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Finally, he answered my earlier question about looking for others. “Let’s just give it a little while. We don’t know what we’ll encounter out there. I don’t think we should leave until we absolutely have to.”
“But, you said we’d be safer in a group. Shouldn’t we at least...”
“Elodie, that’s enough!” I flinched, and he quickly softened his tone as if trying to reason with a small child set on ice cream for dinner. “It’s not safe. And I don’t want you wandering outside the park on your own. We know the park is safe because I test it occasionally with the Geiger counter. I don’t want you wandering outside the guaranteed safe zone into a possible radiation pocket. We need to go together.”
“O-okay.” I didn’t even know if that was how radiation worked, but Trevor seemed sure of himself, so I let it go.
I finished my dinner, even though I didn’t really want it. But I might get hungry later, and the last thing I wanted to do was annoy this man I didn’t remember knowing. I also didn’t relish the idea of coming down here alone in the middle of the night foraging for canned goods like an insomniac squirrel. However unsure I might be of Trevor, I liked the idea of being by myself in this big artificial castle even less.
Trevor took the plates and cups back to the kitchen and washed them with some water he must have drawn from the mysterious well. There were several medieval-looking pitchers of it in the industrial-sized fridge, pitchers which waiters and waitresses no doubt had used to refill iced tea. I stayed off to the side out of his way, trying to pick out a memory of anything I had ever personally experienced before today.
When I thought really hard, I got a fuzzy image of a white room and Trevor’s face. But then it blurred back into nothing but a bright white visual noise that made me dizzy. I gripped the edge of the stainless steel island for support.
“Are you okay?”
“F-fine. Just a little disoriented still.”
Trevor nodded. “Given the spill you took, I’m sure that’s quite normal.” He left the dishes to drain near the sink and joined me on the other side of the kitchen.
“You can explore the park tomorrow. Just don’t climb on any more pirate ships.” He gave me a handsome crooked smile that somehow still felt overwhelmingly ominous despite how hard he tried to make it endearing. “Would you like to see the first floor?”
“Sure.” What I really wanted to say was ‘not really’, but I didn’t want to piss off the only other person possibly for miles—the only one who knew how to navigate this fresh new hellscape.
On the bottom level, Trevor turned a crank. The drawbridge we’d walked across to get into the castle actually came up, closing us in for the night.
“You can never be too careful,” he said.
It had taken a lot of strength for him to turn the crank and raise the drawbridge. There was no way I could do that on my own. It might be easier to lower it, but that was just me guessing because it seemed like letting it downshouldbe less strenuous than bringing it back up. I didn’t like the idea of him being the one who said whether or not I could leave the castle by a simple display of brute strength.
But that was life now, wasn’t it? In a civilized world, there might have been some level of equality, enforced by laws, but mostly enforced by practicality and technology. Now, everything was back to the law of the jungle. And brute strength was king. This wouldn’t be a world of happy equality, no matter what type of person Trevor turned out to be.
“I’ll show you the castle ride. It’s the only one that works.”
Right. Because of the solar panels. Everything else in the park was dead, except for the scurrying creatures that had made the husks of rides into dens and nests. I shuddered at that thought, unsure I wanted to explore too deeply even in daylight.
When we reached the entrance to the ride, Trevor flipped a switch. The lights came on, illuminating wooden doors that ostensibly led into the castle ride. A carriage with cracking and peeling gold paint lurched forward and stopped in front of us. After about half a minute, it moved on and pushed its way through blue wooden doors, beyond which played the creepy music that went with the ride. It was made all the more unnerving by the fact that it didn’t play quite right as if the sound came from a record that spun on a warped turntable.
A second creaking carriage emerged from the same darkness the first one had.
“They’re on a timer,” Trevor said. “It keeps everything evenly spaced while giving the tourists time to get on or off the ride.” He spoke as if the park was still in operation, as if a swarm of people would be forming a line to ride this monstrosity at any moment. He held out a hand to me. “My Lady.”
“I don’t know if I want to...” The whole thing just felt fucked up to me. This isolated half broken down ride that time and the world forgot out in what felt like the middle of nowhere. I felt as if getting in that carriage would edge out the last bits of sanity contained in the universe.
“Come on. It’s not like it’s a run-down roller coaster. It’s perfectly safe. I’ll protect you.”
It wasn’t worth fighting over. I tried to remember what I’d decided about just trying to get along with him and took his hand and got into the carriage. I was barely inside when it pitched forward sending my chicken nuggets rattling around in my stomach.
The music was even more disturbing inside the ride. It was a song about a princess who had been captured and locked inside a castle tower (why did we have to be staying in the tower?) by an evil king who wanted to marry her. But she didn’t love him.
At some point in the story/song, there was a witch and some evil magic. Because how could a fairy tale even work without a witch and some evil magic? That part of the story seemed superfluous. The king was villain enough. There was no real need to add any magic, but the flashes and noises probably appealed to the children the ride was intended for—unless it gave them the awful nightmares I was sure it would give me.
Much of the story was the princess crying and hoping some prince she actually liked would come rescue her. The ride was a visual of the contents of the song. It really shouldn’t have taken an apocalypse to shut this place down.
The whole thing would have been better without the song. Maybe they could have just played some violins or piano without lyrics instead.
As our carriage moved deeper into the bowels of the ride, I closed my eyes against the eerie animatronic people and the wooden way they moved. It didn’t take long for rides like this to fall apart if unattended, unused, and uncared for. A few of the moving characters’ eyes were popping out. I imagined without the air conditioning constantly running, the humidity had just squeezed them right out.
Here or there an arm had fallen off. It was macabre. And I swear one of them looked right at me. Yeah, this was super fun.
