Page 39 of One Adult, Please

The corridor opens into the first scene room. The ride track runs through the center, a rail embedded in the floor. The vehicles themselves are scattered: some on the track, some derailed, one flipped on its side like a mechanical turtle that can't right itself. They're medieval-themed, shaped like enchanted carriages, and they have the battery packs Beck mentioned, bulky black boxes mounted under the chassis.

The scene room is themed as an enchanted forest. Fake trees with fiber-optic leaves. A mechanical owl on a branch that's frozen mid-hoot, beak open, eyes lit from within by a bulb that's still burning. Fog machines, dead. Projected star effects on the ceiling, also dead. But the animatronics are partially operational, running on whatever backup power feeds the ride systems, and they're moving.

A fairy on a wire does a half-rotation and sticks, her wand arm raised in permanent mid-wave. A talking mushroom opens and closes its mouth but the audio is gone so it's just a mushroom doing silent screams. A gnome at a workbench hammers repeatedly on nothing, his arm going up and down in a rhythm that was cute yesterday and is now the stuff of therapy.

"I don't like any of this," I say.

"Noted," Joel says.

"I don't like the fairy. I don't like the mushroom. I especially don't like the gnome. The gnome is doing a thing and I don't like the thing."

"The gnome is an animatronic."

"The gnome is haunted. Look at his eyes."

The gnome's eyes are painted. They radiate the manufactured joy of a theme park character designed to delight children and they're staring at me like the small bearded man knows what I did.

"Moving on," Joel says.

We move through the enchanted forest. Beck checks the ride vehicles, prying open battery compartments and evaluating the packs. Joel checks the structural elements: walls, ceiling, exits.

I check for wrong people by the highly scientific method of looking around wildly and holding my friendship paddle like a woman who knows how to use it, which I don't, but the paddle doesn't know that and confidence is contagious.

The second scene room is the dragon's lair.

It's bigger than the first room. Darker. The theming here is caves and treasure: fake gold coins scattered on the floor, painted stalactites hanging from the ceiling, gem-colored lights set into the walls that pulse in slow red and amber patterns. In the center of the room, on a raised platform, is the dragon.

It's an animatronic. Full-size, maybe fifteen feet from nose to tail, with articulated wings and a jaw that opens and closes and a smoke effect that's still partially working, weak puffs of theatrical fog escaping from its nostrils every few seconds like a beast with a mild respiratory issue. Its eyes glow red. Its body shifts on the platform in a slow, hydraulic breathing pattern that makes its chest rise and fall.

"See?" I point at the dragon. "Breathing. Things in here breathe."

"It's a hydraulic motion actuator," Joel says.

"It's a breathing dragon and I was right about the armor and I was right about this."

"You were not right about the armor."

"The armor was definitely…"

"Grace." Beck's voice. Different tone. Not playful.

I stop.

He's at the far end of the dragon's lair, near the exit to the next scene room, and his flashlight is pointed at the ground and he's not moving.

"We've got company," he says.

The flashlight beam illuminates the entrance to scene room three. The doorway is wide, arched, themed as a castle gate. And standing in the gate, backlit by the dim emergency lighting of whatever room is beyond, are two wrong people.

One's wearing a WonderSphere staff jacket, the kind the ride operators wear, and whatever happened to them happened here, in this building, at their post.

The other is in civilian clothes, a guest, and they're missing a shoe, which makes this the second shoeless wrong person I've encountered in this park.

I'm starting to think shoes are the first thing the apocalypse takes from you, which is a metaphor I'm not going to unpack right now.

They haven't seen us. They're facing slightly away, oriented toward scene room three, doing the sway-and-chew routine. Staff Jacket's arm is moving in a repetitive motion, up and down.

It takes me a second to realize they're standing next to a ride vehicle and their hand is hitting the lap bar. Over and over. The way it would if you were checking restraints. A ghost of a job. A muscle memory that outlived the muscle's owner.