Swipe Right for Murder

by Derek Milman

  “I’m going to have to go through detox. But… you know… one step at a time. Let’s get through the rest of today.”

  I point at a green road sign that says QUEST GARDENS, directing us off the highway at the next exit. We seem to have lost the bikers—at least for now. “Should we pull over, find a phone?”

  “No, it’s too late for that,” says Shiloh. “Let’s just get there.”

  I turn off at the next exit, drive down a long tree-lined road, and suddenly a giant sign looms: QUEST GARDENS AMUSEMENT PARK. There is an image of one of the Derby Racer horses with an almost angry expression on its face, showing bits of teeth, catapulting into the sunlit sky as if it died and is now entering Derby Horse Heaven. Or maybe the horse is just on some kind of magical quest. Let’s go with that.

  I pull into one of those endless, sectioned parking lots. My heart sinks when I see the parking lot is almost half full this early in the morning when the park isn’t even open yet. I guess a lot of families are on vacation.

  Now I remember that Quest Gardens sits on the glimmering Long Island Sound. The sky is crystal, with only a few fluffy milky-white clouds.

  This place is going to be packed.

  The park opens in twenty minutes. In the distance I see the columned entrance with QUEST GARDENS written in puffy banana-yellow lettering with candy-blue trim overhead, sword-and-shield insignia beside the words—symbolizing quests, I guess.

  The wooden framework of the Mind Melter roller coaster rises in the distance. I remember, as a kid, you could hear the whoosh of the ride and people’s distant synchronized screams from anywhere in the lot.

  We park and hop out of the car. We both scan the lot for the motorcycles, but I don’t see or hear them. As we get closer to the entrance I yell, “Look!” and point at the line of people and families snaking around the entrance waiting to gain admission. The glass-walled ticket booths, on both sides of the entrance, are still unmanned. “This is a shitshow,” I say.

  “We might have gotten here just in time,” says Shiloh.

  “That’s optimistic.”

  “There’s gotta be security keeping that line in check,” says Shiloh. “We’ll just tell them to call 911.”

  “Do you have any FBI credentials on you?”

  “I’m undercover!”

  “So they’re just going to believe what we tell them? To close the park?”

  “They’ll have to. There’s going to be a terrorist attack.”

  We both walk quickly toward the entranceway. “Have the pool and the rides already been tampered with, do you think? Or does Scotty hope to—”

  “Whatever he engineered, it happened last night. I didn’t even know about it. During the pool party, Scotty sent a small team to Quest to rendezvous with whoever he has working with him here on the inside. I guess the party was supposed to be a celebration of that, the completion of Phase 2.”

  “What the hell is the point of you infiltrating them, and going undercover, if you can’t let the authorities know what he’s about to do? They said you went dark.”

  “Yeah, Scotty confiscated my cell phone and locked me in the basement.”

  “He did what?”

  “He gets paranoid. He’s super jealous and possessive, in case you may have missed that. And violent.”

  “Yeah. I noticed.”

  “He figured out I was an agent a while ago. But that only thrilled him more. He relished the challenge, thought he could twist the situation to his advantage. He was confident he had turned me, that I was brainwashed by him. But all of a sudden he wasn’t so sure anymore. When you escaped the Adirondacks, he got a clever, nasty idea: he could test my allegiance once and for all by bringing you here.”

  That’s a twist to this dark little fairy tale. I guess that’s why they didn’t try to kill me on the tennis courts. I wonder if the feds knew about this.

  “He didn’t think I’d be wearing a vest? The tooth implant?” I ask.

  “He hasn’t been thinking clearly in a while.”

  “I saw you guys cuddling together by the pool. That looked pretty real.”

  “Scotty felt bad about freaking out on me. That happens. He’ll do crazy shit, then feel bad after. The makeup sex is amazing, though.”

  I stop walking. “You guys were… having sex?”

  “I was undercover, but yeah.” Shiloh points at the entrance line. “We really need to keep moving—”

  “Whoa.” I wave my hands around. “Hold on, hold on. How could you have sex with him? He’s a psychotic terrorist.”

  “It was part of my cover.”

  “Did you feel something for him?”

  “It’s hard to feel nothing.”

  “Were you attracted to him? I mean… are you?”

  “Scotty? He’s not a bad-looking guy.”

  My hands go flat at my sides. “I don’t know what to do with this.”

  “What did you think was going on?” says Shiloh.

  “Part of you is in love with him.”

  “Here’s the thing,” says Shiloh, turning to me, “maybe yes, maybe no. But the Swans have no precedent. In the history of foreign and domestic terror, there’s never been anything like them. Not in the way they’re able to organize, recruit, attack, and remain secretive in the way they do. They’re a total anomaly.”

  “I know all that already! I’ve been debriefed!”

  “Well, I had to get as close to Scotty as I could. And I had to make him believe, at every moment, that I was his lover, his partner, his soul mate… so don’t be naïve enough to think when you give yourself over to someone like that, despite the false circumstances, that you don’t start feeling something back. That would be impossible. I know what side I’m on. Did that get blurry at times? Maybe a little.”

  I’m getting a little tired of people calling me naïve. “So at no point did you maybe start to sympathize with him and his radicalism?”

  Shiloh puts his hands on his hips. “Did you?”

  I look away and sigh.

  “It was hard not to, Aidan. And I’m just the type, as Digital Dust knew, who would be a perfect fit for the Swans. But he never turned me. I’m not a terrorist. I never will be. The FBI knew that, too. Or should have. I know right from wrong. My reason is still intact.”

  I nod. “Yeah.”

  There’s a silence. My ears are still ringing from the gunshots. Sounds—including Shiloh’s voice—remain kind of muffled. I think I hear the rides going, people screaming, and the gentle lap of Long Island Sound against narrow rocky beaches—all of it at once. But I may just be imagining all that from a distant memory—an aural mirage.

  There is a crazy, illogical, serpentine madness to everything Shiloh is telling me. It simultaneously makes me trust him less and like him more, if that’s even possible, and I don’t know if it is. He sacrificed a hell of a lot to go undercover.

  “You said you were an addict,” I say.

  Shiloh nods. “Some of my biggest weaknesses became my biggest assets. It is tricky and messed up… I acknowledge that. But I achieved a lot. I was able to feed the feds a lot of intel they wouldn’t have had otherwise. You helped, Aidan! You did good. You helped expose them, smoke them out. The FBI needs evidence—proper justification to move in—in order to protect civil liberties and all that. We’re finally giving them what they need.”

  I look away. “You have this habit of talking down to me, Shi. Like I’m a slugger on a Little League team in a slump. I always feel like you’re either scolding me or cheering me on in a slightly patronizing way, and there’s no middle ground.”

  “Aidan, I—”

  “No, dude, you’re talking very heroically and majestically, and I’m glad you found your path, that you lifted yourself out of shitty circumstances for the greater good, but let’s look at the whole game, okay? You lied to me. On the train, in the motel, you lied to my face.”

  “I had to—”

  “All that bullshit about me not having faith in human kind
ness—”

  “Not all of it was a lie. We do have a connection.”

  “Was it manufactured?”

  “Not that part.”

  “But you’re still a liar. Say it. I want you to admit it to me.”

  He looks me in the eye. “I lied to you, yes.”

  I shake my head. “This whole Digital Dust thing… that they did this to me without my even knowing… it isn’t right. You have to realize that. And you took part in it.”

  “A lot of things went wrong.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t have,” I say.

  “You’re right. There were mistakes made. The rules keep changing, the game keeps changing, and when the bad guys are faster, more insidious—when they get even more cunning—we have to do what we can to keep up, in order to save as many lives as possible. There are trade-offs. That’s all I can say.”

  He’s parroting Schwartz a little, but clearly this is what he was told, and this is what he has to believe.

  “You know I have a crush on you, Shi.”

  He smiles. “I like when you call me that—”

  “You’re cute, smart, sweet. But every time you open your mouth, I feel like I know you less.”

  “I understand,” he says. He looks a little sad.

  It’s like he just realized the thing he sacrificed for all his heroism was a chance at me. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

  I have no idea what Shiloh’s really like outside his guise, what he’s like outside these extraordinary, terrifying, adrenaline-pumping circumstances. He’s been playing a character the whole time I’ve known him.

  I don’t know how much of the real Shiloh I’ve experienced. I see goodness in him, but I also see a lot of other crap, and anyway I have to stop getting attached too quickly. Being alone is not always a bad thing; it’s not always a sign of some sort of inner failure. Maybe I need to start knowing myself a little more before opening myself up so willingly to people—hurling myself at them and hoping they’ll drop everything to carry me away into the sunset.

  I look at Shiloh, and okay, yes… I want to make out with him really badly right now. I want to fall asleep with him next to me, his arms wrapped tightly around my chest. But I’d rather do those things with a future version of him—a version of him that’s come through the fog of all this. Someone I know is the real Shiloh.

  He might be on the right side of things, but he is a trained liar. And that’s something I have to consider. It’s time I started taking care of myself instead of waiting for other people to do it for me.

  Anyway, what the hell am I doing standing here, thinking about all this crap?

  The amusement park is about to get attacked.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Last Tornado Dream

  As soon we run to the front of the line, about three families—already exhausted, with crying, screaming kids—start making a big show about how we’re cutting. Shiloh reassures them we’re the authorities (ha ha), which all the angry, tired parents refuse to believe. Then park security ambles over: two big guys with earpieces and scowls on their faces.

  “Is there a problem?” says one of them.

  “Line’s back around there,” says the other.

  “This is an emergency,” says Shiloh. “You have to close the park down and get all these people out of here. This place is about to be attacked.”

  “Shiloh!” I point beyond the security guards.

  The ticketing booths have opened, and people are already streaming into the park. Shiloh checks his watch. “You opened early?” he asks one of the security guys.

  “Big crowds today,” the guy replies.

  “What time does the pool open?” I ask him.

  “In about fifteen minutes,” he responds.

  Shiloh tries to explain the situation, but it sounds too crazy and unbelievable, even to my ears. We sound like pranksters. They ask for IDs, of course. We have none, and then things escalate in a really inconvenient way.

  “No way am I calling the cops on this joke,” says one of the security guys, laughing. “I’ll bounce you out myself.”

  “Just call the cops on us, then!” says Shiloh. “People are going to die!”

  But they’re hustling us away from the line of people, because they don’t want to cause a panic (which kind of needs to happen).

  “Shoot your gun in the air,” I murmur to Shiloh.

  “What?”

  “Shoot. Your. Gun,” I say under my breath.

  “I’ve had enough,” barks the security guy, who obviously heard me. He gets Shiloh in a headlock, then the other guy grabs me; they spin us both around, and they do it with unfortunate choreography and tragic timing.

  Because as soon as we switch places, in a really balletic, super-fast way, they both get shot with arrows.

  I yelp and cover my head, diving to the ground. The arrows just, like, appeared. They didn’t even make a sound. They’re the same kind from Mohawk—with the green fletching—arrows clearly meant for us.

  The first guy was shot through the shoulder, the second guy through the upper thigh. Looks like we all got lucky.

  That last archer—the one I killed, Katniss Fuckerdeen—was obviously a better shot.

  Guns and arrows. The Swans came to Quest Gardens well armed.

  The two security guys stumble back, each of them instinctively grabbing the carbon arrows sticking out of them, all bug-eyed with pain and shock. Shiloh and I look behind us, through the entrance to the park. “They’re already inside,” says Shiloh.

  We grab the two wounded security guys and move away from the entrance fast, ducking behind a nearby car. “Is there another way to get inside the park?” I ask one of the profusely bleeding security guys, crouched low on the ground.

  “Along the beach,” one of them croaks. “The park is on the sound. You could get in that way.”

  “On motorcycles?” I ask.

  “Sure,” says the other guy, “if you can deal with wheelspin and don’t care about getting sand in the engine. The sand is thin.”

  Then, right on cue, comes the vrrrrm vrrrrm of motorcycles from inside the park. And then, finally, I hear the sound of sirens—distant, but growing closer. Helicopters, at least six or seven of them, suddenly appear, surrounding the park from the sky.

  I breathe a sigh of relief. “They heard me. They’re here. Thank God.”

  “What’s going on?” says one of the security guys, his face crinkled with pain.

  Shiloh puts a hand on the guy’s knee. “Let the EMT guys take the arrows out. Don’t try to do it yourselves.”

  “Shit,” says the guy, spitting on the pavement.

  “You’ll be okay,” says Shiloh, “but we have to go inside the park now, and we have to cordon it off so no one else can get inside.”

  “I’m going in there,” I tell Shiloh.

  “No way,” says Shiloh.

  No one saw the crossbow attack. People are at the ticket booths, wallets out, streaming into the park in droves. When they open that pool, about a hundred impatient kids are going to jump in all at once. “There are only two of us right now,” I tell Shiloh, “and we may not have much time. You stop more people from getting into the park. I’m going to warn the people already inside.”

  “They’re going to try to kill you,” says Shiloh. “You took off the Kevlar.”

  “The rides are death machines! The pool is electrified. We have to stop them!” I run toward the entrance.

  “Aidan!” Shiloh screams after me.

  I sprint through the gates.

  Most of the park is set on a wooden boardwalk, which wraps around the whole park, facing the water. Booths line the boardwalk: shooting games, throwing games, ring tosses, Whac-A-Mole, Skee-Ball, hot-dog stands, innumerable cotton-candy vendors, stuff like that.

  There are already lines outside the entrance of all the major rides, including the Mind Melter and the Derby Racer. This isn’t good.

  Then something chilling happe
ns. The music coming out of the omnipresent sound system is blaring Top 40 like Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, but then in a staticky hiccup it goes away. There’s a brief moment of silence, replaced by faint classical music—a weird choice.

  The classical music slowly rises in volume.

  I stop in my tracks, because I know the music. I know what they’re playing. But I can’t place it. I press my fists against my temples. It’s Tchaikovsky. And a moment later, I know what it is.

  Swan Lake.

  I run up to the historic Derby Racer. The carousel is under a round wooden honeycomb roof. There are no poles; the horses simulate galloping, faster and faster, as the ride goes on.

  One “race” is just ending, and kids are already filing on for the next.

  I start yelling at the ride operators, but no one can hear me over the bugle call that begins each ride, Swan Lake blaring, and the instructions the ride operators are shouting to the kids—to lean their bodies to one side, brace their feet. Once the race begins, the spinning track of the ride itself is pretty deafening, too.

  Finally, I’m able to grab the ticket attendant. “You have to stop the ride!”

  “Is someone sick?” she asks.

  Let’s just go with that. “Yes. YES! But don’t let anyone else on the ride! Get everyone out of here RIGHT NOW!”

  She looks confused, but she’s smart and can tell I’m not messing around. “Why? What’s going on?”

  In answer to her question, an arrow embeds itself in the side of a passing horse. Another arrow meant for me, but it could have hit the little girl who was riding it. I turn around. Across the boardwalk I see the motorcycle, skidded on its side, facing me, and the green-visored biker reloading a crossbow from a black quiver on his back. No one saw the arrow except the ride attendant and me. She turns to me, eyes wide. “What the hell is that?”

  “Is there an emergency stop on this ride?”

  “Yes.”

  “HIT IT. And get all these kids off the ride, get them out of here, tell them to run and keep their heads down! Alert security, whoever you can, tell them the park is under attack, but get people away from this ride!”