Page 112 of One Adult, Please

Grace takes the handset like it's made of glass and hope. "Mom? It's Grace."

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.