Inferno Park (5 page)

“Shut up!” Carter shouted at the devil’s face.

Then the world shuddered and broke open beneath his feet.

Carter staggered and fell as a chorus of high-pitched screams went up across the park. The first wave went silent as quickly as it had begun, but was quickly followed by a second, louder wave.

He crashed to the ground, scraping his arm and chin on the edge of a widening fissure in the concrete below. When he looked up, he couldn’t believe what he saw.

Living in Florida, he had naturally heard of sinkholes big enough to swallow a house, but his mind didn’t instantly make the connection. The word “sinkhole” itself sounded much too tame to describe what was happening. It felt more like an earthquake shaking the entire park.

On the other side of the midway, a gigantic black hole had opened in the earth and swallowed the entire carousel, leaving no trace of it behind.

The hole grew rapidly, cracking and breaking the pavement around it, and more tourists tumbled inside, screaming. Some of the people were trying to get away from the growing hole, but others in the crowd were pushing them back
toward
it—parents and grandparents shouting and shoving their way to the suddenly empty place where children had been gently circling on painted horses only a moment before.

“What the hell?” asked Jared, who’d toppled to the ground beside him. Carter just watched the spreading destruction, unable to move, feeling terrified.

The Ferris wheel tilted sharply toward the open chasm as its foundation cracked beneath it. The passengers screamed while the great hole widened beneath them. The sound of wrenching metal screeched through the park as an edge of the Ferris wheel struck the lip of the sinkhole. It slammed to a halt, leaning perilously to one side, leaving its riders trapped and screaming above the sinkhole.

On the other side of the sinkhole, the central spindle of the swing ride toppled, bringing down riders from thirty feet in the air. Some of the riders slammed into the pavement around the sinkhole, while the spindle and the rest of the riders fell directly into it.

Carter saw one college-age guy lying twisted on the pavement, still buckled into his swing, groaning for a moment before the chains of his swing pulled taut. Then the guy was scraped backwards across the ground and vanished over the edge of the sinkhole as the central spindle dragged him down.

Fresh screams rose from the riders trapped on the Ferris wheel as they watched the sinkhole slurp down the swing ride and all its passengers.

Carter wondered how deep the hole had to be if it could swallow a merry-go-round and still have room for the swing ride, too. He wondered if it would spread and swallow everything.

The entire park shuddered, as though it were balanced on the back of some great, heaving underground beast. Slabs of blacktop cracked and buckled upward at steep angles, turning the pavement into a jagged moonscape.

The Starland Express, the long wooden roller coaster with its high hills trimmed in light bulbs, cracked and snapped as the sinkhole spread beneath the support columns midway through the ride.

The train of screaming roller coaster riders charged down a splintered hill where the track had broken away. They tumbled off and corkscrewed down out of sight, landing somewhere in Tyke Town. Carter heard crunching metal and a fresh batch of screams at the impact.

The largest hills of the roller coaster broke apart and fell inside the park, smashing into rides, buildings, and the crowd watching the band or playing Shoot-Em-Up Puppets in the fake town of Fool’s Gold. A fire erupted somewhere in that direction—Carter could only tell by the sudden red glow above it.

From his vantage, there was a great deal that Carter couldn’t see, but he would hear about all of it in the days and months to come: how the two-story clock tower in Tyke Town fell over, crushing a couple of kids on the Tick-Tock Train. At the same time, heavy beams from the Starland Express rained down on the Tiny Teacups and the Funtime Firehouse, battering kids and breaking their bones.

Screams and cries sounded from all corners of the park, and a panicked mob rushed toward the front gate, many of them bleeding, burned, or clutching broken arms.

“Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” laughed the enormous face of the devil as the chaos and destruction spread below.

Carter watched as the black mass of Inferno Mountain heaved
upward
while everything else sank and toppled, the two-story devil face rising as if to survey the destruction with his glowing red eyes and frozen fanged grin. Cracks spread downward from the glowing caldera at the peak of the volcanic mountain, and Carter half-expected hot lava to come rushing down the side—though of course there was no lava inside, only fire-red lights and a smoke machine that seemed to be working overtime, chugging out clouds of dark gray smoke that curled up around the devil’s horns.

“Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” The devil’s maniacal laughter went on and on, as though the sound equipment had been jarred and the recording was stuck. That laughter would continue for hours while survivors and rescue workers dug through the wreckage in search of lost children.

“We have to get out of here!” Jared pulled Carter to his feet and tried to drag him along with the rest of the panicked crowd boiling past them, but Carter remained where he was, staring at the shuddering, shaking Inferno Mountain. He was waiting for Tricia.

“Come on!” Jared shouting, pulling his arm.

“Wait.” Carter’s voice was flat and cold, his eyes locked on the red pitchfork gate where the tracks curved out of the mountain. He ignored the overweight lady in the red “Roll Tide!” shirt who nearly flattened him in her panicked jog out of the park.

The pitchfork gates finally opened, and Carter took a sharp breath.

The train of six black cars rolled out of the gate. Ten of the twelve riders were screaming and shoving against their safety bars as the train pulled around and under the roof of the loading station.

The two riders in front were not screaming or shoving at all.

“Holy shit,” Jared’s voice hissed beside him.

Carter ran up through the now-deserted waiting area for the Inferno Mountain ride. Ten of the twelve passengers squirmed and pushed out of their seats as the train braked. They ran past Carter on either side, barely giving him a glance, their faces and shirts spattered with blood.

Across the tracks, the ride operator lay unconscious on the ground. It looked as though he’d lost his balance and knocked his head against something, maybe the ride control console.

In the first car sat Tricia and the teenage boy who’d joined her at the last minute. Neither of them moved. Their hands lay still in their laps.

Both Tricia and the boy had been decapitated.

On top of Tricia’s shoulders sat a shapeless mass of blood and gore encircled by her necklace of plastic jack-o’-lanterns and black cats. Bright red blood leaked in thin streams down her white dress and pale arms, pooling in her lap around her curled hands and her heavily bitten fingernails. Her homemade bracelets were soaked in red.

Her missing head was nowhere in sight. Neither was the boy’s.

“That’s insane,” Jared whispered behind him.

Carter stared at her headless, bloody body and said nothing. He felt hollow inside. He felt as if he’d lost his soul, as if he would feel nothing but emptiness for the rest of his life.

“Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” The devil laughed on and on above them, the small red bulbs glowing in his eyes.

“We have to go, man,” Jared insisted. “This place is falling apart.”

In the hours and days to come, wave after wave of fire and emergency workers would arrive from surrounding counties. Rescue workers would dig at the ruins for weeks, but scores of people would remain missing. More than a hundred people would eventually be counted among the dead, the majority of their bodies vanished into the sinkhole.

The sinkhole was estimated to extend hundreds of feet into the ground, its bottom filled with thick, swampy mud. Attempted excavation was declared too dangerous, and dozens of people, most of them children, would have their final resting place there, beneath the ruins of Starland Amusement Park.

The iconic picture that swept the national news the next day showed the devil’s huge laughing face leering over a burning ice cream stand as panicked, bleeding tourists ran by in the foreground. The entrance to the park’s signature ride was partially visible, high chrome letters spelling out the word
INFERNO
.

That first day, a simple error by a tired, shocked intern at the Associated Press caused hundreds of news outlets to mistakenly identify Starland as “Inferno Park.” The name stuck in the public imagination, until time passed and the event faded from the national mind, lost under the ever-growing layers of new disasters, dangers, and scandals.

While some of the details would fade from Carter’s mind, he remember the misery and horror of that day for the rest of his life. He would remember them most clearly in his nightmares.

Chapter Two

Exactly five years later, Carter stood again at the front gates of Starland. The fake castle towers of the ticket booths were no longer white but a weathered green and brown, sticky with mildew, and the neon stars lay dark. The ticket-taker windows were boarded up. Graffiti had been painted all over the towers and the sidewalk in front of the gate—mostly the names of the dead.

The gates themselves were chained and padlocked to keep out trespassers and vandals. High weeds and spindly trees had grown up along the fence, and the chain-link itself was thick with catbrier and other prickly vines, as well as poisonous vines like crab’s eye. The dense, overlapping growth had turned the chain-link fence into a jungle barrier blocking any view of the wreckage inside.

If Carter had ripped away a handful of the thorny growth and peered through, he might have seen a dilapidated food stand with painted starbursts advertising “Tasty Fries!” and “Frosty Drinks!” or maybe the Lucky Darts game booth with deflated, shriveled balloons still hanging across its cork wall.

He didn’t want to see any of it, so he didn’t try.

The front gates, and the sidewalk directly in front of them, were scattered with flowers, cards in sealed envelopes, little gifts and toys, and pictures, mostly of children. Some of the pictures were faded, hung carefully with twine and left there for years, to be slowly destroyed by wind and rain.

That first year, the fence had been papered with pictures of missing children, many printed on fliers with their family’s phone numbers and email addresses, in the thin hope that their kids hadn’t been sucked away down the sinkhole but were somehow lost in the chaos and still alive somewhere. The following August, the one-year anniversary of the park disaster had brought another wave of pictures, flowers, candles, and little gifts like teddy bears and plush bunnies, but no hopeful phone numbers.

This year, the crop of flowers and cards was smaller than ever. Most of the dead had been tourists from out of town, and a lot of those families had ceased making the pilgrimage—sometimes hundreds of miles—to pay tribute to the lost. Even the yellow signs on the fence reading NO TRESPASSING or CONDEMNED - HAZARDOUS SITE looked faded by time.

Carter carried a handful of fresh white roses he’d bought at the grocery store on the way to the park. He looked for Tricia’s picture, but didn’t really expect to find a new one. Her family had put up a different photograph of her each August for three years, but they’d since moved away, like countless other families in the dying town. It looked like Carter was the only one left to remember her this year.

He found a faded photograph of her from a previous year, clamped to the chain-link with a clothespin. The weather had almost worn the image and the photo paper itself away, leaving only a hint of her bright, intelligent green eyes and her sad smile.

He laid the flowers on the sidewalk in front of it, on top of faded farewell messages spray-painted in years past.

Carter knelt there a moment. As usual, he could think of nothing to say. He had nearly died alongside her—
should
have died alongside her, instead of leaving her in the company of some random out-of-town creep. He should not be here, with his heart still beating, drifting through his life like a ghost.

“Carter, we need to go,” his dad called from the truck. He was in the driver’s seat of a long green box truck with the MOOVIN’ ON cow logo on the side, the cartoon cow looking off into the distance as though expecting greener pastures ahead. Carter’s dad wore green coveralls with his first name, Henry, on a patch on his chest that also featured the MOOVIN’ ON cow.

Carter wore the identical outfit, as he had all summer. It was made of light cotton, but still grew uncomfortable in the Florida heat—any rational person would wear shorts and t-shirt when moving heavy boxes and furniture during the summer. His dad’s employer was a national company, though, and required the same uniform in every state, whether it was winter in New Hampshire or August in Florida.

For Carter, starting school the following week would be a relief from his backbreaking summer job. For his dad, though, there was no relief in sight. As Carter shuffled toward the truck, he felt sorry for his dad. Forty-one was just about too old to be moving heavy furniture for a living, and the job had naturally required his dad to cut off his trademark long hair, which had begun to gray.