With wide eyes and happy grins, we bounded to our feet.
The robot pulled up alongside us.
“What are you two doing out here,” it asked, “and out of uniform? Return to your posts at once!”
Zac marched over to the cart. Smiling broadly, he shoved the robot out of the driver’s seat. It hit the floor on its back, making a loud crash that echoed through the hallway.
I jumped into the passenger’s seat as Zac took control of the cart. We drove off, leaving behind the robot, its arms and legs flailing while trying to right itself, like an overturned turtle.
Intersecting tunnels led to other plant operations like Facilities Management, Chemical Engineering, and Warehouse Automation. We passed wide loading docks with huge shipping containers bound for all parts of the globe. Only then did we realize the enormity of Toby’s underground complex.
Finally, we came to a door with Exit to Fun Zone stenciled on it. Behind it was a long stairwell leading back up to ground level.
“Finally!” I said. “A way out.”
“A way out to what?” said Zac. “More running for our lives like escaped criminals? More cowering like frightened rabbits? No Thanks! I’ve done my good deed for the day. People are going to have to learn to solve their own problems.”
I stared at Zac with a mix of sympathy and sadness. Then I nudged him.
“Listen! Do you hear that?”
“What? I don’t hear anything.”
“The laughter of children unafraid to attend school. The cries of joy from someone given a clean bill of health. A sizzling steak on a workingman’s backyard barbecue.
Zac looked at me, puzzled.
“They’re the sounds of life free from Jimmie manipulation. Listen hard, but don’t expect to hear crowds cheering your name. There’ll be no parades in your honor. But there will be millions of thank yous to a hero, whose name they’ll never know. The grateful heart cries louder than all the glory in the world. ”
Zac’s head nodded ever so slightly.
“I hear one thing more,” I said. “A little boy’s laughter while playing with his father, who didn’t have to fight a needless war.”
Zac’s eyes smiled.
“Yes, Amy. I hear it now.”
Chapter 14
The Code
Daybreak rimmed the hills around Summit Lake. The amber moon dipped in the East. The stars withdrew to the West. It was a welcome sight to Zac and I, as we emerged through the ground level door of the lighthouse.
The lofty tower skirted the edge of Westward Gulch, a replica of a thriving frontier town in the Old West. The quaint western community was more of a ghost town, now. The decaying buildings looked ready to crumble from the slightest breeze. Down its main street, covered wagons lay on their sides, showing their rusted, metal ribs like dead cattle in a dry creek bed. The rowdy cowboys that frequented the saloon were long gone. With no horses to shoe, the town blacksmith had deserted the livery stable.
The trying day and the long night had left me tired and hungry.
“If we somehow manage to get out of here with our skins,” I said, “I say we call it a night.”
“I agree,” said Zac. “Now that we know what we’re up against, we can regroup and come back with a better plan.”
We had just started down the dusty street, when a voice called out:
“Freeze, you dirty varmints!”
It was Tobias Goodfellow, dressed in a cowboy outfit, complete with a wide-brimmed hat, gun belt, and a sheriff star on his leather vest. Behind him stood his ever-present bodyguards, also in western garb, holding Winchester rifles instead of their laser blasters.
With his hand floating just above his gun holster, Toby sneered, then took a bowlegged step toward us.
“Draw!”
“What do you mean,” said Zac. “How can we draw? We’re unarmed.”
“I ain’t talkin’ about a gun, dagnabbit! Draw yer phone!
Toby snapped his fingers. The square-shouldered guards showed their teeth, then cocked their rifles.
“I’m a-givin’ you till sunup to gimme the reset code,” Toby said.
“The sun is up,” said Zac.
Toby looked out at the dawn. “So it is. Guess yer time’s already up, then.”
He reached for his gun, but instead of a six-shooter, he brandished his wireless tablet.
“Alright, you sidewinder,” said Toby, “you’ve got access to the system. I’m a-givin’ you jus’ 10 seconds to enter the code.” He tapped on its screen.
“And if I don’t?” said Zac.
“Then someone’s gonna be headin’ for the last roundup.”
“Forgive me for not being up on my cowboy jargon,” I said, “but did you just threaten to kill us?”
“Not you!” Toby pointed to the top of the lighthouse. “Her!”
The lighthouse lantern snapped on. Then a voice screamed:
“Help, Amy!”
It was Nell!
She was standing high up on the top deck, with her hands tied behind her back. Fred was in back of her, stone-faced, gripping her shoulders.
“That Fred’s a big dude,” Toby said, in a normal voice. “Bet he could throw a feed bag twenty yards. But he only has to fling that little gal a few feet to send her plunging to her death.”
“He would never do that,” I insisted.
“One tap on my pad and he will. I programmed his Jimmie to toss her over the side. Any funny stuff from you two, and down goes poor little Nell.”
“He’s bluffing,” said Zac.
“Don’t bet on that,” said Toby. “I’ve done far worse than throw people off of high places. Now c’mon, James. I don’t have time to fool with you anymore.”
Nell shrieked, “Please, Amy! Do something!”
A tap on Toby’s device, and Fred grabbed Nell by the waist. He lifted her over the railing and dangled her over the sheer drop to the rocky shoreline below.
“Stop!” shouted Zac. “I’ll do as you ask.”
Toby touched the screen again, and Fred returned Nell safely to the platform.
As Zac pulled his flip phone from his pocket, I raised my hand to him.
“Wait!”
I glared at Toby. “Tell me one thing first,” I said. “There’s been a lot of talk about a virus that robs people of their common sense. All those kids below ground are infected with it, or they wouldn’t be here. Is all that true? Is Manipulitis real?”
“Not that it matters now,” said Toby, “but yes, it is real! But it’s not a virus like everyone thinks. Manipulitis is an attitude. It’s a voice inside your head that says, ‘listen to your wants, not your good judgment.’ People don’t fear the consequences from their self-indulgence, but they do fear disease. This nonsense about it being an incurable virus draws attention to their own incompetence. That kind of information could ruin me. Imagine: people thinking before acting; recognizing good from evil; questioning everything they see and hear. My corporate profits would plummet. I’m afraid I can’t allow that to happen.”
“You think you’re so special,” I said, “but you’re not. You have the same misguided desires like everyone else, only when you want something, others pay a price for it. You may have the upper hand now, but someday people will see the trap you’ve led them into. This isn’t over.”
Zac came up beside me. “You’re wrong, Amy. It is over. The code can only be used once. After the system resets, neither I nor anyone else can steal away Toby’s control of it.”
Zac flipped open his phone.
“I know it’s hard to believe in people these days,” he said. “You and I have plenty of good reasons for losing faith in them. But sometimes they can surprise you.”
Zac tapped in the fateful numbers, breathed a deep sigh, then hit Enter.
At that instant, sirens wailed, strobe lights flashed, alarms rang.
Toby’s bodyguards shook their heads as if awakening from a deep sleep. They looked at each other, touched their cloth
ing, then dropped their weapons and took off running.
“The wrong code!” I cried. “Zac! What have you done?”
“Well, Dr. Benton,” said Toby, “you’re a bigger fool than I took you for. Congratulations. You’ve just pronounced your little friend’s death sentence.”
I leaped at Toby to pry his fingers from his tablet, but I wasn’t strong enough. He tapped the screen anyway, commanding Fred to carry out his deadly threat.
I turned my back to the lighthouse and buried my head in my hands. The flashing lights and the alarms went dead. Nell’s cries for help were silenced.
I fell to my knees and wept. I so badly wanted to rescue Nell, but like a pathetic amateur, I took on way more than I could handle. Now it was too late to be forgiven.
Brushing the tears from my cheeks, I heard Nell’s voice:
“Hey, Amy!”
But it wasn’t her heavenly angel from above, it was coming from on high from the lighthouse. I looked up through my weeping eyes. There was Nell, unharmed, with Fred by her side, both of them waving down at me.
“I’m alright, Amy!” shouted Nell, holding her untied hands out in front of her.
Toby viewed this and went into a rage. He tapped his screen repeatedly. Nothing happened. He slammed it with his fist. Still nothing.
Throwing his device to the ground in frustration, he turned to Zac. “What did you do?”
“Not what I did,” said Zac, “what you did. You shouldn’t have jailed me together with Nell and Fred. While your pin-headed guards weren’t looking, I neutralized their Jimmies. Fred was never under your control, and Nell was never in any danger.”
I spun Zac around and looked into his eyes. “You mean you entered the wrong code on purpose?”
“You bet your sweet ass I did! Now as we speak, every Jimmie, in every brain, in every corner of the world is dissolving away.”
Toby slowly backed away from us, then ran for the lighthouse, and cowardly retreated through the open door.
Neither Zac nor I felt the urge to run after him. What would be the point? He had been defeated. And even though he still wielded considerable power and influence, the public would soon learn the truth of his evil ways, even if I had to spread the word myself.
“That was an awful big risk you took,” I told Zac. “While those guards were chasing us all over the Fun Zone, Toby might have reactivated Fred’s Jimmie. How did you know what he was going to do?”
“Fred winked at me,” said Zac. “His strategy was clear after that. Did you see how Toby walked right into our trap? Now, he’s the one on the run.”
The lighthouse door slowly opened, and a wide-eyed face peered out. A teenage boy, now free of his Jimmie, sniffed the morning air. He cautiously looked around him, like an adopted pound puppy scoping out his new home.
Another head poked out behind his. Dozens more appeared. Dozens became hundreds. Soon, the streets of Westward Gulch was repopulated with resurrected zombies.
Hundreds more emerged from other passageways that led to the surface, crawling out of the Spook House tunnels, climbing out the castle manholes, scaling the whale’s slippery slide. The escapees mingled and shared stories, and before long, gladness returned to their faces. The Fun Zone was once again teeming with cheerful teenagers.
A girl with a lost look on her face came up to me. “Where are we? What is this place?”
I smiled at the bewildered girl. “Don’t you know? It’s where dreams come true.”
Zac and I pushed past the kids pouring out of the lighthouse, and climbed the spiral staircase to the top. There I was met by Nell with her arms open wide. We bounced up and down and giggled like old girlfriends at a high school reunion.
I embraced Fred. “My hero!”
Fred nodded at the masses below us. “What do we do about them? I think they deserve an explanation.”
I stepped up to the high railing, then cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted:
“Listen up, everyone! May I have your attention, please?”
A hush fell over the multitude. The teenagers stared up at me, looking like a group photo at a Happy Fun Mart convention.
“For those of you wondering what’s going on, don’t worry. Everything is alright. You’ve just awaken from a very bad dream. Why you are all dressed in matching outfits, well, that’s a long story. For now, please, in a calm and orderly fashion, move toward the main gate. There we will arrange to get you back to your homes and families.”
Someone called out, “How are you going to do that? There must be thousands of us down here.”
Zac held up his trusty mobile device. “I have a phone!”
A rousing cheer erupted that rattled the lighthouse. Never in history had so many been so stoked to see a flip phone.
Then, for no reason at all
Crash!
The lighthouse lens shattered like a giant light bulb. An underground explosion rocked Fairytale Island. A fireball shot upward from the center of the midway.
I grabbed on to Fred. “What’s happening?”
“Toby!” he said. “I think they call it destroying the evidence.”
I shouted to the frantic teenagers below:
“Correction, folks. Forget what I said about calm and orderly. Run like hell!”
A sea of blue shirts raced for the park entrance like water through a flood gate.
Another explosion rocked the Ferris Wheel from side to side. Geysers shot 50 feet in the air from broken water pipes. Fully engulfed in flames, the Crazy House roof collapsed, burying Laughing Lucy under mounds of debris.
I bolted downstairs with my group to joined the frenzied getaway.
By the time we reached the entryway arch, the security fences had been torn down. Most all of the kids had spilled out onto the road to escape the calamity. Everyone appeared to have made it out safely.
Police and news choppers soon began circling overhead.
With sirens blaring, the Shankstonville Fire Department arrived on scene. But just as the firefighters were unrolling their hoses, a loud rumble caught everyone off guard. We all stopped to listen. It seemed to be coming from deep under ground. A moment later, the earth shook like we were having an 8.0 earthquake. Trees swayed. People grabbed hold of one another to keep from falling down.
The vast chambers and long tunnels below the Fun Zone were caving in!
The roller coaster supports crumbled like popsicle sticks. The Ferris Wheel groaned and twisted before toppling to the ground. All of the other buildings sank out of sight like a city built on quicksand.
Then the shaking stopped. All was quiet. The implosion had extinguished the fires. And as the dust settled, I saw that the Fun Zone had been swallowed whole. Only one structure was left standing: the lighthouse!
The next sound we heard was a honking horn. Up the winding road rolled a long line of school busses, this time with humans behind the steering wheels.
Police officers organized the mass evacuation. Lines were formed and heads were counted, to ensure that no one was left behind.
Zac, Fred, Nell, and I waited in line with the rest of them. We were just about to board a bus, when another type of vehicle caught my eye: the WSVL-TV Eyewitness News van.
“You guys go on ahead,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Fred reached for my hand. “You want me to stay with you?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I just have one last thing to take care of.”
The side door to the news van glided open. A broadcast engineer extended the truck’s transmitting antenna. A cameraman hoisted his video camera onto his shoulder. Then out stepped News Director Lewis, the same man who had refused to hear my story about Nell’s disappearance.
He adjusted his intercom earpiece and tapped on his microphone.
“Hello, Mr. Lewis,” I said. “Remember me?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Something about a missing girl and a defective Jimmie. I’m afraid I don’t have time to discuss t
hat with you now. I’m here to cover the Fun Zone bombing.”
“Bombing? There weren’t any bombs. We weren’t attacked.”
“Of course we were, by terrorists. And, by the look of things, they took hostages, too. What are all these kids doing here?”
“Why don’t you ask them?”
The teens were cooperative, but having no memory of what had happened, they couldn’t give Mr. Lewis much to report on.
He walked back to me without a single entry in his notepad.
“Alright, you,” he said. “Tell me what you know.”
“When we’re live,” I said, “I’ll give you the whole, exclusive story. Tell your cameraman to frame the scene behind us, and let’s get on with the interview.”
Mr. Lewis was taken aback by my directness, but with only minutes before going on the air, he had no choice but to trust me.
He spoke briefly to the producer back at the station, then turned to the camera and cleared his throat.
The cameraman counted down:
“In four—three—two—”
The reporter faced the live camera:
“Good morning. Behind me, what was once a pleasure land of family fun, and an historic tribute to a bygone era, has been leveled to this smoldering pile of rubble. You all knew it as the Fun Zone. But, what really happened here, and who was behind it? Was this an accident, or an attack on our American values? With me now is an eyewitness to this tragedy.”
The reporter and the cameraman both shifted their focus on me.
“If you would,” said Mr. Lewis, “please describe for us what you saw.”
I looked straight at him. “Well, sir, it was like this: the whole place blew up.” Then I looked into the camera lens. “But that’s not what’s important.”
Mr. Lewis started to pull back, but I grabbed the mic out of his hand.
“Stay with me, cameraman!” I demanded.
He did as I asked.
I addressed my TV audience:
“By now, all of you Jimmieheads out there already know that your Jimmies don’t work. That’s okay. You’ll learn to live without them soon enough. But while you were gaining so much pleasure from them, you couldn’t see the harm they were doing. All these kids you see—pan right, cameraman—were coaxed here by their Jimmies. They were rounded up like cattle and forced into slave labor—all courtesy of the demented mind of Tobias Goodfellow. That might be a shocking thing to hear, but once crime investigators start digging through this heap, the truth will come out. You may be asking yourselves, ‘how could such a thing happen?’ Simple. Manipulitis!”
The Age of Amy: Behind the Fun Zone Page 12