Page 35 of One Adult, Please

"It's periwinkle, Joel. Periwinkle is a commanding color. Periwinkle says 'this area has been addressed.' Do you have a pen?"

"No."

"Then periwinkle it is."

He stares. I fold the where picture. We move on.

The warehouse is a different story.

The coaster maintenance warehouse is a massive corrugated steel building, accessible through a service road that Beck's already partially barricaded with overturned golf carts. It's the size of a small airplane hangar. Roll-up doors on two sides. A regular door with a keypad on the north face. No windows, which means no visibility, which means we're going in blind.

"I don't love this," I say, staring at the building.

"Nobody loves it," Joel says. "It's a warehouse."

"I mean I don't love the 'what if there's fifty wrong people in there and we open the door and it's a clown car of dead people' part."

"It's not going to be fifty," Beck says.

"How do you know?"

"Because the doors have been closed since the outbreak. And the maintenance crew was four people on Thursday. I watched them working on the coaster before everything went sideways."

"So it's either zero or four."

"Or somewhere in between, if some of them got out before the doors closed."

"So one, two, or three."

"Math checks out," Beck says, and I can't tell if he's mocking me.

Joel punches a code into the keypad. The lock clicks. He looks at us. "Stay behind me."

"I'm not staying behind you."

"Grace."

"I have the friendship paddle. The friendship paddle needs to be in front. You can't paddle from behind. That's not how paddles work."

"It's an oar. Oars go behind."

"It's a paddle, Joel, and paddles go…"

Beck just opens it. While we're arguing. He reaches past both of us, grabs the handle, pulls, and walks in with his sharpened axe in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The kind of flashlight that could signal aircraft and blind satellites and he's sweeping it across the warehouse interior like a lighthouse with legs.

Joel and I stand in the doorway, argument suspended, watching Beck disappear into the dark.

"He just went in," I say.

"He just went in," Joel confirms.

"Without a plan."

"Without a plan."

"Should we?"

"Yes."