26. Sky Pole Situation
SKY POLE SITUATION
BECK
Here's the thing about climbing a building at dawn with Joel from Operations: the man treats a rooftop access ladder like a tax form.
Every rung inspected. Every handhold evaluated.
Every decision preceded by a mental calculation that I can literally hear happening because Joel's brain makes a vibration in the space around him that says, "I'm processing variables and you will wait. "
I don't wait well.
"Clear," Joel says from two rungs above me.
"I can see that it's clear. My head is right below your boots, which I'm also getting a very detailed view of, so if you could maybe pick up the pace on the..."
"The ladder has corrosion on rung fourteen."
"Rung fourteen can corrode in peace, Joel, we talked about this: sunrise window, zombie drift patterns..."
Joel climbs. I climb. We clear the hatch.
The roof of the WonderSphere operations center is flat, industrial, and deeply unsexy.
Gray rubber membrane. Ventilation units squatting in rows like ugly metal mushrooms. Cable conduits running in organized paths toward the center of the roof where the antenna array rises against the pre-dawn sky like a metal skeleton doing jazz hands.
"The dish needs manual realignment. Give me twelve minutes," Joel says.
Joel kneels beside the antenna mount. He pulls the wrench from his belt, sets it against the first bolt, and the sound is immediate. Metal against metal, sharp, percussive. The kind of sound that carries across open space like a dinner bell.
"Starting," Joel says into the walkie.
Grace found the walkies in the maintenance warehouse last night, and she held them up like she'd discovered the ark of the covenant and said "talking boxes" and Joel said "radios" and she said "I know what they are, Joel."
The walkie crackles. Grace's voice, slightly compressed by the radio's speaker but unmistakably hers.
"Copy. Grant says Captain isn't tracking any movement below you.
Also I found a vending machine in here and it still has power and it has those little powdered donuts that are basically just sugar wearing a donut costume. I'm going to eat four of them."
"Focus, Grace," Joel says.
"I'm focused and eating a donut. Multitasking. It's my core competency. You said I was the strategist. Strategists need calories."
Joel loosens the first bolt. The sound rings across the rooftop. I scan the perimeter. The big middle stretches below us in the gray light, pathways empty, the fountain visible from here.
Second bolt. More noise. I watch the edges of the big middle.
The places where the pathways meet the perimeter walls.
The gaps where the drift comes through. The drift is what Joel calls the wrong people wandering in from outside, finding gaps in the fencing, squeezing through maintenance gates, drawn by sound and movement.
We secured the big middle but it doesn't stay cleared.
"Movement," I say.
Joel doesn't stop. "Where."
"Southeast. Two. Maybe three. Coming through the maintenance gate near the food room. Two hundred yards. Slow drifters."
"We have time."
Third bolt. Joel rotates the dish. The sound is worse now, a grinding, screeching protest of metal. It echoes off every flat surface in the big middle and bounces back to us like the building is tattling on our location to everyone within a half-mile radius.
The walkie crackles. "That sound is very loud."
"We know, Grace."
"Like very loud. Grant says Captain sees something."
“He's fixated on the southeast approach,” Grant says. “Something’s moving toward the sound.”
"Options," Joel says.
"I go down," I say. "Draw them off and give you time to finish."
“No. You're not taking them on alone.”
"I've done more with less."
"You've done more with less and gotten lucky."
"Lucky is a skill."
"Lucky is the absence of a skill and the presence of probability."
The walkie erupts. Grace's voice, different now. "Okay, so I'm looking at this control panel and there are a lot of buttons, and I think some of them do things to the rides and I have an idea."
Joel's wrench pauses. "Don't touch the panel."
"I'm not touching it. I'm evaluating it. Touching implies commitment. I'm in the assessment phase," Grace says.
"The operations center has override controls for every ride system in the park. Those controls are not toys."
"If I can activate the rides in the adventure part, the noise will pull the wrong people away from you and toward the rides. That's just science. That's how sound works, things go toward the louder thing, I saw a documentary about it once."
"You saw a documentary about zombies being attracted to sound?"
"I saw a documentary about moths and lights and the principle is the same."
"Do it," I say.
"Beck, don't encourage her."
"The man with the wrench needs two more minutes and the woman with the moth theory needs one button. The math works."
"That's not math."
"Joel." Grace's voice again. "I need you to trust the crayon plan."
"One ride," he says. "One. The loudest one. Turn it on, draw them off, turn it off. Do not improvise."
"I would never."
Mythic Frontier wakes up. Every ride, every attraction I've walked through and fortified and memorized and made mine, lighting up in the gray dawn. The coasters' chain lifts engage with a grinding metallic roar.
The ride queue music from every ride plays simultaneously in a cacophony of adventure soundtracks layered on top of each other.
Heroic orchestral swells colliding with pirate sea shanties colliding with fairy-tale woodwinds, and underneath all of it, the steady mechanical thunder of coaster cars cresting lift hills and plummeting down drops empty.
It's beautiful. It's horrifying. It's the most Grace thing that's ever happened.
"Grace," Joel says into the walkie. His voice is doing the flat thing.
"I may have pressed more than one button."
"You pressed all the buttons."
“I pressed one button, Joel! Then I leaned over to read the label beside it and my hand slipped and the rest of the buttons were where my hand landed. It was a button situation. The overlap was inevitable.”
Below us, the response is immediate and absolute. Every wrong person in the big middle stops. Turns and orients toward Mythic Frontier. The drift pattern reverses. Six, eight, twelve of them, shambling away from the operations center, drawn by the wall of sound rolling out of my zone.
"It's working," I say.
"It's not working," Joel says. "It's accidentally succeeding, which is different."
"Result's the same."
"The result is she just lit up an entire zone. Every zombie within earshot is going to converge on Mythic Frontier."
"Better there than here."
Joel finishes the final bolt, the last rotation, the dish locked into position, aligned, calibrated, done.
"Let's move," I say. "Get the comms online while we've got the window."
We drop through the hatch.
The operations center is small. Government-bland. Drop ceiling tiles and fluorescent fixtures that are running on generator power, giving everything that gray-green tint that makes everyone look slightly dead, which isn't great when you live in a world where slightly dead is a real category.
The comms room is at the end of the left hallway and Grace is in it.
She's standing in front of a control panel that looks like it was designed by someone who believed in buttons with a commitment to covering every available surface.
She's eating a powdered donut. There's sugar on her chin, on her hoodie, on the control panel, on several of the buttons she pressed. A crime scene in confectioner's sugar.
"Before you say anything," she says, turning to face us, donut in one hand, the other hand raised in the universal gesture of a person who knows they did a thing and wants to explain the thing before the consequences, "it worked."
"You pressed all the buttons," Joel says.
"I pressed a neighborhood of buttons. And the neighborhood happened to be the adventure part because the buttons are organized by zone and the adventure part was the closest zone to my hand. I'm not going to apologize for my arm length. They're the arms I have, and they reach where they reach."
"Grace," I say.
She looks at me.
"Eight out of ten," I say.
She blinks. "Eight? That was at least a nine. I redirected the entire zombie population of the big middle using amusement park infrastructure. That's innovation. That's tactical creativity. That's..."
"You pressed every button with your palm."
"Targeted palm deployment."
"Eight point five."
"Nine."
"Eight point seven. Final offer."
"Eight point seven," she says. "But the decimals are trending upward."
Joel is at the comms console. He's already moved past the button situation.
The comms console is older equipment, pre-digital, built like something that expects to survive the end of the world.
Which it technically has. He flips switches.
Adjusts dials. The console hums, then buzzes, then makes a sound like clearing its throat.
“Shortwave antenna's receiving,” Joel says. “Signal's weak. Boosting. Satellite terminal is still acquiring.”
There's a crackle. Then static. The universal sound of the space between people who want to find each other and the technology that might let them.
"If this works," Grace says, and her voice is different now, "I can call my mom."
Nobody says anything for a second. The second is full of all the things none of us have said about what we left out there, who we left, what's waiting on the other end of a signal if there's anyone left to receive it.
Joel turns a dial. The static shifts. Patterns emerge, like shapes in clouds, almost-sounds that could be voices or could be nothing.
"Broadcasting on emergency frequency," Joel says. "Wide band. If anyone's listening within fifty miles, they'll hear this."
He picks up the handset, looks at Grace, and holds it out to her.
Grace takes the handset like it's made of glass and hope. "Mom? It's Grace."