The Funhouse

into the gondola. It connected with such force at the extreme end of its arc that it was jerked out of his hands.
        The thing in the car didn't move, and the car itself ground to a complete stop.
        “I got him!” Buzz shouted.
        Liz and Amy rushed to him.
        Buzz got down on his knees, reached into the gondola channel, into the car, and seized the ax handle again. He pulled up, and the thing into which the dull blade had sunk was lifted up with it.
        A head.
        Not the freak's head.
        The freak hadn't been on that rear seat.
        The dull blade of the ax was embedded deeply in Richie's skull. Brains oozed from the fissures I in the bone and slid down his bloody face.
        Liz screamed.
        Buzz dropped the ax and turned away from the gondola. He vomited on the papier-mâché boulder.
        Amy was so stunned that she let go of Liz's hand. Liz was screaming at Buzz now. “You stupid son of a bitch! You killed him! You killed Richie!” Both Liz and Amy had armed themselves with dull, rusty knives that they had taken from the funhouse displays, and now Liz raised her knife as if she might attack Buzz with it. “You stupid asshole! You killed Richie!”
        “No,” Amy said. “No, Liz. Baby, listen. Buzz didn't kill him. Listen, Richie was already dead. It was just his corpse in that car.”
        Sobbing with terror, her fear magnified by the drugs that she had taken all evening, Liz turned and ran before Amy could grab her. She fled across the flying saucer display, between two tentacled aliens whose rubbery appendages wobbled in the air after she brushed past them. She vanished in shadows, behind the papier-mâché rocks.
        “Liz, damn it!” Amy said.
        The sound of the other girl's panicked flight faded rapidly. She disappeared into the bowels of the funhouse.
        Amy turned to Buzz again.
        He was on his knees. He had just finished being violently sick. The stink was terrible. He wiped the back of his hand across his soiled mouth.
        “Are you okay?” Amy asked.
        “Holy Christ, it was Richie,” he said weakly.
        “He was already dead,” Amy said.
        “But it was Richie !”
        “Don't flake out on me,” Amy said.
        “I… I won't.”
        “You're okay?”
        “I guess… yeah.”
        “Get hold of yourself.”
        “I'm all right.”
        “We have to keep our cool if we're going to survive.”
        “But this is crazy ,” Buzz said.
        “It's crazy,” Amy agreed. “But it's happening.”
        “Locked in a funhouse with a… a monster.”
        “It's happening, and we have to deal with it,” she said patiently.
        Buzz nodded, sucked in his stomach, struggled to regain his macho 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