Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

  "What's wrong?"

  "There's a fucking hole in the gas can."

  "Oh no, Ben…" She shook her head in disappointment.

  He picked it up at an angle so no more gas would spill out and sloshed it around to gauge how much was left. "Not much in it. Less than a quarter of what we had."

  "After all that?" She scowled at the prison door. "Where the hell is he?" Just as she made to pound on it, the door unlocked with a buzz.

  "Door's open," Demont said over the walkie. "Come on in."

  Lilian looked back over her shoulder. Ben shrugged. She pulled the door open and stuck her head in. "He's not here," she said, her voice sounding hollow.

  "Glad you made it," Demont said over the walkie. "We're running on fumes in here."

  "Where are you?" Ben asked.

  "Up in the control tower."

  "Aren't you gonna come down?" Lilian asked.

  "For your safety, it's best if I stay up here. I'm monitoring you on the security cameras. But you guys better get your butts in here quick, I see some nasties heading toward the gate."

  Ben shot a cautious glance behind them. He didn't see anything out there but he wasn't about to wait around for Garrote and his "nasties" to show up. He followed Lilian into the cool, dank, dimly-lit building. Several dead lay on the floor and against the walls, clearly in the process of fleeing when the park went into full meltdown. A generator rumbled somewhere inside. Likely beneath the rotunda, judging by the echo. Below it he could hear a vague vibrating hum he could feel in his fillings.

  Electricity, he thought. Lots of it.

  Lilian already stood just beyond the administration desk near the barred door to the prison interior, tapping a foot impatiently with her arms across her chest. She'd slipped her jean jacket back on against the chill. Ben hurried up to her and reached for the barred door leading to the cell block.

  "Don't touch the bars," Demont said. "Not unless you wanna get knocked out of your shoes."

  Ben drew his hand back quickly, spotting a copper wire curled over the bars. It ran between the two doors where the floor met the wall to the inner door, wrapped around the bars there and spooled into the dimly lit cell block.

  "You electrified the bars," he said.

  "Good eye. You see that broom handle over there by the desk?"

  Ben saw it leaning against the wall.

  "I got this," Lilian said, grabbing it in both hands like a weapon.

  "Easy now. Use it to flick the copper wire off the bars."

  Lilian did, as cautiously as she could manage. The hum Ben had heard since they'd entered the prison diminished, now coming only from beyond the inner door and inside the rotunda.

  "Great," Demont said. "Now come on through, the door's unlocked."

  Lilian stepped into the entryway. Ben followed her, the gas can sloshing against his hip. He pulled the door shut behind them.

  "Lilian, do you see the bent nail on the end of the broom handle? See if you can hook the wire back up onto the bars."

  Lilian tried a few times to snag the wire with the nail. It caught on the third attempt and she raised it delicately back to the closed door and lowered it gently onto the crossbar. Immediately the hum grew louder. Ben was close enough the hairs on his arms stood on end.

  "There was a ton of copper wire just lying around in C Block. I figure they must've stored it there to use elsewhere and never got around to it," Demont said.

  "That was lucky," Ben said.

  "I don't believe in luck. Now this next one's a little tougher. You have no idea how hard it was to do it with just two hands. You ever play Operation?"

  "Once when we were little," Lilian said with a sadistic grin. "Ben told me all the kids do it."

  He felt his cheeks burn as she laughed. The story wasn't true but Demont laughed along with her.

  "Way to go, Ben! But you're thinking of 'doctor.' Anyway, just keep the wire from touching the bars. And Ben, you open the door really carefully while she does. Soon as he's got the door open far enough you can let go of that wire but until then keep it steady or he'll get zapped, you got it?"

  "Gotcha," Lilian said. She slipped the broom under the wire and lifted it expertly off the crossbar. The hum diminished again.

  "Careful now. Keep it steady."

  Ben reached for the handle, eyeing the wire. A small movement in any direction would put it in direct contact with the metal bars and he'd be toast. "Please don't kill me," he said to her.

  "I won't. I don't need you haunting my ass."

  He wiped sweat from his eyes and grabbed the handle, twisted it and pulled the door open carefully. Lilian matched his movement with the pole, keeping the wire from striking any of the bars. But her arms quickly started to quiver from the strain.

  "I think we can get through," he said.

  "Good. My arms are killing me."

  She let the wire drop back onto the bar. The hum filled in the anxious silence as they stepped through, narrowly avoiding the wire.

  "Okay, now just tug the door closed with the pole and we're all good."

  Lilian pulled the door shut, its loud clang echoing throughout the massive circular cell block. She sighed heavily and laid the pole back against the wall.

  "Nice work," Demont said over the walkie.

  They turned to look at their electrified fortress. At the center of the Colosseum stood a guard tower. Three flights of metal grate stairs led up to an octagonal room about twenty feet from the scuffed cement floor, enclosed within tinted protective glass. From the four levels of cells surrounding the so-called Circle of Death—there had to be at least fifty cells per floor, which at two prisoners per cell would make four-hundred at capacity, although there wasn't likely to be even half as many ghosts, considering the total park tally had been just over three hundred—it would have been impossible for any of them to see into the tower, impossible to know when guards had been watching them.

  And at the moment, the cell block lived up to its name: like anywhere else in the park, the dead lay where they'd expired—it reminded Ben fleetingly of the game they used to play in kindergarten, when the teacher said "ashes, ashes, we all fall down," and all the kids would drop where they stood.

  It was clear Demont had kept himself busy while the park went to hell. He'd run copper wire around the bars of each cell on the first floor and up the stairs. Ben could see the wire trailing in and out of several cells on the second floor. He couldn't tell if the other floors had been wired but Demont had obviously had his hands full while they were out there trying to stay alive.

  The generator was larger than any he'd seen outside of a construction site, and orange cones had been placed around it. In here its rumble was so loud he could barely hear Demont talking over the walkie. His mother probably would have said the racket could "wake the dead."

  "Heyo, can you see me waving?"

  Demont stood at the top of the stairs, leaning out the door, waving down at them. The sun was so bright through the glass ceiling above it was almost as though it shone right through him.

  "Yep, we can see you," Ben said, waving back.

  "All right, just get that gas in the generator and get your butts up here."

  Demont opened the door for them as they reached the top of the three flights of stairs. He smiled and stepped back, allowing them to enter. "Welcome to the fishbowl," he said.

  A hexagonal off-white desk stretched around the perimeter. The rolling chairs had orange tweed fabric and burnished brass legs. Heavy green sea glass ashtrays lay in front of several chairs on the desk where old TV monitors had been mounted at intervals. The prison had been closed down in the mid-'90s after a door malfunction had instigated a riot which had ended in the deaths of seven inmates, three guards and the overnight physician. Ben assumed they had retrofitted the prison with new security monitors and cameras in the time between, and that Ghostland must have put the old stuff back in to give it a 1970s vibe. Either way, none of the monitors were on at the moment. Not tha
t they were necessary: the entire Colosseum was visible through the reinforced glass, as advertised.

  "Is there anyone else here?" Lilian asked.

  Demont scowled, closing the door behind them. "You mean ghosts or people?" Ben realized he wasn't wearing glasses. They were on the desk beside a folded pile of shiny silver fabric.

  "Either."

  "I haven't seen anyone living—at least not for very long—since this whole thing kicked off. I…" He paused. His Adam's apple bobbed as he considered it. "It's a long story. Where's everyone else? Did they—?"

  "They didn't make it."

  "I am so sorry to hear that," Demont said, flopping down in a swivel chair. "We lost a lot of good people here today. I found Lola, the woman you met at Guest Services…" He shook his head. "She was one of the happiest people you could ever meet. She'd just rescued three English bulldog puppies, always wanted to show me their pictures. I found her in the staff room, her wrists slit. She'd bled all over my lunch."

  "Sorry for your loss," Lilian said.

  "Thank you. We've all lost people today. The tragedy… it's unquantifiable."

  The chair squeaked and wobbled as Ben sat, sighing heavily, glad to be off his feet. "So now what? We just sit around and wait for someone to rescue us?"

  Lilian glared at him as she sat in the chair between him and Demont.

  "I think I saw cards in one of these drawers," Demont said.

  "Cards? We're gonna play Go Fish?"

  Demont shrugged. "Something to kill time."

  "Don't mind him," Lilian said. "He's got a bug up his ass about this place."

  "You think I like being stuck inside a prison?" Demont asked. "Oh, I found something you might be interested in." He crossed the room to where his glasses lay beside the pile of shiny silver fabric. He didn't pick it up, merely directed their attention to it.

  Lilian stood and approached him. "What is that?"

  "We call them keeper suits. I found it in a locker at Guest Services. I was thinking it might come in handy for one of us if that barrier doesn't hold for some—"

  He backed away as Lilian picked it up and let it drape. It looked like one of the silver suits Ben had seen at the gallows exhibit, the kind that crackled with static electricity when the ghosts had touched it.

  Lilian held the suit up, looking it over with obvious distaste. "How do we decide who gets it?"

  "You know, I would feel a lot better if one of you wore it. Seeing as it's my job to protect you from this place."

  "Not anymore," Ben said.

  Demont chuckled bitterly. "Yeah, I don't suppose I'll be getting paid this week, huh?"

  Rather than putting it to a vote or drawing straws, Ben suggested, "I think Lilian should wear it."

  She looked up from the suit with surprise. "Why me?"

  "Because you're—"

  He saw her fists clench on the material. "If you say because I'm a girl, I swear to God, Ben…"

  "I wasn't gonna say that," he replied, vaguely annoyed that she would even think it. "You're smarter than me. You've always been better with directions, with planning. If anyone's gonna get us out of here, it's you."

  "But you're better with close-range weapons," she said.

  Demont gave them a quizzical look. "Wait, how do you know that?"

  "Infinite Zombie," they both said.

  Lilian gave the shiny fabric a dubious look, obviously thinking it over. "If I wear it, you have to promise you'll get behind me when I tell you to, Ben."

  Ben nodded. "You're the boss." He had no intention of following the order. If it came down to one or the other of them, he'd already decided to put her life above his. He'd already died once. And the possibility of him dying inside Garrote House had always been likely. He'd known today might be his last day alive for weeks now. He'd come to terms with it. To destroy that house, to protect anyone else from suffering the way he had or worse, he'd always meant to put his life on the line.

  And if they made it out of this prison alive, he might still get his chance.

  "Promise me," Lilian said sharply.

  "Okay," he said. "I promise."

  "As far as I can tell, the park is running on the standby generator," Demont said as Lilian slipped her feet into the legs of the keeper suit. "There's still hot and cold water running in the fountains and washrooms and the exits are all secure. We'll know for sure if those big lights on the wall don't come on when the sun goes down, but hopefully we won't be here that long."

  Ben agreed with a vigorous nod.

  "Backup power means the Recurrence Field is still functioning, thank God. But that's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's keeping the spirits contained within the park. I saw a couple of them make a sprint for the outer wall—it didn't end well for them. Blasted right into oblivion. On the other hand, it's still amplifying the dead energy inside the park. That's why the bad guys were able to kill so many people in such a short span of time.

  "Another problem: the backup generator powers the main park program in the control room, but it looks like most or all of the ESPs are offline. That's why the ghosts are free to move around and how the virus keeps spreading. Amplified dead energy, unbound from restrictions, means bad news for the rest of us." He stressed this point with a dark smile before moving on. "Now the only way to prevent Garrote from chomping up every ghost in the park like Mr. and Ms. Pac-Man is to shut off the backup generator. But it's in the electrical building on the other side of a thirty-foot stone wall, and even if we could get to it, shutting it down might release all the ghosts into the outside world."

  "Damned if we do, damned if we don’t," Ben said.

  "That's a good way to put it."

  "So, we wait," Lilian said, zipping up the suit. It was bulky and looked a little awkward. She twisted back and forth. "How do I look?"

  "Good," Ben said a little too eagerly.

  "It doesn't make me look fat?"

  "Jeez, Lilian. Get a grip."

  "I'm just asking."

  Demont eyed them a moment. "What I'm trying to say is, the longer we wait here the more likely we are to attract Garrote's attention. He's searching for survivors. The more ghosts he can infect, the more eyes he has on the ground. You have to understand, this—" He waved a hand around expansively. "—what I've made here was always meant to be a temporary solution. The fact of the matter is, unless somebody outside happens to shut off the generator or tear down the damn wall, ain't nobody getting in here to save us. I hate to say it but we are on our own."

  "What if we go back to the control room?"

  Demont shook his head. "That's the first thing I tried. The whole building is locked down, not to mention heavily guarded. Garrote's got ghosts patrolling the entire area. There's no way he's gonna let us walk in there and shut everything off. That would mess up his plan."

  "Then we're screwed," Ben said.

  "Not necessarily."

  "Why not?"

  "It's still possible we could make a mad dash for Garrote House and get out before anyone even notices. See, this park lies on a series of underground maintenance tunnels—"

  "I thought you were gonna say a Native American burial ground," Ben said.

  Demont fixed him with a vaguely annoyed glare. "The main tunnels are wide enough to drive a truck through, so maintenance can get from one exhibit to the next quickly and easily without having to disrupt the guests."

  "That's smart," Ben said.

  "Yeah. The larger exhibits, like the prison, they each have their own entry portals. So, we get to the tunnel, we may have safe passage all the way to the maintenance hatch. We get out of the park, get the main power back on, trap those angry mother-suckers inside the exhibits. Maybe then we could find somebody to fix the program from the outside. Hack the system. Deactivate any malevolent spirits and wipe out the virus from the ones Garrote's program has already infected."

  The room fell silent as both Lilian and Ben considered the plan. "But how?" Lilian asked finally. "Even if w
e could make it to the house without Garrote finding us, we don't know the code to get out."

  Demont's eyes glimmered and he tented his fingers against his lips.

  "Why are you smiling?" Ben asked.

  "Because I know the door code," Demont said.

  GHOST OF A CHANCE

  LILIAN AND BEN considered Demont's plan while the man himself went downstairs to check on the generator.

  "I think he's right," Ben said. "We can sit around here while the generator runs out of gas or we can be proactive. Allison, Niko and Leonard—they died to find that code. Now we have it. We have it, Lilian. We can get out of here. We can escape."

  Lilian still couldn't believe Demont had changed his mind after they'd come so far and survived so much to get here, a place of relative safety. She'd put so much hope in this sanctuary and now he wanted to leave. It didn't make sense to her. "We're safe here," she said.

  "Maybe. But for how long?"

  That was the question. How long until someone from the outside world came looking for them? Hours? And how long until somebody decided they should call the police? Then what? The cops would try the gate and find it impenetrable. Even if they could get through with acetylene torches or battering rams, or climb over it, what good would their weapons do against Garrote and his army? Even if they sent for a helicopter, there could be hundreds of survivors hiding out here. It would take hours to get everyone out in small groups. Could they survive the whole night inside the prison if they had to? Would the gasoline last that long?

  She heard Demont whistle something tuneless down below. As she looked out the window a bright red streak flickered briefly on the glass. She dismissed it as an errant reflection and shook her head, trying to focus her thoughts.

  "I don't know, Ben. I just have a really bad feeling about that house. Ever since it came through town… since you died and came back… I've been scared of literally everything. And now I look back on it, all that time I was scared for nothing. I've never been this close to death before, Ben. Ever in my life. I should be paralyzed by fear. And somehow, I keep running. But I can't run much longer. I'm tired. I just wanna crawl into a corner and sleep for a year. So please, just… let's wait here twenty minutes. Just twenty more minutes. Then we can go if you still want to. I just need to take a break for a bit, okay? Please?"