It was all I could do to stay on the lion, for although it now moved with the agility of flesh, to the touch it was still like slippery, painted wood. All of these animals were a strange melding of wood, paint, and flesh.
Who made this place?
Beside me I passed an unfortunate boy desperately trying to get some speed out of the banana slug he rode. From behind him, what could only be described as a Fighting Irishman grabbed him by the scruff of his collar.
“Outta me way,” the Irishman said, and hurled the kid off his slug so far out of sight that I had no idea where he landed.
It’s only a ride, I told myself. It’s only a ride.
I caught up to Maggie on her ram. She was experienced on horseback and had taken to the shape and rhythm of her new mount. The look on her face wasn’t fear; it was something slowly creeping toward ecstasy.
“This is wild!” she said as I passed her.
My lion leaped over a rock, and I rose off his back, coming down on his haunches, practically at the tail. I had to throw all my weight forward to keep from falling off.
“You’ll never make it if you ride like that.”
It was Cassandra. She rode a huge beast the color of blood that matched pace with my lion. It was a razor-back, but it was more dinosaur than hog. Cassandra wasn’t dressed in the clothes she’d worn before but was in some exotic safari outfit. And as I looked at myself I saw that I was wearing the same thing. In fact, everyone was. It was as if costumes were part of the deal here.
“None of this is real!” I shouted to her. “It can’t be! I’m getting off!”
“Bad idea.”
As I looked ahead of me I saw what she meant. There was a kid on an orange longhorn bull who was having as much trouble as I was. I heard him scream as he slipped off the bull, but his screams were silenced under the trampling feet of the stampede.
“You could call this the weed-out course,” Cassandra said with a dry smile.
“Okay,” I said, hugging the neck of my lion. “Okay. I get the idea. You can stop the ride now.”
She laughed at me. “The ride doesn’t stop. Find your way to another ride. That’s the only way to get off.”
Another ride? That implied surviving this one. Had Quinn been through this? He would have loved it. He would have died loving it!
“Where’s my brother?”
Instead of answering, Cassandra tugged on the ears of her razorback. It turned its head, opened its massive jaw, and dug its tusks into my lion, shredding its neck.
“Bad piggy,” Cassandra said, but it was clear this was exactly what she had intended to do. Maggie came up behind me. Her ram reared and threw her to the ground. My lion roared in pain, wood splintering in all directions. It collapsed, and I tumbled off just as the huge razorback chomped down on my lion, lifted it up, and swallowed it whole.
“Survival of the fittest,” Cassandra said with a wink. “Looks like your lion didn’t make the grade.” Then she rode off, leaving me and Maggie standing in the middle of the stampede.
“We’re toast,” Maggie said.
By now I’d seen more than one kid trampled into dust. What happens if you die here? I wondered. Is it just the end of the ride, or something worse?
“Come on!” I grabbed Maggie’s hand and wove us through the stampede. Somehow we managed to sidestep every animal. I turned away from the kid being swallowed by a crimson alligator and another who got speared by a maroon and gold Trojan warrior. We fought our way past a host of horrors until we came out into tall grass. I was exhausted, but I felt I could run forever to get away from this place.
“Wait! What about Russ?” Maggie said. We’d completely forgotten about him.
I turned back, fearing the worst. But he, too, had broken away from the stampede—only he hadn’t left his mount. He still rode the back of that gargantuan peacock, which now ran AWOL through the grass.
“Help!” Russ yelled. “Get me off this thing!” As big as he was, he was at the mercy of the ridiculous bird.
Maggie and I ran toward him, just as his bird reached the edge of a gully and lost its balance. It tumbled, disappearing down the ravine along with Russ. By the time we got to him, Russ was already picking himself up out of the dust. He was fine, but the peacock wasn’t.
“I broke my bird.” It lay in splinters around him. The bird’s wooden head and neck were still intact, pecking at Russ’s ankles. He kicked it away in disgust.
Now that the ride was over, my legs gave out, and I had to sit down on a boulder. I looked at my hands, my feet, the ground around me. I looked at the boulders and at the bright red sky. Nothing I had experienced before stepping on that carousel had prepared me for this. I knew it couldn’t be happening, and yet it seemed so real—more than real. There was a heightened sense of reality to everything around us, as if this place truly was made up of whole new dimensions beyond the three that filled up the rest of our lives. My senses were so unaccustomed to it, I didn’t know whether to feel wonder or terror.
Maggie came up beside me. “You okay?”
“Why are you asking him?” said Russ. “What about me? I’m a wreck! I want to go home! I didn’t sign up for some weird, communal acid trip.”
But Russ was wrong to call it that. This was the exact opposite of some drugged-out experience. We still had our senses. Our minds were sharp and clear. It was the rest of the world that had gone crazy.
“The rules have changed,” I told them. “We’ve got to accept it and learn to deal with things the way they are now.”
I stood up, feeling my strength return and feeling my senses adapting to the dimensions of this new reality. “It’s kind of like learning to swim. The first time you were in water, it must have felt like this.”