Page 25 of One Adult, Please

My body, which has been inverted for too long, has no idea which way is up, which way is down, or what to do with any of its limbs. So I land on Joel with full weight, and he catches me, or tries to. What actually happens is somewhere between catching and collapsing.

His arms come up. We both go down, him backward, me on top of him, and I end up lying on Joel on the cobblestones in a tangle of limbs and his arms are around my waist because they were trying to catch me and now they're just... there.

My hand is on his chest. My face is approximately four inches from his, close enough to see the shock he hasn't managed to lock down. It's the first genuine, uncontrolled emotion I've seen from him. Underneath it is something I'm absolutely not going to examine with a stranger watching and gummy sharks scattered around us like festive confetti.

"Hi," I say, because my mouth handles crises by being social.

"Get up," he says, but his arms don't move, which sends a mixed message I receive, notarize, laminate, and file on the shelf in my brain marked Absolutely Not.

The shelf collapses immediately.

It was not rated for Joel.

I get up. He gets up. We don't look at each other. I brush off my knees. He brushes off his back.

"Anyway," says the voice. "Impressive as hell. That was reflexive. Most people freeze. You kicked toward the chute."

I finally turn to look at the source.

He's about ten feet away. Maybe in his mid-twenties, tall, built like he was athletic before this and then the apocalypse handed him a free trial of manual labor. His hair is dark and messy in a way that suggests either styling product or emotional collapse. At this point in the apocalypse, those are legally identical.

He's wearing armor. No. He's wearing sea life.

It's fiberglass. Curved. Painted in faded grays and blues. And it's... it's a dolphin. It's the front half of a fiberglass dolphin, the kind that you'd see mounted on a wall or in a display or as part of a themed ride vehicle. He's cut it, shaped it, and strapped it to his torso with bungee cords and seat-belt webbing from a ride harness. It covers his chest and wraps around his sides, and the dolphin's painted eye is still on his right pectoral, staring into the apocalypse with glassy optimism.

At his feet are a battle axe and a funnel cake. Apparently, he put down both weapon and breakfast to applaud me and operate the release pin. I'm touched.

"He's wearing a fish vest," I say, because facts matter in a crisis.

Joel looks at the breastplate. Looks at me. "Yeah," he says. "He is."

The man looks down at his dolphin armor with the pleased expression of someone receiving a compliment. "Fish vest. That's good. I've been calling it the dolphin plate but fish vest is better. Fish vest is way better."

He picks up the battle axe with his right hand. It looks like a blunt steel prop from the blacksmith demonstration, complete with decorative filigree and a WonderSphere property-control sticker on the handle. Except he's ground the edge into something that's no longer decorative and very much a weapon.

With his left, he retrieves the funnel cake.

Not on a plate. Just holding it. Bare-handed. Like a Frisbee made of fried dough. He takes a bite while looking at me and Joel. "People," he says around a mouthful of fried batter.

"People," I confirm. "We're people. Very alive people. I'm Grace. This is Joel. He's maintenance."

"Operations," Joel says.

"He keeps the buildings alive."

"I keep the systems running."

"Same thing." I look at the man. "Who are you?"

"Beck." He takes another bite. Powdered sugar snows down onto the dolphin breastplate. "I'm... I don't know. A guest? I was a guest. I came here on Thursday because they had a deal on single-day passes and I like roller coasters and then..." He gestures with the funnel cake. "You know. The whole thing. Everything went sideways. I stayed."

The powdered sugar and fish vest should make him ridiculous, but somehow the axe and the arms are keeping the argument open.

"You built all this?" Joel's voice is doing the Joel version of impressed, which is identical to his normal voice but with a 0.02% increase in volume.

"Yeah. I mean, the coaster track was already damaged. I just kind of helped it fall the right way. And the barriers are just queue stuff. Bolted some of it. Zip-tied the rest. The trip wires are the velvet ropes from the ride lines. They're actually pretty strong, turns out. Held her." He points at me with the funnel cake.

"I noticed," I say, rubbing my ankle where the rope caught.