7. Queue Jumping Is Prohibited #2
I'm hanging upside down from a queue rope attached to a pulley system rigged to an overhead coaster support beam, and I'm about four feet off the ground.
My hoodie is falling over my face, and my tote bag is dangling from my shoulder spilling gummy sharks onto the cobblestones, and my friendship paddle is still in my hand because my grip on that oar is the one reliable thing about my body and I won't let go of it even in the face of gravitational betrayal.
"Joel. I'm upside down."
"I see that."
"Fix it."
He's already at the rope, pulling a folding utility knife from his belt as he examines the knot.
Blood rushes to my head with the enthusiasm of a liquid that's been waiting its whole life for this moment. My strawberry purse has swung around and is now hanging beneath me, brushing the cobblestones.
"Joel, I can feel my brain filling up."
"That's not how blood circulation works."
"My brain is filling up and it's going to overflow and I'm going to pass out and the last thing I'm going to see is the inside of a Wondie hoodie and that's not the death I planned."
"You're not going to die. The knot's a modified bowline. Give me thirty seconds."
"I don't have thirty seconds, I have maybe ten seconds of consciousness left and I'm spending them all on yelling."
I hear something from the avenue behind me, from the direction of the barricade, from the other side of the trip wire field.
A shuffling sound. The wrong-footed drag that I've learned to recognize the way you learn to recognize the sound of your alarm clock or your mother's ringtone or any other sound that your brain categorizes as "pay attention to this immediately. "
"Joel. Is it?"
"Yes."
The rope goes taut above me.
"Don't move," Joel says.
"I'm upside down. My movement options are limited to panic and light rotation."
"I mean it. If I cut the wrong line, you drop on your head."
That's a terrible sentence to hear from a man holding a knife.
The shuffling gets closer. There's a metallic scrape of something bumping into the barricade. Followed by the wet, gurgling sound of a throat that's still producing noise but has forgotten why.
Oh. Great. Great great great. My friendship paddle is in my hand but I can't aim because I don't know where anything is and the blood in my head is throwing a party that I didn't authorize.
Then I hear a different sound. Faster. More coordinated. Not shuffling. Scrambling.
I drop the oar, yank my hoodie away from my face. The blood rush makes everything pulse red at the edges.
The wrong person is coming through the gap under the barricade. The same gap we crawled through. It's doing the army-crawl, or its version of it, which is less army and more "determined meat puppet navigating an obstacle through sheer persistence."
I'm swinging, slowly, the rope creaking, and I can see the cobblestones above me and the sky below.
The wrong person is through the barricade now, on its feet, shuffling toward the trip wire field.
Joel swears. The rope shifts above me as he moves, then stops hard.
"Joel?"
"The release line runs across the wires. If I cross now, I might drop you."
"Love that for us."
The wrong person hits the first wire, stumbles, and keeps coming.
Joel pins the rope beneath one boot, folds the knife closed, and grabs a loose piece of themed masonry and throws it. It sails past the wrong person's shoulder and cracks against the cobblestones.
"That wasn't your best work," I say.
"I'm trying not to hit you."
"Lower standard. Hit the wrong person."
The wrong person hits the second wire, staggers, and keeps coming.
Joel's moving around the pulley rig, knife in one hand, his other hand locked on the rope like the only thing between me and a skull-first introduction to pavement is his refusal to blink.
Third wire. It pitches forward, hits the bench, and for one beautiful second I think gravity has joined my team.
Then it grabs the bench leg and pulls itself upright.
Because falling is apparently not a concept zombies respect.
Falling is just a little pause on the way to eating the loudest thing in the area.
Which is me. I'm the loudest thing.
It's close. Ten feet. Eight. I can see it clearly, a woman in a sundress that was probably yellow once and is now the color of things I don't want to describe, and her jaw is doing the chewing thing and her hands are reaching and she's stumbling through the wires toward me with the single-minded focus of something that used to be a person and is now just hunger wearing a sundress.
"Grace," Joel says. His voice changes. That scares me more than the sundress. "Kick."
I kick with my free leg, the one that isn't tangled in the rope, with every ounce of force that panic and adrenaline and the raw injustice of dying upside down can produce.
The kick connects.
I apologize to my foot and also to whatever part of her used to understand apologies.
The wrong person's head snaps sideways. Its body follows. It staggers, off-balance, away from me, toward the open side of the avenue, toward the jagged mouth of the collapsed coaster track, toward the kill chute that someone built for exactly this purpose.
It falls.
There's a sound. Several sounds. The initial impact. Then secondary impacts, the kind of sounds that happen when a body encounters metal and concrete in rapid sequence on the way to the bottom of a maintenance trench. Then a final, definitive, wet thud.
I don't see the bottom. I can see the opening of the chute from where I'm swinging and I can see that nothing comes back out and I'm choosing to let the sound effects be the end of that story because my imagination is already providing a visual and my imagination needs to be stopped.
I'm breathing hard. My foot hurts from kicking a skull. My hoodie is twisted. My gummy sharks are all over the ground. And somewhere, from above me, or below me, or in whatever direction, I hear a sound that isn't coming from a wrong person or Joel.
It's clapping.
Someone is clapping.