THE GARDEN PART HAS A ROUND FRIEND PROBLEM
GRACE
The back route to the garden part is a service corridor that runs along the park's outer wall, behind the maintenance buildings, through a section of the park that guests never see because it's ugly and has none of the manufactured wonder that someone paid millions to manufacture.
Joel knows about it because Joel knows about every hallway, corridor, passage, and duct in this place the way I know about every Walgreens in a five-mile radius of my apartment.
"Service Corridor D," he says, unlocking a gray metal door behind the maintenance warehouse. "Runs the full western perimeter. Connects to Wonder Garden's rear access near the veterinary building. Four hundred meters. No windows. One junction. Two fire exits."
"And the wrong people situation?"
"Unknown. It's been sealed since the outbreak but there were staff in the service areas when everything started."
"So it could be a hallway or it could be a wrong person highway. Love that for us."
Beck goes first because Beck always goes first and has made this his whole personality. Axe in one hand, flashlight in the other, fish vest gleaming in the industrial lighting like a dolphin on a mission.
Joel goes second because Joel has a wrench and a system and the system says second.
I go third because it's where I'm least likely to accidentally trigger something.
The corridor is gray, lit by emergency strips that cast everything in a sickly yellow that makes my skin look like I'm auditioning for wrong person status myself.
Pipes run along the ceiling. Electrical tube things line the walls.
The floor is bare concrete, which is actually great for me because concrete is the most honest surface I've ever walked on and I appreciate its commitment to flatness.
We find them at the junction.
Two of them. Standing in the T-intersection where Corridor D meets a cross-passage. They're facing opposite directions, which is a small mercy, like two security cameras with overlapping blind spots.
One is in kitchen whites, still wearing nonslip shoes, which are industry standard for food service and apparently very helpful for wandering dead through service corridors. The other is in maintenance coveralls, and Joel's step falters for just a fraction of a second when he sees the uniform.
He knows this person. Knew. The tense matters.
"I've got them," Beck says.
"Wait," Joel says.
Beck stops immediately, which tells me two things. One, Beck does know how to stop. Two, Joel's voice can do things to people when he lets it.
Joel's flashlight stays on the maintenance coveralls.
"You know him?" I ask.
Joel doesn't answer fast enough. That's the answer.
"Kitchen first," Joel says.
Beck looks at him.
Joel's eyes don't move from the coveralls. "I've got maintenance."
Beck's grin is gone. "Okay."
I hear Beck move. I hear Joel move.
I face the way we came from, because I've learned there are parts of survival I don't need to watch to believe.
Two sounds. One wet. One metal.
Then silence.
When I turn back, Beck is wiping the axe on a maintenance rag from the dispenser. He pulls a second maintenance rag from the dispenser and hands it to Joel. Joel cleans the wrench carefully, folds both contaminated rags inward, and drops them into a trash bag.
I brush my fingers on his sleeve. His eyes shift to me. I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that isn't obvious or insufficient or both. I just touch his arm and we keep walking.
The corridor continues past the junction. No more wrong people. Just pipes and electrical tube things and the low hum of systems that Joel maintained and that are still running because he taught them well. We reach a door marked WONDER GARDEN - VETERINARY ACCESS - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
"You have the key?" I ask.
"I have every key in this park," Joel says.
"It's an attractive quality."
The words just walk out, like they own the place. Joel's hand pauses on the lock. Beck makes a sound that could be a cough and could be a laugh compressed into a cough.
"I mean... strategically attractive. As a resource. Keys are a resource and resources are... attractive in a survival context." Every word is making it worse. My mouth is a shovel and I'm digging and the hole is getting deeper and I can see the earth's core from here. "Open the door, Joel."
He opens the door.
Wonder Garden smells like dirt and rain and green.
It's different than the polished green of a theme park where every plant knows its assigned square footage.
This is the green of a place left alone since Thursday.
Leaves plaster the walkways. Flower beds slump over their borders.
Decorative vines have torn loose from their supports and fallen across the path.
A hedge trimmed into the shape of Wondie has gone soft around the edges, less cheerful cartoon sphere now and more damp mascot corpse trying to remember its job.
It's beautiful. It's eerie. It's what happens when you build a garden and then remove the gardeners and let the garden make its own decisions, and the garden has decided that boundaries are a social construct.
"It's a plant prison break," I say.
"It's been a few days," Joel says. " This much overgrowth this fast is… aggressive."
"The plants were in prison. And now they're free and they're going for it. Look at that vine. That vine has ambition."
The vine in question has come loose from its trellis, tangled around the decorative WonderSphere banner, and is hanging halfway across the path like it's making a break for the nearest building.
The paths through the garden part wind between themed areas: a butterfly pavilion with a mesh dome that's still intact, a botanical garden section with labeled plant beds, a children's discovery zone with interactive nature exhibits, and beyond all of that, the animal areas.
The petting zoo. The bird aviary. The wildlife rescue center.
We can hear the animals before we see them. These are real animal sounds, alive sounds, the kind of sounds that say "I'm a creature with opinions and I'm expressing them at volume." Bleating. Squawking. Something that sounds like a very large rodent sneezing.
We round a corner and find what was the petting zoo. The gates that kept the animals in their designated encounter zones have been unlatched, and the animals have done what animals do when you give them freedom and remove all supervision: they've gone everywhere.
There are goats on the pavilion roof. Three of them, standing on the peaked wooden structure designed for the Birds of Wonder show, eating the thatched decorative roofing.
There's a goat on the drinking fountain, somehow.
Standing on it. Like it climbed the drinking fountain because the drinking fountain was there and goats don't need better reasons than that.
There are chickens in the botanical garden, scratching through the labeled plant beds, destroying months of careful horticulture with the focused efficiency of tiny dinosaurs who never got the extinction memo.
And there are two animals sitting in the middle of the main pathway like they own it.
I stop walking because they're the most perfect things I've ever seen in my life and I need a moment.
They're enormous. The size of medium dogs but shaped like...
like if someone drew a dog from memory but made it rounder and flatter and gave it the face of a creature that has achieved spiritual enlightenment through the complete elimination of urgency.
Their fur is coarse, brown, slightly damp.
Their eyes are small and black and communicate absolutely nothing except a deep, abiding calm that I find personally offensive because I've never once been that calm and neither has anyone in my genetic line.
"Oh my God," I say. "The round friends."
"The what?" Beck says.
"Capybara," Joel says.
"Look at them. They're round. They're friendly. They're round friends, Beck."
Joel looks at them. They look at Joel. Both parties appear to reach the same conclusion, which is mutual acknowledgment followed by complete emotional neutrality. They're spiritually the same species.
One of them stands up. Slowly, like it finds standing to be an inconvenience imposed by a universe that should have designed better seating.
It walks toward me. It reaches me, sniffs my shoe, sniffs my legging, sniffs the friendship paddle, and then presses its enormous head against my thigh and just... stays there.
"It's touching me," I whisper. "The round friend is touching me."
"Don't move suddenly," Joel says.
"Joel, I'm never moving again. I live here now. Notify my mother. Forward my mail. I live wherever this round friend is pressing its head against my leg."
The second round friend watches from the path. Unmoved. Unimpressed. Round Friend Two has seen things and remains committed to sitting.
I want to stay with the round friends forever but we have a mission and the mission is the rescue center and the rescue center is past the aviary, past the tortoise enclosure, in the big steel-frame building at the back that has WILDLIFE RESCUE AND VETERINARY CENTER painted on its facade.
The building looks sealed. Doors closed.
Windows intact. A barricade of stacked animal crates blocks the main entrance from the inside, visible through the glass.
Someone is in there. Someone built walls out of pet carriers and feed bags and whatever else was available, and someone is still maintaining those walls, because the crates are not thrown together in panic but stacked with careful attention.
Joel tries the door. Locked. He pulls out his keyring.
"Wait," I say. "If someone's alive in there and barricaded, we should probably not just walk in. That's how you get a thing pointed at you."
"A thing?"
"A weapon thing. A whatever-they-have thing."
"She's right," Beck says. "Someone sealed in since Thursday isn't going to love a door opening without warning."
Joel steps back. I step forward and knock on the glass.
Nothing.
I knock again. "Hello? We're alive and we're people and we're not the wrong ones. We have teeth that we're using for normal mouth purposes."
Beck looks at me. "Normal mouth purposes."
"Chewing food. Talking. Teeth stuff, Beck."
A shadow moves behind the barricade. Then a face appears in the gap between two stacked crates, pale, framed by dark hair that hasn't been washed in a few days and a pair of glasses that are held together on one side with medical tape.
"Who are you?" The voice is the kind of voice that's been talking to animals for days.
"I'm Grace. That's Joel, he works here. That's Beck, he lives on a crime boat. We're keeping the park."
Behind the glasses, brown eyes process this information. "You're... keeping the park?"
"Clearing it. Securing it. Making it safe. We've secured the adventure part and established a safe base in the fish part. Can you let us in? Are you okay? Do you need water? Food? A conversation with a mammal that talks back?"
The face disappears. I hear sounds behind the barricade. Crates moving. Feed bags shifting. The methodical deconstruction of a fortress by someone who built it alone and is choosing, against what I imagine is significant psychological resistance, to let someone through.
The door opens.
He's taller than I expected from the face in the crate gap.
Lean in the way that says "hasn't been eating enough" rather than "chose this body type.
" He's wearing a WonderSphere veterinary staff jacket, a green one with the Wonder Garden logo, and it's covered in animal hair and feed dust and what I'm going to optimistically identify as mud.
His hands are steady but his eyes are tired.
In his left hand, he's holding a tranquilizer gun. It's pointed at us.
"Sorry," he says immediately. "I'm sorry.
I'm not going to... I just... sorry. I've been alone and I heard noises and I didn't know if you were...
" He lowers the gun. His face collapses into something that looks like relief mixed with embarrassment mixed with the social mortification of a person who just pointed a weapon at strangers and wishes he could redo the last ten seconds with better choices.
"I'm sorry. I'm Grant. I'm the veterinarian. "
"Did you just apologize for pointing a sleepy stick at us?" I say.
"A what?"
I nod at the tranquilizer gun. "The thing that makes things get sleepy. The sleepy stick."
Grant looks at the tranquilizer gun in his hand. "It's not a stick."
"It creates sleep. I'm naming by outcome."
He lowers it further, pointing it at the ground.
The front of his jacket is moving. There's a bulge at his chest, between the zipper panels. The bulge is shifting and something inside it is making a small chirping squeak.
A tiny pointed face pokes out of the collar. Enormous dark eyes. Ears that are too big for its head. A nose that twitches with rapid-fire intensity, processing the entire olfactory landscape of a new situation and finding it overwhelming.
"Why is there a kangaroo in your coat?" I say.
"It's a wallaby," Grant says.
"Those are different?"
"They're quite different, actually. Wallabies are smaller and they have different dentition and their hind legs are proportioned differently relative to…"
"It's in your coat."
"Her name is Pepper. She's seven months old.
She was hand-raised, her mother rejected her, she still needs supplemental warmth, and the incubator lost power, so I've been...
I'm the pouch right now. If I put her down she gets cold and if she gets cold she...
" He trails off. His hand comes up to cup the wallaby's head through the jacket fabric, a gesture so gentle and so automatic that it's clearly something he's done a thousand times, a reflex born from the kind of care that doesn't turn off when the world does. "She needs me."
"Oh no," I say. He's tall, exhausted, apologizing to me with a weapon in one hand and a baby animal tucked against his chest. This shouldn't be doing anything for me. It's doing several things.
Joel and Beck both look at me.
"You stayed." I point at him. The friendship paddle is in my other hand and it waves when I gesture.
Grant flinches slightly.
I lower it because this man doesn't need to be threatened by nautical sporting equipment right now. "Everyone who could evacuated. The park went to hell. And you stayed for the animals."
"I couldn't leave them. The wallaby can't survive without me."
"Then you're one of us. Welcome to the park. We're keeping it."
Grant looks between the three of us. His hand is still on the wallaby. "Come in," he says, stepping back from the door. "I should... you should meet the others."
"The other people?" I say.
"The other animals."