Page 50 of One Adult, Please

Joel's flashlight stays on the maintenance coveralls.

"You know him?" I ask.

Joel doesn't answer fast enough. That's the answer.

"Kitchen first," Joel says.

Beck looks at him.

Joel's eyes don't move from the coveralls. "I've got maintenance."

Beck's grin is gone. "Okay."

I hear Beck move. I hear Joel move.

I face the way we came from, because I've learned there are parts of survival I don't need to watch to believe.

Two sounds. One wet. One metal.

Then silence.

When I turn back, Beck is wiping the axe on a maintenance rag from the dispenser. He pulls a second maintenance rag from the dispenser and hands it to Joel. Joel cleans the wrench carefully, folds both contaminated rags inward, and drops them into a trash bag.

I brush my fingers on his sleeve. His eyes shift to me. I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that isn't obvious or insufficient or both. I just touch his arm and we keep walking.

The corridor continues past the junction. No more wrong people. Just pipes and electrical tube things and the low hum of systems that Joel maintained and that are still running because he taught them well. We reach a door marked WONDER GARDEN - VETERINARY ACCESS - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

"You have the key?" I ask.

"I have every key in this park," Joel says.

"It's an attractive quality."

The words just walk out, like they own the place. Joel's hand pauses on the lock. Beck makes a sound that could be a cough and could be a laugh compressed into a cough.

"I mean... strategically attractive. As a resource. Keys are a resource and resources are... attractive in a survival context." Every word is making it worse. My mouth is a shovel and I'm digging and the hole is getting deeper and I can see the earth's core from here. "Open the door, Joel."

He opens the door.

Wonder Garden smells like dirt and rain and green. It's different than the polished green of a theme park where every plant knows its assigned square footage. This is the green of a place left alone since Thursday. Leaves plaster the walkways. Flower beds slump over their borders. Decorative vines have torn loose from their supports and fallen across the path. A hedge trimmed into the shape of Wondie has gone soft around the edges, less cheerful cartoon sphere now and more damp mascot corpse trying to remember its job.

It's beautiful. It's eerie. It's what happens when you build a garden and then remove the gardeners and let the garden make its own decisions, and the garden has decided that boundaries are a social construct.

"It's a plant prison break," I say.

"It's been a few days," Joel says. " This much overgrowth this fast is… aggressive."

"The plants were in prison. And now they're free and they're going for it. Look at that vine. That vine has ambition."

The vine in question has come loose from its trellis, tangled around the decorative WonderSphere banner, and is hanging halfway across the path like it's making a break for the nearest building.

The paths through the garden part wind between themed areas: a butterfly pavilion with a mesh dome that's still intact, a botanical garden section with labeled plant beds, a children's discovery zone with interactive nature exhibits, and beyond all of that, the animal areas. The petting zoo. The bird aviary. The wildlife rescue center.

We can hear the animals before we see them. These are real animal sounds, alive sounds, the kind of sounds that say "I'm a creature with opinions and I'm expressing them at volume." Bleating. Squawking. Something that sounds like a very large rodent sneezing.

We round a corner and find what was the petting zoo. The gates that kept the animals in their designated encounter zones have been unlatched, and the animals have done what animals do when you give them freedom and remove all supervision: they've gone everywhere.

There are goats on the pavilion roof. Three of them, standing on the peaked wooden structure designed for the Birds of Wonder show, eating the thatched decorative roofing. There's a goat on the drinking fountain, somehow. Standing on it. Like it climbed the drinking fountain because the drinking fountain was there and goats don't need better reasons than that.