Page 21 of One Adult, Please

He does the go-wave. We keep moving.

The path is quiet for the first sixty meters or so. Quiet enough that I can hear the park speakers cycling in the distance, Wondie's voice now permanently warped. Quiet enough that I start to relax, which is always when the universe puts on lipstick and leans in.

Joel's hand goes up. Flat palm.

I stop. I also bump into him because my stopping distance is longer than my following distance. He doesn't react. He's looking ahead, through the lattice, at the open courtyard where the pathway widens before it reaches the adventure part's gate.

There are two of them.

They're just... there. Upright. Swaying slightly. One is wearing the remains of a WonderSphere staff polo. The other is in cargo shorts and a tank top and one flip-flop, which means somewhere in the park there's a single flip-flop sitting on the ground and that detail is so mundane and so human that it makes my throat tight.

Joel puts his hand on my arm. His fingers are warm. I notice because my arm has apparently decided to develop a journalism career and is reporting live on every sensation while the rest of my body is trying to focus on not dying.

"They're between us and the gate," he says, barely above a breath.

"Can we go around?"

"Through the landscaping. There's a maintenance access on the south side. But it's louder. More brush."

"Louder is bad."

We stand there. The two wrong people sway. Tank Top does the chewing-on-nothing thing that I've now seen enough times that it's migrated from "horrifying" to "deeply unpleasant." Polo Shirt is facing the wrong direction, which is great, except wrong people don't stay facing any direction for long. They rotate. Slowly. Like the world's worst lawn sprinklers.

Joel leads us off the main path, through a gap in the lattice that he apparently already knew about because of course he did, and into the landscaping. The bushes are thick, ornamental, the kind of plants that theme parks use because they look tropical and require minimal maintenance and I've never been more grateful for corporate landscaping decisions. An executive approved these bushes to look expensive and block stroller traffic, and today they may save my life.

Joel moves through vegetation like vegetation is his native environment.

I, on the other hand, am having a full relationship with every plant in this hedge. They're grabbing me. They're holding on. They're making choices about my hair and my tote bag straps and I'm pretty sure one of them is trying to take my shoe.

A branch snaps under my foot.

Joel goes still. I go still. We're both frozen in a bush, and I can see through the leaves as Polo Shirt's head turns toward us.

…look past us, past us, keep going, keep going, keep...

It stops.

Polo Shirt is facing our bush. Its head is tilted at the angle that means something registered, some input that its rewired brain decided to process, and it takes a step toward us.

I stop breathing. Joel's hand is still on my arm. His grip tightens. A physical sentence that says: don't move.

Polo Shirt takes a step. Its foot drags on the concrete with a wet scraping sound that I'm going to hear in my nightmares for the rest of whatever life I have left. It's close enough now that I can see details I don't want. The skin color. The eyes, open, searching, vacant in a way that's worse than closed because closed means gone and open means the machinery is still running with nobody at the controls.

Tank Top hasn't moved. Tank Top is still swaying in the courtyard, one flip-flop, chewing on the memory of being a person.

Polo Shirt stops. Six feet from our bush. I can smell that sweet rot that I've been trying to forget since the Sheldon incident and my brain has been helpfully storing in high definition.

Ten seconds. Twenty. I'm counting in my head but the counting isn't reliable because my head is occupied by a symphony of panic that drowns out accurate timekeeping.

Polo Shirt turns away. Slowly. Resumes its drift back toward the courtyard. Rejoins Tank Top. They sway together in the empty space, slow-dancing to music that only the dead can hear.

Joel's grip relaxes. His hand stays on my arm for one more second, then lifts. The absence of it is rude and I'm putting that on the same shelf as his cheekbones, which is getting structurally concerning at this point.

We move. Faster now, trading stealth for speed because the maintenance access is right there, a chain-link gate in the fence with a padlock that Joel has a key for because Joel has a key for everything in this park and I'm starting to think his keyring is the most important object in the apocalypse.

He unlocks the gate. We slip through. He relocks it behind us.

And we're in the adventure part. Or what's left of it.