10. Wrong Person Soup
WRONG PERSON SOUP
GRACE
The log flume is where I learn that wrong people and ride water are a combination that nobody should ever have to witness with their eyes or their nose or any of their senses, actually.
"Oh no," I say, standing at the entrance to Timber Rapids Log Adventure, which is a name that promises a fun time on a fake river and delivers a reality that fun has left the building and taken the fake river with it.
The ride is a long, winding water channel that loops through a themed building designed to look like a lumber mill.
Fake trees. Fake beavers. Fake waterfalls.
The log-shaped boats are stacked up at the loading platform, bumping gently against each other in water that's no longer the cheerful blue of a family-friendly attraction.
It's brown. It's cloudy. It's the color of water that's given up on its original purpose and is now just existing in a state of liquid regret.
And there are things in it.
Three of them. Partially submerged. Moving in the slow, purposeless way that wrong people move when they're in an environment that their dead brains can't process.
They're wading. They're just... in the water.
Walking on the bottom. Bumping into boats.
One of them keeps walking into the fake waterfall and getting pushed back and then walking into it again.
"It's a wrong person soup," I say.
"Don't call it that," Joel says.
"Joel, look at it. It's broth. They're the ingredients. That's soup."
Beck is evaluating. His whole face lights up like he's receiving a transmission from the part of his brain that solves problems by turning them into games. "We don't need to go in there. We just need to seal it."
"Seal it how?"
"Loading platform entrance, ride exit, two maintenance doors on the east wall. Close them, barricade them, done. Nothing in there can get out and nothing out here needs to get in." He grins. "Unless you want the boats."
"I don't want the boats."
"The boats could be useful."
"Beck, the boats have been marinating in wrong person broth. I don't want the boats. Nobody wants the boats. The boats are retired."
Joel's already at the first maintenance door. He has a key. At this point, the sound of his key ring is becoming dangerously comforting.
The door closes. Locks. Joel moves to the second one. Beck handles the ride exit, dragging a metal crowd barrier across the opening and wedging it with a piece of lumber from the themed landscaping.
I stand guard at the loading platform entrance with the friendship paddle raised and my eyes locked on the three wrong people in the water who are, mercifully, too busy walking into the fake waterfall on repeat to notice us.
The closest log boat bumps the platform.
I look at it.
It bumps again.
"That boat's being rude," I say.
Joel looks over. "Step back."
A gray, swollen hand slides over the side of the log boat and grips the edge of the loading platform with wet fingers. From inside the boat.
Of course there's a wrong person in the log. Why would the log be empty? Why would the murder soup have only three ingredients? That would be reasonable, and this park has rejected reason at the corporate level.
The head rises next. Bloated face. Park poncho stuck to one shoulder. Mouth opening and closing with a soft wet clack that makes my entire soul try to leave through my left ear.
"No," I tell it.
It keeps coming.
"I said no."
It doesn't respect verbal boundaries.
My friendship paddle comes down on its hand. The crack is horrible.
The wrong person jerks. Its other hand grabs the platform. It hauls itself higher, and suddenly the top half of it's out of the boat, dripping wrong-person broth onto the pretty fake-wood floor.
This time I aim for the head, because that's who I am now. A woman who clubs a dead man in a log flume with nautical sports equipment.
The paddle connects. The wrong person drops back into the boat hard enough to rock it.
"Grace, move," Joel says.
"I'm moving… emotionally."
"Physically."
"Wait," Beck says, and the excitement in his voice is a warning label. "The dispatch brake."
"The what?"
He points at the loading mechanism. "The thing that moves the boats forward. If we release the next boat, it'll pin that one against the bumper."
"That could work," Joel says.
"I hate that sentence," I say.
Joel grabs the manual lever beside the loading gate.
Beck plants one boot on the next log boat and shoves. "Grace, keep it down."
The wrong person surges up again. Its fingers scrape my paddle. Its mouth opens, and the smell hits me full in the face, hot and rotten and wet.
I press the paddle across its chest and shove with everything I have. The boat rocks. My shoes slide. My shoulder screams.
The wrong person reaches for me.
I hit it in the face.
There's nothing cinematic about it. I make a noise like a furious raccoon falling down stairs and swing the friendship paddle with both hands.
The head snaps sideways.
"Now," Joel says. He pulls the lever.
The station brake releases with a heavy mechanical thunk. The conveyor catches the next log and drives it forward, slow and stupid and inevitable. Beck slams his shoulder into it from the side, guiding it. The wrong person gets one hand up.
Then the second boat hits.
There's a wet crunch. The wrong person disappears between the two fake logs.
I'm still holding the friendship paddle like the wrong person might reassemble himself out of spite and ask for a rematch.
Joel notices first. Obviously. Joel notices structural weaknesses in buildings, machines, and apparently me.
"Grace," he says. "Breathe."
"I'm breathing."
"You're holding your breath."
"I'm preserving oxygen for the team."
"You okay?" Beck asks.
"I just hit a dead man in the head with sporting goods and then helped murder him with a theme park boat, so I'm going to say no, but in a functional way."
"Functional no," he says, nodding. "That's fair." He steps closer and pulls a gummy shark from his pocket and holds it out. "Emergency shark?"
I take it. It tastes like sugar and chemicals and not crying, which is exactly what I need.
Joel's hand lands briefly between my shoulder blades. Warm. Steady. Gone before I can decide what to do with it.
For one second, nobody says anything.
Then Beck says, softly, "Boat kill."
"No," I say.
"That absolutely counts as a boat kill."
Joel looks at the pinned wrong person. Looks at the boat. Looks at me. "It counts."
I hate that I'm pleased.
"We're sealed," Joel says. "Both maintenance doors locked."
"Exit is blocked," Beck says. "Loading platform is blocked. Boat kill is complete."
"We are not calling it boat kill."
"We have to call it something."
"We absolutely do not."
"Boat kill is accurate," Joel says.
I stare at him. He doesn't look sorry.
"Great. Building one. Addressed." I pull the where picture out of my pocket and unfold it on the loading platform counter. I find the log flume. I draw an X through it with a souvenir crayon that I grabbed from the kids' activity station near the funnel cake stand.
"You're marking the map with crayon," Joel says.
"I'm marking the where picture with the planning tool."
"It's a crayon."
"It's periwinkle, Joel. Periwinkle is a commanding color. Periwinkle says 'this area has been addressed.' Do you have a pen?"
"No."
"Then periwinkle it is."
He stares. I fold the where picture. We move on.
The warehouse is a different story.
The coaster maintenance warehouse is a massive corrugated steel building, accessible through a service road that Beck's already partially barricaded with overturned golf carts.
It's the size of a small airplane hangar.
Roll-up doors on two sides. A regular door with a keypad on the north face.
No windows, which means no visibility, which means we're going in blind.
"I don't love this," I say, staring at the building.
"Nobody loves it," Joel says. "It's a warehouse."
"I mean I don't love the 'what if there's fifty wrong people in there and we open the door and it's a clown car of dead people' part."
"It's not going to be fifty," Beck says.
"How do you know?"
"Because the doors have been closed since the outbreak. And the maintenance crew was four people on Thursday. I watched them working on the coaster before everything went sideways."
"So it's either zero or four."
"Or somewhere in between, if some of them got out before the doors closed."
"So one, two, or three."
"Math checks out," Beck says, and I can't tell if he's mocking me.
Joel punches a code into the keypad. The lock clicks. He looks at us. "Stay behind me."
"I'm not staying behind you."
"Grace."
"I have the friendship paddle. The friendship paddle needs to be in front. You can't paddle from behind. That's not how paddles work."
"It's an oar. Oars go behind."
"It's a paddle, Joel, and paddles go…"
Beck just opens it. While we're arguing.
He reaches past both of us, grabs the handle, pulls, and walks in with his sharpened axe in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
The kind of flashlight that could signal aircraft and blind satellites and he's sweeping it across the warehouse interior like a lighthouse with legs.
Joel and I stand in the doorway, argument suspended, watching Beck disappear into the dark.
"He just went in," I say.
"He just went in," Joel confirms.
"Without a plan."
"Without a plan."
"Should we?"
"Yes."
We follow Beck into the warehouse. Joel's wrench is up. My friendship paddle is up. My stomach is somewhere around my ankles but the rest of me is functional and that's going to have to be enough.