Everybody Scream! (28 page)

“Great,” her voice trembled. She could barely look at him since what he’d said. Exhilarating, but scary.

New people scrambled up into the wheel to replace them. Fawn and the others moved along, and so Fawn didn’t hear one of the new passengers cry out in recognition, “Oh my God–Jeanie! Jeanie! Jeanie!”

The second ride they entered together also gyrated in a fast circle, but there were branches growing from the center, with two carriages pointing in opposite directions at the end of each, which would rotate around each other as the entire machine rotated. It had an exact twin close by, actually the same ride, and the spinning path of their branches overlapped at one point. Were the mated machines so perfectly timed and calibrated that the whipping carriages of one would never collide with those of the other? Such a concern was the whole purpose of the thing. Fawn and Fen squeezed into a carriage.

The sadistic machine hurled them gleefully, cracked them in its whip, jolted them from side to side. Fawn screamed as their car seemed about to crash into those of the twin machine upon which Wes and Heather rode, but the car wove out just in time. Upon every full rotation their car also flew at the young man who collected the tickets and stood so still and calm watching their frenzied hurtling. He was grim, homely, tough-looking, a deep scar on a pocked face, the many colored lights pooled in the pocks like rain water reflecting neon. He seemed to be showing off to Fawn in particular (his eyes would appear to meet hers as she rushed at him) but she was sure he always did this...standing so close that the carriages brushed his shirt. Fawn resented him for making her nervous.

The solitary man in the other carriage at the end of their branch wore an expensive business suit, secured with a more complex harness than the others, perhaps of his own devising. He typed intently at a keyboard on his lap. Fawn didn’t know, but he would ride this ride all night, had paid to ride this ride all day every day this season. He had a disease. Sometimes he had to go into constant spinning motion to find relief. He was having a device built into his home and one in his yard. He would allow his children to ride in them once in a while. This was the only way he could currently work at his job.

The force of the spinning pressed Fen painfully against Fawn, squashing her, pinning her. He had taken her hand; she squeezed it back. Shortly before the ride ended he leaned even closer to kiss her lightly on the lips.

The third ride was the Screamer, back toward the entrance. She, Heather and Cookie had ridden on it earlier, but without the company of the boys. Its loud music crashed in Fawn’s ears, the wailing force which seemed to generate the spinning of the ride. She and Fen ran up the clanging metal ramp, squeezed together in one tiny rocking car. Wes and Heather, and Cookie alone, took cars on the other side, and were soon out of sight and out of mind.

Chauncy Carnal of Sphitt lustily rasped out
In Your Face
. Though the song was from a man’s point of view, Fawn sang along softly and bounced in her seat to the beat as the last cars loaded up. She smiled to Fen as she sang, and he grinned. She became shy, stopped singing. He took her hand again and squeezed it as the circular train pulled out of the station. “Man, you’re so blasting gorgeous,” she could just barely hear him say to her.

Again, they were in a whirlpool of black night smeared with colored light and watching faces painted with glowing pigments, also blurring all together as if to create one huge hideous staring being. The Screamer blazed with bulbs from every available railing, support beam, rim and edge, and the lights flickered and fluctuated, pulsed and throbbed in time to the blaring, deafening, raucous music.

“Do you want to go
faaast
-er?”

“Yeahhh!” came the giddy chant.

Fen had released Fawn’s sweaty hand, and rested his own on her leg above her knee. He gave it a light squeeze, then began rubbing his hand slowly up and down the length of her long slim thigh. Fawn’s hands tightened slickly on the metal restraining bar…

“I
said
, do you want to go
FAST
-
ER?
”

“
Yeahhh!
”

Fen’s hand caressed the inside of her thigh, damp with perspiration through her black sweat pants, the heel of his hand pressing into her crotch at the end of each heavy stroke. And, inevitably, his hand continued in its stroke, cupped her crotch, the fingers moving. Without even thinking Fawn moved her legs open wider, but she didn’t look at Fen’s face. She knew, uncomfortably, that he was watching hers, his gaze weighing more heavily against her than his pinning body.

“Alright…everybody SCREEEAM!”

Voices rose. Fawn made not a sound. Like a spider burrowing, his fingers teased the elastic waistband away from her soft belly. The spider scurried into the dark out of view, dug at the scantier inner layer. Fawn sank down lower in her seat. The legs of the spider slid lightly over her red crinkly hair, brushing it. Then proceeded lower. Teased at a more intimate layer. One leg made a reconnaissance mission into the dampness of this final burrow and found it inviting. Two legs hooked inside it, and the spider moved rhythmically as if in hopes of squeezing its entire bulk inside. His thumb rubbed at the tiny protuberance over the top of the cave like some kind of emblem.

Fawn arched her back violently, arched her neck back, clenching her eyes shut and grimacing like the trapped rider on that hurtling wheel. The music had plunged inside her through this opened hole, and crashed around madly, gleefully inside her body. The whole carnival had been sucked into her. She
was
the black hole. She squirmed and jolted in her seat as if this ride had finally revealed its true purpose to her, and was a torture device she was strapped into, electrified.

But, masochistically, despite the drug-like dizziness, the reeling disorientation, the shocks through her body, she welcomed the torture. She wanted to reach over and take him in hand but didn’t dare let go of the bar. If she let go she would be flung off into space.

Fen’s grin and gaze hadn’t left her. Though he didn’t share her rocking orgasms he loved just watching her face, knowing that
he
was doing that to her…it made him feel powerful; he had her fully in his hand. Anyway, he had no doubt whatsoever that his time would come soon now.

Del wove his way alone through the carnival, more a living ever-shifting maze than an inorganic one, the volume of flesh perhaps outweighing the volume of the inorganic materials which composed it. Del moved quickly. He had a slight fear of losing Noelle before he could get to her. He had sent her along ahead of him; luckily she knew the spot he’d chosen for a rendezvous, although she had expressed confusion.

He had been afraid to have Noelle accompany him. God only knew where Sophi might be. But even alone he dreaded seeing her pop up. Thus it was that he moved swiftly, furtively. Guilt drove him as much as his hunger.

She was there behind the Screamer; she hadn’t changed her mind. She didn’t look any less confused, but smiled nervously. Del did also, relieved to have made his destination without obstacle. And no kids were back here smoking iodine joints or fucking on the ground. “Stay here one more minute,” Del instructed her, and gave her a light kiss on the lips.

Here?
Noelle thought after Del had gone around the Screamer. She didn’t see him go up to the elevated control booth with the shadowy figures inside behind its glass. Noelle glanced around at the trash on the ground, sensing sex that had taken place here previously as if she could still smell it. It was one of those places, like the back of a cemetery, where you could almost see the sperm wriggling all over the ground and onto your shoes.

Del returned again, and moved straight past her to a metal panel at the base of the ride. Keys jingled. Noelle understood. Del slid the panel open. “Go on in,” he invited. He looked more than a little embarrassed, but still undauntedly hungry. His smiles were more shy, uncomfortable now than flirty and charming. It was dark in there and Noelle had to hunch down.

Once inside she could stand easily; so could Del, who wasn’t tall anyway. He locked the panel behind him. It shut out the music a little, but it still poured in through some spaces above, as did the whirling lights, flickering across the vibrating walls, shadows of the train fluttering like the wings of huge birds. The inside of the Screamer rumbled. Del moved to two mechanic’s lamps hanging from the support frame, and now the interior was well lit.

There was a plastic mattress in the center, of course. For a few moments she watched as Del removed a dark green plastic sheet from a cardboard dispenser and covered the bed, as a doctor will pull down new white paper on his examination table. Her eyes strayed to a number of empty beer cans, some tools spread out on a sheet of cardboard, a dog-eared skin magazine tossed almost out of the pool of stark light. The sperm she had felt crawling across her shoes must have actually come from in here.

But hunger is honest, hunger isn’t proud. Far stronger than the kind of mild disgust she felt was a fresh surge of desire at the bald purpose of this chamber. Straightening, Del turned to face her. He had been avoiding her eyes and she his but now they held contact. He slowly approached her and his aura of lust almost pressed her back; she had to put one foot a step behind her.

His hands sliding up under the bunched material of her lacy skirt, Del held Noelle’s ass inside the taut smooth skin of her tights while their mouths locked. She let her tongue into his mouth first. He seldom kissed or fucked with closed eyes because he liked to watch the bliss, but he didn’t always like to be looked back at unless it was that dazed grateful adoration when they (
if
they) reached their plateau of ecstasy. He ran his hands up and down her ass, cupped it, squeezed it. He unclamped his mouth to burrow into her neck, which she arched, her wide lips puffed wider as if swollen with lust, parted open. He kissed her throat, licked her neck just under her jaw line and she groaned shudderingly, holding on to him. Her hair was heavy with the smell of shampoo, her skin had the powdery aftertaste of perfume, chemical but clean. His hand whispered up the skin of her back under her sweater.

More of her body had the scent and taste of applied perfume as it was revealed to his hands, eyes, nose and lips. Like most young people without a lover, Noelle prepared herself each day as if that day she would meet one, and go to bed with him. A person might wait for years but still conceivably make sure to be so prepared. Only in one place–at which he thirstily dwelt like a man in a desert lapping at mud in a hole he’s dug, dwelt until she squirmed as if to kick or buck him off, though she held his head there until he couldn’t breathe–was she not so perfumed, but he was used to this.

He moved up to mount her after she’d finally pushed his head away, grimacing with eyes closed, and now she cried out and climaxed within moments of his furious pumping. She had been so primed that he had barely felt himself enter. Her slim legs greedily rose up to hook him like the jaws of a giant beetle, her toes curled from the intensity of her gripping. Del’s contrastingly white buttocks pumped like a bellows. He was panting, sucking down air greasy with the smell of machine lubrication, holding her head in both hands and staring fixedly at her face, her head thrown back, upper chest and throat and bared forehead filmed with sweat. She pursed her lips out at the air, eyebrows lifted and twisted over her capped lids as if in pain. Staring at her face now, more than anything else, would bring him to his zenith.

She cracked her eyes open a little, smiled faintly at him. Though past the orgasm peak and below even the plateau, her smile looked grateful. But after a few moments Del looked away, twisting atop her body to draw a tiny brown-nippled breast into his mouth. So Noelle stared up at the dark ceiling as her body was rocked on the slick plastic sheet.

The train had stopped earlier, started again, stopped, now started again. Above, the DJ or operator or whatever you’d call him drawled, “Okay, we’re just about ready to roll…rock and roll, that is. Keep your limbs inside the cars, please, and hold on tight…”

Mm, it was good. She knew another train of orgasms was coming around slowly. He nuzzled her neck and she inclined her face away, hoping he wouldn’t kiss her, not liking her own smell on his breath. She stared beyond the pool of light into the dark where colored ghosts of light flitted around and around them. She could almost see all those people lined up out there, so close, for the next ride–staring at them, an audience.