Fun World Page 4

  So filled with adrenaline, Eric didn’t feel the closest zombie grab his arm. Only when a second grip prevented him from throwing his body against the door did he take notice. Instinctively, he lashed out like a cornered animal, twisting and flailing wildly. It was a violent, uncoordinated action characterized by the kind of hysterical strength that allowed a panicked mother to lift the weight of a car off her pinned child. The zombie’s death grips worked to its detriment, serving as an effective conduit for the brunt of the rotational force generated by Eric’s frantic movement.

  When its grasp finally failed, the zombie that had grabbed Eric flew backward, once again colliding with the others on the stairs. This time, however, the rest of the group managed to stay upright. Unfazed by the impact, they trampled over their fallen comrade with their singular goal in mind. Exhausted by his immense effort, Eric’s heart sagged as the mass of infected bodies pressed in.

  The pack’s new frontrunner was once a lumberjack of a man. Even considering the flesh it was missing, the thing still weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. Its blood-soaked flannel shirt was torn in several places, revealing multiple nasty bite wounds that oozed a thick, oily fluid. Dangling by a tendril of meat, its right ear looked more like an oversized earring as it swung to and fro with each plodding step.

  Despite having already resigned himself to his fate, Eric dug deep in search of one last burst of energy. He reached back and grabbed the door’s push bar with both hands. Hopping off the ground, he pulled his knees to his chest before exploding outward and planting both of his feet squarely against the massive zombie’s chest. The impact failed to yield the desired result, as the brutish zombie continued driving forward as if nothing had happened. Despite pressing with all his might, Eric felt as though he were being compressed like a spring. Although he’d been expecting a painful death, having his spine crushed hadn’t been part of the picture. Thoughts of being paralyzed as the zombies had their way with him filled him with renewed horror.

  Eric’s world began to go dark, and he was unsure if it was due to the zombies crowding in or if he was actually losing consciousness. As if in answer to his question, the growls all around him intensified. Closing his eyes, he waited for the first fateful bite. The noise crescendoed, reaching a monotony that was strangely mind numbing, almost soothing. As such, he was none too pleased when a discordant groaning sound entered the mix. He felt like a boy desperately retreating under the warm covers as his mother tried to wake him on a cold, winter morning. Like his mother, the groaning refused to leave until…SNAP!

  Although his eyes were closed, Eric’s dark, cramped world instantly vanished and he felt momentarily weightless. He opened his eyes to a blinding light and the strange sensation of floating through the air. He no longer felt the crushing pressure in his back. The experience was intense and oddly glorious. He’d often wondered what death would feel like, and now he thought he knew—right up to the point when he didn’t. Just before his head slammed into the concrete and his world went dark once again, he heard a familiar bloodcurdling scream that chilled him to his core.

  * * * * *

  Having huddled against the door since her escape, Lila was thrown to the side when the latch gave way and the door exploded outward. She looked up to see her father flying through the air before slamming down hard on the concrete surface. Inhuman moans poured out of the doorway after her father. She could think of only one thing to do: close the door. Much like the bogeyman that lived in her bedroom closet until she was five years old, she knew that the best way to keep these monsters away was to shut them inside.

  Lila leapt to her feet and scrambled toward the open door. Peering into the darkness, she saw a hulk of a man sprawled out on the ground with nearly a dozen limbs poking out from around him in every direction. Although it went against everything her brain was screaming for her to do, she stepped toward the door and the wriggling pile of bodies. Every one of the foul things seemed to be trying to stand up at the same time, making it virtually impossible for any of them to do so, but she knew it was only a matter of time.

  Lila grabbed the heavy door and began to close it when she noticed a piece of metal blocking the doorjamb. Warily, as though approaching a coiled snake on a dare, she stepped into the doorway to kick the shrapnel out of the way. Her foot slipped in the same oily goo that had sent the big zombie to the ground, but she managed to keep her footing. Leaping back, she slammed the door as hard as she could.

  The damage that had allowed the door to open now prevented it from closing completely. Scratches on the inside of the door made her jump, rattling the chain still attached to the door’s exterior. Working frantically, she looped the chain over a metal pole anchored in concrete to the side of the doorway. A second later, the door burst outward but the chain held. Gray fingers poked through the crack, trying desperately to reach their quarry.

  Lila spun on her heels as low moans poured out of the doorway behind her. The battered figure climbing doggedly to his elbows hardly looked like the man she’d left only minutes ago. He shook his head as if to dislodge the last vestiges of a terrible dream.

  “Daddy!” Lila exclaimed as she rushed to her father’s aid.

  Her concern for his well-being was briefly eclipsed by the possibility that he was no longer really her father. The moment of hesitation quickly dissipated when his pained inhalation gave way to a familiar expletive. She wasn’t sure if they were capable of doing so, but she hadn’t heard any of the zombies use curse words; she hadn’t even heard them talk.

  “Dammit. What the hell happened?” Eric said gruffly. His voice came out like a fractured whimper, but it was his voice.

  Lila knelt down to help her father to his feet. He wobbled unsteadily as they stumbled toward the side of the building. Leaning against the wall for support, Eric looked around and tried to regain his senses. Although his mind wasn’t perfectly clear, he recalled certain things, and taken as a whole, none of it seemed to make much sense. He remembered wave after wave of creepy, dancing dolls, and above all, their unending singing. While he found both unimaginably annoying, he could at least place their existence into a logical framework of the world. More blurry yet distinctly present was the blood and screaming, the running and fighting. Like a piece of another puzzle that had somehow found its way into his own, he couldn’t find a way to fit these details into the Happy Little World.

  “What the hell happened? What’s going on?” he asked, shaking his head as if that might somehow produce the answers.

  His questions surprised Lila, who had been wondering the same thing since they leapt from the boat. She shot him an incredulous look before offering him the abbreviated version of what had transpired within the attraction. Eric’s first thought was to request a refund; the ride didn’t sound like fun at all and not even remotely happy. As he listened, his memory became increasingly clear to the point where he felt as though he were back up to speed by the time she’d finished her narrative. As if to get the final word in, the monsters banged against the metal door, rattling the chain and testing its hinges. Had he doubted the validity of her words, the ominous sound provided the necessary corroboration as it punctuated her story with a terrifying exclamation mark.

  Despite a splitting headache and painful throbs in parts of his body he didn’t even know existed, Eric’s mind had cleared and felt more or less back to normal. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see when he glanced around, but it was certainly more than the door’s rhythmic shudder. Aside from that, there was nothing—no employees, no annoying park patrons, and no zombies.

  The sun’s warm rays offered a nice counterpoint to the cool breeze snaking through the trees. There wasn’t a single cloud in the cerulean sky. Under any other circumstances, it would’ve been a beautiful day. For a moment, he struggled to reconcile the world’s innate majesty with the ungodly abominations he wouldn’t have thought possible even an hour ago. On some level, he understood that the paradigm had shifted. Who was he kiddin
g? The paradigm just had the shit beaten out of it before being dismembered, burnt to a crisp, and thrown off a mile-high cliff. There was no more paradigm. A particularly hard jolt that threatened to dislodge the chain securing the door drove this fact home in emphatic fashion.

  Turning to Lila, Eric said, “Let’s go find some help and see if we can figure out what’s going on.”

  They crept cautiously around the side of the building, as though anticipating more of the monsters to leap out at any moment. A grease-stained service path paralleled the plain concrete wall and ended at a thick stand of luscious fir trees that served to keep the unsightly walkway obscured from view. Disappearing into the trees, they were glad to leave the horrors of the Happy Little World behind. When they emerged on the other side, it felt as though they were a world away from the atrocities they’d just experienced.

  The wall adjacent to the short, finished pathway was adorned with an ornate, colorful mural depicting various aspects of nearly every culture imaginable. Several park benches located at the end of the cul-de-sac held the promise of temporary sanctuary away from the park’s insane crowds. The sole occupant was a man in his eighties who slept so soundly that Eric initially wondered if he might have died and gone unnoticed. Head hanging back with mouth agape, he sat motionless save for the subtle rise and fall of his chest. If he were honest, the sleeping old man, with his weathered skin, didn’t look much different from the monsters that’d been chasing them aside from the fact that he wasn’t trying to eat them.

  Eric nudged the man and said, “Excuse me, mister. You might want to think about finding another place to sleep. I don’t think you’re safe around here.”

  The man stirred but didn’t open his eyes as he grumbled, “Get the hell away from me, hoodlum. You damn kids and your Facebook. Got no respect for anyone…”

  Taken aback by the curmudgeon’s sleepy tirade, Eric was about to try to warn him again when he noticed the busy thoroughfare ahead. Finally, some help. He slid to the corner of the building and peered nervously around the front. If he was expecting a blood-soaked landscape of hellish pandemonium, then he was sorely disappointed. Instead, he saw yet another insanely long line of dimwitted patrons waiting outside an attraction called Fairy Land.

  Overall, the scene was startling in its normality, at least by Fun World’s standards. Families hurried to and fro with tired kids straggling behind. People laughed and ate ice cream, while vendors tried to entice them with their gaudy wares. He saw nothing indicative of the violence they’d narrowly escaped. On the contrary, such carefree nonchalance seemed completely incompatible with the world from which they’d just emerged. The stark dichotomy left him feeling as though he might be in the midst of a full-blown psychotic break.

  When Eric had dabbled with LSD and other hallucinogens as a teenager, he hadn’t much worried about any long-term consequences of his actions. He’d been bored and it’d been fun; that was pretty much it. Years later, he watched several guys he’d grown up with lose their shit and step right off the deep end. Whether due to drugs, a genetic predisposition, or some other unknown factor, he didn’t know, but he’d worried that he, too, might one day suffer a similar fate as atonement for his past transgressions. Perhaps it’s finally happening. Maybe this is just the first crack in my psyche—a temporary rift through which the demons of my primordial brain can escape. It was a truly frightening idea. If what he’d just experienced had merely been a preliminary glimpse into his impending madness, he knew he couldn’t survive an all-out nervous breakdown.

  As he turned to gaze in the other direction, a sharp pain shot through the right side of Eric’s neck. Wincing, he rubbed the spot in hopes of easing his aching muscles. He was no doctor, but he didn’t think physical pain was characteristic of a mental breakdown. A low rumble like thunder on the distant horizon slowly found its way to his ear, and he looked up in spite of the nagging ache. At first glance, nothing seemed amiss. Whether the rolling din grew closer or merely intensified, Eric didn’t know, but its volume increased steadily until it reached a tumultuous roar.

  Any notion that the madness had all been in his head or that it was confined to the Happy Little World ride was quickly dispelled as a mass of people—part stampede and part tidal wave—flooded into view. It plowed forward relentlessly, enveloping everything in its path and swallowing anyone too slow to stay ahead of it. Even from a distance, it was clear that the situation within the park was very, very bad.

  Eric stood stock-still, momentarily transfixed by the immense human wall rushing toward them. Holy shit that’s a lot of people! How many park-goers had been on the Happy Little World ride? Maybe fifty? It had to be less than one hundred. Of those, how many had escaped? Although he imagined there must be others, he hadn’t seen anyone else make it out alive and…what? Uninfected? Whatever this was had come on so quickly that no one seemed to be aware of what was happening. From what he’d witnessed, the sickness appeared to be transmissible via the secretions of anyone affected, though the rate of spread seemed impossibly fast for any infectious agent that he’d ever heard of. Then again, he’d never heard of a disease that killed its victims before reanimating their corpses as savage, homicidal cannibals either. He recalled the bellman at the resort mentioning that more than fifty thousand people visited the theme park on an average day. His face turned ghostly white at the thought—fifty thousand hapless victims. Fifty thousand bloodthirsty monsters… Well, 49,997. I’m going to get my family out of here. A frantic tug on his sleeve pulled his mind back to the moment.

  “Dad!?” Lila said in a voice more filled with anxiety than he thought possible. The word was part question, part pleading, but completely terrified.

  As the mob grew closer, the frightening details became increasingly visible; it was a scene of unimaginable chaos. Infected and uninfected alike raced in every direction, colliding with one another like some nightmarish, life-and-death version of human bumper cars. While some ricocheted apart, others were dragged to the ground. What followed was unspeakable, and Eric did his best to avert his gaze. That it was occurring virtually everywhere made that all but impossible.

  No more were the sounds of joy and merriment. Giggling and laughter had been replaced by screams of terror and cries of pain. The park’s annoying songs, once inescapable, were now drowned out by the zombies’ rapacious snarls. Calls from pushy vendors selling things people didn’t need had fallen silent. Perhaps loudest of all were the desperate pleas for help that was nowhere to be found. Taken together, it created an evil cacophony capable of chilling even the hardest of men to the bone. It was as harrowing to hear as it was to see, but at least he could shutter his eyes to the horror. The sounds were inescapable.

  3

  “Run!”

  That was all Eric had time to say. Truthfully, even that wasn’t necessary. He and Lila were already racing through the crowd that hadn’t yet taken notice of the horror bearing down upon them. Picking a line, he wove through the mass of people with the skill of an NFL running back. More than a few people regarded them with a quizzical expression, but he wasn’t about to stop and explain. It wasn’t that he didn’t care what happened to everyone else at the park; he was just realistic about the situation. Screaming that a horde of zombies was coming was likely to be disregarded as an immature prank or the insane rambling of a lunatic. If anyone actually took heed of the warning, pandemonium would ensue. In his experience, people tended to make poor decisions when panicked, and he wasn’t about to risk that endangering Lila. Perhaps it was the pessimist in him, but he didn’t think it really mattered. The end result was likely to be the same either way: most of these people were going to die. He needed to make sure Lila was not one of them.

  The Haunted Manor’s copper cupola, oxidized to a deep green patina, poked up high above the trees ahead. A rickety, metal bat sat atop its creaky weathervane, patiently waiting to greet visitors looking to add a little fright to their day. Earlier that morning, Eric had half-jokingly tried to convin
ce Lila to scrap the Happy Little World in favor of heading to the haunted house, but she would have none of it. Now, intentionally seeking out more terror was the last thing he wanted to do. On the other hand, he doubted anything inside the Haunted Manor could hold a candle to the horrors they’d witnessed within the Happy Little World.

  As they ran, Eric pulled out his cell and was elated to see three bars indicating it now had a signal. He tapped the screen to call Melanie and anxiously waited for the familiar ring. He barely heard the chaotic noise of the surrounding crowd, as the dead air on the line seemed to drag on for an eternity. Having expected to hear the familiar ring, he was surprised to hear his wife’s voice.

  “Hi, it’s Mel. Leave a mess—” Eric ended the call in frustration. Despite constantly telling Melanie to keep her phone charged, it always seemed to be dead.

  “What good is it if it’s never charged,” he said breathlessly as they moved through the crowd. He phoned her again and was elated to hear it ring rather than go straight to voicemail. Unfortunately, it rang only once before an unknown voice came on the line.

  “We’re sorry. All circuits are busy at this time. Please try your call again later.”