8. The Pirate King of Funnel Cake Mountain
THE PIRATE KING OF FUNNEL CAKE MOUNTAIN
GRACE
"Oh, sick," says a voice I've never heard.
Male. Young. Loud in a way that has nothing to do with volume and everything to do with a man who's been alone long enough to become his own podcast. "You just scored!
Did you see that? That's a direct hit. That's a ten-pointer.
I've been using the chute all night and I've never gotten a kick-score. That was beautiful."
I try to orient myself toward the voice and I can't because I'm a human pinata. "I want to get down," I say.
"Oh, right. The snare. I should probably... yeah." The voice gets closer. "That trap's for the dead ones, not the, uh, alive ones. My bad. I didn't think alive people would come through here. Alive people haven't been a thing in a while."
"Down. I want down. Joel, are you still working on the rope? Joel?"
"I'm here. Working on it."
"Hey." The new voice is close now.
I still can't see him properly because the blood in my head has turned my vision into an impressionist painting and also I'm spinning slowly.
"There's a release pin on the left side of the beam mount. I'll get it. You catch her."
There's a pause. I imagine Joel looking at the stranger, running calculations. Then I hear metal scraping and a click and the tension in the rope vanishes.
I drop four feet.
Onto Joel.
My body, which has been inverted for too long, has no idea which way is up, which way is down, or what to do with any of its limbs. So I land on Joel with full weight, and he catches me, or tries to. What actually happens is somewhere between catching and collapsing.
His arms come up. We both go down, him backward, me on top of him, and I end up lying on Joel on the cobblestones in a tangle of limbs and his arms are around my waist because they were trying to catch me and now they're just... there.
My hand is on his chest. My face is approximately four inches from his, close enough to see the shock he hasn't managed to lock down.
It's the first genuine, uncontrolled emotion I've seen from him.
Underneath it is something I'm absolutely not going to examine with a stranger watching and gummy sharks scattered around us like festive confetti.
"Hi," I say, because my mouth handles crises by being social.
"Get up," he says, but his arms don't move, which sends a mixed message I receive, notarize, laminate, and file on the shelf in my brain marked Absolutely Not.
The shelf collapses immediately.
It was not rated for Joel.
I get up. He gets up. We don't look at each other. I brush off my knees. He brushes off his back.
"Anyway," says the voice. "Impressive as hell. That was reflexive. Most people freeze. You kicked toward the chute."
I finally turn to look at the source.
He's about ten feet away. Maybe in his mid-twenties, tall, built like he was athletic before this and then the apocalypse handed him a free trial of manual labor.
His hair is dark and messy in a way that suggests either styling product or emotional collapse.
At this point in the apocalypse, those are legally identical.
He's wearing armor. No. He's wearing sea life.
It's fiberglass. Curved. Painted in faded grays and blues.
And it's... it's a dolphin. It's the front half of a fiberglass dolphin, the kind that you'd see mounted on a wall or in a display or as part of a themed ride vehicle.
He's cut it, shaped it, and strapped it to his torso with bungee cords and seat-belt webbing from a ride harness.
It covers his chest and wraps around his sides, and the dolphin's painted eye is still on his right pectoral, staring into the apocalypse with glassy optimism.
At his feet are a battle axe and a funnel cake. Apparently, he put down both weapon and breakfast to applaud me and operate the release pin. I'm touched.
"He's wearing a fish vest," I say, because facts matter in a crisis.
Joel looks at the breastplate. Looks at me. "Yeah," he says. "He is."
The man looks down at his dolphin armor with the pleased expression of someone receiving a compliment. "Fish vest. That's good. I've been calling it the dolphin plate but fish vest is better. Fish vest is way better."
He picks up the battle axe with his right hand.
It looks like a blunt steel prop from the blacksmith demonstration, complete with decorative filigree and a WonderSphere property-control sticker on the handle.
Except he's ground the edge into something that's no longer decorative and very much a weapon.
With his left, he retrieves the funnel cake.
Not on a plate. Just holding it. Bare-handed. Like a Frisbee made of fried dough. He takes a bite while looking at me and Joel. "People," he says around a mouthful of fried batter.
"People," I confirm. "We're people. Very alive people. I'm Grace. This is Joel. He's maintenance."
"Operations," Joel says.
"He keeps the buildings alive."
"I keep the systems running."
"Same thing." I look at the man. "Who are you?"
"Beck." He takes another bite. Powdered sugar snows down onto the dolphin breastplate.
"I'm... I don't know. A guest? I was a guest. I came here on Thursday because they had a deal on single-day passes and I like roller coasters and then...
" He gestures with the funnel cake. "You know.
The whole thing. Everything went sideways. I stayed."
The powdered sugar and fish vest should make him ridiculous, but somehow the axe and the arms are keeping the argument open.
"You built all this?" Joel's voice is doing the Joel version of impressed, which is identical to his normal voice but with a 0.02% increase in volume.
"Yeah. I mean, the coaster track was already damaged.
I just kind of helped it fall the right way.
And the barriers are just queue stuff. Bolted some of it.
Zip-tied the rest. The trip wires are the velvet ropes from the ride lines.
They're actually pretty strong, turns out.
Held her." He points at me with the funnel cake.
"I noticed," I say, rubbing my ankle where the rope caught.
"The snare system was an accident, honestly. I set up the trip wires to slow them down and then I realized if I added a counterweight I could actually grab them. It's crowd control." He grins. The grin is enormous and unfortunately it works for him.
I can't tell if he's thriving or medically interesting.
"Crowd control," Joel says slowly.
"Yeah! Like, the park was already designed for it, right? Lines and funnels and single-file sections and chokepoints." Beck pauses. Looks at Joel. Looks at me. "Wait, did you guys already figure that out?"
"She figured that out," Joel says, and he tips his head toward me.
I blink. Joel voluntarily gave me credit for an idea. To a stranger. Out loud.
I'll treasure this forever, but first I have gummy sharks to recover because some of the little bags are still sealed and I refuse to abandon viable candy.
Beck wedges the funnel cake between his teeth and crouches beside me. He helps gather the gummy sharks that are still sealed, dropping them into my tote with powdered sugar on his fingers.
"Snare get your ankle bad? I've got a first-aid kit where I'm staying."
"I'll live."
He looks up at me. "That kick really was beautiful."
This time, he isn't looking at the chute.
He takes another bite of funnel cake. "So you're, what, clearing the park? Moving in?"
"Keeping it," I say. "We're keeping the park. Zone by zone. Clearing it out. Making it a home."
Beck's grin somehow gets bigger. "That's exactly what I've been doing. I mean, I got most of this zone blocked off and part of the open area."
"Solar Plaza," Joel says.
Beck takes another bite. "I've been living on the pirate ship.
The big ride, the galleon thing?" He points behind him, past the collapsed facades and the barricade network, deeper into the adventure part, where I can just barely see the top of a structure rising above the themed buildings.
Masts. Rigging. A crow's nest. "I've been sleeping up on the deck.
Nothing can climb up there because the access ramp retracts and I pulled the ramp up. It's like a treehouse but a boat."
"You live on the crime boat," I say.
Beck stops chewing. "The crime boat," he repeats. "Because pirates commit crimes. And they're on a boat."
"Yes."
"Crime boat." He says it one more time, rolling it around in his mouth like a piece of candy he's deciding to keep. "Oh, that's perfect. That's the name now. It was the pirate ship and now it's the crime boat. That's non-negotiable. That's permanent."
Joel looks at me. There's a flicker of amusement or it might be the horrified realization that there are now two of us.
"Show us the crime boat," I say. I retrieve the friendship paddle from the cobblestones and inspect it for emotional damage. It's fine. Our bond survives.
Beck walks through his own trap field with casual confidence and talks the entire time. Joel is efficient silence. Beck is enthusiastic noise. I'm somehow in the middle, which feels suspicious because I've never been in the middle of any spectrum in my life. I'm usually at one end with a flag.
"So the park has four zones, right? I've been working on this one because it has the most stuff. Ride parts, construction materials, tools in the maintenance building. The forge," Beck says.
"The forge?" Joel says.
"Well, it's a blacksmith exhibit. In the castle courtyard. But it's a real forge. They do demonstrations, or they did, where a guy in a costume makes horseshoes and stuff for the kids. Real fire. Real anvil. Real tools." He holds up the sharpened battle axe. "Real useful."
"You sharpened that in the blacksmith shop," Joel says.
"I sharpened a lot of things there. I've got like three of these. The big ones are from the Viking section. The small ones are from the fairy-tale section, which, you wouldn't think fairy tales would have weapons, but there's a whole Brave Knight display."
We round a corner and the crime boat comes into full view.
It's magnificent. It's enormous. It's the kind of theme park ride designed by someone who said, "What if a playground had liability insurance and delusions of empire?
" It sits in a man-made lagoon that's been drained to about two feet of murky water.
The ship is elevated on a platform, the deck visible above the lagoon wall.
The access ramp, a wooden gangplank themed to look like a dock, is retracted. Folded against the hull like a drawbridge.
There are supplies on the deck. Coolers. Stacked boxes. A sleeping bag draped over the ship's wheel. A clothesline strung between the mainmast and the rigging, with a T-shirt and a pair of socks drying. A stack of funnel cakes on a crate.
"Beck," I say. "How many funnel cakes do you have?"
"Define 'have.'"
"How many are on the crime boat."
He lights up. "You said it again. That's so good.
I love that." He turns back to the ship, counting mentally.
"On the crime boat I have maybe... twelve?
Fifteen? There's a funnel cake stand on the other side of the castle courtyard.
The fryers still work because they're gas-powered, not electric. I've been making them."
"You've been making funnel cakes during the apocalypse?"
"I have. Grace, I'm going to be honest with you, this is the most fun I've had in years."
Joel looks at me. I look at Joel. We have a silent conversation that goes something like: Joel's face says "he's insane," my face says "he has funnel cake," Joel's face says "that's not a qualification," my face says "it absolutely is."
"Is the funnel cake fresh?" I ask.
Beck looks at the piece in his hand, examines it, takes a bite, and chews thoughtfully, like a sommelier evaluating a vintage. "Define fresh."
"Made today."
"Then no. Yesterday."
I look at the funnel cake. The funnel cake looks back at me.
It has the texture of something that was fried with confidence and has been aging with dignity.
I want it with a desperation that surprises me because yesterday I was eating dolphin shortbread and today I'm negotiating the freshness parameters of unauthorized funnel cake with a man in a fish vest and this is my life now.
"I'll take some," I say.
Beck pulls a rope on the hull and the gangplank lowers with a mechanical groan, unfolding from the ship like a tongue from a wooden mouth. It hits the lagoon wall with a thud.
"Welcome to the crime boat," he says, sweeping his arm in an invitation that has theatrical energy.
I step onto the gangplank, it creaks, and my foot slides on a wet plank. I grab the rope railing, the rope railing holds, and I don't fall. That's the most functional my body has been all year.
Joel follows. His feet are steady on the planks. He looks at the ship, the rigging, the supplies, cataloging.
We stand on the deck of the crime boat. Beck's home.
Below us, the adventure part stretches out in its damaged, booby-trapped, barricaded glory. The kill chute is visible from here. The trip wires glint in the low light. The barricades form a maze.
Beck hands me a funnel cake from the crate.
It's not fresh. It's not even close to fresh. It has the consistency of sweet plywood and the powdered sugar has congealed into a paste.
I eat the entire thing.
"So," Beck says, sitting on the rail with his sharpened axe resting against his knee and powdered sugar in his hair like apocalyptic snow. "You're serious about keeping the whole park?"
"All of it," I say.
Beck's grin returns. "I'm in."
My head still hurts from where I hit myself with my own weapon. I have powdered sugar on my face and rope burn on my ankle and the memory of Joel's arms around my waist.
We have walls. We have a kill chute. We have a forge and a funnel cake fryer and a crime boat with a retractable ramp.
But now there are three of us.
The adventure part is just getting started.