There was a crowd to fight through, but once they recognized who I was, it wasn’t hard getting through. It got harder the closer I got to the door because Sadie wasn’t done with us yet. The wind was still howling, and there was water everywhere along Section A, just everywhere. I tried yelling but no one could hear me, so I ran back to the Command Center and got on the PA.
Author’s Note: Mr. Garliek’s speech was recorded on camera phone and is as follows:
“Employees, I need your attention. Attention, please. [Pause] The generators are now working and will run for the next forty-eight hours. There is an exit door open in A Section. If you wish to leave, no one but Hurricane Sadie is going to stop you. If you choose to stay you will have lights, food, and a dry place to sleep tonight, but I need your help, and I need it without question. Looking at the radar, it looks like we’re in for at least another twelve hours of rain and high winds, and we’ve got a lot of hurt people. I need everyone who’s going to stay, please help your injured coworkers to D Section, where the medical supplies are kept. I need park managers and anyone else with first aid training to please report to D Section. I’m going to leave this door open for another hour, and if you want to leave, make your way out right now. If you plan on violence in my shelter, I would strongly recommend you taking your chances with the storm, because if I find out you were responsible for any of the chaos down here, you will get more sympathy from the storm than you will from me. There will be order here, and order involves clean spaces and everyone getting their fair share of food. If you have any questions, see me or your immediate supervisor, and we are all out of here, probably tonight. That is all.”
I sounded like kind of a badass, huh? [Laughing] I guess I was kind of jacked from fighting my way through the crowd. The good news is, the speech worked for the most part. I was able to get the weather computers back up and running, and we were able to leave en masse about twelve hours after we started the generator. Our managers, they responded like champs, and the place was in pretty good shape in just a couple of hours. Soon we had a proper infirmary going. Well, infirmary and morgue. I’d never seen a dead body before, much less five of them. Three had been beaten or trampled to death, including Maria Flynn; one had gone into some sort of shock and died, at least that’s as near as we could figure; and another poor guy needed his inhaler and couldn’t get it in the dark. He couldn’t find help over the shouting, and he was just out of luck. He suffocated in that part of the shelter. That’s the one that gets me. He must have been terrified. It wasn’t until much later that I learned who he was, and I didn’t feel so bad for him anymore. It was Bryce Hockney, he was the one who died. Yeah, that Hockney. I mean, if your brother is a monster, how far does the acorn fall from the family tree, right? He didn’t get his inhaler, and it probably saved us some issues in the grand scheme of things.
No, I don’t think the person who attacked me was Maria Flynn. Why would you ask that? Didn’t you hear the story? I was the only one working to save people. I was it. Without me, who knows how many more would have died? Hundreds maybe. I don’t want to say I’m the hero, but you could certainly read it that way. Plus, even if it was that Flynn girl, what would it matter? I was attacked and I defended myself, that’s the entire point, that’s always been the point, not just in the shelter but in the entire park. Look at it this way—if you consider what happened after the bunker, I am the only one who was able to keep order at the beginning, and I spent my entire time in the park fighting and scratching and bleeding to try to keep any amount of order that I could, OK? I don’t care what others tell you, that’s the God’s honest truth.
It doesn’t matter who attacked me, and quite frankly, I’m not the bad guy here. I was saving people when we were in the shelter, and I was doing my best to keep order and keep the peace after we got out. Given all the violence that came later, I feel pretty safe in saying I’m the closest thing you’re going to find to a good guy in this clusterfuck.
INTERVIEW 6: STUART DIETZ
Maintenance employee at FantasticLand, Mole Man.
Sam? Oh yeah. He definitely killed that girl. At least that’s what everyone thought, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it? I don’t have any information that you don’t have ’bout that, but I can tell you getting out of that hole was one of the best goddamn feelings I’ve ever had, bar none. How ’bout we start there?
Part of it was because I’m quite a bit older than most of the little farts who work in the park, so all us old guys, we hung around together, and because we hung around together, we were constantly getting asked questions on how to fix things. Us maintenance guys and gals, we knew more than anybody about what makes that place run. Shit, I knew more about fixing the park in my little finger than anyone in charge does. You think any one of those assholes could change a safety arm on any of those rides? If they were in charge of my job we’d have kids falling from the sky and splatting on the ground, and then I’d probably have to clean it up. That’s anywhere, I guess, but the good news about this whole thing was people who knew how to get things done, we were finally getting asked to help make decisions about everything. That’s how it shook out when Sam and the rest of his little group realized how fucked we were. They came running to the guys with the big ring of keys.
Once Mr. Mueller—he’s one of the good ones—once he was done telling everyone to duck and cover, we headed to the shelters, and I’ll tell you, it was not where anyone wanted to be. The one thing worse than being stuck somewhere you can’t leave is being stuck there with a bunch of half-wits twenty minutes out of middle school. Most of those kids, you could size them up in a few seconds. You had the criers and you had the jokers—they’re the worst because you can’t give them enough attention for them to shut the fuck up—you had the ones who try to be in charge of something to make themselves feel big. Me and my guys, we played cards and practiced the fine art of riding it out. If you’ve ever worked on a construction site, you know what I mean. People think guys are just standing around not doing anything, but the truth of the matter is more often than not we’re waiting for another guy to finish his job so we can do ours and go home. Until then, you stare and wait, stare and wait. There’s an art to it, but you gotta be prepared when it’s your turn, and that’s how we were down there. We were waiting, but ready in case anything happened.
Me and a group of guys, about twenty of us, we knew once we headed to the shelter that if things were going to go bad they were going to go real bad real quick, so we all camped out as far on one end as we could. All the way to one end of Section D, up against the door. We figured if we needed to live to fight another day, if you will, we could leave the shelter and take cover somewhere else. The storm was bad, and there was a lot of water, but you weren’t going to take flight if you stepped outside. There are over five hundred goddamn structures in the park, and nobody locked up. We would have been OK. An escape route was absolutely necessary and us old guys, we had one. Well, not just guys. Janet and Jill, they were on the clock and in the shelter and were madder than hell about it. Some women sure can complain when given the opportunity.
When it went dark, we had the door cracked within two minutes. Every one of us maintenance folks had emergency keys, it’s part of the protocol, so the only holdup was who was going to unlock that heavy-ass door and let in the fresh air. To be honest, there was a lot of pushing and pulling, and I’m not sure how we got that big son of a bitch open, but we did. Problem was, after we had the door open, the wind caught it and blew it open hard, making it an absolute bitch to close. We had these two guys, Carlos and Miguel, both great guys, who stepped out into it and tried to pull the door shut. They’re a couple big boys and couldn’t make it budge. The wind got to them too and they were inside within ninety seconds. That Sadie was a big old bitch, let me tell you.
Once we cracked the door everyone calmed right down, no fussin’, no fightin’, no problem. Most everyone sort of crowded toward the door to get a look at the storm and, oh man,
was there something to see. Even the jokers shut their yaps for once. The Section D door was hidden under some fake buildings, but you could make out the Golden Road if you squinted, and it was not in good shape. There was shit flying everywhere, awnings and decorations, and I thought I saw part of a roof go. I never got to take a closer look. Never made it that far along the Golden Road until we left the park, and by then I wasn’t too interested in checking out the storm damage, but I swear it looked like it took part of a roof on those Golden Road shops. It’s one of those things where, as a maintenance guy, part of you is thinking, “Jesus Christ, that’s going to take forever to fix,” even as you see it happening, you know? Anyway, it was pretty bad. Thing about it was, the wind was whipping and the rain pounding, we didn’t hear much of what was going on in Section C, much less B or A. The doors that separate the sections, they were pretty thick and hard to open, I’d guess. I figure that’s why no one from C made it in our direction. I’m not sure why no one thought to open the door from our side, to be honest. It’s just one of those things. No one thought of it. Wish we had.
The shelter was built to not let water get in, even with the door open, so a few rain drops aside we kept pretty dry and just let the door be wide open until the power came back on. We heard about the fighting and the bodies and all of that. Everyone on our side was hunky dory, so we were really surprised when that little Garliek asshole who thought he was in charge got on the intercom and tried to sound like Charles Bronson. He was shitting his pants, we could all tell. Then he tells everyone who’s hurt to come to Section D, where we all are. I guess it made sense looking back on it, but at the time the thought was, “Why are you dragging your mess to my section?” Still, everyone jumped up and helped and there was enough work to go around. Like I said, wait until it’s your turn and then do your job. You remember me talking about Carlos and Miguel, those big guys? They were the heroes. They were the ones who went into the other sections and brought back the bodies, and they were the ones who covered them up and kept watch over them. I got the impression it was a Catholic thing, I don’t know for sure. I’ve been attending Bedside Baptist since the late ’80s, if you know what I mean.
To be honest with you, it didn’t take that long for everything to calm down. Sam Garliek, he was strutting around like he was in charge, and he’d occasionally throw shade in someone’s direction to prove he was in charge, but other than that it was a pretty quiet twelve hours. They gave hourly reports on the intercom about what Sadie was doing, and most of my crew even got some sleep, which is good. A lot of people slept, actually. Not me. Charlie and me, we were mapping things out. Charlie was a good guy, another one of the good ones. It’s hard to peg down what makes a leader, but whatever it was, Charlie had it. He and I, we both had the same set of priorities, get out or hide, because shit was already bad and going to get worse. We could see it coming. A bunch of scared kids with no rules and more resources than they know what to do with, a lot of them without mommy or daddy looking over their shoulder for the first time? Didn’t take a genius to figure out things were going south and no one would be looking out for the guys in the work shirts. Us old guys, we needed a plan.
This is what we came up with: Once the storm broke, we were going to check the back exit, the employee parking along the west side, and the route to FresnoVille. We knew the front was flooded, and all around the park there were acres and acres of trees. They did that because Johnny Fresno said he wanted people to feel like the outside world couldn’t intrude on the park. What it meant for us is we didn’t have any damn access roads to about 70 percent of the places that needed access roads, so we had to get creative. Every time we expanded, which was every two or three years, those trees had to be uprooted, and we had to save the ones we could and replant them and get new trees. Those assholes didn’t care. If you have enough money, moving a forest was no big deal. OK, sorry, off on a tangent. The idea was to see how bad it was around the park. I knew that if the employee parking lot was flooded we were in some trouble because those forests are nothing but mud up to your asshole on a dry day. It’s basically the most tree-filled Florida swamp you can imagine. I didn’t think it was impassable by any means, I was just thinking if all the concrete was flooded, we were in for a really rough go of it. So Charlie and me, we talk it out, and we decide that if the only way out is through the trees, we ask for volunteers to see how bad it is. Then, worst-case scenario, we figure out where these kids are congregating, and we get the hell away from them. We saw eye to eye on that. These kids were unsupervised, some of them were strong, and there were more of them than there were of us. Like I said, you don’t have to be a genius to see where this was headed. The proof was right there in that shelter. Five dead bodies tend to get your hackles up.
Slowly, we spread the word around. We told everyone to meet in the maintenance break room off of the Golden Road, and we were going to talk this out, just us maintenance folks. Most of them had the idea that once the storm broke they were heading right home, and I had to remind them that we were kind of stuck here. Just how stuck we didn’t know, but stuck. So I told them, come to the maintenance break room off the Golden Road and we’d hash it out. I don’t want to make it seem like they were a bunch of simpletons, but when you’re in a situation like this and someone has a plan, they seem pretty ready and willing to follow it, you know? Especially when it was Charlie who had the plan. Like I said, leadership.
The storm broke a little after lunchtime on the sixteenth, and by broke, I mean went from dangerously rainy and windy to not quite so rainy and windy but still pretty goddamn rainy and windy. But you could walk around. Before we left, Sam, he comes up to me and Charlie and asks me all these questions. “What’s unlocked? What’s not unlocked? Where should we move the bodies? Is there power in the park?” To which Charlie tells him, “Why are you asking these questions now? Couldn’t we have done this ten hours ago?” But that little shit, he was having none of it. He was ordering Charlie around. At one point, he said, “Follow behind me so we can survey the damage,” to which Charlie replied, “Yes sir, Sergeant Shitstain!” which got a big laugh from the group. Old Sam, he didn’t like that. He walked away to find someone else to yell at, and by then the rumors about him and that Flynn girl had started. He had what you could politely call a “credibility gap.” From Sam’s perspective, he must have felt like he was in charge, but as far as anyone with a brain was concerned, he was in charge of Jack and Shit at that point.
Once we got out, first thing we all noticed was there was no way we were getting out the front. No way. The water stretched from the first store on the Golden Road as far as we could see, past the parking lots, past the trolley stands, past the two hotels we could see out the front, past everything. I remember Charlie saying “this is not good,” and he was goddamned right. It wasn’t good. Neither were the south exits to the employee parking lot, where there was just as much water as the front gate. The road to FresnoVille, that was a little better, but once we got down that path a little further it was clear that we could almost get to campus, but not quite. If you really wanted to, you could get there, but you would be exhausted and wet to the bone. I don’t care if you were a competitive swimmer, you weren’t making it more than a couple miles in that muck, and most of us were not competitive swimmers. It was a slog and a half, so the only option left was to go for the trees.
We met up with everyone in the break room off the Golden Road, and there were a hundred questions. Being the good guy that he is, Charlie calmed everyone down, told them what he knew, and then answered every single question, even the rock stupid ones. Then he told them the plan. We were looking for volunteers to see how far they could get through the trees, and the rest of us, we would stick together. There was plenty of food and water, good food as it turned out, and if we all stuck together, rescue would be along in a day or two. That was before we knew the dumb-ass board members had called off the rescue for us. If I ever meet those rich assholes … they better be faster
than me. That’s all I’m saying.
Sure enough, Carlos and Miguel step up and volunteer for our little expedition to see how far we can make it through the trees. I need to describe these guys to you. Carlos was a spark plug, about five foot eight but wide and strong. If you were carrying something heavy, he’s the guy you wanted on the other end because you knew he’d carry his weight and then some. Miguel was a little taller, a little lankier, but a good guy. Always on time, always ready to work. I wish I’d known him better. Once they volunteered, Charlie and I had a bit of a tussle over which way they should go. Charlie figured the boys should head out straight into the trees behind the Pirate Cove on the east end of the park. His thinking was the nearest civilization that wasn’t run by FantasticFun Inc. would be that way, and if there were rescue tanks or boats or whatever that’s where they would be coming from. My thought was everywhere was underwater, it was just a matter of degree, so why not head toward the parking lots and see if you could find something to get us out of here? I didn’t know at that time that they had used every available vehicle to move folks out. Turns out, when we did make it down there, it was as empty as hip-hop night at the bingo parlor.
Charlie won out because of course he did. He had a way of talking you into things, and he talked me and Carlos and Miguel into heading toward civilization. The thought was they’d wait until morning and then head out to give the rescue efforts a chance to get their shit together. That was the thought, anyway. We spent that morning packing food and fresh water for them and planning out where they were most likely to run into someone. They were pretty upbeat, and everyone thought for sure they’d run into someone who knew what was going on. Thinking back with hindsight and all that, it was kind of stupid. Word was, and I don’t know if this is true or not, but word was Ritchie Fresno got out on a helicopter before the winds got nasty, and if that was true, or even if it wasn’t and he drove out in a limo, the disaster folks would be looking to him to figure out how urgent our situation was. Honestly, thinking back, I don’t know what we thought Carlos and Miguel would find other than water covering everything. I don’t mean to go off on a thing here, but us Mole Men were resourceful and smart, we weren’t killers, and we looked out for each other. We were, by far, not the worst of the group, but when I look back on it with, like, a rational head, we were acting like numbskulls. Idiots without a brain in their fucking head, that was us, and I wish I could tell you why. I kind of tell myself Carlos and Miguel didn’t have to go, but then a little voice in my head tells me, “you didn’t have to let them.”
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