Inferno Park (14 page)

Because you
wanted
to come here
, a little voice said somewhere in his brain.
You wanted to see it again for yourself
.

Carter shook his head. He definitely did not want to go inside and see the destruction. He didn’t need to see that at all. The sinkhole’s ripple of destruction had already spread to engulf his life. He saw enough evidence of it every day.

“Somebody’s been here.” Victoria pointed. Carter couldn’t argue with her. A path of weeds stomped down into the mud led along the fence, deep into the wooded area beside the park.

The walk grew gloomy, between the palm trees overhead and the heavy shadows of the log ride and Crashdown Falls blotting out the low summer sun. Victoria clicked on her flashlight. If she hadn’t, she might not have noticed the glint of metal from the weeds ahead.

“What’s that?” she asked, veering to one side of the path they’d been following. Near a spot where large pipes jutted out of the ground, drooling dark water into a mostly dried creek bed, Victoria reached into the weeds and pulled up the handlebar of a bicycle. “You think it’s that kid’s bike?”

“Maybe...” With a sinking feeling, Carter helped stand the bicycle up on its wheels.

“There’s a skateboard, too.” Victoria picked it up from the patch of ground they’d exposed from under the bike.

“We should probably report them to the police,” Carter said.

“We can’t call them yet,” Victoria told him. “It’s inconclusive. We should keep looking. I bet the two kids went in through there.”

Carter felt disheartened as she stepped toward a low section of the chain-link that had been pulled free of its post, directly over a swampy puddle of water. He knew she wouldn’t stop now.

“This is it, Carter,” she said, squatting beside the fence and pulling it open.

“Let’s check.” He cupped his hands and shouted “Reeves! Kevin! Are you in there?”

He listened, but there was only silence inside the fence.

“I guess they’re not here,” he said.

“We should go inside and check,” Victoria said.

“Don’t say that.”

“Come on, they could be hurt or unconscious in there. Maybe they stumbled into the sinkhole.”

“If they did, they’re already dead. It’s a long way down.”

“Are you scared of this place?” she whispered.

“No. It’s just a bad place now. It used to be the happiest place in the world, and now it’s...exactly the opposite.”

“We’ll only go in for a minute.” Victoria took his arm and stared into his eyes. “Please?”

“I’m still going to stick with ‘no’ on that.”

“Is there no way I could change your mind?” She smiled, squeezing his arm a little tighter.

“It’s a really bad idea. We should get out of here, tell the police what we found, and that’s all.”

“Fine. Do what you want.” She unzipped a pouch on her bag and slipped out a small pair of wire-cutters, with which she began to snip along the top of the loose section of chain link.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m not crawling through that mud.”

“I told you, we’re not going in there.”

“You might not be going, but I am.” Victoria gritted her teeth as she cut through both a strand of the fence and a thick green vine tangled around it.

“You brought wire cutters? You were planning to break in, weren’t you?”

“I just thought they might be useful. And I was right.” She clipped through the next metal strand.

“You’re seriously doing this?” he asked.

“I seriously am.”

He watched her snarl as she sheared through another length of vine, another bit of fence.

“You should let me do that,” he said, squatting down beside her.

“Why?”

“You could hurt yourself.”

She snorted and kept cutting. When she’d cut all the way across the top of the loose piece, she packed away the wire cutters, wiped sweat from her forehead, and pushed aside the newly cut flap of fence. She hunched down, squatting on her heels, and ducked through the fence.

Inside, she stood, stretched, and adjusted the shoulder strap of the camera bag.

“You can’t go in there!” he said, still squatting outside the fence.

“I just did.” She looked up at the enormous leaky underbelly of Crashdown Falls, a simple waterfall ride in which a boat with fifteen people went up, around a curve, and right back down a steep water slide, getting soaked in the process. “It seems darker in here. Weird.”

“You can’t do it by yourself, either,” Carter said. “You don’t know your way around the park. You could get seriously lost. Or hurt.”

“Then you’d better come with me.” She gave him a long look, then turned around and walked deeper into the park.

“Wait!” Carter sighed as he ducked and crawled through the fence. She smiled as he joined her.

“I know you couldn’t resist a mystery,” she said.

“You’re a mystery.”

“Am I?” Her smile wavered before she looked away. “Let’s go.”

Victoria took snapshots of the old Crashdown Falls and Log Drop, both of them decrepit and filled with scummy dark water.

They followed a broken, uneven path from under the water rides and out toward a wider plaza. Carter remembered the ground shuddering beneath his feet, the pavement buckling and breaking into the jagged moonscape they were now crossing. They had to watch their step to avoid tripping on the uneven ground.

“This was Pirate Island,” he told her, pointing toward the overgrown pirate ship, still hanging from its axle high above. “That’s the Swingin’ Scalawag, over there are the bumper boats...”

She took pictures, then drifted over to check the ruins of a row of game booths.

“That’s Harpoon Lagoon. I was good at this.” Carter stepped to a booth with its front panel left open and one wall blackened by fire. The big fake harpoon gun was still mounted on the front counter. It creaked as he turned it toward the three cardboard cutouts hanging at the back of the booth—a whale, a shark, and a jaunty seahorse, each one with a hole through the center of its body. “You try to shoot a ball through one of the fish. Three shots for a dollar.”

“What did you win?”

“A plastic snake. Loved that thing.” Carter lined it up on the seahorse, the skinniest and most difficult target. He closed one eye, aimed the harpoon a few inches to the left of the hole—that was the critical part—and squeezed the trigger.

He jumped when the gun actually fired a softball with a hiss of compressed air. The ball sailed through the hole in the seahorse, through which it just barely fit, trailing string behind it like a harpoon.

When the ball reached the end of the string and the line went taut, a foghorn blew in an upper corner of the booth. Carter and Victoria both yelled in surprise.

“What the hell was that?” Victoria asked.

“The winner bell,” Carter said. “It must be automated.”

“You should have warned me!” She punched his arm. “That scared the crap out of me.”

“I didn’t even expect the gun to work.”

“I’m surprised anything still works here. Pose with the harpoon thing. Show me how proud you are of your kill.” She snapped a picture while he forced a grin. “What did you win, Carter?”

“One of those crocodiles, probably.” He pointed to three big plush crocodiles with happy grins, all of them filthy with mildew. “But technically, I didn’t pay a dollar first, so I don’t win the prize.”

“You’re so ethical.” She rolled her eyes.

They continued past the collapsed remains of Pinchy Pete’s Sandwich Stand, which had once looked like a big red crab, and on out to the midway. He thought he could smell faint traces of popcorn and cotton candy, as though the ruins had been permanently imbued with those aromas.

The midway looked just like Carter remembered from the day the sinkhole opened, the asphalt broken into chunks that had jutted up or sunken down, inviting you to break your leg if you walked too fast. A few wooden buildings along the center had collapsed into heaps.

“Look at that.” Victoria pointed past the row of rotting, vine-infested game booths—Bat Ball, Whack-A-Frog, Knock-’Em-Dead Bowling—toward a cheerful red popcorn cart on golden bicycle wheels, shaded by an umbrella striped red and white. While everything else in the park was rotten and falling down, the cart gleamed as if its glass windows and brass frame had been recently polished. Even the umbrella was spotless, its red and white stripes crisp and bright.

“What the hell?” Carter walked toward it.

The glass display window glowed with inviting yellow light, and it was filled with a mountain of golden popcorn. A big red scoop was shoved deep into the popcorn, its handle pointed out toward a small open window in the side. The smell of freshly-popped corn, dusted with salt and drizzled with butter, wafted out from the cart. Red and white striped paper bags were folded and stacked neatly on the little shelf by the open window.

“It smells so good,” Victoria whispered beside him, her chest brushing his arm, and he jumped a little. She gazed at the salty, buttery puffs inside. “I kind of have a weakness for popcorn. If it’s good popcorn, if it’s made just right...” She nudged past him and closed her eyes, leaning in toward the window and sniffing, and her lips broke into the first real smile he’d seen on her face. “That’s amazing.”

“It’s insane,” he said, though his mouth was watering and his stomach rumbled. It had been hours since he’d eaten. “We can’t eat this. It must be so old...”

“It’s fresh,” she whispered. She opened her eyes and looked at the stack of popcorn bags, neatly folded and ready to be used.

“We aren’t going to eat it.” He touched her arm. “Victoria?”

“Huh?” She blinked as she looked up at him.

“We aren’t eating this.”

“Oh, yeah, of course...” Her voice had a disappointed tone, and she looked back longingly at the popcorn.

“I wonder who did this. Those kids?” Carter looked around the ruined, overgrown midway.

“What kids?” Victoria’s brow furrowed as she stared at the popcorn. “Oh, yeah, the kids. They must be living in the park, surviving off preservative-filled candy and delicious...popcorn...”

“Reeves! Kevin!” Carter shouted. “Are you guys here?”

Victoria jumped when he yelled, and she blinked a few times, as though he’d startled her out of a trance. She raised her camera and took pictures of the popcorn cart. Then she shouted, “You guys, are you okay? Come out if you can hear us.”

They listened carefully, but no voices answered them.

“Do you hear that?” Victoria whispered, but he shook his head. She pointed up along the midway. “Listen.”

Carter concentrated. He thought he did hear something in the distance, very faint little beeps and blats.

“Something like a video game?” he whispered.

“Yeah. Little lasers and explosions.”

“It has to be coming from Space City. There’s a big arcade there, and Martian laser tag.” He started up the midway.

“But it wouldn’t have electricity, would it?” she asked.

“I didn’t expect Harpoon Lagoon to work, either. Maybe they brought a generator.” Carter stopped walking. “Or maybe it’s not those two kids.”

“Who would it be, then?”

“Any crazy person who might have drifted down to Florida—they do that, you know, crazy people drift down here from all over the country. One of them might decide to live in a condemned amusement park. Maybe we’re not hearing the kids, but the psycho who killed them when they snuck in here. Did you ever think of that?”

“Of course I did,” Victoria said. “That’s why I needed you to come with me.”

“So I can get psycho-killed first?”

“You would die protecting me? That’s so sweet. Come on.” She started up the midway, and he walked along beside her.

The midway ended at a square central plaza with a wishing well and a few benches shaded by palm trees, all of it overgrown by thick vines. Colorful arrow signs pointing in different directions: TYKE TOWN, MERRY-GO-ROUND, FOOL’S GOLD....Victoria looked along the black arrow painted HAUNTED ALLEY in faded green ghost-letters. Dark Mansion was straight ahead of them, its waiting area full of fake gravestones. Inferno Mountain loomed behind it, the devil face grinning down at them over the peaked dormers and collapsing turrets of Dark Mansion.

“Is it just me,” Victoria whispered, “Or does it always seem like the devil is looking right at you?”

“It always seems like that.”

She looked in the opposite direction, along the weed-choked MERRY-GO-ROUND path, which was shattered into pebbles and sloped downward toward a large open valley, empty except for chunks of the roller coaster tracks visible on the far side. A row of decaying sawhorses wrapped in faded yellow police tape sat across the sloping path.

“Is that it?” Victoria whispered.

“That’s the sinkhole. We really need to not go over there.”

“I just want a closer look.” She started down the sloping path with her camera in front of her. The pulverized asphalt crunched like loose black gravel beneath her old sneakers.

“Be careful.” Carter walked a few feet behind her. The shattered path felt unstable beneath his feet, and it grew steeper as it approached the sinkhole.

“Look at that,” Victoria whispered, leaning over a sawhorse toward the darkness beyond. Carter reluctantly stepped up to join her.

The sinkhole was a broad, black pit fifty feet across, and they couldn’t see far into its depths under the gloomy late-afternoon clouds. Pebble-sized bits of asphalt rolled from under their feet and tumbled away into the open hole, making no sound after they fell inside, no echoing impact from the bottom. The air around the sinkhole felt much colder.

“I didn’t realize it was so big,” she said.

“Big enough to swallow a merry-go-round.” Carter felt a growing fear inside him as he gazed into the sinkhole, which seemed to go down and down forever. He glanced around the edges of the pit, where more sawhorses with yellow tape were scattered in a very loose ring with several wide gaps. “It looks like some of these things have fallen in. The sinkhole could still be growing.”

“It’s so creepy. Do you hear that?” She leaned her head a little farther over the sawhorse, listening. This close to the ocean, the breeze was almost constant. As it passed over the mouth of the dark chasm, it made a sound like a soft, endless sigh.