The hand came out. It was pudgy and stub-fingered, and the fingernails were all gnawed down to the quick. Death looked at it. Spray-can. Pepper-spray? Mace? He didn’t wait to find out. He launched himself off the railing at the fat man, going for his wet, whistling cave of a mouth.
The man nodded as he came for him and let him paste one on him. Death's rings drew blood on the fat cheek and rocked the guy's head back a bit. The man stepped back and armed away the blood with his sleeve. Death was running for his car, hand digging into his pocket for his phone. He managed to get the phone out and his hand on the door handle before the fat man caught up, breathing heavily, air whistling through his nose.
He punched Death in the mouth in a vastly superior rendition of Death’s sole brave blow, a punch so hard Death’s neck made a crackling sound as his head rocked away, slamming off the car’s frame, ringing like a gong. Death began to slide down the car’s door, and only managed to turn his face slightly when the man sprayed him with his little aerosol can.
Mace. Death’s breath stopped in his lungs and his face felt as if he’d plunged it into boiling oil. His eyes felt worse, like dirty fingers were sandpapering over his eyeballs. He choked and fell over and heard the man laugh.
Then a boot caught him in the stomach and while he was doubled over, it came down again on his skinny shin. The sound of the bone breaking was loud enough to be heard over the roaring of the blood in his ears. He managed to suck in a lungful of air and scream it out, and the boot connected with his mouth, kicking him hard and making him bite his tongue. Blood filled his mouth.
A rough hand seized him by the hair and the rasping breath was in his ears.
“You should just shut the fuck up about Disney on the fucking Internet, you know that, kid?”
The man slammed his head against the pavement.
“Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” Bang, bang, bang. Death thought he’d lose consciousness soon — he’d had no idea that pain could be this intense. But he didn’t lose consciousness for a long, long time. And the pain could be a lot more intense, as it turned out.
Sammy didn’t want the writer meeting him at his office. His organization had lots of people who’d been loyal to the old gothy park and even to Death Waits. They plotted against him. They wrote about him on the fucking Internet, reporting on what he’d eaten for lunch and who’d shouted at him in his office and how the numbers were declining and how none of the design crews wanted to work on his new rides.
The writer couldn’t come to the office — couldn’t come within miles of the park. In fact, if Sammy had had his way, they would have done this all by phone, but when he’d emailed the writer, he’d said that he was in Florida already and would be happy to come and meet up.
Of course he was in Florida — he was covering the ride.
The trick was to find a place where no one, but no one, from work would go. That meant going as touristy as possible — something overpriced and kitschy.
Camelot was just the place. It had once been a demolition derby stadium, and then had done turns as a skate-park, a dance-club and a discount wicker furniture outlet. Now it was Orlando’s number two Arthurian-themed dining experience, catering to package-holiday consolidators who needed somewhere to fill the gullets of their busloads of tourists. Watching men in armor joust at low speed on glue-factory nags took care of an evening’s worth of entertainment, too.
Sammy parked between two giant air-conditioned tour coaches, then made his way to the entrance. He’d told the guy what he looked like, and the guy had responded with an obvious publicity shot that made him look like Puck from a boys’-school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — unruly hair, mischievous grin.
When he turned up, though, he was ten years older, a cigarette jammed in the yellowing crooked stumps of his teeth. He needed a shower and there was egg on the front of his denim jacket.
“I’m Sammy,” Sammy said. “You must be Freddy.”
Freddy spat the cigarette to one side and shook with him. The writer’s palms were clammy and wet.
“Pleasure to meet you,” Freddy said. “Camelot, huh?”
“Taste of home for you, I expect,” Sammy said. “Tally ho. Pip pip.”
Freddy scrunched his face up in an elaborate sneer. “You are joking, right?”
“I’m joking. If I wanted to give you a taste of home, I’d have invited you to the Rose and Crown Pub in Epcot: ’Have a jolly ol’ good time at the Rose and Crown!’”
“Still joking, I trust?”
“Still joking,” Sammy said. “This place does a decent roast beef, and it’s private enough.”
“Private in the sense of full of screaming stupid tourists stuffing their faces?”
“Exactly.” Sammy took a step toward the automatic doors.
“Before we go in, though,” Freddy said. “Before we go in. Why are you talking to me at all, Mr Disney Parks Executive?”
He was ready for this one. “I figured that sooner or later you’d want to know more about this end of the story that you’ve been covering. I figured it was in my employer’s best interest to see to it that you got my version.”
The reporter’s grin was wet and mean. “I thought it was something like that. You understand that I’m going to write this the way I see it, not the way you spin it, right?”
Sammy put a hand on his heart. “Of course. I never would have asked anything less of you.”
The reporter nodded and stepped inside the air-conditioned, horsey-smelling depths of Camelot. The greeter had acne and a pair of tights that showed off his skinny knock-knees. He took off his great peaked cap with its long plume and made a stiff little bow. “Greetings, milords, to Camelot. Yon feast awaits, and our brave knights stand ready to do battle for their honor and your amusement.”
Freddy rolled his eyes at Sammy, but Sammy made a little scooting gesture and handed the greeter their tickets, which were ringside. If he was going to go to a place like Camelot, he could at least get the best seats in the house.
They settled in and let the serving wench — whose fancy contact lenses, piercings, and electric blue pony-tails were seriously off-theme — take their roast beef orders and serve them gigantic pewter tankards of “ale”; Bud Light, and the logo was stamped into the sides of the tankards.
“Tell me your story, then,” Freddy said. The tourists around them were noisy and already a little drunk, their conversation loud to be heard over the looping soundtrack of ren faire polka music.
“Well, I don’t know how much you know about the new Disney Parks organization. A lot of people think of us as being just another subsidiary of the Mouse, like back in the old days. But since the IPO, we’re our own company. We license some trademarks from Disney and operate rides based on them, but we also aggressively license from other parties — Warners, Universal, Nintendo. Even the French comic-book publisher responsible for Asterix. That means that we get a lot of people coming in and out of the organization, contractors or consultants working on designing a single ride or show.
“That creates a lot of opportunities for corporate espionage. Knowing what properties we’re considering licensing gives the competition a chance to get there ahead of us, to land an exclusive deal that sets us back on square one. It’s ugly stuff — they call it ’competitive intelligence’ but it’s just spying, plain old spying.
“All of our employees have been contacted, one time or another, by someone with an offer — get me a uniform, or a pic of the design roughs, or a recording of the soundtrack, or a copy of the contracts, and I’ll make it worth your while. From street-sweepers to senior execs, the money is just sitting there, waiting for us to pick it up.”
The wench brought them their gigantic pewter plates of roast-beef, Yorkshire pudding, parsnips, and a mountain of french fries, presumably to appease the middle-American appetites of the more unadventurous diners.