It was raining when they headed out, but they were still feeling good about it. Miguel didn’t talk much but Carlos was talking big, about how they were going to come with the cavalry, though he pronounced it Calvary like the place Jesus died. Again, Catholic. He was all smiles and said, “See you in a day or two, boss,” to Charlie when they headed out. Then we waited. A wise man once said it’s the hardest part.
We kept our little plan a secret, obviously. If we hadn’t, someone would have had some brains and tried to put a stop to it, but nope. We knew best. We had the big ring of keys. Charlie pulled me aside once they were gone and said, “If they don’t come back with good news, we could be here a while.” I remember it clearly, we were sitting in the covered picnic area in front of Pirate Cove, one of just a few acres of the park that are general space and not dedicated to any one theme. The rain was hitting the top of that candy-green awning and I remember thinking, No way. We’re out of here in time for the weekend, but like I said, Charlie had a way of talking you into things. He said everyone kicking and biting and killing each other in the dark, that was going to happen again, and, “There’s a lot of dark around here with no power,” was how he put it, and of course he meant it two ways. I don’t know what it was, but that hit me hard in the chest, and I knew he was right. He was goddamn right. It wouldn’t take long, and these kids who sold trinkets and pushed the buttons on rides would start all sorts of bad around here, and we had to plan for it even if nothing ended up happening. Charlie’s plan was simple: “Lie low.” Head to the tunnels, take some of the beds from the shelter, and sort of hunker down. We’d have access to every part of the park, we’d be able to lock the entrances and exits from the inside, but most important, we knew the tunnels, and these little shits didn’t.
The tunnels? Every major theme park has them. You ever been to Universal Studios or Disney and see someone lugging a bag of trash for blocks? Of course you haven’t, and the tunnels are why. They get the support staff to and from where they need to be without the public having to look at them or smell what they’re carrying. If I had to describe them, they’re exactly what you’re picturing in your head—lit with fluorescent lights and long and narrow. The power was out, but one thing we didn’t lack was flashlights and batteries. There were tens of thousands of hours of flashlight power down there. The park was big on that. Sure, it was dark, but it’s not like there was very much to see when the lights were on. They were tunnels, but like I said, we knew them, and if you knew where you were going you could get anywhere in the park in fifteen minutes, from one side to the other. We knew where the tunnels went and what direction got us where and where to hide if need be. It turned out to be a pretty damn good idea almost immediately.
Sorry, I keep getting off track. Charlie and I just started going around to all the maintenance folks and saying, “We’re headed for the tunnels. Please think about coming with us.” And they’d ask why, and we’d lay it out for them, and most of them packed up and headed for the nearest utility entrance. Beautiful part was there was a big central work area that had a skylight, so that room and everything next to it had natural light, and that’s where we all congregated. The reason there was a room like that is it’s part of the exclusive “behind the scenes package” where you could see folks taking out the trash and tour part of the tunnels. Some folks are weird like that, but if someone wants to pay an extra ninety-five bucks to watch me work, more power to them, I guess. That’s where we all gathered and Charlie laid it out. What I remember about it was he basically said “pucker up buttercup,” because those kids were going to start grabbing and punching any second, and it was up to us older folks to take care of ourselves and each other, and the tunnels was how we were going to do it. Someone shouted, “But we’re going to be rescued soon,” and Charlie, I remember, he said, “If so, then all this is no big deal, but if it takes a while, you’re going to want a plan, and if you got a better plan than this, we are all fucking ears, my friend. Lay it on us.” I remember because Charlie hardly ever swore. He saved it for special occasions, I guess.
The good news was everyone sort of got it. A lot of them had either heard bad stories about the storm shelter or had been in the middle of it, and even the folks who didn’t want to stay in the tunnels, they recognized we were in danger and needed to do something about it. Someone said, “What about Carlos and Miguel?” and it occurred to us that was going to be a problem. They would either come back with help, which was looking less and less likely the more we surveyed the condition of the park, or they would come back in bad shape having tromped through water for God knows how long, and we had no idea where they would come back. If they came with help, great, but if not, we wanted them in the tunnels with us. What we decided to do was set up camp in the tunnels. Everyone would set up their bunks in whatever tunnel they wanted, there were plenty to choose from, but we would meet in the mornings at 9:00 a.m. to make sure everyone had what they needed and no one was going out of their minds. The “morning meeting” ended up being a really good idea because it allowed us to keep track of our people. I don’t know about the rest of the tribes, but we knew when someone was sick, we knew when someone was unexplainably gone, we knew when someone was late, and we had a good group of guys and girls who knew everyone else’s business. We watched out for each other, I can say that much. All told, there were thirty-eight of us down there, not counting Carlos and Miguel. That was us. That was the Mole Men.
Carlos and Miguel turned up three days later. Well, Carlos did. So I hear. I’ve heard from people I trust that Miguel never made it back, that he got too sick and dehydrated and couldn’t go on and that when Carlos stumbled back into the park, the Pirates got him. Either way, we never heard from either of them again.
INTERVIEW 7: JILL VAN MEVEREN
FantasticLand Character, Deadpool Soldier.
I used to get called Jill the Soldier all the time. There was this popular cartoon when I was a kid called Major Pummel and His Army Elite, and I remember I used to put my hair in braids like the Jill in the show and run around the neighborhood with the boys. We used, like, sticks for guns and pretended to shoot people. It made total sense that when I went to work at FantasticLand, one of the first jobs I tried out for was Jill the Soldier in the Hero Haven. I tried three times before they finally gave it to me, and then I learned that’s pretty standard. No one gets the character they want right out of the gate. They want to make sure you have, you know, tenacity.
It was a great gig, no doubt. There must be, literally, ten thousand photos of me pointing my guns at the camera while some little girl or boy used their fingers to make it look like they had guns too. That was the standard pose. We told parents to post pictures to their Facebook pages and hashtag it “#FantasticFun.” That was a “success metric,” how many mentions we actually got on social media. I remember at the beginning of the summer the “social media manager” of the park came and gave us this big speech about how this was the new “word of mouth,” and “word of mouth” was the best advertising there was. We were supposed to “harness the power of social media” by encouraging the parents to use hashtags and shares and retweets and any other way we could think of to get our product out there. Then he told us if we didn’t meet our goals in terms of mentions, that we’d be hearing about it and he wasn’t kidding around. There was a fairly big flatscreen in most of the break rooms that had the running tally for the day and it was always the Fairy Prairie or the Circus, always always always. It was a lot harder for us in the Hero Haven because a lot of the characters in the Fairy Prairie or the World’s Circus were characters you hugged. Sometimes there would be lines over half an hour to hug somebody in a stuffed costume or to take a selfie as a trapeze artist or whatever they did over there, but it wasn’t like that with the Pirates or with us. We had to work a lot harder to get mentions and we did work harder. We got a lot of high fives and struck a lot of poses, which was OK with me. Less chance some adventurous little boy would feel you up, you know?
[Laughter] But other than having that pressure to get some parent to share their photo, it paid really well for a summer job, and I got a bunch of stories out of it.
You remember that viral video last year when a little kid dressed up as ToBor the War Lord and pretended to take down the entire Army Elite? I was in that video. It was an awesome day. Tons of hashtags. You also got to interact with a lot of kids. It hit home with me rather quickly that some of these kids had really built up this meeting and you actually have a great amount of power. Some kids, just by telling them some stupid catchphrase like, “There’s a warrior inside you,” or “You make America shine,” was enough to make these kids so, so happy. And it made their parents happy too, which meant our bosses were happy, which meant I could keep my hair in braids and put on my fatigues and go out there every day and get paid better than working at a Dairy Queen or something.
After my first year of playing Jill the Soldier, I decided to take some martial arts classes through UT, where I went to school. It was an elective, so I figured it was, like, no big deal. I thought it might help me with the job, that it would make me look more like I knew how to handle myself. I loved it. Like, loved it, loved it. I went through my first four belts in one semester and planned to go back. The instructor told me I had a natural talent for martial arts and I could earn my black belt by the time I was out of school, which I really wanted to do. After I got out of FantasticLand, he called me and asked how I was doing, and I told him he had either saved my life or kept me from getting messed up pretty bad. He said he was proud of me and the truth is, I’m proud of myself. I played Jill the Soldier in the park, but I had to become Jill the Soldier to get out alive.
Oh God, that sounds so stupid. Cut that out, OK? Seriously, that just tumbled out of my mouth, and it’s really stupid. I’m embarrassed I said that.
OK, I’m serious now. Want me to start when we got out of the shelter? OK, everyone’s already told you that, basically, it never stopped raining, right? The storm hit, and we didn’t see the sun hardly at all, and it was always raining or about to rain. Keep that in mind, that’s the backdrop. Once we got out of the tunnel, everyone sort of looked around, and it was clear no one knew what they were doing. That Sam guy who thought he ran the place, everyone was talking behind his back and in front of it about that girl he killed. I remember one time he tried to stand on a bench and get everyone’s attention and someone shouted, “Shut the … f—up, killer!” and he got really red in the face and got down. Can we swear here? Well, you get the idea.
So you’ve got the one guy in charge with absolutely no credibility still walking around like he was in charge of something, and you’ve got a couple hundred kids like me who suddenly have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing. After all that excitement, kids got really bored. There was no texting, no Instagram, no nothing. Some kids literally did not know what to do with themselves. There was this one group of kids who claimed they could hack the RADs to pick up Wi-Fi, but that never went anywhere, at least not that I saw.
During one of the really boring periods, I actually read some of the disaster plans, and it said that shift managers were supposed to start giving their workers direction and tell them what specific jobs to do, but no one did. There was just this giant sense of “no one is in charge and no one knows what to do.” What do you do when you’re in an empty amusement park and you can do what you want because no one’s going to stop you and you’re bored out of your gourd? Turns out, there are a lot of different answers. Some people started taking things from the shops, but the people who worked in the shops kind of shut that down. Some people started hanging out with their groups of friends. I remember one guy started climbing up on some of the roofs and making Batman jokes, like, “I’m the hero this park deserves,” in that stupid growly voice, and like, some people would cheer him on, and others would yell for him to get down. There were a lot of people milling around trying to figure out what to do. Some people kind of naturally migrated back to their section of the park to see what sort of damage there had been, but there was a big group of people who just sort of milled around the center of the park waiting for some sort of direction. Sometimes a sing-along or something would break out, but mostly it was groups of people hanging out in the rain or under awnings or going back to their sections where they knew where the shelter was. Some of the shop girls, or the employees who would later become the ShopGirls, I noticed they were protecting their shops from getting looted, kind of aggressively in some cases. There were a lot of locked doors just minutes after we all got out of the shelter.
The first bad thing I remember happening was over food after it became clear no one was going to feed us lunch. There was no cafeteria, so at first people raided the food that was already there in the shelter, and there was plenty of it. You would think that over three hundred people would mow through that food pretty fast, but people were pretty calm at first. I even heard one person say “slow down, we need to make it last.” This girl who worked in the Hero Haven that I knew, her name was Riley, I heard her whisper, “bullshit,” and I asked her why. She said there were more than seventy restaurants in the park, and all of them were meant to serve 1,500 meals a day. This food might last three or four days, she said, but people would start raiding the restaurants pretty soon, so I said, “Hell yeah, we should definitely do that!” You know, get the good stuff. At this point, we thought we’d be there, like, four days tops, so that “make the food last” line seemed really stupid at the time.
I asked Riley what restaurant she worked at, and she said the Muscle Man Grill, so she grabbed some of her friends and I grabbed some of my friends, and we headed over there. There was me and Tom and Shelly—we were all characters. Tom was Shooter Adams and Shelly was Crackin’ Kate, the explosives expert. And Riley brought Braden and Allie who she worked with at the restaurant, so there were six of us all together. She had keys and everything, but nothing was locked, which bothered Riley because she had told everyone to lock up when we made for the shelters, and someone clearly hadn’t. It made me wonder if the whole park was like that. By the time we got there, we looked like we just got out of the shower, and I was still in my full Jill the Soldier outfit. I hadn’t had time to change and it’s … it made my boobs look huge, OK? There’s a reason I’m telling you this, I don’t just suddenly start talking about my boobs. I’m not nearly the D cup the costume made me out to be. In the shelter, I was wearing a sweater, but a wet sweater is a terrible thing so I had it rolled up under my arm, and I was ready to get into some different clothes, but when we went into that kitchen, it was awesome. I mean, it was dingy and like any other kitchen, and it was sort of hard to see because the power was out, but there was more food than we could eat and no one to tell us not to eat it, you know? I’m not a big eater because of my job, but I had a great time making my own desserts from the dessert bar and ripping into a giant turkey leg. It was awesome until we heard the door open and those three guys walked in.
I had never seen them before, which is easy when you work at a park that employs 1,700 people. There were four of them, and they had been laughing about something. They saw me first because I was up at the front case to get some more root beer from the bottles because the machines weren’t working with the power off. Everyone else was in the kitchen eating, so it looked like I was there by myself if you didn’t know better. These guys, the second they see me, they get what I call the “bully look.” I … I was bullied in middle school because I, um, developed early, you know? I “filled out,” my mom called it, and the boys in school, some of them would leer, and that was gross, but others would get this different look. It was like a mix of … I don’t know, of smugness and joy but in the worst way. Like they were saying “I’m going to hurt you and you’re not going to do anything.” You know, bully face. The grins were always bigger when they were in a group, and they hurt you more in a group, too. Well, this was a group, and they all had the same face, and I was instantly uneasy. They came in, and the fi
rst thing out of one guy’s mouth was, “Holy shit, check out the tits on Jill the Soldier,” and that was funny to the three other guys, and they all started laughing. Other rude things were said. I’m not, like, a prude, but this wasn’t about that. It was pretty damn clear I was being threatened, and I started to panic until I started remembering my martial arts stuff about when to fight and when not to fight, and that helped calm me down.
I could have called for the rest of the group, but part of me wanted to see if I could handle this. It’s hard to describe why, exactly, but I felt like this was my deal and the others didn’t need to take part. Slowly, I moved behind the register. I was figuring, if I moved quick they would move quick, so I moved slow and kept my mouth shut. Plus, I wanted something between me and them. The main guy comes up and leans against the register, and the three others close in around him. He said, “You gonna take our order, Jill? I’ll have the grilled breast and some tater tits.” This sent them all laughing, of course. I kept my mouth shut and my heart rate down. His friends kept up with the jokes, and I kept waiting. I knew eventually one of them was going to try to grope me and when he did I was going to break his arm. Finally, after three or four more jokes about my boobs, the main guy says, “Why aren’t you talking, Jill?” and I busted out the old, “When you can’t say anything nice …” but I said it really slow and deliberate. I wanted them to know I wasn’t scared even though my heart was beating pretty fast. The main guy was the first who realized I had insulted them, and he was the one who made the move. I think he was going for my braids, but I grabbed his arm under my left side and twisted really hard. His whole body moved in the direction of the twisting, just like in class, leaving his face right over the table, so with my free hand I punched the back of his head as hard as I could with my open hand and busted his nose on the counter. It was quicker and easier than I imagined it would be, and when I let go of his arm, he didn’t stagger back, he fell. And his friends stood there with their mouths open. At that point, Riley and Tom and Shelly and all of them came running from the back and the guys, their magic bully spell was broken, and they left. Sure, they threw a bunch of swear words my way and called everyone all sorts of names, but they knew I wasn’t scared and I was smarter than they were. To be honest, it was the first time I had ever gotten the better of a bully, and it felt really, really good.
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