Page 42 of One Adult, Please

The chain reverses. The carriage jerks backward a foot. The wrong people climbing over it lose their balance and spill onto the track.

"Now," Joel says.

Beck swings. I shove with the paddle. Joel hits the forward control, and the carriage surges into the gate again, pinning the crawlers against the frame.

"Doorstop kill," Beck says.

"No."

"Track smash?"

"No."

"Haunted carriage combo?"

"Beck, please develop grief."

Once the carriage pins them, Beck and Joel finish what the ride started. Joel backs the vehicle out with the maintenance controls, and we move through the rooms behind it in pieces: throne room, wizard tower, grand hall.

Joel keeps one eye on the track. Beck keeps the axe ready. I keep the friendship paddle in both hands and try not to think about the fact that it has graduated from "prop I stole" to "thing with a job."

The finale room is worse than the dragon because it's trying so hard to be beautiful.

Animatronic dancers spin in slow circles beneath a ceiling of fake stars, held in each other's mechanical arms, smiling with painted mouths while the music doesn't play. Their skirts brush the floor. Their glass eyes catch the emergency lights. Around and around and around.

And between them, wrong people move.

I can't tell which bodies are mechanical and which bodies are dead. Everything is turning. Everything is smiling. Everything has hands.

"Nope," I whisper.

A dancer rotates past me, gown whispering against my knee.

Behind it, a wrong person reaches out.

I swing at the wrong person and hit the dancer instead.

Its mechanical body turns, arms extended in a frozen waltz, and catches the wrong person across the chest. The wrong person staggers sideways into another dancer, which turns into another dancer, which turns into a chain reaction of haunted ballroom violence.

The entire room becomes a formal dance and a workplace accident.

Beck whispers, "Zombie ballroom."

"No."

"You invented zombie bowling and zombie ballroom in the same building."

"I'm under a lot of stress."

We sweep the rooms after that, which is a very calm way to describe walking through a fairy-tale murder tunnel and checking which things still have teeth. Beck handles the still-moving ones with the axe.

I don't watch that part.

Beck steps away long enough to clean the axe on a torn velvet curtain from the wizard tower. When he rejoins us, the blade is clean.

He always cleans it. I noticed that. I'm going to ask him about it someday when we're safe enough for questions like that.

Joel extracts three battery packs from the ride vehicles that didn't participate in zombie bowling, which I appreciate because I have boundaries now. They're heavy. He leaves them beside the entrance. We'll need a maintenance cart to move them, but they're ours now.