Page 24 of One Adult, Please

The wrong person hits the second wire, staggers, and keeps coming.

Joel's moving around the pulley rig, knife in one hand, his other hand locked on the rope like the only thing between me and a skull-first introduction to pavement is his refusal to blink.

Third wire. It pitches forward, hits the bench, and for one beautiful second I think gravity has joined my team. Then it grabs the bench leg and pulls itself upright. Because falling is apparently not a concept zombies respect. Falling is just a little pause on the way to eating the loudest thing in the area.

Which is me. I'm the loudest thing.

It's close. Ten feet. Eight. I can see it clearly, a woman in a sundress that was probably yellow once and is now the color of things I don't want to describe, and her jaw is doing the chewing thing and her hands are reaching and she's stumbling through the wires toward me with the single-minded focus of something that used to be a person and is now just hunger wearing a sundress.

"Grace," Joel says. His voice changes. That scares me more than the sundress. "Kick."

I kick with my free leg, the one that isn't tangled in the rope, with every ounce of force that panic and adrenaline and the raw injustice of dying upside down can produce.

The kick connects.

I apologize to my foot and also to whatever part of her used to understand apologies.

The wrong person's head snaps sideways. Its body follows. It staggers, off-balance, away from me, toward the open side of the avenue, toward the jagged mouth of the collapsed coaster track, toward the kill chute that someone built for exactly this purpose.

It falls.

There's a sound. Several sounds. The initial impact. Then secondary impacts, the kind of sounds that happen when a body encounters metal and concrete in rapid sequence on the way to the bottom of a maintenance trench. Then a final, definitive, wet thud.

I don't see the bottom. I can see the opening of the chute from where I'm swinging and I can see that nothing comes back out and I'm choosing to let the sound effects be the end of that story because my imagination is already providing a visual and my imagination needs to be stopped.

I'm breathing hard. My foot hurts from kicking a skull. My hoodie is twisted. My gummy sharks are all over the ground. And somewhere, from above me, or below me, or in whatever direction, I hear a sound that isn't coming from a wrong person or Joel.

It's clapping.

Someone is clapping.

8

THE PIRATE KING OF FUNNEL CAKE MOUNTAIN

GRACE

"Oh, sick," says a voice I've never heard. Male. Young. Loud in a way that has nothing to do with volume and everything to do with a man who's been alone long enough to become his own podcast. "You just scored! Did you see that? That's a direct hit. That's a ten-pointer. I've been using the chute all night and I've never gotten a kick-score. That was beautiful."

I try to orient myself toward the voice and I can't because I'm a human piñata. "I want to get down," I say.

"Oh, right. The snare. I should probably... yeah." The voice gets closer. "That trap's for the dead ones, not the, uh, alive ones. My bad. I didn't think alive people would come through here. Alive people haven't been a thing in a while."

"Down. I want down. Joel, are you still working on the rope? Joel?"

"I'm here. Working on it."

"Hey." The new voice is close now.

I still can't see him properly because the blood in my head has turned my vision into an impressionist painting and also I'm spinning slowly.

"There's a release pin on the left side of the beam mount. I'll get it. You catch her."

There's a pause. I imagine Joel looking at the stranger, running calculations. Then I hear metal scraping and a click and the tension in the rope vanishes.

I drop four feet.

Onto Joel.