Inferno Park (9 page)

He had close-cropped sandy hair and might have been in his thirties or forties—it was hard for Kevin to judge his age. He regarded them with eyes that were a hollow, almost colorless shade of gray.

Reeves and Kevin gaped at him, waiting for him to speak. Kevin wondered what kind of trouble they were in now, whether this guy was going to let them go or if he would be a dick and call the cops. Kevin imagined how super-pissed his mom would be if he got arrested.

“I’m afraid you’ve caught us at a bit of an embarrassing time,” the man said. “We are still in the midst of our renovations. We haven’t opened for the season.”

“Oh,” Kevin said, nodding. “Are you the new owner? Sir?” He thought the “sir” might help keep them out of trouble.

“I am indeed.” The man nodded slightly. He looked at them coldly, but he did not seem particularly angry. Bored, almost.

“Are you re-opening the park?” Reeves asked.

“Not to the general public, though wouldn’t that be grand?” He peered closely at Kevin. “Only to a select few. Only those who are worthy. Are you worthy?”

Kevin shrugged. “Probably not.”

The man smiled just a little.

“How were your concessions?” He looked at Kevin a bit longer, then at Reeves. “The French fries? The milkshakes?” He looked back at Kevin. “The pastry?”

“Uh...” Reeves said.

“We would have paid for them,” Kevin squeaked. “If anyone was there. And...if we had any money....Right, Reeves?” Kevin nodded rapidly, as though in a hurry to agree with himself. Reeves didn’t say anything, just stared at the guy.

“We restored the food stands first,” the man said. “Because you must offer your guests refreshments first, followed by entertainment. That is the proper etiquette. Gifts from the guests are given upon arrival, at the
beginning
of the evening, while gifts from the host are provided at the
end
, just before departure. Am I understood?” The man’s flat gray eyes stared at Reeves.

“Uh, yes?” Reeves said, shuffling uneasily on his feet and looking away, like he was thinking about running. If he ran, Kevin would never be able to keep up with him.

“Good. But you’ve already helped yourself to gifts, haven’t you? From the shrine?” The man’s gaze shifted to Kevin, and his cold eyes now seemed a dark gunmetal color.

Kevin felt the horror and guilt of that sacrilege rising in him, the shame of sin, something he’d learned about during the handful of times his mom had dragged him to church.

“We didn’t mean to,” Kevin whispered. “Are you mad at us?”

“Of course not. In fact, it has brought us to this unique opportunity.” The man reached into the shack and pulled on something. “As I’ve said, the rides are not yet fully restored...but Jungle Land
is
up and running, if you don’t mind the actual swamp grass and live frogs. I think those add something to the experience, don’t you? I suppose you can tell us about it after your ride.”

The double doors at the ride exit may have looked like bamboo fencing, but they creaked with rust as they swung open. A plastic boat, decorated like a bark canoe on the outside, rolled out of the open gate, trundling through the heavily overgrown canal. It braked with a squeal in front of the roped platform where Kevin and Reeves stood. The boat had two plastic benches for seating, one behind the other, each with belt buckles for three people. Though the ride’s waterway was badly overgrown, the boat looked freshly restored with a new coat of paint.

“What do you say, gentlemen? Will you help with a little market research?” the man asked.

“Does that mean we get to go on the ride?” Kevin asked.

“Provided you keep your hands and feet inside the boat at all times,” the man said. “Climb aboard, and do remember to wear your seatbelts.”

Reeves and Kevin shared an excited look—there was no doubt, they were definitely taking the free ride.

They scrambled into the boat, buckled their seatbelts, and stared at the bamboo doors set into the cave entrance ahead. A safety bar dropped over their laps and locked into place.

The man finally descended the stairs and approached them. His smile was almost warm now, though his eyes were not. He stood on the edge of the canal, looking down at them.

The drumbeats sounded louder and faster inside the dome.

“Watch for snakes and alligators,” he said. “And the jungle natives and their dark rituals. Sometimes they need a human sacrifice or two to prime the pump.”

He gave them his first real smile, full of perfectly straight, bleach-white teeth.

“Enjoy the ride,” he added. “I know I will enjoy watching.”

The boat jerked to life, rolling forward on its underwater tracks. It nosed through cattails and slime toward the entrance cave, where the bamboo doors were already swinging open to admit them.

Kevin and Reeves shared a smile—and for the moment, Kevin felt like they were
real
friends, that Reeves might even stop picking on him in front of other people after tonight.

The boat followed a tight curve through a cave full of stalagmites jutting up through the water, under stalactites thick with moss—possibly real moss. The ride still smelled dank, the water swampy and dark. It was hard to tell what was part of the ride and what was real Florida jungle creeping back to swallow the old amusement park.

They reached a spacious, tropical cavern resplendent with Jurassic-sized flowers and trees thick with blooming vines. A waterfall spilled into one side of the boat canal. Beside it, a big Venus flytrap munched on an insect the size of a seagull. The insect, with most of its body trapped in the flytrap’s jaws, kept rolling its cartoony eyes as though to say
just my luck
or
ain’t that life?

In one of the tree limbs, a pair of miniature pink monkeys playfully wrestled a banana back and forth between them. Brightly colored mechanical birds occupied other tree limbs, and as the boat approached, they waved their wings and whistled overlapping rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

“This is lame,” Reeves said. “It’s so fake.”

Kevin kind of liked it, though. The look on Reeves’s face said he was enjoying the ride, too, even though he was pretending it was beneath him.

The boat moved closer to the whistling tropical birds, some of them perched on flowery, leafy limbs that extended out over the canal.

“Okay, we get it, birds and flowers,” Reeves said. “This the most boring--”

Three dinosaur-sized alligator heads lunged up out of the water, their jaws opened wide to reveal rows of teeth. There was one on each side of the boat and a third straight ahead, all of them close enough to bite. The whistling-bird sounds above turned into frightened, confused squawking.

Reeves and Kevin screamed and pulled close to each other, away from the monsters menacing the sides of the boat. It took a moment to realize that the gator heads were fake, the open jaws were not even moving, and the deafening snarls were actually blasted from hidden speakers in the rocks along the tropical shoreline.

“You were totally scared,” Reeves snorted, pushing Kevin away as though he hadn’t been clinging to him. “Wuss.”

“You were scared, too!” Kevin squeaked.

“They could have been real.” Reeves watched the three alligator heads sink back beneath the dark, slimy surface. The boat resumed its slow glide through the water. “There could be real snakes or anything in this place.”

“But they’ve been working on it,” Kevin whispered. “Fixing it. That guy said.”

“Maybe he’s lying,” Reeves said. “We don’t know who that guy is. Maybe he’s just a random freak who kills kids in old amusement parks.”

“Don’t say that!”

The boat passed through a narrow, dim cavern, its walls and ceiling shaggy with green growth. Unseen things slithered and hissed among the cattails. Kevin glimpsed an enormous water moccasin near one of the sparse underwater lights, but it dove away before he could tell whether it was fake or not.

The cave grew darker as the boat advanced. When it grew a little brighter—just a little—Kevin saw they were traveling through a rocky cave with no greenery. Instead, hundreds of black spiders with strange red markings scurried among the rocks, spinning thick webs overheard.

“That’s not real, right?” Reeves was pale. “I hate spiders. I really hate spiders.”

“They can’t be,” Kevin whispered, but he thought that there seemed to be an awful lot of them, and their movements were pretty quick and nimble for cheap mechanical contraptions.

The cave grew dark again, leaving no light at all.

“Oh, come on, not with all the spiders,” Reeves said. The sound of narrow, hairy spider legs rustled in the shadows all around them.

Kevin and Reeves felt the sticky filaments of webbing all over them, as if the boat had carried them directly into the dense tangle of thick spiderwebs. They screamed again, but then the boat continued on, leaving the spiderwebs behind.

“I think that was part of the ride,” Kevin whispered. “The little strings.”

“It wasn’t funny,” Reeves said.

Ahead, Kevin could see the narrow tunnel widen into another cavern with more jungle trees and high grasses, lit by moonlight. On the canal bank a few yards away, pairs of glowing yellow eyes watched from the high grass. Kevin gradually discerned the shapes of giant jungle cats waiting to pounce.

As they pulled out of the narrow channel and into the wider jungle-cat cavern, a saber-toothed tiger struck around the side of the boat with a roar, its claws extended. The mechanical tiger ripped through Reeves’s shirt, scratching four red lines into his shoulder.

“Ow!” Reeves yelled and tried to pull back from the thing’s claws, but he was locked into place by the seatbelt and safety bar.

The mechanical tiger swung back out of the way, retreating among giant plastic leaves to lie in wait for the next boat. Reeves scowled back over his shoulder while the boat continued onward.

“That thing scratched the shit out of me!” he said. “They need to fix that. Damn.”

The boat floated along the high grass where the other tigers crouched, watching. Kevin kept waiting for these other fake beasts to pounce or attack somehow, but they only stared and growled at the passing boat.

The next display was lit from behind by dim red light. Kevin could see the outlines of three shaggy, apelike creatures, all of them swinging what looked like sticks at some indistinct dark mass in front of them. The primal drumbeats sounder closer, louder, and faster now.

The boat eased closer to the hairy ape-shapes, mechanically swinging their sticks over and over again. Even two feet away, Kevin couldn’t see exactly what was happening.

An overhead spotlight flicked on, revealing that the three apes were actually swinging large, blood-stained bones, the femurs of some giant animal. They were repeatedly bashing a fourth ape, one of their own kind, who lay facedown on a boulder, its head a shapeless, bloody mass from the repeated, relentless pounding.

When the light turned on, the three bashing apes all swiveled their heads toward the approaching boat. All three apes wore huge, happy, blood-spattered grins, as if they were having the time of their life.

“Sick, dude,” Reeves said. Then, as an afterthought, “That’s pretty cool, though. That’s how life really is, you know?”

“Yeah,” Kevin replied, though he wasn’t sure exactly what Reeves meant. If he asked for an explanation, Reeves would probably just thump him in the head and call him stupid.

The next section of the jungle had a little village of straw huts decorated with totem poles carved to resemble stacks of animal skulls. Red-bulb “torches” lit the scene. The drumbeats were loudest here, accompanied by chanting voices, but there was no sign of the village’s inhabitants.

The words TURN BACK NOW were painted in red on the side of the hut closest to the boat canal, followed by a skull and crossbones.

The boat continued on, and the village grew stranger. The totem pole carvings started to resemble stacks of human skulls overlooking low, glowing-red fire pits, probably lit from underneath with more red light bulbs.

They reached a stone temple area lit by skull torches, with very real-looking human skulls heaped in its alcoves and niches. A large stone skull overlooked a raised altar, which appeared stained with a fresh pool of blood. A bloody stone knife lay near the head of the altar.

The boat stopped here, as though the ride wanted them to contemplate this scene. It was as if a blood sacrifice had only just happened, and all the people involved had scattered for some reason.

The boat slid forward again, taking them into a darker jungle area lined with high grass. Kevin’s eyes had to adjust to the dimness before he saw the mannequins lurking in the grass on both sides of the canal, their face painted like skulls as though they were some kind of death cult, holding long bamboo blowguns pointed right at the boat.

If they were real, Kevin knew, those blowguns would be loaded with poisoned darts.

A series of short compressed-air blasts fired from the blowguns, and Kevin felt sharp little impacts on his face, arm, and hip. He and Reeves both screamed, and then the boat turned out of the dim jungle into a much brighter cave. Kevin realized they were unharmed—the blowguns had fired no darts, just air.