Page 65 of One Adult, Please

Beck drops the bucket and throws his shoulder into the gate. Joel catches the chain, wraps it once, twice, and snaps the padlock shut.

Seven infected hit the fence from the inside.

The metal rattles.

Grace stands very still beside me, breathing hard. "So," she says. "Animal jail works on wrong people."

"Quarantine holding yard," I say.

"Wrong people timeout," Beck says.

"That one." Grace points at him. "The garden part is mostly clear. We seal the rest of the perimeter today, finish the small buildings, and then we plan the big middle."

Joel pulls out the map. He unfolds it on a garden bench. Grace adds seafoam green X's to the secured buildings. She adds a small drawing next to the petting zoo. It has horns and an expression of malice. It's the most accurate portrait of Kevin I've ever seen.

Then she adds a box around the east holding yard and writes WRONG PEOPLE TIMEOUT in block letters.

Joel looks at it. "It's a containment zone," he says.

"It's a timeout for wrong people."

"They're not being disciplined."

"They tried to eat Kevin. They are absolutely being disciplined."

Kevin chews a flower beside us, ungrateful and alive.

"To the thinking box," Grace says. "For planning. And funnel cake. And the stabby fork memorial service."

We walk back toward Mythic Frontier. Kevin follows everyone from fifteen feet. Captain rides my arm.

I walk at the back. Grace stumbles on a cobblestone, catches herself, and keeps walking without looking back.

Joel's hand twitch when she stumbles. Beck's hand twitch when she stumbles.

Neither of them reaches. But they twitch. Both of them. Every time.

I'm watching, learning the group.

And somewhere in the watching, I became part of it.

17

THE SLEEPY STICK HAS A LOADING SCREEN

GRACE

The big middle is where the people were.

I know because I was here, walking through the main hub, watching families pressed against restaurant windows and staff in polo shirts managing the situation with walkie-talkies and the organized urgency of people who still believed this was manageable.

That was then. Now the windows are dark. Some are broken. The polo shirts are on the ground in various states of no longer being worn by anyone who's making management decisions.

The plaza is open, wide, glossy tile and decorative planters and Wondie signage everywhere, and in the middle of all of it, the wrong people are milling around in the kind of density that makes my stomach do things no stomach should do after funnel cake.

There are a lot of them.

"How many is a lot?" Beck asked this morning in the thinking box when I used the word "a lot" to describe the expected opposition in the big middle.