26. Sky Pole Situation #2
There's a long static. The kind that gets into your chest, and makes you wonder if anyone's left to hear anything anymore or if the signal is just bouncing around an empty world.
Then the signal catches something already in progress.
A voice. Distant, compressed, fighting through interference like someone shouting through cotton.
"...WonderSphere, this is Ridge Group, repeating on emergency channel... if anyone inside can hear..."
Grace's hand tightens on the handset. Joel's posture shifts. I feel it in my spine, the thing that happens when the game changes, when the board tilts and all the pieces slide.
"...we've been watching... your walls... the lights..."
They've been watching. They saw enough to know WonderSphere isn’t empty and whoever is inside has kept it standing.
"...fourteen of us... we need shelter... we're coming to your location..."
Grace looks at Joel. Joel looks at me.
"... we're coming in through the east gate..."
Fourteen people, coming, through the east gate.
"The rides," Joel says. "The noise." Joel grabs the handset. "Ridge Group, hold position. Do not approach the east gate yet. Repeat, hold position."
Static eats the reply.
"...moving now... fourteen of us..."
"They can't hear us," Joel says.
"Grace," I say. "Turn off the rides. We can't attract dead too."
She's already at the panel. "This one says Frontier Zone Primary," she says.
"That one."
She hits it.
Mythic Frontier goes halfway dark. Some rides shut down. Some don't. The fast mountain keeps running. Its chain lift grinds. Cars crest. Cars plummet. The sound carries.
"That didn't work."
"Try the one next to it."
Something clunks inside Mythic Frontier.
On the security monitor, a single empty maintenance car begins rolling along the transfer spur above the east entrance. The zone restart must have released a brake on the damaged section of track. The car gathers speed down the incline, metal wheels screaming against the rail.
“That seems bad,” Grace says.
The transfer spur ends where the track was damaged during the outbreak.
The car doesn’t stop.
It runs off the broken rail, drops to the pavement, and keeps moving, half a ton of fiberglass and steel sliding across the entrance plaza into a group of wrong people who didn’t read the height requirement sign and wouldn’t have met it.
The sound is substantial.
Grace is at the window, staring. Her mouth is open. The powdered donut is forgotten. Powdered sugar drifts off her fingertips like snow.
"I meant to do that," she says.
She didn't mean to do that. She meant to turn off a ride and instead she committed vehicular homicide with a roller coaster. The look on her face is a combination of horror and pride that only Grace can produce.
"Nine point five," I say.
"I didn't... it wasn't... the button..."
"Ten. It's a ten. I've never given a ten."
"Beck."
"Grace, you just hit a strike with a roller coaster car. You are the luckiest strategic disaster I've ever met and I'm including myself in that comparison."
Joel's back on the comms. Joel doesn't have time for the coaster kill assessment. He's in operations mode.
Grant comes in from the hallway a minute later, Captain on his glove, and locks the operations center doors behind him. We fill him in.
"They said they're coming. We need to decide now," Joel says.
"Decide what?" Grace says, still at the window, staring at the wreckage of a coaster car.
"Whether we let them in."
The question changes from "can we survive" to "who do we survive with" and the answer has consequences that extend past the next dawn.
Fourteen strangers in the park we secured with our hands. Our park.
"They're people," Grace says. "They're people and they're alive and we have walls."
"We don't know them," Joel says.
"We didn't know each other."
She's right.
"I'll take east gate," I say. "Close the maintenance gap. Make sure the approach is clear."
"I'll come with you," Joel says. "Grant, stay with Grace. Monitor comms. If the survivors reach the gate before we do, get their count, condition, whether anyone's bitten."
"Grace," I say from the doorway.
She looks at me.
"For the record, the coaster was a ten. You were always a ten. The coaster just caught up."
"Go fix my perimeter, fish vest," she says.
"Your perimeter?"
"Our perimeter. The collective perimeter. The perimeter of the group heart situation. Go."
Joel and I hit the stairwell side by side. We push through the operations center's front door. The big middle stretches ahead. To the east, the gate. To the west, Mythic Frontier. Between them, the fountain where Kevin put Gregory last night.
Gregory's gone. The cockblocking undead, escaped from his fountain prison and wandered off to plan his next interruption. I respect the dedication.
Kevin's on the churro cart. He surveys his kingdom with the rectangular-pupiled certainty of a goat who's never doubted his position in the hierarchy and never will.
The walkie crackles one last time. Grace’s voice, powdered-sugar sweet and edged with something fiercer. "Beck. Joel. Come back."
Come back as in: you'd better come back because the group heart situation has a strict no-vacancy policy on permanent departures.
"Copy," I say.
Joel doesn't say anything. He just runs faster.
That's his copy. That's always been his copy.