wore little or nothing. All were drenched with blood.
Four bodies remained on the floor.
Two males, two females.
Naked and mauled. Dave saw caved-in faces, eyeless sockets, slashed throats, a severed arm, a man whose chest had been stripped of skin. He saw worse, and jerked his flashlight away from the carnage. He stared at the trolls lined up against the walls.
“What are you?” he whispered.
A wizened old crone cackled, raised a hand from her side, and said, “What’re you? What’re you?” As she spoke, her hand worked, moving the “mouth” of the bloody sock it wore.
Dave aimed his pistol at her face.
“Bullet in the bean,” her sock puppet chanted. “Slug in the noodle. Bad for the brain-pan, that.”
“Shut up!”
Joan stepped forward. She stood over one of the female corpses. Dave lit it for her.
It was young and slender. The legs stuck straight out to the sides, as if a couple of trolls had played tug of war with them. Not much was left of the breasts. Nothing was left of the face.
“It’s not Debbie,” Joan muttered.
How could she tell?
Dave couldn’t bring himself to ask.
He saw for himself that the other mutilated female wasn’t Joan’s sister. This corpse was fat.
Joan stepped over the body. Turning around, she walked backward toward the door at the other end of the room. “Let’s go,” she said.
Dave swept his light over the trolls at the wall. “What about these…things?”
“I don’t care. Let’s just leave ’em.”
“After what they’ve done?”
“I don’t care. I want Debbie.”
Dave started across the room, shining his light on the bodies, stepping around them, his shoes sinking into the soft rubber mat, sliding on the blood. He aimed the beam forward to light Joan’s way. He shone it on the trolls along the wall.
Joan waited until he was close to her, then opened the door.
“Anybody comes out after us is dead,” he warned. Then he followed Joan through the doorway. He pulled the door shut and tried its knob. The door was locked. But just from this side, probably.
He backed away from it, pistol ready in case it should fly open, half-hoping the trolls would make a try for them.
Jeremy, crouching, put his cleaver on the floor and gripped one of the steel spikes to hold the barrel as steady as possible while Tanya crawled through. In the light from her candle, he could see Liz and Cowboy at the other end, also gripping spikes. Their efforts weren’t enough to keep the barrel from rocking slightly from side to side while Tanya made her way over Samson.
It sickened him to think they were using the boy this way. But none of them could’ve gotten through alive if they hadn’t dropped the body across the bottom of the barrel. Samson was tall enough to stretch most of the way from one end to the other, and thick enough to absorb the full length of the four-inch spikes.
Must have twenty or thirty in him, Jeremy thought.
Samson can’t feel them.
If he knew what was going on, he might even be happy about it. He was like a bridge that might get his friends out of here. And he would probably like the idea of Tanya squirming over him like that.
Tanya was almost out now. She stopped, sank down against Samson, kissed his lips, and whispered, “Thank you, Samuel.”
They’re all calling him Samuel now, Jeremy realized. As if it’s not right to use his nickname anymore.
Tanya raised herself. Kneeling on Samson’s chest, high up near his shoulders, she reached out. Jeremy set his candle on the floor. He grabbed her wrists and pulled as she sprang forward.
They stumbled together away from the barrel.
When they crouched down to hold it for Liz, it was rocking slowly, lifting Samson’s body from one side to the other. In spite of the motion, he didn’t slip or slide at all. He might have been glued to the thing. But he wasn’t.
Robin pressed her shuddering body tight against the back of the seat and watched the troll scoot slowly along the Ferris wheel’s rim.
He was almost near enough to reach her.
She prayed that he would fall.
Though he moved cautiously, he didn’t seem afraid of that. His legs were hugging the narrow beam, his hands sliding forward, gripping it, pulling himself closer to her. He never looked down at his hands. His single eye stayed on Robin.
She had thought about trying to get away. She had even turned from him for just a few moments, peered over the front of the gondola, and weighed