self-confidence. “Yeah. We’ll , deal with it. We can handle it. I’m
not afraid of any freak.”
The instant he finished speaking, a blossom of blood appeared in the
center of Buzz’s forehead.
At first Amy didn’t even realize it was blood. It A’ looked black,
like a spot of ink. But then the wan light caught it at a slightly
different angle, and she could see that it was red.
Then there was a follow-up noise that echoed through the cavern an
instant after the blood appeared, it was barely louder than the clatter
that the moving gondola had made–crack!
Buzz’s mouth fell open.
.
….
. .
Less than a second after that, while Amy was still unaware of what was
happening, Buzz’s right eye exploded in a spray of blood and ruined
tissue and splintered bone, and the dark, empty socket looked like a
screaming mouth.
Again: crack!
Blood and pieces of flesh spattered the front of Amy’s green T-shirt.
She whirled around.
The barker was standing only ten feet away. He was pointing a small
handgun at Buzz. It wasn’t a very big gun, it looked like a toy.
Behind Amy, Buzz sighed and made an odd gurgling sound and slumped over
in his own vomit.
This can’t be happening! Amy thought.
But she knew it was. She knew that this night had been waiting to
happen for a long, long time, it was a night written into her life
before she was born.
The barker smiled at her.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The new Joseph,” he said.
“What?” “I’m the father of the new God,” he said. His smile was
sharklike.
Amy held her rusted knife at her side, hoping the barker wouldn’t see
it and that somehow she would get close enough to him to use the
blade.
“Say hello to your little brother,” the barker said. He was holding a
rope in one hand. He pulled on it. Joey staggered out of the
darkness, at the other end of the leash.
“Oh, God,” Amy said. “God, help us.”
“He can’t help you,” the barker said. “God is weak. Satan is
strong.
God can’t help you this time, bitch.”
LIZ STUqBLED INTO someone in the shadows. He was big. She cried out
before she realized that it wasn’t the freak. She had walked into
another of the mechanical monsters, which were all motionless and
silent now.
LiZ was sweating, shaking, disoriented. She kept colliding with things
in the darkness, and each time her heart nearly stopped. She knew she
should either sit down until she was calm again–or go back to the
gondola channel, where there was some light, but she was too frightened
to do what she ought to.
She staggered forward, hands out in front of her, the knife in one
hand, gagging when she thought of Richie with the ax buried in his
head, resisting the urge to throw up, her head light from the effects
of adrenaline and dope, just trying to save herself, gasping,
whimpering, aware that all the noise she was making might be the death
of her, but unable to be silent, just trying to save herself any way
she could, hoping she would luck into an exit, counting on the fact
that she’d always been a very lucky girl, wishing (crazily) that she
had time to stop and smoke another joint, and that was when she tripped
over something and fell, hard, onto the plank floor, and she reached
back to free her foot, and she discovered a metal ring in the floor, a
large ring in which she had caught the toe of her shoe, and she cursed
the pain in her twisted ankle, but then she saw a thread of light
coming up through the floor, light from a room below, and she realized
that the ring was a handle on a trapdoor.
A way out.
Laughing excitedly, Liz scrambled off the trap, on which she had been
sprawled. She knelt in front of the door and took hold of the ring.
The door was warped, it didn’t want to open. She grunted, put all her
strength into one hard tug, and finally the trap swung up.