8

FAR BELOW WHERE Rob and Mary are perched, awaiting sure death, the pier has burned through the base of the ride. The giant metal triangles supporting the wheel’s core crunch through the burning wood of the pier. The platform slants, sinks slowly through charred timbers toward eager water.

The great wheel is defeated.

Half-burned, free of its moorings, it begins, ever so slowly, to lean.

Then, when it can hold itself upright no longer, and with the dying groan of a great god, it falls.

9

MARY STARES IN horror as Rob’s feet leave the metal lip, float outward into the air, as if he’s entered zero-gravity. She clasps her jacket tight. Looped around the opposite side of the tub, she holds it like a lifeline. The pads of her sneakers are melting into the rubber-matted floor, the heat unbearable. Like standing on a frying pan. She stares at her fiancée, wide-eyed. She watches in rapt fascination as the landscape behind him changes, like a vertically sliding backdrop, from the night sky, to the ocean, to a sea of flames.

We’re falling, she thinks, and knows it to be true as her bottom rises, slides toward the open door. Toward Rob. Toward the flames.

“Rob!” she screams, not sure what scares her more: him leaving, or him coming back. She wants so badly for him to comfort her, to hold her in these last moments.

“It’s gotta fall toward the water!” he yells, red-faced, and she can see now what he’s doing. He’s pulling the great wheel. Using his meager weight to throw the balance in the sea’s favor. Helping it to fall toward the water versus the flaming pier. She knows it’s meaningless. Knows his scant one-hundred-eighty pounds won’t have sway over which way the massive, burning wheel tumbles. But my god, look at him, she thinks. She was never more proud. Never more in love.

She feels something – something final – give, far below. Her body lifts away from the floor. The jacket she holds no longer a reassuring support, but a rope to dangle from.

They’re tipping.

“Mary!” Rob screams, now fully horizontal, his feet hanging away from the gondola, toward the flames and raging water below. “Mary! It’s going to fall! Be ready to jump!”

Mary nods, but doesn’t move. This is no movie. The physicality of the metal, the heat, the flames. All too real. The force being consumed will take her down, her life nothing but an afterthought to the great devouring.

“Mary!” he says, his face full shadow. “I love you, Mary.”

And then, before she can think or hear any more, they are tilting over… they are falling.

She watches in frozen horror as the world rushes upward.

There’s a flurry of sparks, and only Rob’s hand remains, clutching the post. Their descent picks up speed, the world splinters.

Rob disappears. Sucked away into the night sky.

Her body lifts higher, toes tapping the roof of the doorway, but her eyes never leave the onrushing landscape. She dangles, legs kicking, from a great height. Though she is stationary, the world accelerates toward her.

A world made of flames. The speed of her descent spreads to her cheeks, her fluttering eyes. Wet hair is blown away from her face. The raging fire rushes at her, eager, and then falls away frustrated and hungry as she pushes outward past it. Now only the dark water fills her vision. Coming to kiss her. Flames and pieces of flesh or wood she doesn’t know fall all around her – down, down into the sea.

She does not let go, but hangs on tight, sticks a heel against the metal wall, rides the gondola down. Her stomach lifts into her throat, gravity pulling her apart. She does not yell out as she slams into the frigid waves, an avalanche of water crashing upward. Swallowing her. She wants to scream at the shock of it, but it’s too late.

The weight of the burning wheel lands on top of her, overwhelming.

It pushes her down, down into the cold black sea, which devours her with an insatiable, giddy greed.

THOUSANDS OF ONLOOKERS, from the beaches to the streets, watch in horror and fascination as the pier burns, and as the great wheel finally succumbs to the flames, belches a death rattle groan and crashes, lifeless, into the sea.

They know that nothing on it could have survived.

THE SOUNDS OF death fall silent.

Mary sinks. Pushed down into the water, the weight of the massive steel gondola presses at her back, the wheel itself – what remains unburned – sinks quickly, hundreds of thousands of pounds of dead weight plummet toward the bottom of the ocean. Taking Mary with it.

It is shallow near the end of the pier. Only about thirty feet until you reach the settled muck at the ocean’s shoreline floor. A buried world of seaweed and mud, crabs and other creatures that live and feed in the kelp forest below.

Mary lets go of the jacket she’d been clinging to, holds her breath as she sees the black seafloor come up at her, illuminated from above by the oily flames now settling on the roiling surface. She can’t move, can’t swim. Can’t escape. The weight is forcing her deeper, deeper. Writhing kelp arms slip through the open door of the gondola, reach for her. She kicks out. A silver fish swims past her field of vision.

Then the tub slams into the sea bottom, the floor coughs a cloud of mud.

And still the weight of the wheel presses downward, burying the gondola and Mary into the soft floor of the sea. Dark sand billows into the water, blinding her. Mary feels her feet, then shins, knees, sinking into the cold sand. Past the weeds, into the soft sea bottom as the colossal weight presses impossibly hard upon her back, driving her into the mud, folding her over. Terror overrides her mind and reflexively she wants to scream. Eyes widen as she fights the impulse, manages to keep her breath. She twists her body, convulsively, desperate for escape. One arm pushes up, expects to meet metal, but finds open water. She spins, blind, chest burning, the great weight pushing her down… but realizes there is still time.

Seconds.

The opening between the base of the gondola and the roof. She can squeeze through. She grips the metal lip with both hands, forces her body rigid, lifts her head through the descending opening.

Seaweed entangles her legs. Mud sucks at her feet.

She shakes her head violently, needing so badly to cry out one last primal scream of survival. She keeps her lips sealed tight and grips the edge of the metal and pulls herself – using all of her strength – through the space and into open water. Her legs slide free and, as the gondola sinks into the mud, she rises through, into the dark, gloomy sea.

Alive. Still alive.

She spares a glance down, watches the gondola sink deeper into a haze of disrupted muck, knowing she was nearly buried forever beneath it, then kicks upward, tries to center herself. The entire ocean seems to be illuminated by flame. She looks up. The surface impossibly far. A bed of fire rests upon it, a flickering orange canopy spread out as far as she can see. A blackened beam sinks past, smoldering, trailing liquid smoke as it drifts downward.

Running out of breath, she allows herself one last look around, then down, where the wheel is settling into a gray cloud, its white limbs like fossils. Mary takes a second to study the surreal entirety of the drowned Ferris Wheel. Flickering orange, green and blue in the flashing depths. It’s bigger than she would have imagined. Like an alien spacecraft, crashed and sunken.

Arms and legs of trapped riders dangle from the gondola openings, waving at her like the seaweed, beckoning, blackened by death.

She does not see Rob.