I can tell you what I think I saw because it was very dark except for the torches, but Sam looked like he was going to cry. He chose his shoulder as the place for the Pirates to put the mark, and the other boys gathered around him. They were saying things like, “It’s going to hurt, brother,” and “Brace yourself,” and most of all, “After this, you are with us.” They were all talking near his head and … this sounds silly, but it’s like they were all giving him a hug. One of the boys took a rolled-up piece of cloth out of his pocket and asked if Sam wanted to bite on it, and he nodded. Then the leader came and said, very loudly, “We welcome our brother, Sam, into the Pirates. He will fight for us, we will fight for him.” Then they all spoke in unison and said, “A Pirate never quits!” That’s when the screaming started.
They held Sam very tightly, from what I could see, and his screams turned into whimpers, and he slowly started to calm down. I’ve had people ask me if I heard a sizzling sound or something like that, and I didn’t. All I heard was Sam and the crackle of the fire. The second it was over, I started to very much worry about myself. If that was what they did to people that were in their group, what would they do to me? I made sure I could still get out of my ropes if I needed to, and I could. No one had noticed I wasn’t tied up very well.
The leader handed the piece of metal back to another boy, who put it in the fire. Then he told Sam what else he had to do. He said, “Now that you’ve felt pain, you must inflict it. This girl is scared, Sam. She ran away, and she hid and those are two things a Pirate never does.” He said because she was afraid of pain, that pain would find her or something like that. Then he whispered something to Sam, and a couple of the boys grabbed Adrienne, who immediately started to cry and say, “No, please don’t.” I don’t know if she looked at me. It was too dark. I can only imagine her fear. She was wet, away from home, in the dark, and strange boys were pulling her into the middle of a circle and promising her pain. I can’t think of many things more terrifying, and I knew my time was coming if I didn’t do something.
I remember Sam had the brand and he walked toward her. She was on her knees, and three boys were holding her as she sobbed. I don’t remember her saying words. They were more noises and sobs. Sam said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Which side of your face do you want it?” and all the Pirates started to cheer. When they started to cheer, I let my ropes drop. I didn’t move, because the hands of the two boys responsible for me, they were still there, but I was ready to run, and I had a sense of where I wanted to go. I was not the fastest runner, but in the dark, if you know where you’re going and your enemies do not, well, that will make all the difference, will it not? But I wanted to see what happened to Adrienne and if there was any opportunity to help her.
By now, she was crying and, what’s the word, hysterical. She was not making sense and wasn’t fighting, so it was easy for the boys to push her head into the mud so Sam could do the deed and join their club. I remember, very clearly, that he paused a bit as he walked up to her with the piece of metal, and when he put it to her face, this time, I did hear a sizzling noise, and it didn’t stop. Sam sort of jerked his hand around and then let go of the metal and it was stuck in Adrienne’s cheek. He started yelling and saying, “Brock, Brock, it’s stuck!” and jumping backward as Adrienne screamed and screamed and pulled at the metal piece sticking out of her face. The boys let her up, and the piece of metal, the brand, had gone through her cheek and into her mouth. It was still burning her tongue. I have thought about it, and what must have happened was she screamed and the brand must have gone through the soft part of her face and missed the teeth all together until it was in her mouth, burning her. I cannot imagine the pain or the panic she must have felt.
Everyone was in shock, and there were many people who ran toward Adrienne, including one of the boys who was supposed to be looking after me. I thought about punching the other one, but he was too wrapped up in Adrienne and her torture to even think about me. I turned on my heel and ran into the dark. I knew there was a restaurant fifty yards or so away and beyond that was a small shack used for storage. I was able to get into the shack by very quietly breaking a window and climbing in, and that’s where I stayed until there was the first trace of light. Then I opened the door and ran as fast as I could to the center of the park where the Exclamation Point was, and then I kept running. I ran until I found my new friend Jeremy and I burst into tears telling him what I had seen. He was kind to me and I’ve never been so thankful for kindness in my life.
INTERVIEW 9: ELVIS SPRINGER
Security Manager at Fantastic Future World, Leader of the Robots.
We were having a great time until Cristobal showed up.
The kids in Future World, we’re a pretty tight group. In the Science Dome, for some reason, seven employees are stationed at the entrance and exit to the ride, and then there are a couple safety and maintenance guys whose job it is to make sure everyone stays in their pods and nothing goes wrong while the ride is going. That’s a dozen or so people whose job is to watch this machine that entertains guests. There’s a lot of downtime, so they get to know each other, you know? It doesn’t take long for coworkers to become friends and then they start hanging out during their off-hours. The whole section was like that. It was a constant, fun soap opera to watch these kids come through and fight and fall in love and get in Twitter beefs or whatever they called it. None of them were shy about introducing themselves so I knew everyone. I’m a people person. You can tell.
What you’ve heard is probably pretty accurate. After things went bad in the shelter, the most popular thing to do was go to your section of the park. You had some couples who were dating or people who had good friends in other sections, and they would sometimes end up in a different section, but by and large, everyone stuck to where they were comfortable. And that just makes sense. But Fantastic Future World, that was different. A few stragglers aside, it was forty or so of my favorite people. That’s what I would say when I was on the job. One of them would nudge me as they passed by or yell at me when I was on break, and I would always go, “There goes my favorite person in the park.” I don’t play favorites. They were all my favorite, and I was sort of honored when they all started looking to me to solve problems. See, I’d worked at the park for eight years, which is an eternity for some of these kids fresh out of high school. Man, I’ve seen it all. I saw puke and blood and more puke and lost kids and teenagers screwing on the rides and puke and old ladies passing out. The job always kept me on my toes, but my favorite part was hanging out with these kids.
Now, I want to get something off my chest, and then I’ll get into it, OK? If I’m a security guard, I bet you’re wondering why me and the other guys and gals in my department didn’t do anything when we first started hearing about the violence. It’s a natural thing to wonder about, and I’ve got a couple of answers for you. First, the park is big. I mean, really big. You can scream your lungs out in one section and they won’t hear you in another, plus the buildings have a way of swallowing sound. Plus, a lot of what we were hearing sounded like rumor. I’m not the type to go looking for trouble, but I’ll take a good swing at it if it comes in my direction, you know? The second thing was, I inherited a shit-ton of responsibility once things went tits-up at the shelter. That Garlic guy, whatever his name is, he was supposed to be in charge, and it was clear by the way he acted and the stuff we heard about him that he wasn’t up to the job. Scratch that, if everything I heard was true he was too stupid and full of himself to lead both hands to find his ass. Bottom line is you’ve got no structure, a huge area, no power, scared kids looking to you, and really no incentive to stick your neck out. At some point you make the calculation that it’s easier to play defense and stop folks from hurting you than it is to stop what’s already going on. It might sound a touch cowardly, but there you go. That’s the answer. That make sense?
OK. So after the shelter we start trickling back to Fantastic Future World, and everyone’s gre
eted with open arms. There’s this big courtyard right off the main entrance where most people go to wait in line for the Star Slammer and Shoot the Shrieker rides. All the kids called it the “Big S.” They’re kids. What you gonna do? When I walked into the Big S, there were already about six or seven kids on the second floor of the courtyard, and they were yelling for me to come up. Once I got up there, they immediately had all sorts of issues. One of them thought she broke her nose, another lost his glasses, a third had really sensitive skin and the rain and the wet was a problem. I said, “Not broken but bloody, find some glasses at the gift shop near the bridges, and toughen up a bit and hang out up here where it’s dry.” All of these problems seemed huge to these kids, but they were nothing we couldn’t handle at first. A couple of the kids who were a bit … how do I want to put this … whose mom and dad may have taken care of them a little too much, they were starting to get weepy. I heard a lot of, “I need to call my mom,” and “My mom will be freaking out,” but of course what could you do? No phones, no power, no nothing. Best I could do was to get us all together in one place. I wanted to make sure anyone from our group who came looking for us would find us, so some of the kids hung out in the public area of the park, and I moved the other kids who were there into the Shoot the Shrieker ride, which was shut down and dark, but I knew there was a spot with scaffolding that had skylights in the maintenance area. Most rides have a place where maintenance folks can go in case the power goes out, which happens more often than you’d think. One time on the Star Slammer, we had a major power outage, and it stuck people on the ride for twenty-five minutes. That might not seem like a long time, but try it hanging upside down. [Laughter] Anyway, then I told the kids, “Gather supplies. We’re going to hang out here for a while.” And we did. It was dry, it was isolated, it was good for that number of kids, and it was a short climb to the roof where we could see all the way past the big Exclamation Point in the center of town. Not to pat myself on the back, but it was as close to a perfect setup as we were likely to find, and I thought I had everything taken care of.
Now I’m back where I started. We were kind of having a great time. We had light during the day, all the food and drink we wanted, we even busted into some of the beer from the Future World Gravity Grill, and I swear, some of those kids hadn’t touched alcohol before, but they were having fun that night. We had a talent show, and the kids quit bitching about their phones every five minutes. It was great. During the day, we hung out, we played cards, and we always had folks patrolling the Big S and other folks gathering supplies like water and such. By the time the third or fourth day rolled around, I was starting to think, “What’s taking them so long?” I knew that some of the Mole Men, they weren’t the Mole Men then but that’s what we called them later, and I knew a few of them had set out into the forest surrounding the park, and from up on the roof we could see that everything was flooded beyond belief. I mean, you don’t really get a sense of how trapped we were until you get up on that roof and saw all the water around the park. It was everywhere but I still thought rescue would be coming pretty soon. But the other thing I could see up on the roof of that ride was all the planes flying past us and absolutely nothing else going on. It’s not like we could see to the highway, but I could tell nothing was moving out there. I sort of thought, in the back of my head, that we might be there a while, but I didn’t let on. There would have been panic.
So the third or fourth day or whatever, we run into Cristobal. This really fun dude named Jeremy Neal, he was out hauling food for the night when this kid runs into him. To hear Jeremy tell it, he was babbling and talking about terrible stuff that was going on. Terrible stuff. He brought Cristobal to me since I was the resident fixer, and I took him into my office, and he told me the whole story about the Pirates and the Deadpools and the girl getting her face branded and all and it sounded really bad. But that’s the other end of the park. There was no trouble in my place. We were keeping to ourselves and having a good time. It didn’t track that other people couldn’t get along just as well as we were getting along. I mean, how hard is it to hang out with friends, eat a bunch of free food, and wait for the cavalry? According to Cristobal, it was really damn hard. He was making it sound like some third-world hellhole where they chop off your head for eating meat on Saturday or whatever. It spooked me, so I figured we needed a bit more information. I mean, we hadn’t even been to other sections of the park. No need, no desire. I knew the park, and Karen, who worked with me on the security beat and had been on the job a couple months, she was getting to know the park, so we figured we would take a look around, see what we could see.
I told Cristobal to keep his trap shut until we figured out what was going on, and of course he didn’t. By the time we were getting ready to leave the next day, we had a full-blown game of “panic telephone” on our hands. Girls were asking me if the Pirates were raping anyone who went west of the Exclamation Point, and one kid came up and said we needed weapons and had started tearing big chunks off the Shoot the Shrieker ride to make the most ineffective clubs I had ever seen. I told everyone to calm down, we were in the information-gathering phase, and to sit tight until we get back. One kid yelled, “What if you don’t come back?” and I yelled back, “Then do whatever the hell you want!” and everyone laughed at that. It was a nervous laugh, but I took it. Once we were clear, I told Karen what we were really up to, which was to go find the riot locker. I haven’t told this to anyone yet, so you’re getting the exclusive, pal.
I was looking for guns. Of course, we don’t carry guns in the park. That would be stupid. We carry pepper spray and handcuffs and a small club if we want it, but it’s made of shitty wood and is no good for anything other than looking like you’re carrying a club. If what Cristobal was saying was even half right, there was danger coming, and I wanted the option of threatening to shoot someone if that’s what it came to. You threaten most people with a loaded gun and they turn tail pretty fast, that’s where my head was at. All the guns in the park were in the riot locker, and the riot locker was in the Fairy Prairie, which was south of where we were. That’s where we started. We took off just after breakfast and walking through an empty Fantastic Future World was … I don’t know. I want to use the word “stirring,” but I don’t think that’s right. It changed the way I looked at the park. Every minute, I mean every single minute I’m working, there are people everywhere and you’re never far away from an employee. Also, as a security guy, I’m watching for certain things like sudden movements that look like a fight, or smokers, or people running who shouldn’t be running. Without the people around, the facades were really obvious, and every little crack was huge. The place was just a place, and it was sad but not in a depressing way. It was sad in a way that made me wish people were back here. What’s a theme park without people enjoying it? Well, whatever that is, that’s what I was walking through. Karen thought it pretty amazing and pulled out this little sketch pad she kept in her back pocket and sat right down and started sketching out a few of the details. I let her do that for about five minutes before I looked over her shoulder. She wasn’t the best artist, but man, she nailed it. She caught the beauty and the sadness and everything. She said she was going to post the sketch on Instagram later once the Wi-Fi came back up. I don’t know what happened to the picture.
We get to the Fairy Prairie, and it’s crickets. There’s nothing happening. Later, I learned where everyone was but there was no one we could see, so we waltzed right into the office under Wings and Things and into the security station. The door was wide open, which made me nervous, and when we went in, it was clear right from the first step that the place had been ransacked. There wasn’t a gun or a bullet or a uniform or a club or a can of pepper spray or anything in that station, which was weird because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get in the locker. You need a special key and security clearance that would have been shut down without power, but someone had been there, and the guns were gone, and my stomach was in
knots. I knew this was sort of a game changer. Not only were there no guns for us, but someone had thought far enough ahead to grab all the guns and probably wasn’t planning on sitting on them for very long. Karen agreed with me that this was a bad deal.
We headed across the Fairy Prairie to the big Exclamation Point and there was nothing there but water. Lots of water. I told Karen, let’s go to the Pirates and work our way north to the World’s Circus, but she was getting a case of the creeps and wasn’t really interested. I told her it was OK, we could look out for each other. She didn’t want to but she also didn’t want to let me down. We kind of had a thing going. When you take shelter from a major storm with someone, it tends to tear down walls, you know? I have been single since my divorce a few years ago, and Karen, she was in a relationship, but she told me it wasn’t that serious, and we really clicked. We sort of hooked up in the shelter and after that we got some alone time in the park. Not a lot, but enough to get to know each other. It was really nice to have someone looking out for you, watching your back in a bad situation. Like I said, it tore down walls. I’m glad, too, because the chances of me landing a girl like Karen outside of the park, that’s pretty damn slim. She was out of my league, brother. Big time.
We weren’t the only ones. A lot of kids were … not coupling off, but just sort of free and grabby with their coworkers. I know for a fact there was not a lot of straight-up sex, because I heard a lot of complaints that there wasn’t a gift shop in the park that carried condoms. I asked one kid about it and he said, “I’m horny, not stupid,” and I told him, “That’s the same thing,” and he said, “Don’t worry. There won’t be any knocked-up girls on your watch,” and we had a good laugh about it, but there’s something to that. These kids needed a release, really, so I wouldn’t have blamed them if they were going at it like bunnies, but what I heard was there was a lot of other stuff, but not that one thing. Like that one kid said, horny, not stupid. In a way, I was sort of proud of them.
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