Full Tilt

Page 19

I could feel the guard’s excitement build as he considered it. “So then, you were supposed to die?”
“But I didn’t.”
He looked at my “father,” who turned his shadowy face toward the stone.
“If no one survives Cassandra, and you did,” said the guard, “then you could be the only one who’s ever beaten her!”
I shook my head. “I didn’t beat her, I just survived.”
“So survive again! How did you survive the first time?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Try! You must remember something.”
I turned away in frustration. “I’ve been through it a thousand times! The bus was spinning out of control. We crashed through the guardrail, and I couldn’t open the back door.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing!” I paced away, but there was nowhere to go in the small chamber. “There was nothing else! One moment I was there at the back of the bus, and the next thing I remember, I was home, and no one was talking about it, and no one has since.” I felt like pounding my head against the wall to shake loose the memory. There was a gap in there. I always knew it was there, but since no one ever discussed the crash, it was easy to ignore. The crash had knocked me unconscious. The concussion erased my memory of the trauma, and that was that. Why did it matter? Why should anyone care?
“If you’re going to be the one to make it out,” said the guard, “you’re going to have to remember what you did.”
He looked at me for a moment more, then motioned to the open door. “Come on. I can lead you to the seventh ride.”
But getting out wasn’t enough. “What about my brother?”
“Who?”
“The pharaoh—King Tut.”
The guard lowered his eyes. “You can’t save him.”
He was right about that. Only Quinn could save Quinn. I knew that. But if he was still alive, perhaps I could give him the means to save himself. “Where would he be now? Where would they take him?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “King Tut dies—King Tut always dies. You can’t change the ride.”
Well, we’d see about that. I started to follow the guard out, but in the corner of the room the phantom image of my father began to speak.
“Blake?”
His face was still fuzzy and unclear, but I had to admit his voice was the voice I remembered.
“I told you what you wanted to know. Now you have to do something for me.”
“What?”
“Let me out of here,” he said. “Please. I’ve been in this place for a long, long time.”
In the torchlight I could see how truly helpless he was in those shackles. It was a fair request. Whatever he might deserve, I didn’t think he deserved this tomb. I picked up a stone lying on the ground and smashed the chains until the links broke.
Once he was free, he left. Simple as that. Just like he did all those years ago. No apologies, no thank-yous, no good-byes. Still, it didn’t change the choice I made to let him go.
12
No Guts, No Glory
The room where they had taken Quinn was a long chamber full of stone tables, and you can guess what was on each of those tables. The process of mummification is not pretty. Making one mummy is bad enough, but here, where there was a new King Tut every evening, it was an assembly line—or a disassembly line, I guess you might say. On each table was another unfortunate rider in some stage of the process. Quinn was in the earliest stage, and still, to my relief, very much alive.
The temple guard and a few of his conspirators had smuggled me in, but in my current hiding place I couldn’t do anything to help my brother. Not yet, anyway. He was just a few yards away from me, but all I could do was watch. He was still groggy from the drugs he’d been given, but even if he’d had all his strength, he wouldn’t have been able to tear free from the ropes that tied down his arms and legs. He glanced at the fully wrapped mummy on the slab next to him.
An old woman with red cheeks tended to him. She seemed pleasant enough, humming to herself as she removed Quinn’s facial rings, and put them on an alabaster tray.
“Who said you could take those?” Quinn said, defiant to the last.
“You just relax, dearie,” she said, sounding like someone’s grandma. “I’ll take care of everything.” She smiled at him and gently patted his hand. He pulled his hand away.
“So am I dead now?” Quinn asked. “Is this what death is?”
“No, you’re just drugged. In this heat it’s always best to keep you alive until we begin work, there being no refrigeration and all.”
Quinn thought about this while Madame Embalmer continued humming to herself, measuring Quinn with some sort of ruler shorter than a yardstick. Maybe it was a cubit stick.
“What are you doing?” Quinn asked.
“Measuring you for your sarcophagus, dearie.” She turned and shouted angrily at one of her assistants. “ACHMED!” she yelled. “Easy on the salt!”
Her gawky assistant, who didn’t look much older than me, had shoveled a mountain of sea salt over an ex-Tut who was already well on the way to long-term preservation. “Yes, ma’am,” Achmed said dutifully.
Madame Embalmer shook her head and looked down at Quinn. “Waste, waste, waste! The way he uses that salt, you’d think the Dead Sea were around the corner!”
That’s when Cassandra showed up, still decked out in her Egyptian glory. I flinched and then realized that even a flinch could give me away. But I was lucky. No one saw me.
She looked at Quinn and kissed him on the forehead. “I want him put on the fast track,” she told Madame Embalmer.
“Was he a good Tut?” she asked.
“Oh, completely incompetent,” Cassandra said.
I could see Quinn’s eyes getting moist, but his jaw was still set hard. I wonder what he was feeling. Shame? Humiliation? The realization that this truly was the end of the line? Suddenly he pulled against his bonds, but Madame Embalmer was right there to comfort him.
“There, there. Don’t you worry.”
“Wh-What’s going to happen to me?”
The old woman looked at Cassandra for permission before speaking.
“Well, it’s really rather simple,” said Madame Embalmer, taking on a singsong tone of voice, as if she were reading him a bedtime story. “First we disembowel—”
“Disembowel?”
“Yes. We take out your heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—every organ—and tuck them nicely away in their own little jars. Except, of course, for your brain. We pull that out through your nose with a hook.”
Quinn whimpered.
“Then,” continued the old woman, “when you’re nice and empty on the inside, we cover you with salt, to dry you up.” At the sound of a nasty splat, she turned to her assistant.
“ACHMED!”
Achmed picked up something from the floor and fumbled with it in his arms. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, but it looked suspiciously liverlike. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Butterfingers!”
Achmed slipped the thing carefully into an earthen jar with a sickening slosh. I closed my eyes and grimaced. Now I had a legitimate reason never to eat my mother’s liver-and-onions again.
There were tears rolling down Quinn’s cheeks. He was afraid, and maybe for the first time in his life he was admitting that he was. “I don’t want to be empty on the inside,” he cried. “Please . . . please don’t do this.”
For a moment I thought I saw compassion in Cassandra’s gaze, but it only lasted for a moment. “Shut him up,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“I’ll go get a gag for him.”
The old woman left, and Cassandra strode down to the far end of the hall, where the mummies could no longer talk back.
This was my chance. I rose from the table where I’d been lying and hurried to Quinn. When he saw me, his eyes bulged, and he opened his mouth to scream. I clamped my linen-covered hand over his mouth before he could make a sound.
“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 attitude.
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 fiancé, had given him. He fixed it in his ear as we ran.
“No! Stop them!” Cassandra 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 Cassandra 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!”