9. Fish Vest Means He’s Friendly
FISH VEST MEANS HE'S FRIENDLY
BECK
Here's the thing about the end of the world: it's the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I'm self-aware enough to know that says more about me than it does about the apocalypse.
Yesterday morning I was Beck Alvarez, data entry specialist at Cornerstone Insurance Solutions, a company whose name has three words and zero soul.
I entered data. Into fields. On screens.
For eight hours a day, five days a week, in a cubicle with a motivational poster that said TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK except someone had crossed out DREAM and written OVERTIME in Sharpie and management never removed it because management never looked at anything below eye level.
I quit. Or got fired. The story changes depending on who's asking and how much I like them.
The accurate version is that I stood up during a Thursday morning stand-up meeting and said, "I can't do this anymore," and my supervisor said, "The meeting?
" and I said, "Any of it," and then I walked out and drove to WonderSphere because it was the first thing I saw on the highway billboard and the single-day pass was thirty percent off and I thought: sure.
Roller coasters. Why not. The universe is telling me to ride something that goes fast and screams.
That was Thursday.
It's Friday now. I think. The days have gotten blurry in the way that days get blurry when you stop measuring them by clock-ins and start measuring them by how many of the dead ones you've redirected into the maintenance trench.
Current count: fourteen. Fifteen if you count the one Grace kicked in while hanging upside down from my snare trap.
I haven't slept in a real bed. I've eaten funnel cake for at least four meals. I've killed zero people because the things in the park aren't people anymore and the distinction matters, It matters a lot actually.
The point is: I'm thriving. In the way that a plant you forgot about on a windowsill suddenly starts growing toward whatever light it can find. I'm the plant. The apocalypse is the light. The metaphor is concerning and I'm keeping it.
And now there are people on my crime boat.
Grace is standing on the main deck examining my supply layout with the intensity of a general reviewing troop formations, except the troops are funnel cakes and the general is five foot four in a hoodie that could fit two of her and has a decorative oar she calls "the friendship paddle."
I still don't entirely understand the naming convention but I don't need to because it's perfect. Everything she says is like that. Wrong and perfect. Wrong in a way that loops all the way around and arrives at a kind of perfect that regular words can't reach.
Joel is leaning against the mainmast doing inventory with his eyes. He's been counting since he got here and his face hasn't changed once, which I find fascinating because my face changes approximately forty times a minute.
I've never understood people who can just... not do that. People who have one face. How do you only have one face? Where does everything else go?
"Beck," Grace says, and the way she says my name is like she's already known me for a year and has been saying it that whole time. Just my name, used casually, like a tool she picked up and immediately knew how to hold. "Where did you get all of these?"
She's pointing at the funnel cake crate.
The stack has diminished since I gave her one.
She ate it in under two minutes and her face while eating it went through a journey that started at "this is terrible" and passed through "this is still terrible" and arrived at "I've accepted that this is terrible and I love it.
" I watched the whole thing and I couldn't look away.
"Funnel cake stand on the other side of the courtyard. Gas fryers. The line's still live."
"Wait." She turns. Her eyes do something that I'm going to call ignition. "The fryers still work?"
"Yeah, I said that earlier."
"You said it but I didn't hear it because I was processing the crime boat and the fish vest and the trip wire situation and my brain was full, Beck, my brain has a limited number of tabs and they were all open." She's already moving toward the gangplank. "We can make fresh ones."
"That's what I've been doing."
"You've been making them for you. Now we can make them for the dessert armory."
I stop walking. "The what?"
She's halfway down the gangplank, friendship paddle in one hand, the other hand on the rope rail. She turns back to look at me and her face is the face of someone who has just said something completely normal and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
"The dessert armory," she says. "The funnel cake stash. The strategic reserve of fried dough. The dessert armory, Beck."
Because in Grace's head, funnel cakes are munitions and the fryer is a forge and snacks are a military asset and she's right. She's insane but she's right because morale is a resource and sugar is morale and I've been making funnel cakes for exactly this reason.
"Dessert armory," I repeat. The words feel good. They feel like putting on a shirt that fits better than the one you were already wearing. "That's... yeah. That's what that is."
"Obviously." She turns back to the gangplank and resumes her descent.
Joel's still at the mainmast. He watched the entire exchange. His face didn't change. But there was a micro-calibration in the way he's standing.
They've known each other for a day. Maybe less. And he already translates her in real time. Like he's installed a Grace-to-English filter and it runs in the background and costs him nothing.
They've built a system. In a day.
I want in.
I was fine alone before the outbreak. I've been fine alone during it. I'll probably be fine alone after it, if there is an after, And if there isn't then I'll be fine alone in whatever this becomes. Alone is my operating temperature.
My apartment had one chair. One plate. One fork. Because that's how many of those things I needed and I don't buy things I don't need. Data entry teaches you that. Everything has a field. Everything goes in a cell. One chair, one plate, one fork, one person. The math is clean.
But Grace said "we're keeping the park" and some cell that's been empty got a value entered into it. I don't know what the value is yet but it's there and it's not going away. The math isn't clean anymore and I think I might be okay with that.
Which is new.
"Beck, are you coming?" She's at the bottom of the gangplank.
Joel's behind her, already on the dock, wrench in hand, scanning the perimeter.
"Coming." I grab a tote bag, one of the ones she brought, canvas, turquoise, Wondie giving a thumbs up.
I clip the axe to a loop of ride-harness webbing on the fish vest with a carabiner I took from the rock-climbing exhibit. I look like the final boss of a game that couldn't decide on a genre.
The funnel cake stand is called Ye Olde Funnel Forge, because everything in Mythic Frontier is "Ye Olde" something, a naming convention that I'm sure someone in marketing was very proud of and that someone in historical accuracy was very upset about.
It's tucked into the corner of the castle courtyard, between the blacksmith exhibit and a face-painting booth that still has a laminated menu of options taped to the counter: butterfly, dragon, superhero, princess, skull. The skull option seems prophetic now.
Grace approaches the fryer with the reverence of a pilgrim approaching a shrine. She sets the friendship paddle against the counter.
"Okay," she says. "Funnel cake protocol. What's the batter situation?"
"Dry mix in the storage cabinet. Bags of it." I open the cabinet under the counter. Stacked bags of funnel cake mix, the institutional kind, just-add-water. "We've got enough for hundreds of cakes."
I turn up the burner and watch the thermometer begin to climb while Grace investigates the dry mix.
"Hundreds." She says this number like it's a unit of hope. "Hundreds of funnel cakes, Joel."
Joel's standing at the edge of the courtyard, watching the perimeter. He turns his head enough to acknowledge her but keeps his eyes on the sightlines. "I heard."
"Hundreds of funnel cakes is a civilization. That's infrastructure. That's culture. You can build a society on funnel cakes."
"You can't build a society on funnel cakes," Joel says.
"Name one society that wouldn't be improved by funnel cakes."
Joel doesn't answer . I think it's because he can't. She's right. She's always right. She's right in the wrongest possible way and it's starting to make me dizzy.
I show her how to mix the batter. She asks questions. She holds the measuring cup with both hands because funnel cake batter is precious now and I'll defend this position academically.
"You pour in a spiral," I say. "Start from the center, work outward. Keep the stream thin."
"A spiral. Like a snail."
"Sure. Like a snail."
"A hot snail."
"Grace, please don't call it a hot snail."
"A golden spiral of delicious intent."
"That's worse."
She grabs the squeeze bottle I've been using for the batter, fills it from the mixing bowl, holds it over the fryer, and begins to pour.
The first spiral is actually pretty good. Tight center, expanding outward, even thickness.
She's focused. Her tongue is poking out the side of her mouth in concentration.
The second spiral goes wider. Still okay.
The third spiral gets ambitious. She's trying to connect to the first one, trying to build a lattice, and her wrist does a thing that wrists shouldn't do at that angle, a sort of enthusiastic over-rotation, and the squeeze bottle slips.
It squirts a jet of batter sideways, across the counter, across the friendship paddle, and directly into the face-painting menu, where it hits the laminated surface and splatters back onto Grace's hoodie.
She flinches. Her whole body participates. Her feet shuffle. Her shoulders jump. Her left foot slides on the batter that's now on the floor. Her right foot tries to compensate. The compensation is worse than the original problem.