Vic watched it rise. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the churning mass climbed the rocks and broke the border trees. Even when the massive waves crashed through Fairy Funland, it didn’t seem real, especially from so high, so far, and so alone in the cloudless sky. She had sounded an alarm and closed the watchtower window, but she could still hear the screams of people tossed from the top of the Ferris wheel and impaled on twisted roller coaster rails. The waves blasted families apart, hurling them like sputtering ragdolls through the air. Some landed on rooftops, dying instantly, while some hit the rising tide and were sucked slowly underwater.
But some stopped in mid-air. As if suspended by invisible nooses, they hung in the sky, bleeding out, pissing themselves over the swamped park. As Vic beheld the catastrophic melee spread out in frothy waves before her, a security guard was snatched up by the wind and dangled just outside the watchtower window. Harlan’s voice had charged out of the speakers and ordered everyone underground, but Vic couldn’t move. The hanging man was alive. He was praying, reaching out, trying to touch the glass.
Then the wind had taken him. It snapped him out of the sky like a child plucking a wilted blade of grass.
Vic grits her teeth. She smells briny cologne again and tries not to dry heave in Tiffany’s face, but the stench is stronger when the actress steps up to Vic, like she’s brewing Aqua Velva kombucha in her gut.
“Why didn’t you tell us these tunnels were here?” Tiffany demands.
“I didn’t know.”
“Bullshit. You must’ve surveyed the land before you overhauled the old park.”
“I thought they were filled in,” she says. “Harlan said he filled them in.”
“But you didn’t check?” Raymond asks.
Vic exhales heavily. “Not personally.”
Rina’s staring at her, looking like she bit into a bad apple. “You said you upgraded the security systems too.”
“We did.”
“And we’re just supposed to believe you?” Tiffany throws her head back with a laugh that echoes through the corridor. “You say you believed your dad when he claimed to fill in the tunnels, but you don’t actually think your dad was your dad after the first hurricane, do you?”
Rina’s face screws up in confusion, so Tiffany looks to Raymond for support, which he hesitantly gives.
“I do remember reading something about that, Ms. Fell. You told the cops your dad was an alien or something.”
Vic grunts in frustration. She’s a grown ass woman. A Cornell graduate who’s worked as lead project manager with Fortune 500 companies. She’s run two successful small businesses, not including managing Fairy Funland’s massive overhaul. And a twenty-five-year-old actress with bleached eyebrows and scaredy-cat rent-a-cop are making her feel like she’s fifteen again: paralyzed with fear and certain she’s going to die under this goddamn park.
“You know something?” Tiffany continues, now calling Rina into the circle of scorn. “I don’t think this is about protecting us at all. I think this is about you being down here during that storm when you were a kid. I think you’re scared, and we’re gonna die for it. Well, pardon my French, but fuck that, Ms. Fell.”
Tiffany isn’t wrong. Vic is scared; more than she was an hour ago when she thought the damn tunnels were full of cement. But parts of her still scream out in the voices of the investigators and doctors who convinced her she was crazy. What she witnessed from the watchtower broke something in her, they said, disassociating her mind so far from itself that she invented trauma to suffer underground as well as above. Every harrowing second beneath her father’s theme park — the things she saw Harlan do, the demons he worshiped — she’d hallucinated them all, partly to mask her pain and partly to punish the father who failed to protect her.
“This is crazy,” Rina blurts at Ms. Fell. “Why aren’t you denying any of this shit?”
“Because there’s nothing to deny,” Vic replies softly. “Whatever you’ve heard about me, it’s probably true… and worse. And you’ll see that for yourselves if we stay down here.”
With a stifled whimper, Tiffany collapses against a faded cartoon of a pixie beside the watchtower ladder. “Rina’s right. This is insane.”
“I’m doing the best I can, and frankly I don’t care what you think about me right now. Any of you.” Peering at the group, Vic lifts her chin. “But I do value your safety, and I’m telling you these tunnels aren’t safe. As hospitable as they may seem, there are demons in the woodwork.”
Tiffany snorts. “It’s stone, honey.” Despite her bloody nose and injured thigh, as she rushes to the ladder to call down the rest of the survivors, she looks like the cat that got the cream. They hurry down like starving kittens, thanking God and Tiffany for discovering salvation in the still-accessible tunnels.
The smell rises again, and Vic knows the hyperia are watching her. Though her knees soften at the terror of her earlier decision, she braces herself on the map of the underground chambers and calls for attention from the clammy crowd.
It doesn’t come easy. Half of the actors portraying Fairy Funland characters look to Tiffany and a few others look to Raymond as the only remaining security guard. But their gazes eventually sweep to their boss when she says, “I’m the only one who’s spent any time down here.”
She traces her finger across the faded map and draws several circles in the dust. “There are three access points to the grounds, as well as several chambers that were used for costuming, rehearsal, and breaks, but I’m not sure what condition they’re in. As far as I know, they haven’t been used since 1991.” She glares at Tiffany, who’s conveniently tossing her gaze around the corridor. “Raymond and I will investigate the areas ahead to make sure there aren’t any leaks or weak spots,” she continues.
The security guard flinches but salutes, causing the older man portraying The Sleeping King to raise his tattooed arm.
“I’ll come with you,” the king says.
“Thank you, Tom. Anyone else?”
Ben, still dressed in his skin-tight time-traveling knight costume, points to the largest chamber on the underground map. “With your permission, Ms. Fell, I’d like to lead everyone here. If it’s not filled in either, it stands to reason there might still be supplies.”
“Be careful, all of you. Stay together. And should you reach the northern exit,” she says, circling what looks like a waffle embedded in a cliff, “turn around immediately.”
“Where does it go?” Rina asks.
Tiffany whistles, walks her fingers to the edge of an imaginary cliff, and plummets them into the abyss.
“We’re going to check it out, so there’s no reason for any of you to take the risk,” Vic says. “But for god’s sake, speak up if you see something strange.”
“Like what? Little alien crabs?” Tiffany snickers and elbows a teenage boy who portrayed a dancing flower.
He doesn’t respond. He stares at the floor and continues crying.
As the trio set off to inspect the entryways and the others prepare for the march to the break room situated under the northern quadrant of the park, Vic looks back on the shivering clusters. Nearly three dozen employees stood in the atrium for the mock run that morning. And of the twenty yawning performers and makeup artists, a handful of security guards dressed in padded suits of armor, and a dozen actors playing park guests who lined up with the rising sun at their backs and not nearly enough caffeine in their bloodstreams, only nine remain.