The Swallow hastily headed straight towards the donut-shaped fairground complex which looked more and more bleak. Wild vegetation, torn tents, twisted vertical loops. The ruined park no longer shone with its thousand colors of yesteryear. It could have been a movie set for the next Funhouse, which made Ali even more thrilled.
It was a miracle that the rusted garage’s door remained functional as drifting pebbles and cosmic radiation had severely damaged the exterior of the station. Once the ship parked vertically, we ventured into the main lobby where the atmosphere—charged with CO2 but breathable—was rancid and moist.
“This park has been closed for more than two decades—at least since the beginning of the Rings Rush,” I said, looking at a pile of garbage near a smashed open ATM.
“How can you be so sure?”
“There’s a brick of milk without sinister missing child’s notice on it,” I answered while pointing to the faded cardboard container under a giant plush tiger emptied of its polystyrene foam. “Also, an ad for the Muppet Movie is stapled on the wooden panel near the souvenir shop.”
“This is the most fantabulous place in the system!” shouted Ali as she crossed the entrance’s gripped turnstiles under the vacant eye of a creepy animatronic.
I did not share her enthusiasm. Despite the sorry aspect of the park, we were not the only ones recently roaming around. On the covered dusty ground, tiny footprints were clearly visible. The newest ones belonged to a pack of small automatons. And one of them soon crossed our path.
“Isn’t it cute, Lee? It reminds me of F.A.B. but shaped like a Wonder Ball.”
I grunted. The ridiculous robot was the opposite of endearing. It was a modest iron ball roughly painted in red with thin skeletal limbs. All around the ventral joint circling this mini-sphere, someone had drawn sharp teeth with a permanent marker after adding three stupid googly eyes.
“We’re bringing him back!” Ali pursued, brushing her new pet. “Imma find another one for you.”
“You better put it down,” I coughed as she was rummaging through the dust and a pile of moldy folded maps. “It could already belong to someone.”
My human pouted and wanted to rest the bot on a mail box yet the little machine had clamped its small metal limbs around her fingers. Trying to free herself, Ali shook it like a broken Magic 8 Ball but without further success. “The fuck you doing?” Ali cursed before wincing in pain. “Stop it! You’re hurting me you little—” The robot suddenly opened in two and a long elastic tongue concluded by a threatening hypodermic syringe slowly unfolded before dancing in the air as a cobra would have done to the sound of his master’s flute. “Oh shit! Lee! Help m—ouch!” Helpless, Ali got stung between the eyes and fell backwards.
“I told you so—” Taken by surprise, I ended up slammed to the ground by three other bots. These little punks had just appeared from a candy shop. Not without fighting back, I sadly suffered the same fate. And I could only blame my ludicrous partner!
A terrible headache woke me up. The previous sequence of events was a bit confusing. All I could hear over the migraine was a singsong voice: “Knock. Knock. Knock!”
“Where’s Ali?” I asked myself, trying to rub my dry eyes. Alas, I had been solidly attached to a child’s booster seat and suspended high in front of a shredded tarpaulin. Surrounded by stalls, I was apparently in a dark alley of a sordid carnival.
“Wake up, kitty-cat!” My kidnapper then introduced himself, but refused to tell me more about my human. Jacques was a surreal character wearing an old European cosmonaut costume from the early Space Age. His face was masked by his tinted visor which had been painted in orange and decorated with grotesque Jack-O-Lantern features. “We need to proceed to the challenges!”
“Challenges? What challenges? Where am I?” I meowed, trying to free myself from a conglomerate of knots tied together without any logic.
But Jacques hit me on the head. “Questions—questions—questions!” He whined, imitating my panicked tone. “Surviving the trials shall bring you answers!”
I agreed and the cosmo-pumpkin applauded like a child before removing the tarpaulin that protected the boards of a shooting range. After theatrically positioning himself behind me, he lowered from the awning a heavy rusty air gun which he handcuffed to my front paws. “Alright—hear me out, kitty-cat!” he patronized me. “The targets will appear—but they are just a warm-up! Don’t miss the bigger one!”
“Why?” I got angry trying to aim at my jailer with the gun.
“For the… Apotheosis!” he warbled, activating a mechanical cog from the tip of his weighted boot.
“What apotheosis?”
“The Apotheosis…” he repeated more softly, shaking his hands while lifting his arms over his head.
In a rattling song, the pewter targets began to dance on the shelves. They were miniature faces of Thorandell, the blond barbarian from Forgotten Quest. When I hit my first bull’s-eye, it exploded under the impact. My weapon used military ammunition! It wasn’t a BB gun!
I didn’t miss any targets in the first series, but the game quickly started to be more complex. The figures spun in all directions at a frantic pace. Jacques laughed every time I failed, and the exercise became nearly impossible with the pungent smoke coming out of the cannon.
“Stay focus, kitty-cat! You have 85 points! 85—85—85! The biggest one arises—and it’s worth 20!” Jacques sang as the little faces of Thorandell converged towards the center of the firing zone. “The Apotheosis!”
The small targets suddenly disappeared. The resulting second of silence ended when something emerged in the middle of the shooting range. I pressed the trigger by reflex and a drop of blood splashed on my snout before Jacques burst out of an insane laugh. I had hit someone’s face. A human with blond hair.
“A—Ali?” I stuttered as the powder screen dissipated. My heart had stopped. But it was not my sapiens; just an individual with a vile toupee supposed to make him look like the famous barbarian from popular culture. “What is this degenerate challenge!” I burst out when I found out about the legitimate murder. “Who was this person?”
I heard my executioner’s loudly sticking his tongue behind his helmet. He still refused to answer. We were far from completing the endless list of these glaring and twisted trials. Fortunately, there were no other homicides. I passed my last challenge at the slot machine stand when an unknown hour rang at the ghost train’s clock. Jacques then made squealed the superstore wagon’s wheels holding me captive and told me that it was time for a final ordeal. “You ruined my day asking where your mistress was!” Jacques cackled before annoyingly imitating my past pleas.
“Because you never replied, airhead! Where is she?” I cried out as he had exhausted my last reserves of patience.
Luckily, I ultimately got my answer a few minutes later when we entered a traditional barn covered with spider webs. There, Ali was gagged and tied up against the back wall. An anonymous woman in a Separatist uniform suffered the same fate next to her.
“You convoluted iconoclast! Release her!” I cried to Jacques. But my captor had already vanished.
Surrounded by an audience of animatronics, the mad cosmonaut reappeared at a desk overlooking the room. He was wearing a powdered wig and a tricorn with a red-white-blue roundel on his helmet. He hammered his counter using a screaming rubber chicken before expressing himself solemnly with a very exaggerated French accent: “The Tribunal Révolutionaire randomly declares one of the defendants ‘enemy of the peuple’. The sentence required iz death—by rotatory guillotine!” The audience of animatronics applauded as this carnival Robespierre jumped from his desk to join me, an old mechanical control panel in hand. Then, he pressed a tricolor button which blew away the straw covering the floor. Between Ali and us appeared a labyrinth of iron rails that ended in a junction with two ultimate tracks facing the victims. Finally, a circular saw brutally came out of the ground right in front of my nose. “The choice is yours, citoyen kitty-cat!” Jacques solemnly sang like a comedian from Les Misérables would do. “Guide ze sword of the Révolution to the sans-culotte who deserves it the most!”
“What is going on?” I cried.
“Justice iz blind, mon ami. Just picked the one you want to save.” Besides the tricolor button, the case had a single switch that tilted in two positions: on the right to a child’s drawing representing my partner with her blond hair; on the left to the unknown with her brown mall bangs.
A terrible choice and yet already made. “Alright, Jacques.” I turned the latch to save my human. The circular saw began to spin and slid slowly towards the center of the room. Several LEDs flickered at the junction of the tracks. But against all expectations, the blades took Ali’s direction. “Hell! You lied to me!” I yowled.
The executioner frantically tapped his toy and jammed the switch. His only reaction was to laugh at the situation: “Palsambleu! That iz bad luck!”
The ring saw advanced slowly, and nothing could stop it. It continued its morbid course towards the hips of its victim who was struggling. We both screamed, helpless, as the steel blades tore the flesh. It was a shower of hemoglobin and viscera. Soon after, my human’s pelvis and legs fell to the ground and the machine froze. My poor partner remained suspended by the wrists; bleeding out.
After Jacques freed me from the wagon, I rushed to my reason for living and cried. “You nefarious bastard! What have you done?” I cried before hearing a feminine laughter and startled. My sapiens had opened their eyes and was mocking me.
In what absurd nonsense had I lost myself again?
