left wing. My gauges dropped suddenly. My engine began to miss, then caught fire, and my plane began a doomed spiral toward the sea.

I didn’t know whether or not the other planes still followed my lead or if I had fallen out of formation when I took the damage. All I could see was black smoke billowing from my engine, but through that smoke, I caught glimpses of an aircraft carrier directly below.

“It’s a noble death,” Cassandra said. “An end worthy of a pilot of the Divine Wind.”

And then Cassandra’s own words came back to me.

There’s a way out of every ride.

Without intending to, she had provided the means of my salvation. My plane was crashing, no doubt about that now. But there was a way out of every ride. Even this one.

The cockpit smelled of gasoline and smoke, and a bitter taste filled my mouth, like I’d been chewing on rubber. The engine had stopped completely. I looked frantically around the cockpit for a way out of the ride, pounding on the canopy, searching in front of me, below me, behind me. I was disoriented and dizzy from the spiraling of the Zero, but I wasn’t giving up.

“Good-bye, Blake,” and she sighed, as if sorry to see the hunt end. “It was worth the risk to bring you here.”

There’s a way out of every ride... a way out of every ride, I chanted to myself over and over. A hundred knobs covered the dashboard, but I had no idea what they did because they were all marked with Japanese symbols.

Except one.

Seconds from impact, I spotted it. The ride symbol was right there on a little button hidden in a corner of the instrument panel. Ha! I didn’t wait to think about it. I hit the button.

Boom! The canopy tore away, my seat ejected into the sky, and the plane crashed into the tower of the aircraft carrier. Shrapnel from the explosion shot past me. The heat singed my eyebrows, but I was out! I was out and rocketing skyward. No strings, no ceiling to hang them from. I’d been cut loose, and I was still alive. I was a survivor, and nothing had ever felt so good.

Your own words saved me, Cassandra. Who’s the winner now?

A hole opened up in the sky like the iris of a camera, and I shot through, out of the world of the Kamikaze.

10

Depraved Heart

Last year I did a term paper on cancer. Cancer is such a sneaky disease because it starts inside, hiding in the body, turning the body’s own cells into the enemy. Insidious—that’s the word for it—sneaky and subtle and evil all at the same time. It just keeps growing and growing, because the body doesn’t know how to wage war against itself. That’s the way the park worked. It dug into your thoughts and pulled these worlds right out of them. Your own mind became the enemy, and how can you fight your own mind? The only difference is that cancer doesn’t have a soul. I don’t know which was harder to face: the soullessness of a tumor, or Cassandra, the spirit of a malignant park.

She’d done her best to take me out on the Kamikaze, and had almost succeeded, but I was still standing. Well, actually I was floating, with a parachute above me and the lights of the amusement park below me. I thought that after ejecting from the Kamikaze, I’d have to swim the South Pacific to find the next ride. Instead, I’d been sent back to where I’d started: the crossroads of all the rides—the place where my world met Cassandra’s. I wondered why.

I landed in the midway, hitting the ground hard and feeling the pain of the impact in my joints. The chute settled down around me, and I had to fight my way out of it, pulling back on the silk. As I tried to pull the shroud of the parachute away, I saw a second figure moving toward me in the billowing fabric, like a ghost. Had I come down on some other rider? Was it Cassandra?

I pulled the parachute away. It was Russ. I didn’t know who was more relieved, him or me.

“You’re alive!” he said. “This place hasn’t chewed you up!”

“Well, I kinda keep kicking it in the teeth whenever it tries.”

The relief in seeing him faded quickly when I thought about Maggie and how he’d run from her in the maze.

“So where’s Maggie?” I asked, just to see if he’d squirm.

“Lost her,” he said.

Should I confront him about it right here? I decided against it. I looked at the amusement park around us. There were still some riders milling around, latecomers seeking out their first ride, but the crowds had been absorbed by the attractions.

“Until now the rides have all connected to one another,” I said. “So how come we’re here and not in another ride?”

“Like I know?”

There was something strange about Russ. A kind of fear in the way he looked at me. A twitch in his cheek. The rides had stressed me almost to my breaking point, and when I last saw Russ, he was already pushing his. Funny, but I always thought Russ could take care of himself.

I checked my watch: 4:40. Only two rides to go, and time was running out. Maybe he’d abandoned Maggie, but I didn’t have it in me to abandon him. “We’ll stick together,” I told him, “and make sure we don’t separate again.”

“Okay, fine.”

“The rides are tough, but we can be tougher.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Remember that there’s a way off of every ride.”

“No problem.”

He was so agreeable, it was sad. This place had whipped him, wiped him, and hung him out to dry. I led the way, trying to second-guess what the rides around us might be. “Do you think we should try—”

A sharp explosion of pain on the side of my head. I was on the ground before I knew what hit me, clapping my hand to my aching ear. It was swelling, but my ear had cushioned the blow, protecting my skull. I looked up to see Russ holding a steel pole. It looked like one of the levers that operated the rides.

“I’m sorry, Blake, but I gotta do what I gotta do.”

There were tears in his eyes, but they didn’t stop him from swinging that pole again. I dodged, and it caught my upper arm; the bone didn’t break, but I could feel the pain of the blow from my shoulder to my fingertips. I scrambled away, but Russ still stalked me.

“She’s gonna let me go.” Russ’s face was red from anguish. “You understand, right? I gotta do this, so Cassandra’ll let me out of here. She promised.” Russ swung again, but this time he missed. It gave me the time I needed to get to my feet and bolt.

My head was still reeling from that first blow. I couldn’t think straight, and I didn’t know which way to run, so after rounding a corner I ducked into one of those automated photo booths—the kind you squeeze into with your friends, when they’re not trying to kill you. I pulled the curtain and peeked out, hoping I could throw Russ off the track long enough for me to recover physically, and mentally. Through the curtain, I saw him wandering the midway.