Page 115 of One Adult, Please

"The crayon plan doesn't cover armed incursion."

"The crayon plan covers everything. That's the point of the crayon plan. If it's not on there yet, I'll add it."

I step past the barricade.

Joel, Beck, and Grant step with me.

I stop. "What are you doing?"

"Coming with you," Joel says.

"I'm the one talking."

"You talk. We stand behind you. Non-threatening unless they make it otherwise," Joel says.

I look at him. He looks back.

This isn't negotiable. It's written in every line of his body.

"Fine," I say. "But nobody says anything weird."

Beck opens his mouth.

"That was mostly for me," I admit.

The tall woman sees us first. She's maybe forty. Short hair. Sunburned. The look on her face is the one I've seen in every mirror since Thursday: exhaustion wearing a costume of competence. She's holding a rifle across her chest, in the "I haven't decided yet" position.

"You the one on the radio?" she asks.

"That's me. Grace. This is Joel, Beck, and Grant. This is WonderSphere. We have walls and funnel cakes and a very complicated goat situation."

She stares at us. Behind her, the group stirs. People looking at each other. People looking at me. A man in the back who's either laughing or choking, it's hard to tell. A woman holding a kid who's maybe five and the kid is holding a stuffed animal that's been loved past the point of species identification.

"I'm Diane," the woman says. "We've been on the road for days. We saw you from the ridge." She looks past me, at the park. "We need shelter."

"I know."

"We have people who need medical attention. Food. Water. A safe place to sleep."

"I know."

"We're not leaving."

And there it is. Three words that turn a request into a statement and a statement into a situation.

“Okay. Give us a minute.” I look at the men. “We need to talk. Privately.”

Joel looks at the group. His scan is working overtime, processing threat assessments and structural vulnerabilities and all the things Joel's brain does when the maintenance log encounters an entry it wasn't designed for.

"Where?" he says.

I look around. The east entrance has the turnstile bank, the ticket booths, the guest services window, the stroller rental. Standard theme park entry infrastructure, designed for the orderly processing of large crowds, which is exactly what we're about to need but not until we figure out what we're doing.

"There," I say, pointing at ticket booth number three. It's the big one, the one Craig was sitting in on day one, with a counter and the register and a little stool and just barely enough room for four people if two of them are willing to stand very close to each other. Which in our case isn't a problem because we're four people who've recently agreed to a group heart situation and personal space is a concept we've renegotiated.

We fit into the ticket booth the way you fit into a phone booth in those old photos: ridiculously, with a complete disregard for the space's intended capacity. Joel takes the corner by the register. Beck leans against the counter. I sit on Craig's stool. Grant stands by the door.

"Okay," I say. "Options."