Part 12 (2/2)
”Be quiet, it's me!” I peeled the mummy wrappings from my head.
”Blake?”
”No, Ramses the Great.”
The temple guard had done a good job of wrapping me up, and we'd gathered enough workers to carry me here and quietly leave me on the table. Of course, getting out wouldn't be as easy as getting in.
There was a knife strapped to my arm. I pulled it out and used it to cut the bonds on Quinn's right hand. I was about to cut the other ropes but stopped. Instead, I put the knife into his free hand. He had to do it. I couldn't do it for him. He had to choose, or we'd just be right back here again tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.
He looked at me almost as if he could hear what I was thinking, then he sliced through the rest of the ropes. ”I'm done with this place,” he whispered. ”I wanna take my organs and go home.”
He hopped off the table, but as we were about to slip away he suddenly stopped.
”Come on! What are you waiting for?”
He stared at the tray beside the table-the one that held all of his facial rings. It was like his whole life was on that little tray: his alienation and his anger, his auto-destruct att.i.tude.
A few tables away, Achmed had spotted us.
Quinn hesitated a moment more, then reached for the tray, picking out a single ring. A little diamond stud. It was the one that Carl, Mom's fiance, had given him. He fixed it in his ear as we ran.
”No! Stop them!” Ca.s.sandra ran at us from the far end of the room. Workers grabbed for us, but their hands were slick from the oily balms of mummification. We evaded their grasps, but Ca.s.sandra was much faster than we were. She was almost upon us when Achmed came out from behind a table and hurled a shovelful of salt into her eyes.
”Go on! Get to the seventh ride!” he shouted. We raced out without looking back.
We met up with the temple guard at the outer gate of the palace. Racing down the steps, we caught the attention of guards and slaves, courtiers and warriors. I expected them to try to stop us. After all, part of their jobs was to make sure the ride went smoothly. Instead, I heard murmurs spreading through the crowd as we ran past.
”That's him!”
”There he is!”
”His sixth ride!”
Something was stirring in these people that hadn't been here before: a sense of hope! Now taskmasters broke the chains of slaves, artisans abandoned their work, and a great rumbling began to fill the earth and sky. As I looked up at the mottled heavens the sky began to melt, like wax in a furnace.
”What's happening?”
”I'm not sure,” the guard said. ”I think the ride's breaking down!”
”What?” said Quinn. But I understood, and I understood why. It's not walls that make a prison, but the willingness of the prisoners. These rides were built on the broken, resigned spirits of those trapped here; but without them, the rides couldn't hold.
One more ride, I told myself. ”We have to get to the next ride before this one crashes!”
”This way!” said the guard.
”No, this way's faster,” I heard a voice behind me say. ”I'll show you!” It was the street vendor. He tossed aside his tray of trinkets and led us through a narrow alley, pointing as we came out the other side. ”There.”
It was the Great Pyramid of Cheops, its golden tip glowing against the melting sky. There was a hieroglyph emblazoned on the golden tip, but it wasn't Egyptian: It was the ride symbol, s.h.i.+ning a neon red. To reach it, we'd have to climb the pyramid.
Quinn and I took off across the sands toward the pyramid in the distance, and as I looked around me I realized we were not alone. Dozens ran alongside of us now, a wave of people escorting us, cheering me on to the last ride.
I knew Ca.s.sandra was somewhere nearby. I could feel the wild extremes of her soul-the searing heat, the frosty cold. But the wake of excitement created by the ride in revolt protected us and swept us toward the pyramid.
The rumble in the earth grew more violent, and now the entire sky was melting away. Then, as we reached the base of the pyramid, the ground tore open beneath me. Quinn was already up on the first stone block, but I lost my footing and tumbled into the widening creva.s.se. Sand poured in all around me; steam rose from down below as I fell. I was so close! So close! My hands had touched the pyramid, but I hadn't moved fast enough. Now my eyes were so full of sand and steam, I couldn't see where I was falling, but I didn't have to see; I knew. I knew because of the sounds around me. The terrible gnas.h.i.+ng sounds of gears.
I'd fallen into The Works.
13.
The Works I may forget everything else that happened to me in the park. The memories of the rides may be sucked from my mind by a real world that cannot allow such things to exist. But I will never forget The Works. That will live on in my nightmares. I will feel its grinding metallic teeth every time I see scenes of war, or a plane crash, or some other disaster on the news, too terrible to watch but too riveting to look away from. I will see in those things the dark clockwork that gets built gear by gear out of our dying dreams and our desperate fears. Ca.s.sandra did not build The Works. We're the ones who built it. She just gave it form. I know that as surely as I know that I stood there, and watched the wheels turn.
I fell through the crack in the desert sands and landed with a clang on an iron catwalk in a place so hot and humid, my lungs felt as if I were breathing water. All around me were gears, s.h.i.+ny chrome gears, from the size of a dime to what seemed the size of planets. They all revolved at a fever pitch, turning crankshafts and pumping pistons in an unrelenting dance that extended downward into a bottomless pit. The chrome cogs were as cold as a glacier, and yet the air burned furnace-hot. Waves of heat and spatial distortion pulsed out from the great machine, and I had to hold on to the catwalk to overcome a light-headed vertigo as I looked down into the depths. Yet that wasn't the worst of it.
I'd thought at first that whoever was consigned to The Works got ground up in its unforgiving gears like human hamburger, but I was wrong.
There were figures working the machine-hundreds upon hundreds of them. They held levers, valves, and cranks, pus.h.i.+ng and pulling in a backbreaking rhythm, but they weren't really holding the machinery. They were growing out of it, their flesh melding into the metal of the gear-work, as much a part of the machine as the cogs, pinions, and rotors. Their muscles bulged, sinewy and strong from the work, but their eyes were vacant and reflective chrome.
The park had absorbed them, as Ca.s.sandra had said, but I could never have imagined this.
Closest to me were two figures laboring on alternate sides of a two-man pump-a seesaw device, like an old-fas.h.i.+oned hand-cranked railroad car. They struggled to turn a ratchet wheel that was connected to a larger wheel that turned a shaft running down to the sweltering depths. Their eyes-their souls-had been voided into mechanical numbness.
It was Maggie and Russ.
”They make a nice team,” I heard Ca.s.sandra say.
I turned but couldn't find her. Her voice seemed to come from all around me.
”We're all part of something larger than ourselves,” she said. ”That's the nature of the universe. And now your friends are part of my machine.”
My revulsion and anger fused into something so heavy, I couldn't move. There was nowhere to go. The catwalk ended just behind me at a huge wheel that slowly churned the steam. On either side of the wheel was a drop down into the h.e.l.lish Works.
Ca.s.sandra appeared out of the steam on the narrow catwalk, still adorned in Egyptian splendor. This was it. She was coming in for the final kill. She'd won.
What she said next caught me completely by surprise.
”Thank you, Blake.” Her voice was soft yet surprisingly clear over the throbbing of the great machine. ”Because of you, I've experienced fear for the first time. Your challenge was remarkable.” She put her hands on my shoulders. Something about her touch made the atmosphere of The Works different. Sweat still poured from me, yet I felt chilled deep inside. ”You wanted to make a deal before,” she said. ”Will you deal with me now?”
And against all my better judgment, I said, ”What do you have in mind?”
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