Authors: Saundra Mitchell
Tasha was dead. I understood that. But she was still there, in that sunflower field. If she was going to be dead, then she should at least be somewhere beautiful. Not in an empty field.
So I went.
It was two in the morning, and there was no moon and everything was bathed in black. I thought I'd feel closer to her there, but I was as empty as the field. I tried lying down; the earth was dry and scratched my face. There were no sunflowers. There was no sun.
There was no Tasha.
I stared at the stars and waited for the tears to come. They never did, and when the sun came up, I went home. It was like I hadn't even gone. So I thought that if I wrote it down, it would help. But it hasn't. Nothing's changed.
My best friend was murdered, and I made out with a boy in his truck. My best friend was all alone when someone grabbed her from behind, and I worried about what to do with my hands.
She had unspeakable things done to her that everyone spoke about anyway, on national news, with official-sounding words meant to mask the unpleasantness of it all, and I let Zachary Feldman do things to me that would've been whispered about in locker rooms and hallways if everyone weren't already talking about poor Natasha Robeck. The lost little girl. The angel in heaven.
The first of the six Sunflower Murders.
I'm sorry, Tasha. I'm so, so sorry.
I
t was stupid of us and we knew it. The news said we had a few more days before the dead made their way this far south, and Wylie was the one to suggest we have one last blowout. The roads were too clogged to leave town and everyone's parents were freaking out about how to secure their houses, so it wasn't hard to sneak away once night fell.
All the restaurants were closed and everywhere else was packed with panic. It was Sarah who saw the lights down the hill and made the decision for us. “The coasters are still running,” she said. And sure enough, when I squinted my eyes up tight, I could see the streaks of cars sailing over the humps and ridges of the monstrous metal serpents writhing along the horizon.
The amusement park was still charging admission, which we all agreed was pretty stupid, but what else would we spend our money on, anyway? Almost overnight, currency became useless as, before the military hit town, people just broke into stores and took what they wanted. Apparently no one thought about breaking into the amusement park. That was one of the strangest aspects of the whole thing: the rules that persisted and the ones that were quickly lost.
My family was no exception to jettisoning inexpeditious rules, even though I know it bothered my mom an awful lot. I remember that first morning hearing my parents arguing about how they'd get enough food to stock up the pantry, and my father was telling my mom they had to get to Costco with the minivan and fight their way inside.
There were bodies piled up outside the store, she'd told him. They'd been shot by packs of soccer moms who'd taken control of the place and were only doling out food to people they knew.
“It's a good thing Connor was an all-state keeper this year,” my father told her, and that was that. We got a full car of food because in the semifinal games of the state championship, I'd guessed their star forward would fake left and shoot high center. I'd been right and blocked it.
And here I was, no one caring about trivialities like high school soccer anymore because everything in our world was falling apart except for these roller coasters. As kids, this place had been our Mecca. During the summer, Sarah, Bart, Wylie, and me would spend every waking moment trying to convince our parents to drive us out here, swearing we'd take on any chore imaginable just for the chance to spend a day sticky with sweat and cotton candy, standing in line for the moment when our hearts would race loud and hard.
It was our own kind of rapture, the rides so fast they'd strip away all layers and leave us bare until the car came skidding back into the wheelhouse for the next group of kids to worship.
Though none of us said it, that's what we were looking for: we thought we wanted to forget the crushing imminence of the end of our world, the dead walking toward us with a slow and steady determination.
But really we wanted to recognize the end of the mundane: unreciprocated crushes, failed tests, blank college applications sitting in a drawer waiting. These things that had once been so all-encompassing but were now rendered moot.
The park was emptier than we'd ever seen it before, which made sense with everything going on in the world. People were out looting stores for food and weapons, but there was nothing to take from this place. Besides, I think most people liked the idea that something could still be going on as it had before. You could see the lights of the coasters from nearly anywhere in town, and staring at the spinning and whirling of them almost made us forget about the truth of our new reality.
Our little group wasn't the only one that had been drawn to the park that night. We stood in line for the Tower of Doom behind a slew of kids from the class below us, and we saw a few graduates attempting to bribe one of the Western bar slingers to tap a keg for them.
Beyond that there were several families trying to pretend that spending the night in an amusement park before the end of everything familiar made the most sense in the world. I had a hard time watching them all, kids' eyes so bright with excitement over the heady combination of missing bedtime and getting access to the rides after hours, and the parents trying not to shatter under the strain.
“How many of them know they're not going to make it?” Wylie asked, nodding his chin toward a family hovering by one of the maps to choose their next ride.
Sarah slipped her hand into mine. But it was too late. Already Bart and Wylie were turning it into a game, muttering “lunch” every time they collectively voted that a pack of strangers would soon become food for the dead.
Except we weren't in the amusement park that night to remember that everything was falling apart, we were there trying to remember that once it had all been held together by something indefinable. Maybe we wanted to prove we weren't friends just because we shared a second-period class or sat at the same table together at lunch but that there was something deeper bonding us and we wanted to hold on to that until the very end.
It was Sarah's idea to ride the Screaming TerrorCoaster, and we joked about the name of it while we stood in line. Behind us, Bart and Wylie played their game of picking winners and losers in the impending apocalypse, but that didn't matter as much to me because Sarah still had her hand in mine.
I began to wonder when she'd have to let go and if she could feel the sweat I was sure was gathering in my palms and slicking the webbing between my fingers. If she noticed, she didn't seem to mind as the cars rumbled into the platform, disgorging their contents and sitting empty for more.
When we got to the front of the short line, it ended up perfectly with Sarah and me in the front car and Bart and Wylie behind us. As the operator locked the safety bar into place, I put my hand on Sarah's knee.
She didn't even glance at me, but she also didn't make me move it.
That first trip down the rails was wind and rush, screaming and adrenaline, and the entire time my fingers gripped the contours of Sarah's leg as the edge of her skirt fluttered up in the night air.
It was almost more than my body could handle, and when the car slid back into the wheelhouse, I found myself shaking as if I might crack apart. I wanted to rip Sarah free and run with her down the stairs into a dark corner and push her against the wall.
When the ride jerked to a stop, she turned to me with her hair wild around her face and her eyes glistening. This is how I wanted my world to end: here with her and the night sky and the sounds of the park roaring loud.
I didn't want to go home to where my parents had boarded up every window and cut away the stairs to the second floor. Since I'm an only child, it would just be the three of us and the dwindling days and a slowly emptying pantry.
“Let's go again,” Sarah whispered, and she might as well have told me she loved me because that's what it felt like as she took my hand and pulled me back around to the line.
Behind us Wylie and Bart hooted and giggled, but that didn't matter anymore.
On the second ride Sarah let me kiss her. On the third she slid my hand under the edge of her shirt. On the fourth we refused to leave the car, and the operator threw up his hands and let us stay.
And then on the sixth or eighth trip around, the coaster ground to a halt at the top of the highest ridge. So enraptured was I in Sarah at the time that I wouldn't have noticed if Bart hadn't thumped me on the back of the head.
“Wakey, wakey, lovebirds,” he giggled.
I expected Sarah to blush and pull away. That's what the awkward neighbor I'd grown up with would have done, but something about this night made her different, and she laid her cheek against my shoulder as she twisted toward the car behind us to face Bart and Wylie.
I'd never been on the coasters at night, and for a moment I was almost dizzy with the scope of Vista spread beyond the gates of the park. To one side lay the darkness of the national park edged by a long strip of abandoned condos. All along the coast road I could see the flickering of headlights as a military convoy threaded into town.
But the other side was empty, a pure darkness that stretched unbroken. The ocean roared out black and severe, no indication of where it met the sky out on the horizon, so the entire expanse seemed to be nothing but a void.
Staring at it for too long summoned feelings of dread, and for that moment I understood how we'd underestimated what we were about to face. I looked into the emptiness and I grasped that this was what awaited us all: an eternal oblivion that would never end with death.
Bart began making all kinds of sly jokes about the state of Sarah's clothes, but his words hardly pierced the abyss that was pouring into my head until Sarah pressed her lips against my neck and said, “Hey, you,” so softly that I couldn't help but be reminded of warmth.
I smiled down at her, the girl who could tether me against the emptiness, and just when I was starting to feel a sort of hope again, Wylie cut off whatever Bart was saying with a slice of his hand through the air.
“Something's wrong,” he said.
Bart laughed. “Of course something's wrongâthe coaster broke down.”
Already Wylie was shaking his head. “More than that.”
Bart opened his mouth to say something dumb, and Wylie silenced him with a hissing command. “Listen.”
At first there was the usual bustle of the park that sounded distant and faded up here so high: the
plink
of carnival games, the roar of machines, and the shouting of kids as the Tower of Doom dropped them toward the ground.
Nothing seemed out of place until Wylie said it. “The screaming.”
“It's just from the other rides,” I said, already feeling uneasy knowing it couldn't be true. There were too many voices, too much urgency.
“Oh, God.” Sarah's voice shook, and when I glanced at her face it was pale and beaded with a sheen of dawning terror.
I didn't want to see what she saw. I didn't want to look. I watched her face instead, as her lips drew thin over her teeth and her breath came faster and her eyes widened, welling with tears. She never blinked, not once.
Behind us Bart started to buck against the safety bar, trying to pull himself free as if he'd forgotten we were trapped so far up in the air. Wylie threw his arm across him to physically hold him back and started screaming in his face to calm down.
I couldn't resist any longer. With the people running and screaming below, all I had to do was trace back to what they were fleeing from.
Once, a few years ago when Halloween fell on a crisp Saturday afternoon, Wylie convinced us to dress up and come out here together. We'd taken several cars, and almost all of our friends came out for it: Micah, Guy, Leroy, and Omar dressed as Charlie's Angels, Calvin carting along a stuffed tiger as he did every year because it was the cheapest costume he could think of, Danny done up as a bookie, and his sister, Sally, tagging along wearing a miner costume with a sign that read
UNACCOMPANIED
taped to her chest.
As part of the festivities, the park held a Dreadful Dead Walk and that's what Wylie, Bart, and I had dressed up as. We'd spent the morning perfecting the look of our fake blood and determining what kinds of wounds we'd sport and how we'd been killed. I fashioned a noose that rose up from my neck, Wylie went with scores of scorch marks as though he'd been electrocuted, and Bart chose the execution route with a row of bullet wounds to the gut.
My mom even put a picture of the three of us up on the fridge.
For a moment, sitting there on top of the roller coaster, I tried to believe that this was like that autumn afternoon and everything happening was just another display by the park's entertainers. That the people straining against the fence and lumbering into the park weren't real.
I wanted to convince myself that they had better access to special effects and that a flotilla of makeup artists had encamped in the parking lot to stage this entire event.
But then Wylie started to sob and I realized I'd never seen him cry before. He'd always been the one of us in perfect control of himself, the center around which we all revolved. Watching him break apart shattered the delicate layer of denial I'd built up.
I lost the ability to inhale.
Without anyone holding Bart back, he slithered from the restraints and climbed through the empty cars to the end of our little train.
I still couldn't move, terror shutting me down, but Sarah had forced her way out of frozen fear and she went after him. “Bart! Wait!” she cried.
Bart perched on the edge of the last car, straining his feet toward the slick rail of the tracks and the wooden trellis underneath. “We can still make it,” he called out to her. “If we climb down now, we can get out to the car and make it home.”
I glanced to the ground, wondering if he was right. Already the dead had made their way deep into the park, lunging from shadows as the living raced toward the entrance. There was a surge of people at the gates, a purposeful choke point for crowd control, and the dead were there, picking off the stragglers like it was some kind of carnival game.
Some people were fighting back, but it seemed useless from this far away.
“We won't make it.” Wylie wasn't crying anymore, and though his eyes were red and puffy and his upper lip glistened, his voice was calm and under control. He'd taken charge again, and before the words even sank in, I knew he was right.
Wylie was the one to talk Bart back into the cars while I sat staring at the gates and trying to avoid being drawn to the yawning darkness of the ocean beyond. Sarah slipped in next to me, almost silently, and this time when she took my hand there was nothing sexy about it. Her grip was pure need born of the simmering realization that we were stuck.
Below us the dead flowed in like the tide and we were creatures who could no longer swim.
“What are we supposed to do now?” The words choked in my mouth and I couldn't force them out. I wasn't sure I wanted the answer. Because from up here I couldn't see any options, and the longer I sat paralyzed, the more dead came.