Page 113 of One Adult, Please

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.