The diner doesn’t have power, making it hot and stuffy inside. The windows don’t open, and the soldiers are a bit jumpy about keeping doors open. They’ve got the “civilians,” mostly parkgoers, herded into the middle, down on the floors, under tables bolted to the floor. They’ve also set up a triage at the rear, near the bathrooms and the kitchen, where a soldier is in heated argument with a female carrion bird, whose wings were probably a feather-patterned cloak earlier today.
“She can’t…Lance, tell her she can’t do that!” growls the short, stocky soldier.
Lance rolls his good eye, then points Isaac at the injured soldiers, lined up against the walls, turning off to intervene with the lady crow.
“Payment is due before services are rendered,” she purrs, tapping her cane insistently.
“Ma’am, we got hungry, thirsty people…women and children…” Lance sighs, sounding tired, his robotic tail curled around one raised ankle.
“Payment is due before services are rendered,” the crow growls again, more stern.
“Just take it from her! She’s not even a real person!” a parkgoer growls from nearby seating.
“You don’t…you don’t own this stuff, you know that right?” Lance asks. “It belongs to Monsterland.”
Ozzy produces a wisp of lemon and vanilla, turning his head to watch the soldier interact with the other slider, before looking back at the floor. A touch of jasmine overrides the lemon.
Oddly, the scene makes me feel a little better. If the soldiers were lying about being…lucid, they’d probably just gun her down and take the supplies she has. Or drag her off to the whatever they do with the people they take, “flesh for the Master.” If they’re willing to argue with her, it means they’re willing to entertain peace.
The nearest injured soldier is missing his leg. It was probably a boot before sundown, but now it’s steel and gearwork, lying beside him as he screams in one sounds like real agony.
One of the attending, another soldier, kneels down before Isaac, also kneeling, and asks the eyeless man if he can do something about it.
“Maybe,” Isaac muses, surveying the damage, stroking his wrench as if taking note of its nearly worthless size. “I need tools.”
“I’ll bring you what we have,” the soldier tells him, watching Ozzy step around the wounded man, producing something sweet that smells like lavender and chamomile, numbing my snake’s tongue.
The injured man’s eyes start to close, his cries starting to quiet. Whatever Ozzy’s misting, it seems to be working. What was he said about the inspiration for his costume, “phantom anesthetist?”
When the man is quiet, Ozzy stands back up and begins moving from soldier to soldier, sweet-tasting, floral smoke pouring from his mask. Not exactly the most direct method of administration, Isaac rubs his mouth and flexes his fingers, like you do if your hand falls asleep.
Ozzy’s behavior doesn’t exactly do much to make the soldiers relax. They grip their rifles a little more tightly as he passes, looks shared between them.
“I don’t think they’re going to feed us to the machine,” I whisper to Isaac, sitting next to him while he works, connecting wires with a rusted bag of tools brought somewhere from the kitchen.
“Well, not me,” Isaac grins. “They need someone with good eyes and clever hands.”
“Haha,” I growl, watching Ozzy speak quietly to a parkgoer, wearing a glowing blue bracelet, who removes it in exchange for a bottle of water from somewhere inside the leather greatcoat.
“He should…probably not being doing that,” Isaac mutters, moving to get up, but stopping when he sees Ozzy instead offering the bracelet to the family of a crying boy in exchange for the mother’s Wonderland hoodie. “Oh, that makes more sense.”
I watch Isaac work, quietly, for some time, muttering under his breath the way men do when the engine they’re working on doesn’t want to start.
“Can you…move your hand?” he asks. “Your bracelet is…blinding me.”
It is bright under the red emergency lights, so I move it onto my snake and then angle it under my knees. “Is that better?”
“I can still tell you’re wearing it, but…yeah,” he replies, touching two wires together, which makes the injured soldier howl in pain, evidently not what the eyeless man wanted.
“It’s a coward bracelet, isn’t it?” I ask, referring to the souvenir bracelets meant to signal to the scareactors that the parkgoer wanted a more chill experience. “Do you think it…”
I don’t really know how to phrase that. Keeps the horrible, hostile, once-costumed monstrosities, you know, like you, away from innocent, virtuous parkgoers like myself?
“Probably,” he growls through gritted teeth. “I don’t like looking at it.”
“They should have given you and Ozzy one, too. If that’s what they’re for.”
“If you tried to put one of those on me, I think I’d chew my arm off.”
Swearing in a language I don’t understand, he leans up, still on his knees, squiggly toes splayed for balance, held rigid, and waves over his head. “Ozzy!” he calls, getting the haunt slider’s attention.
Once back near us, Ozzy’s smoke takes on a smell of something like cedar and mustard, with a touch of pepper.
“I need smaller tools,” Isaac huffs, throwing a pair of pliers probably meant for work on an electric stove and not the finer work of steampunk artificial limbs, at the ground. “Jewelry repair, eyeglass tools, anything like that. Can you get it for me?”
The silent, masked figure nods, his vapor smelling of patchouli, before returning to work.
“How do you know how to do that?” I ask, watching Isaac tinkrr.
“I…have no idea…” he replies, pausing, as if taking note of it for the first time. “This…this isn’t even real engineering. This…shouldn’t work at all.”
“And I shouldn’t have a live snake attached to my ass and probably the less we know about how Ozzy’s lungs work, the better,” I laugh. “Don’t question it, just do what you can.”
I watch Ozzy move from person to person, trading water and bandages for candy bars and hand sanitizer, trading alcohol swabs for umbrellas, umbrellas for small objects I can’t see from here. After a few minutes, he returns with a small tube, a tiny screwdriver and some other things therein.
“Perfect!” Isaac smiles, showing his sharpened teeth, rapidly returning to work.
Ozzy lingers near me for a bit, before pulling the hoodie I watched him trade the bracelet for, which makes me blanch.
“You didn’t…take that woman’s hoodie for me, did you?” I ask, staring at it in his hands, feeling a bit sick at the thought he might have held a child’s safety hostage for it. It’s black, with Harlequin and Jester playing in a pumpkin patch.
“…Cold…” Ozzy replies. “…Needed…bracelet…”
I look down. That woman has a kid with her. She needs to be warm and comfortable more than some wastebasket-emptier from nowhere.
“Keep it…or give it back to her,” I tell him. “Trade it to someone who needs it more.”
Ozzy tilts his head in confusion. “…Warm…”
“I know, but…I’m fine, Ozzy, really,” I insist. “Worry about people who need your help.”
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Ozzy pauses, evidently not knowing how to react, and then tucks the hoodie back into his coat and resuming his trade negotiations.
“Don’t make yourself sick,” Isaac advises, tightening wires.
“You can fix people, he can ease their pain, what can I do? I’m just a…a…”
Janitor? Trailer trash?
Don’t get above yourself, my mom says in my head. Some people are just meant to clean bathrooms.
“Just be you,” Isaac says. “You can worry about making your mark on history later. For the moment, just try to see sunrise.”
It can’t be that late, just after sunset, but I fight to stifle a yawn, as if it just occurred to my body that I’m supposed to be at home now, showering off the smell of theme park, getting into bed with a movie to zone out to. Realizing that, my stomach chimes in, prompting me to look up at the Halloween-themed 80s diner menu.
I was going to stop here for dinner, reasonably-priced burgers and fries, souvenir cups, all the soda I could drink. I’ve been running, frightened, breathing in whatever Ozzy is aerosolizing, and now I feel empty and drained.
Noticing my discomfort, Isaac says, “If you want to close your eyes for a bit, I’ll keep an eye on things. Wake you up if anything exciting happens…or someone brings dinner.”
“Thanks,” I say, putting my back against the wall, next to the soldier, keeping the bracelet out of view.
After a few moments of darkness inside my skull, I’m suddenly aware of someone standing over me. Thinking it’s Ozzy, I open my eyes to find Lance looking down at us.
“We’re…having a problem with the…the carrion bird in the kitchen,” he explains.
Isaac looks up at him with a distinct “And?” expression.
“Can you get your…haunt slider friend to talk to her?” the soldier continues. “She’s holed up in the kitchens and won’t let anyone in.”
Isaac clicks something into place. The one-legged soldier sits up with a start, moving the leg like he was born with it.
“Praise be my noodly appendage!” Isaac cheers, arms in the air. “Yeah, sure, we’ll talk to them.”
Lance looks down at the injured soldier, eyes wide in stunned silence, before remembering where he is and helping the man to his feet. The man tests his leg, finding it to be in working order.
“It…doesn’t hurt,” he mumbles. “How did you do that?”
“Let’s not think about that,” Isaac smiles, myself sliding up the wall behind him.
The tall man turns to go find the haunt slider, me following behind, snake watching the excited chatter between the formerly-injured soldier and Lance. My tongue flicks speculatively, envisioning a future with Isaac held in a dark, dank cell, forced to repair soldier after soldier.
That’s how these things work out, right? They’re from a dystopian alternate timeline, in the service of an uncaring machine. Isaac’s only value would be in repair, not being a person.
I shudder, hoping the lot of them are more lucid than that.
The knotted groups of families, the mutants with no discernible useful skill, the care to soldiers whose injuries are more fleshy than mechanical, it paints a hopeful picture.
We pass by a teenage boy whose lower face has been replaced with some kind of crocodile maw, and then I remember they were giving out printed masks at ticket-taking. They don’t normally let people in costumes in, but, during recent events, they decided to lean into a bit. Gazing from person to person, most of the parkgoers have some kind of facial deformity, monstrous mouths or fixed silly expressions.
“Ozzy, come here,” Isaac tells the haunt slider, trading a bottle of water for a flashlight.
Осовец moves like poison mist across a barren landscape. He’s fluid, theatrical, still performing his haunt slide routine, and unable to stop.
It makes me wonder about the people who were only wearing masks. How is that boy with the crocodile going to go back to school like that? If Isaac can repair machinery that has no right to exist and craves Halloween snacks, is that boy going to hold is breath for hours and crave raw meat?
I look down at my gila monster-esque claws, wondering if I got off easy.
Isaac briefs Ozzy on the situation in the kitchen.
“Why doesn’t he just…hold her at gunpoint?” I ask Isaac, glancing at the rifle they’ve allowed him to continue to carry.
“He probably doesn’t want to have to fight her, too, in an enclosed space full of bystanders, and then make an enemy of the other sliders, if they’re still around.”
Ozzy peers around Isaac to look at the rifle, then sets his sights on the kitchen, producing vapor that smells like lavender and vanilla. The families cower has he passes by, pulling children close, his less human characteristics ironically highlighted by the full-body costume, rather than mechanical components on an otherwise human face. The parkgoers might be fooling themselves into thinking that the implants on the soldiers are just really good special effects, but Ozzy has a different presence.
We find the slider girl seated on a countertop, legs folded at the ankle, hands resting neatly on her cane. She nods at Ozzy when she sees him, and lets him look over her wares, but taps the cane against the ground with a loud crack when he attempts to open the refrigerators, prompting him to move on.
She’s separated out what can be used without preparation, soda bottles, mostly, but also some apple slices packed on ice, melting into a drain on the floor, and prepackaged desserts. The food that was already prepared, before things got real, seems to be down to just a handful of dry fries, traded for odds and ends that only she sees immediate value in.
“She’d been in there by the time we moved in,” Lance explains. “I guess she ran in, to hide, and…didn’t come back out.”
“Like magpies,” Isaac muses, lingering with me at the door, clearly picturing Ozzy raiding the first aid box. “Collecting things.”
“That’s what they do, right?” Lance asks. “Wander an empty wasteland looking for shiny things.”
“So why did she stop?” I ask.
Isaac shrugs. “There’s no power. She can’t make burgers and fries without the griddle. Or she might be trying to drive prices up.”
“Can you do something about the power?” Lance asks, which would have been an absurd question if I hadn’t just seen an eyeless man with tentacle hands repair a prosthetic leg that defied the laws of physics.
“Maybe, but I’d need parts,” he says. “I might be able to dismantle some things, if anything in the rides are still mechanical. Maybe some spare parts in Props and Costuming…but trust me, you don’t want to go into the service tunnels.”
“She could be rationing,” I suggest, trying to contribute. “Going to be a long, hungry night if she gives everything away at once. Or nobody has anything she wants anymore.”
“What do they want?” Lance asks, watching the haunt sliders speak in low tones, Ozzy with partial pantomime. “What’s more valuable than food and medical supplies, now?”
Isaac shrugs. “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? What the carrion birds collect?”
“What’s it been like out here?” I ask. “We were in the back.”
“Bit of a mess,” Lance explains. “Most of the people performing when…things went south—”
“—we’ve been using the term ‘got real—’” Isaac interjects.
“—aren’t right, like they don’t know who they are anymore. Props and puppets have just…gotten up and walked away, and if you’re lucky, that’s all they did. We’re right between Soul Survivor and Steampunk Singularity, so we’ve been having to deal with toxic pools and people dragging people way as ‘flesh for the Master.’”
“That thing is gonna have to go,” Isaac growls, stroking his chin with his tentacles.
I immediately go pale, bile rising in the back of my throat, flashing back to the rooftop when the thought first crossed my mind.
“You didn’t build it, did you?” I hiss. “Tell me you didn’t build that thing.”
Lance gapes helplessly. “We couldn’t have a zone based around a world-dominating supercomputer and not have a supercomputer prop!”
“It might be real, and it’s loose!” I snarl, hands balled, shaking, getting some stares from the nearest people.
Isaac motions for me to calm down and motions me closer to the bathrooms, away from the parkgoers.
“Don’t blame me, blame set design!” Lance protests. “Those people were nuts. One of the artists they brought in is supposed to be, like, a special effects super prodigy.”
Ozzy nods at something the female slider is saying, although I can’t be sure what, a spray of mist from his mask. Sitting on her shoulder is a Jester and Harlequin pair, who, upon being told something by Ozzy, help each other climb into her hood.
“Has a thriving career in Hollywood if his head is still on straight after all this.”
“Any word from the outside?” Isaac asks, raising an eyebrow, adjusting the heavy rifle.
“Not since power went out,” the soldier answers. “Word is, the news was reporting riots. We’re thinking whatever’s going on here, is going on elsewhere. Some people still have a little cell service, but it’s getting spottier and spottier.”
“What is going on here?” I ask, holding out my hands to indicate the orange and black scales and sparkly black claws.
“Things getting real is about as good a way as any to put it,” Lance sighs, tapping his mechanical eye, a camera-like aperture serving as iris, red light as pupil. “Ain’t no telling why.”
“Ever wonder what the movie is like from the side?” Isaac asks, bracelet between his sharpened teeth.
“You think there’s superheroes fighting an ancient Halloween witch somewhere?” I ask dryly.
“Maybe,” he chuckles. “Maybe they’ll win, and by morning everything will be back to normal.”
“Life ain’t no movie,” the soldier states gravely, looking past Isaac at the restaurant’s main entrance. “Oh—sheehsz, it’s back.”
