7. Queue Jumping Is Prohibited
QUEUE JUMPING IS PROHIBITED
GRACE
The lattice pathway is a suggestion of a hallway with the structural conviction of a promise made by someone who was already leaving.
The pergola stretches ahead in a long, gentle curve, connecting the fish part to the adventure part with a canopy of wooden slats and lattice walls that let in approximately eighty percent of the outside, which means the outside can also see approximately eighty percent of us.
Decorative vines are threaded through the lattice in a way that was probably charming a few days ago and now feels like the park tried to hide us with a salad.
Joel moves first, two loaded totes slung across his body and the wrench in his hand. He has two hand signals: the flat palm that means stop and the wave that means go.
I follow. My shoes squeak on the concrete. My tote bag rustles. The stabby fork, strapped to the outside, catches a vine and I have to stop and untangle it.
"Sorry. The stabby fork got vine'd."
He does the go-wave. We keep moving.
The path is quiet for the first sixty meters or so. Quiet enough that I can hear the park speakers cycling in the distance, Wondie's voice now permanently warped. Quiet enough that I start to relax, which is always when the universe puts on lipstick and leans in.
Joel's hand goes up. Flat palm.
I stop. I also bump into him because my stopping distance is longer than my following distance. He doesn't react. He's looking ahead, through the lattice, at the open courtyard where the pathway widens before it reaches the adventure part's gate.
There are two of them.
They're just... there. Upright. Swaying slightly.
One is wearing the remains of a WonderSphere staff polo.
The other is in cargo shorts and a tank top and one flip-flop, which means somewhere in the park there's a single flip-flop sitting on the ground and that detail is so mundane and so human that it makes my throat tight.
Joel puts his hand on my arm. His fingers are warm. I notice because my arm has apparently decided to develop a journalism career and is reporting live on every sensation while the rest of my body is trying to focus on not dying.
"They're between us and the gate," he says, barely above a breath.
"Can we go around?"
"Through the landscaping. There's a maintenance access on the south side. But it's louder. More brush."
"Louder is bad."
We stand there. The two wrong people sway.
Tank Top does the chewing-on-nothing thing that I've now seen enough times that it's migrated from "horrifying" to "deeply unpleasant.
" Polo Shirt is facing the wrong direction, which is great, except wrong people don't stay facing any direction for long.
They rotate. Slowly. Like the world's worst lawn sprinklers.
Joel leads us off the main path, through a gap in the lattice that he apparently already knew about because of course he did, and into the landscaping.
The bushes are thick, ornamental, the kind of plants that theme parks use because they look tropical and require minimal maintenance and I've never been more grateful for corporate landscaping decisions.
An executive approved these bushes to look expensive and block stroller traffic, and today they may save my life.
Joel moves through vegetation like vegetation is his native environment.
I, on the other hand, am having a full relationship with every plant in this hedge. They're grabbing me. They're holding on. They're making choices about my hair and my tote bag straps and I'm pretty sure one of them is trying to take my shoe.
A branch snaps under my foot.
Joel goes still. I go still. We're both frozen in a bush, and I can see through the leaves as Polo Shirt's head turns toward us.
…look past us, past us, keep going, keep going, keep...
It stops.
Polo Shirt is facing our bush. Its head is tilted at the angle that means something registered, some input that its rewired brain decided to process, and it takes a step toward us.
I stop breathing. Joel's hand is still on my arm. His grip tightens. A physical sentence that says: don't move.
Polo Shirt takes a step. Its foot drags on the concrete with a wet scraping sound that I'm going to hear in my nightmares for the rest of whatever life I have left.
It's close enough now that I can see details I don't want.
The skin color. The eyes, open, searching, vacant in a way that's worse than closed because closed means gone and open means the machinery is still running with nobody at the controls.
Tank Top hasn't moved. Tank Top is still swaying in the courtyard, one flip-flop, chewing on the memory of being a person.
Polo Shirt stops. Six feet from our bush. I can smell that sweet rot that I've been trying to forget since the Sheldon incident and my brain has been helpfully storing in high definition.
Ten seconds. Twenty. I'm counting in my head but the counting isn't reliable because my head is occupied by a symphony of panic that drowns out accurate timekeeping.
Polo Shirt turns away. Slowly. Resumes its drift back toward the courtyard. Rejoins Tank Top. They sway together in the empty space, slow-dancing to music that only the dead can hear.
Joel's grip relaxes. His hand stays on my arm for one more second, then lifts. The absence of it is rude and I'm putting that on the same shelf as his cheekbones, which is getting structurally concerning at this point.
We move. Faster now, trading stealth for speed because the maintenance access is right there, a chain-link gate in the fence with a padlock that Joel has a key for because Joel has a key for everything in this park and I'm starting to think his keyring is the most important object in the apocalypse.
He unlocks the gate. We slip through. He relocks it behind us.
And we're in the adventure part. Or what's left of it.
I don't know what I expected. Something like the fish part, maybe. Damaged but intact. Systems failing but structure holding. The bones of the place still recognizable beneath the crisis.
It looks like a medieval village lost a fight with a junk drawer. The main pathway, a wide cobblestone avenue themed to look like a medieval village, is littered with debris. A coaster car sits sideways in the middle of the path, derailed, its lap bars still down like it was holding ghosts.
A facade, one of those painted plywood fronts designed to look like a tavern, has collapsed into the street, splintering across the cobblestones in a spray of fake timber and real nails.
The animatronic knight that used to stand by the castle entrance is lying face-down on the ground, his sword arm bent at an angle that suggests he lost his last battle.
There's a barricade across the main avenue, built from ride parts. Pieces of queue railing welded or bolted or just jammed together into a wall of interlocking steel. It's not pretty. It's not engineered with Joel-level precision. But it's intentional.
"Joel. Someone built that."
"I see it."
We move closer. The barricade extends across the full width of the avenue, anchored on both sides to the building facades.
There's a gap at the bottom where something could crawl through, but it's been stuffed with rolled-up crowd-control banners.
WAIT TIME FROM THIS POINT: 45 MINUTES, says one of the banners. The wait time has changed considerably.
Beyond the barricade, the path continues and the modifications get more elaborate. Trip wires strung at ankle height across the pathway, tied to posts and railings and the legs of overturned benches.
Beyond the trip wires, a section of roller coaster track has been collapsed.
The track curves down from an overhead section and terminates in a jagged opening that points straight into a pit, which is actually just the maintenance trench beneath the coaster, covered on three sides with more ride parts and open on the fourth. The barricade funnels toward it.
"This is..." Joel pauses. "This isn't bad."
From Joel, "not bad" is Joel getting on one knee and proposing to someone's structural engineering.
"Should we go through?" I ask. "Or around?"
"Through is the only way deeper into the zone. The barricade blocks the alternates." He examines the gap at the bottom. "We can fit."
"I want you to remember who you're talking to. And you want me to army-crawl under a barricade made of sharp metal in a minefield of trip wires set up by someone who's apparently the MacGyver of theme park violence."
"Yes."
"Great. Let's do it."
Joel goes first, shoving the supply totes through the gap, then sliding through with the efficient worm-motion of a man whose body does exactly what he tells it.
I follow. My tote bag catches on a bolt.
My friendship paddle won't fit through at the angle I'm holding it, so I have to back out, reposition, and re-enter the gap at a diagonal, which adds approximately ninety seconds and three new scrapes to my collection.
The stabby fork, still strapped to the tote bag, drags across the ground and picks up a crowd-control banner that trails behind me like a train on a very ugly wedding dress.
"You have a banner," Joel says from the other side.
"I'm aware of the banner. The banner and I are in a committed relationship now. We didn't choose this."
I pull the banner free and we move forward, into the trip wire field.
Joel maps the wires. He points to each one. I step over them with careful, exaggerated movements.
First wire: success. Second wire: success. Third wire: success. Confidence growing. I'm a wire-stepping champion. I was born for this.
I step forward before Joel's hand comes up for the fourth.
My shin catches the trigger line. A loop hidden against the cobblestones snaps tight around my ankle. Somewhere overhead, a counterweight drops, the rope pulls taut, my foot goes up, and the rest of me goes with it.