I told Tom and Shelly and Riley and the rest of them what happened, and suddenly I’m a hero. I was getting all sorts of pats on the back, and my group was taking turns telling me what a badass I was, but Riley was really quiet. I asked her what was up and she said, “First what happened in the shelter and now this? Things are going to get bad before we get out of here.” Tom said, “We should stick together then,” and Riley was like, “Yes we should, but, it’s got to be more than that. We’ve got to recruit.” She laid out what we should do in the restaurant, and we talked about it for a long time, but basically, this is what she meant—she wanted to get as many folks from the restaurant together and kind of make it a base, and I said I could probably get the costumed characters together, too, and we shouldn’t meet in the Muscle Man Grill, but in the costumed character lounge in the back of the false cityscape. My thought was that place was big, it was more or less hidden, and you could access seven or eight different locations in the Hero Haven pretty much in secret. Everyone thought that was a good idea but that we had to move fast. The plan was Riley and Tom and Shelly and I would head back toward the center of the park, and when we saw people we knew, we would tell them there was a big meal at the characters’ lounge and to go there now. Braden and Allie would stay behind and actually cook something up. They had the buffet stuff for corporate events; the Muscle Man Grill was one of the twelve restaurants in the park that could set up for what we called “mass feeding,” but what that meant was corporate events or parties, so they were going to move that stuff over to the lounge and start cooking. Once we got a group together, Riley thought we could take everyone who was at that meeting, and they could recruit their friends, and it would go from there.
She was really smart because she said what we would do is form a preliminary council. The six of us, this was our deal, she said, so if there was anyone who seemed like they were going to cause problems, we could vote them out. We would make a decision and then, in private, go tell them that they were … that it wasn’t going to work out and they should seek shelter somewhere else. We would try that and see how it went, you know? The idea behind it was, what if those four guys showed up at the meeting and wanted to eat our food and take shelter from us? I remember Tom saying, “Fuck that!” Sorry, Mom, if you’re reading this, but that’s what he said. He was really shaken up by those guys. He wanted to go find them, but I asked him, “What would you do then? How would you hurt them?” and that calmed him down. I learned that from a friend of mine, who was a Buddhist in my dorm at UT. She said, if someone wants to commit an act of violence, walk them through it, and once they see the consequences, most of the time they’ll back down. It worked that day. Not so much later, though. God, I’m talking so much and I’m off on so many tangents! You’re going to edit this so I don’t sound completely stupid, right? Oh my God.
OK, so we headed back to the main part of the square, and immediately it was clear something was wrong. There was a big crowd on one side of the Golden Road, and they were all gathered around something. It turns out that idiot guy who was climbing on the buildings pretending to be Batman had fallen while trying to climb down, and he had hurt himself really badly. I was to the back, so I didn’t see it myself, but what I heard was he hit his head, and I guess first aid was, like, not going to help. He had liquid coming out of his ears, which means there’s significant brain damage, someone told me. I could hear a couple of people yelling, one was screaming, “Help him,” and another was yelling, “There’s nothing I can do,” that sort of thing but with more swear words, and other people were pushing to see, and it was just sort of an ugly scene. Then this guy, he starts pushing his way through the crowd, really aggressively. He pushed past me and hit my elbow with something metal. It turned out to be one of those big metal stanchions that hold the ropes up so people can get in line, you know? He pushed his way through the crowd and lifts the stanchion over his head, and I hear people start screaming. You can guess, right? It took all of ten seconds for him to walk through the crowd and crush not-Batman’s head in with that big metal pole. Just like that. Everyone shut up and watched him, and, even from the back, I heard him mutter, “Someone had to do it.” Then he walked away, and nobody followed him or questioned him or nothing. He left the stanchion on the ground, and I heard it clang—it was the loudest thing anyone could hear—and there was this trail of blood coming off it. It was … look, we’re talking about Brock Hockney here, I figured you’d have guessed by now, so I don’t want to make it sound like anything he did was good. He was a fucking monster, sorry, Mom. But of all the terrible things he ended up doing, that was probably the most understandable, you know? Not-Batman, I never learned his name, if he was hurt as bad as everyone was saying and he was going to die anyway and was in a lot of pain, someone sort of did have to do it. He was suffering, you know? I didn’t walk up to see the aftermath. I don’t even know what happened to his body. He … he deserved better as a person, I guess is what I want to say. Please, don’t make a stupid joke about “the death he deserved” in a stupid Batman voice, OK. I’m being serious.
Whatever the, like, morals of the situation, seeing that lit a fire under my ass, and I had found seventeen people I knew in about half an hour and told them to get to Hero Haven and what we were doing. Nobody asked me any questions. They just went. They were scared, and I think they could tell I was getting scared, too. Plus, this is hard to describe, but everything just felt really “off.” There was no one in charge, no structure, no phones. I mean, I’m not glued to my phone, but I check Facebook and Instagram once every two hours or so, and when you aren’t connected it’s just … weird. Recruiting wasn’t hard. Riley and Tom and Shelly, they had the same sort of reaction from the people they talked to. All the clocks in the park were stopped, so we couldn’t say, “Meet us at 9:30” or whatever, so people trickled in to the characters’ lounge, and we had over fifty people present when we started talking.
Riley, she wasn’t what I’d call a good friend of mine, but I knew her well enough to say that girl really stepped it up at that meeting. She was amazing. She was clear in what we wanted to do, which was start a group that could protect its members. She said, if you have friends who you want to have in the group, you have two hours to find them and bring them here and that after sundown, things would start to get hairy, that’s what she said, hairy. She said get them here and we would work out where to sleep and where to eat and what space belonged to us and how to keep it safe, and everyone agreed. The story of Hockney killing that kid with the stanchion, that had spread like wildfire, and folks were understandably scared. Then along comes Riley with a plan for sleep and food and safety right away, and everyone jumped at the chance. I did notice that one of the four of those guys who had bullied me at the Muscle Man Grill was there, but he left quietly when he saw who was running the meeting, and we didn’t have to tell him to leave. Turned out, we should have at least talked to him. He ended up in the Pirate Cove.
See, what happened was word of this group and what Riley and the rest of us were doing spread almost as fast as news of what happened to not-Batman. It spread the old-fashioned way, too, which means it became a game of telephone, I think. People may have … what’s the word, embellished a bit. In the two hours between when the meeting ended and when we “closed enrollment,” that’s what Riley called it, we had a visit from Mr. Garliek, who was still sure he was in charge of something. He said we didn’t need to form this group, that the park was safe and that he was trying to get everyone to the Dream Pop Star Amphitheater so he could tell us all what to do. That went over like a lead fucking balloon. Tom kind of laughed at him, and I told him what had happened to me in the restaurant, that I would have been assaulted had I been in there by myself. He said everyone would be safe, the disaster manual had protocol for this and yadda yadda. We didn’t take him seriously, and it was Riley who hit him with what he had done in the shelter. She said something like, “If we don’t come with you, are you going to kill us in th
e dark like you did that other girl?” and that shut him up. We didn’t hear from him much after that.
But what we did see was that the people at the meeting went to find their friends, and they were finding that their friends didn’t want to leave their section of the park. Apparently our story was not unique. Someone in each section of the park knew where the food was and got their friends together, and even if they weren’t organized, they had gravitated to their own section. That was fine with Riley, because she said, we want people who will fight for themselves and their friends if they have to. What we didn’t want was a lot of freeloaders, that’s what she called them, a bunch of freeloaders eating our food and running when it was time to stand up and protect ourselves, which is what we were convinced was going to happen. Personally, I was still in love with the idea that your friends standing up with you would run off all the threats we were going to face. I got my heart broken on that one.
OK, that was stupid, too. Just make it sound like I was normal there, OK?
I finally, finally found some different clothes in a locker, but I decided to keep on my Soldier Jill beret because of the rain. Keep your head covered, you know? All of Private Pummel’s platoon wore berets, so there were a ton of them in the characters’ lounge, and people just started putting them on. I hesitate to say they were our uniform, because people wore them to keep the rain off their heads, not to identify themselves, but just so you know, most of us wore berets, and that might be my fault. Anyway, things kind of took shape fast, and it seemed like, in the early stages, things were going to be OK. Braden and Allie were in charge of food distribution, and they were good at it. Tom and Shelly and I figured out the bathroom situation, which wasn’t pleasant. It was a bucket system, OK? The less said about that, the better. Also, most of the toilets for visitors and employees had backed up during the storm. The less said about that, the better. Riley was sort of the general, in charge of it all. She sent some folks to the other restaurants and snack bars to gather up food, she met with Braden and Allie to figure out what would keep and what we had to eat right away, we figured out water and how to ration it and we figured out where to sleep, all before it got dark, which was pretty impressive, thank you very much.
It was Tom who thought that a patrol would be a good idea, to send five or six people out every so often just to have a look around. It was Tom who talked about what we should call ourselves. The idea was most of our section was about superheroes, but we had this great comic book store in the middle of the Hero Haven, and it had absolutely anything you’d want to read. It was weird because they featured all the comics that had characters in the park, but you didn’t have to look too hard for niche items or some really weird stuff. I remember one time a couple of us played a game to see who could go in with ten dollars and come out with the weirdest piece of literature, drawn or otherwise. My friend Jackson won when he found some Japanese tentacle porn, which means they sell that stuff in FantasticLand. That’s pretty far out there. The reason it had such niche stuff, rumor had it, was that Johnny Fresno told this owner of a great comic book store in Los Angeles that he would have autonomy if he opened the store in the park, and the guy agreed, which is why you have the Private Pummel and all the kids books in one part of the store and then whatever in the bulk of the store. The store had the FantasticLand Exclamation Point logo outside, but when you go inside the first thing you saw was this giant sculpture of the character Deadpool from Marvel comics coming out of the wall. It was really big. You couldn’t miss it. So much so that a lot of people would say, “Meet me under the Deadpool if you get lost,” so that’s where the name came from. Deadpool was also a really rude and caustic guy in the comics, which is why Tom suggested the name. Some people said, “How about the Justice League or the Avengers?” and Tom said “The Deadpools,” and everyone was like, yeah, that’s it. Tom was good at stuff like that.
So the first night, everything is going better than you would have thought. Some people are playing cards, other people are just talking, and there’s a real community atmosphere in the characters’ lounge. Nobody had gone to their assigned places to sleep because no one was tired. Everyone was kind of juiced. We had candles lit, and there was a very soft glow in the room. It was after dinner when Tom picked his group to go out on patrol.
Real quick, how much of this have you heard? I don’t like going over it if I don’t have to.
OK, Jill, deep breath. The Hero Haven, it’s not that big. It’s probably four to six city blocks of walkable space, so it was a no-brainer that Tom and the rest of them should have been back in less than fifteen minutes. We started getting nervous at twenty, and just when Riley and I were going to get a group together to go looking for them, we heard an explosion outside. A couple of us threw open the door and saw a firework exploding, which was kind of unexpected because it was still raining. Not hard, but kinda drizzling. I also remember it was really dark and everyone was having a hard time seeing what was going on. What we were able to see was a bright light and what looked like a flare. Later we found out it was some sort of flare gun. Let me back up, the second we opened the door, the flare went off. What we saw was that Brock Hockney guy and two of his friends standing, each with a candle. Tom was there, and he was on his knees with his hands tied in front of him on a wooden block. At least, that’s what it looked like.
I’m going to remember this as long as I live. Brock held the flare above his head and yelled, “You think you’re safe. You’re not.” Then one of his friends made this movement, and we heard Tom scream. Just like that the flares go out, and all you can hear is Tom screaming and screaming and people inside the lounge are screaming too, and there’s lots of jostling and people scrambling around. It was like the shelter when the power went out, but worse. It was more frantic. Thank God no one knocked over any of the candles because the next thing I’m able to make out is Riley holding Tom. By that point, someone grabbed one of the flashlights and turned it on, and we all saw what happened. They had cut off Tom’s hands. He had blood gushing out of both wrists and … nobody knew what to do. There was a first aid kit but it had Band-Aids and heat packs. What the fuck were we supposed to do with those? I ran over and grabbed Tom’s head and was whispering whatever I could think of to him, but he was already really cold. I was whispering, “I know it hurts,” and “It’s OK baby,” and stuff like that, but like I said, no one knew what to do. God damn it, all we could do was watch him bleed and scream and cry. At some point, someone got the idea to stop the bleeding by making tourniquets out of belts, but by the time two people got their belts off and got them around Tom’s wrists, he had lost consciousness. Maybe that was good.
It wasn’t until the morning that we noticed the stanchion. That monster left it, there like some fucking calling card. Tom’s hands were … on top of it, and one of them, one of the Pirates had taken the time to make the middle finger stick up. There wasn’t even any blood. The rain had washed it away. All the blood was all inside, on us.
I … he lived another nine hours or so. During that time, we had folks running around trying to find anyone with medical training, but everyone was in their tribes by then. There was no one to help. Tom would occasionally make noise and struggle around, but he never opened his eyes. There has not been a day since then when I didn’t think of him. Mostly I hope he wasn’t in pain. I … we tried things to help but we only hurt him more, I think. No one knew what they were doing. I can’t tell you how bad it was other than to say I’ve never felt so helpless, but so in need of help. We were grasping onto anything. Someone would have an idea and say, “We have to put his feet up, so he doesn’t go into shock,” and no one had a better idea so we put his feet up, and he would get worse, and then someone would say “we need to get him water,” so seven people would go and get him water, and there would be these bottles of water lying around. Someone even convinced us if we could get the Internet back up we could go to WebMD and figure out what we needed to do. It was that kind of desperate.
>
We were still missing another one of the guys from the patrol. I heard later they went and joined the circus, as it were. Tough to say. I don’t really care. I had something else on my mind, something bad. Riley felt it too and she was, once again, the leader we needed. When the sun came up but before Tom died, she went into the comic book store on her own and grabbed a real sword off the wall. Everyone gathered for breakfast, like we had talked about the night before, and we all looked like a bunch of drowned rats, wet and tired and miserable, and I remember when the sun came up you could see just how much of Tom’s blood had gotten everywhere. Riley went to the center of the room, took the sword, and drove it hard into one of the tables. It stuck there, wobbling a little bit. She said what we all were thinking.
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