Defy the Dark

Carrie Ryan Almost Normal

It was stupid of us and we knew it. The news said we had a few more days before the dead made their way this far south, and Wylie was the one to suggest we have one last blowout. The roads were too clogged to leave town and everyone’s parents were freaking out about how to secure their houses, so it wasn’t hard to sneak away once night fell.

All the restaurants were closed and everywhere else was packed with panic. It was Sarah who saw the lights down the hill and made the decision for us. “The coasters are still running,” she said. And sure enough, when I squinted my eyes up tight, I could see the streaks of cars sailing over the humps and ridges of the monstrous metal serpents writhing along the horizon.

The amusement park was still charging admission, which we all agreed was pretty stupid, but what else would we spend our money on, anyway? Almost overnight, currency became useless as, before the military hit town, people just broke into stores and took what they wanted. Apparently no one thought about breaking into the amusement park. That was one of the strangest aspects of the whole thing: the rules that persisted and the ones that were quickly lost.

My family was no exception to jettisoning inexpeditious rules, even though I know it bothered my mom an awful lot. I remember that first morning hearing my parents arguing about how they’d get enough food to stock up the pantry, and my father was telling my mom they had to get to Costco with the minivan and fight their way inside.

There were bodies piled up outside the store, she’d told him. They’d been shot by packs of soccer moms who’d taken control of the place and were only doling out food to people they knew.

“It’s a good thing Connor was an all-state keeper this year,” my father told her, and that was that. We got a full car of food because in the semifinal games of the state championship, I’d guessed their star forward would fake left and shoot high center. I’d been right and blocked it.

And here I was, no one caring about trivialities like high school soccer anymore because everything in our world was falling apart except for these roller coasters. As kids, this place had been our Mecca. During the summer, Sarah, Bart, Wylie, and me would spend every waking moment trying to convince our parents to drive us out here, swearing we’d take on any chore imaginable just for the chance to spend a day sticky with sweat and cotton candy, standing in line for the moment when our hearts would race loud and hard.

It was our own kind of rapture, the rides so fast they’d strip away all layers and leave us bare until the car came skidding back into the wheelhouse for the next group of kids to worship.

Though none of us said it, that’s what we were looking for: we thought we wanted to forget the crushing imminence of the end of our world, the dead walking toward us with a slow and steady determination.

But really we wanted to recognize the end of the mundane: unreciprocated crushes, failed tests, blank college applications sitting in a drawer waiting. These things that had once been so all-encompassing but were now rendered moot.

The park was emptier than we’d ever seen it before, which made sense with everything going on in the world. People were out looting stores for food and weapons, but there was nothing to take from this place. Besides, I think most people liked the idea that something could still be going on as it had before. You could see the lights of the coasters from nearly anywhere in town, and staring at the spinning and whirling of them almost made us forget about the truth of our new reality.

Our little group wasn’t the only one that had been drawn to the park that night. We stood in line for the Tower of Doom behind a slew of kids from the class below us, and we saw a few graduates attempting to bribe one of the Western bar slingers to tap a keg for them.

Beyond that there were several families trying to pretend that spending the night in an amusement park before the end of everything familiar made the most sense in the world. I had a hard time watching them all, kids’ eyes so bright with excitement over the heady combination of missing bedtime and getting access to the rides after hours, and the parents trying not to shatter under the strain.

“How many of them know they’re not going to make it?” Wylie asked, nodding his chin toward a family hovering by one of the maps to choose their next ride.

Sarah slipped her hand into mine. But it was too late. Already Bart and Wylie were turning it into a game, muttering “lunch” every time they collectively voted that a pack of strangers would soon become food for the dead.

Except we weren’t in the amusement park that night to remember that everything was falling apart, we were there trying to remember that once it had all been held together by something indefinable. Maybe we wanted to prove we weren’t friends just because we shared a second-period class or sat at the same table together at lunch but that there was something deeper bonding us and we wanted to hold on to that until the very end.

It was Sarah’s idea to ride the Screaming TerrorCoaster, and we joked about the name of it while we stood in line. Behind us, Bart and Wylie played their game of picking winners and losers in the impending apocalypse, but that didn’t matter as much to me because Sarah still had her hand in mine.

I began to wonder when she’d have to let go and if she could feel the sweat I was sure was gathering in my palms and slicking the webbing between my fingers. If she noticed, she didn’t seem to mind as the cars rumbled into the platform, disgorging their contents and sitting empty for more.

When we got to the front of the short line, it ended up perfectly with Sarah and me in the front car and Bart and Wylie behind us. As the operator locked the safety bar into place, I put my hand on Sarah’s knee.

She didn’t even glance at me, but she also didn’t make me move it.

That first trip down the rails was wind and rush, screaming and adrenaline, and the entire time my fingers gripped the contours of Sarah’s leg as the edge of her skirt fluttered up in the night air.

It was almost more than my body could handle, and when the car slid back into the wheelhouse, I found myself shaking as if I might crack apart. I wanted to rip Sarah free and run with her down the stairs into a dark corner and push her against the wall.

When the ride jerked to a stop, she turned to me with her hair wild around her face and her eyes glistening. This is how I wanted my world to end: here with her and the night sky and the sounds of the park roaring loud.

I didn’t want to go home to where my parents had boarded up every window and cut away the stairs to the second floor. Since I’m an only child, it would just be the three of us and the dwindling days and a slowly emptying pantry.

“Let’s go again,” Sarah whispered, and she might as well have told me she loved me because that’s what it felt like as she took my hand and pulled me back around to the line.

Behind us Wylie and Bart hooted and giggled, but that didn’t matter anymore.

On the second ride Sarah let me kiss her. On the third she slid my hand under the edge of her shirt. On the fourth we refused to leave the car, and the operator threw up his hands and let us stay.

And then on the sixth or eighth trip around, the coaster ground to a halt at the top of the highest ridge. So enraptured was I in Sarah at the time that I wouldn’t have noticed if Bart hadn’t thumped me on the back of the head.

“Wakey, wakey, lovebirds,” he giggled.

I expected Sarah to blush and pull away. That’s what the awkward neighbor I’d grown up with would have done, but something about this night made her different, and she laid her cheek against my shoulder as she twisted toward the car behind us to face Bart and Wylie.

I’d never been on the coasters at night, and for a moment I was almost dizzy with the scope of Vista spread beyond the gates of the park. To one side lay the darkness of the national park edged by a long strip of abandoned condos. All along the coast road I could see the flickering of headlights as a military convoy threaded into town.

But the other side was empty, a pure darkness that stretched unbroken. The ocean roared out black and severe, no indication of where it met the sky out on the horizon, so the entire expanse seemed to be nothing but a void.

Staring at it for too long summoned feelings of dread, and for that moment I understood how we’d underestimated what we were about to face. I looked into the emptiness and I grasped that this was what awaited us all: an eternal oblivion that would never end with death.

Bart began making all kinds of sly jokes about the state of Sarah’s clothes, but his words hardly pierced the abyss that was pouring into my head until Sarah pressed her lips against my neck and said, “Hey, you,” so softly that I couldn’t help but be reminded of warmth.

I smiled down at her, the girl who could tether me against the emptiness, and just when I was starting to feel a sort of hope again, Wylie cut off whatever Bart was saying with a slice of his hand through the air.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

Bart laughed. “Of course something’s wrong—the coaster broke down.”

Already Wylie was shaking his head. “More than that.”

Bart opened his mouth to say something dumb, and Wylie silenced him with a hissing command. “Listen.”

At first there was the usual bustle of the park that sounded distant and faded up here so high: the plink of carnival games, the roar of machines, and the shouting of kids as the Tower of Doom dropped them toward the ground.

Nothing seemed out of place until Wylie said it. “The screaming.”

“It’s just from the other rides,” I said, already feeling uneasy knowing it couldn’t be true. There were too many voices, too much urgency.

“Oh, God.” Sarah’s voice shook, and when I glanced at her face it was pale and beaded with a sheen of dawning terror.

I didn’t want to see what she saw. I didn’t want to look. I watched her face instead, as her lips drew thin over her teeth and her breath came faster and her eyes widened, welling with tears. She never blinked, not once.

Behind us Bart started to buck against the safety bar, trying to pull himself free as if he’d forgotten we were trapped so far up in the air. Wylie threw his arm across him to physically hold him back and started screaming in his face to calm down.

I couldn’t resist any longer. With the people running and screaming below, all I had to do was trace back to what they were fleeing from.

Once, a few years ago when Halloween fell on a crisp Saturday afternoon, Wylie convinced us to dress up and come out here together. We’d taken several cars, and almost all of our friends came out for it: Micah, Guy, Leroy, and Omar dressed as Charlie’s Angels, Calvin carting along a stuffed tiger as he did every year because it was the cheapest costume he could think of, Danny done up as a bookie, and his sister, Sally, tagging along wearing a miner costume with a sign that read UNACCOMPANIED taped to her chest.

As part of the festivities, the park held a Dreadful Dead Walk and that’s what Wylie, Bart, and I had dressed up as. We’d spent the morning perfecting the look of our fake blood and determining what kinds of wounds we’d sport and how we’d been killed. I fashioned a noose that rose up from my neck, Wylie went with scores of scorch marks as though he’d been electrocuted, and Bart chose the execution route with a row of bullet wounds to the gut.

My mom even put a picture of the three of us up on the fridge.

For a moment, sitting there on top of the roller coaster, I tried to believe that this was like that autumn afternoon and everything happening was just another display by the park’s entertainers. That the people straining against the fence and lumbering into the park weren’t real.

I wanted to convince myself that they had better access to special effects and that a flotilla of makeup artists had encamped in the parking lot to stage this entire event.

But then Wylie started to sob and I realized I’d never seen him cry before. He’d always been the one of us in perfect control of himself, the center around which we all revolved. Watching him break apart shattered the delicate layer of denial I’d built up.

I lost the ability to inhale.

Without anyone holding Bart back, he slithered from the restraints and climbed through the empty cars to the end of our little train.

I still couldn’t move, terror shutting me down, but Sarah had forced her way out of frozen fear and she went after him. “Bart! Wait!” she cried.

Bart perched on the edge of the last car, straining his feet toward the slick rail of the tracks and the wooden trellis underneath. “We can still make it,” he called out to her. “If we climb down now, we can get out to the car and make it home.”

I glanced to the ground, wondering if he was right. Already the dead had made their way deep into the park, lunging from shadows as the living raced toward the entrance. There was a surge of people at the gates, a purposeful choke point for crowd control, and the dead were there, picking off the stragglers like it was some kind of carnival game.

Some people were fighting back, but it seemed useless from this far away.

“We won’t make it.” Wylie wasn’t crying anymore, and though his eyes were red and puffy and his upper lip glistened, his voice was calm and under control. He’d taken charge again, and before the words even sank in, I knew he was right.

Wylie was the one to talk Bart back into the cars while I sat staring at the gates and trying to avoid being drawn to the yawning darkness of the ocean beyond. Sarah slipped in next to me, almost silently, and this time when she took my hand there was nothing sexy about it. Her grip was pure need born of the simmering realization that we were stuck.

Below us the dead flowed in like the tide and we were creatures who could no longer swim.

“What are we supposed to do now?” The words choked in my mouth and I couldn’t force them out. I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. Because from up here I couldn’t see any options, and the longer I sat paralyzed, the more dead came.

They commanded my attention; I could look nowhere else. Some of their wounds were garish and disgusting, limbs torn almost free, cheeks ripped from skulls, mouths torn open. But with others it was almost impossible to see the bite; there was no evidence of blood and struggle. Their clothes were still freshly pressed, some with their shirts tucked in and shoes neatly tied.

They looked normal. As if this was some sort of game they’d stumbled upon and decided to join. But then they’d open their mouths and the moaning would spill forth and it became clear they were just as dead as the others.

Sarah pressed her face into the crook of my shoulder, shuddering. “They’re everywhere.”

That’s when the lights in the amusement park blew. One moment everything was alive with brightness of various colors and the next it was absolute darkness. I couldn’t see the ground, I couldn’t see the front of the coaster car. I couldn’t even see Sarah sitting right next to me.

And all I could think about were the dead bodies stumbling around below, seeping around the base of the coaster, turning their gaping mouths toward us and stretching their arms high.

“Can they climb?” Bart whispered from a few cars back.

The horror of that question drilled into me. Suddenly I knew—just knew—that the dead were already scaling their way toward us. Their moans turning to grunts as they wrapped their arms around the trellis and found footholds to push higher.

We had no escape. We had no weapons.

Sarah’s response was strangled. The tips of her fingers dug against my skin, one hand clawing at my ribs and the other at the side of my neck as she buried herself deeper against me as if I could be some sort of protection for her.

I wanted to be strong. I wanted to fold my arms around her and let her believe my strength could keep us safe, but even I didn’t believe that.

“No,” Wylie finally said. “I don’t think so. The news reports didn’t say anything about them climbing. Otherwise they wouldn’t be building those big fences at the forest.”

For a moment none of us said anything. We were surrounded by the noise of panic: the living crying out for help, kids calling for their mommies and daddies, people screaming with pain as they were overtaken, and woven through it all was the sound of the dead: a moaning so visceral it invaded my skull, making me want to claw at my ears as if that could make it stop.

With the darkness there was no way we could attempt escape. Climbing from the coaster would be suicide either in a misplaced step or making it to the ground only to be taken by the dead.

We were trapped.

“Maybe in the morning, when it’s light, we can figure out what to do next,” Wylie said, confirming that he’d come to the same conclusion.

“I’m telling you, it’ll be too late then.” Bart’s voice sounded agitated and sharp. “They’re just going to keep coming through the night. In the morning there’ll be too many to fight our way out.”

Wylie lost the edge of control he’d been holding on to. “Then what do you propose we do, Bart? What other option do we have?”

“We climb back to the wheelhouse,” Bart shouted back. “There’s bound to be something we can use as a weapon in the control room. Wrenches or broomsticks—things we can use to fight our way out.”

“You’re being stupid.” Wylie was the sound of frustrated ire. “They’re probably already swarming the tracks down there. And seriously? A wrench? You think that would be enough?”

The car began to shift then as one of them threw himself at the other, fists hitting against flesh. It felt like at any moment we could go careening off the rails, and Sarah gasped, slamming her hands against the safety bar.

“Stop it, guys!” I shouted, but they were beyond caring. I fought my way free of the tiny car and started making my way back toward them. Already my eyes were adjusting to the darkness, but depth was still impossible to judge and my progress was slow as I felt my way from bucket seat to bucket seat, holding my breath every time my foot slipped along the plastic noses of the cars.

As I got closer I saw the dark forms of Bart and Wylie tussling, and then I was there between them, barely able to fit my body into the tiny space only meant for two. I shoved them away from each other. “This isn’t helping,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

They were both panting and Bart’s teeth glistened with something dark that I assumed was blood. He swiped it away and then looked back down the tracks. “We can’t just sit here.”

“Yes, we can,” I answered before Wylie could. “What we’re not going to be is stupid.”

“How long do you think we can stay up here?” Bart responded. “The dead aren’t just going to go away. They’re not going to disappear no matter how much we want it.”

“It’s the rule of threes,” Wylie answered. “The human body can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. We have time to figure out a next step.”

Bart shook his head. In the black night, the whites of his eyes shone like stars. “Those rules are worthless. Those things on the ground—they don’t need any of that stuff.”

Neither Wylie nor I had a response to that. Instead I said I’d better be getting back to Sarah, and I made my way along the cars, leaving the silence of my two best friends behind.

At that point it just became about waiting for the dawn. The screams of our fellow park-goers had dwindled, so now we were left with moans.

Wylie settled into the car behind us but Bart was more restless, moving about and even venturing onto the tracks, though he never went very far.

Sarah leaned against me, her breath alternating between the hiccuping aftereffects of sobs and the regular rhythm of sleep. I thought about the rides we’d taken just hours ago. How it’d been the most alive I’d ever felt.

“If you had to go now—if this was it—would you have any regrets?” I found myself asking.

“Virginity,” Wylie said almost immediately, and I started to laugh, even as I became hyperaware of exactly how Sarah draped herself over me, her head cradled in my lap. His response made her grin, her nose crinkling up just a bit like it always did when she was truly happy.

“Does coming here tonight count?” Bart shouted from a few cars back, and then he was laughing as well. For a moment it drowned out the sounds of moans.

Sarah blew out a short breath. “I wish I’d studied less and snuck out more, but then again, who could have figured a four point oh GPA would become so worthless so quickly?” She shifted her focus to me, asking, “What about you?”

Everyone else’s answers had been flippant and light, but I felt a different kind of pressure building in my chest, and I knew that if I didn’t say it now it would become the thing I’d regret most.

I brushed the backs of my knuckles along Sarah’s cheek, twisting a stray strand of hair around my thumb. “I wish I’d told the girl next door that I’d fallen in love with her.”

At the end of the train of cars Bart snickered and Wylie just grunted before heaving himself free and going back to join him, leaving Sarah and me alone. Her lips were parted and I could just catch the hint of the edge of her teeth.

“Really?” It was a question voiced along an exhale.

I nodded. “Years ago. Maybe even forever.”

She maneuvered around the safety bar until she was straddling my lap, her knees pushed into the depths of the bucket seats. “You should have said something before.” She placed her hands on my shoulders and then slid them down my back.

“I was too afraid.”

Her lips covered mine but this time there wasn’t the thrill of racing along the roller coaster, wind whipping her hair around us. Now there was a desperation, a longing deeper than I’d ever felt.

I took her hips, my fingers pressing against the curve of flesh, and wished I could forget about Bart and Wylie only a few yards behind us. Wished I could forget the dead scattered below.

Wished we could have been, even if for just a few heartbeats, the last people on Earth.

She said something in my ear I couldn’t understand and I traced my fingers up her spine, under her shirt, reveling in the feel of her flesh.

And then there was a scream, one of agony and pain, followed by Wylie shouting Bart’s name. Sarah froze, as if she’d known this was our last chance together and it was over too soon.

The cars shuddered as Wylie scampered over them wildly and then he grabbed my arm. “You gotta help,” he said in a panic, and I let him pull me away from Sarah, her eyes glistening with tears.

The night must have been damp, because my feet kept slipping as we raced toward the back of the train. Bart’s screams were horrid and piercing, like no noise I’d ever heard.

Wylie kept trying to explain. “He was crawling along the tracks. I don’t know what happened.” He sounded close to panic. “He must have slipped through.”

“He fell?” I asked as we made it to the last car and leaned over the edge.

“Not all the way.” Wylie’s face was ghostly pale and I realized that the moon had begun to rise on the horizon, laying down a dull sheen that reflected off the coaster rails.

It was just enough light to find Bart. He’d fallen maybe twenty feet and gotten caught in a tangle of wooden supports. His body seemed twisted wrong, as if he were hanging by his knees, but the proportions were all off and then I saw the gleam of white through his jeans.

Both of his legs were broken, almost in half, right in the middle of his shins, and the bones had pierced through skin and fabric. Bart hung upside down, his arms flailing as he tried to relieve the pressure on his legs.

Through all of it he kept wailing, but now he was forming words, begging for help. Everything about him screamed agony.

“Whatdowedo?” Wylie’s question came out as one word.

As a keeper on the soccer field I’d learned to take all the angles, all the approaches, and calculate them instantaneously and then make a decision and commit without question. I looked for any way to scale down to Bart, but every path was too convoluted, too dangerous.

I was already shaking my head when Wylie grabbed my arm. “What are you saying?”

I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t find the words to put to the truth that there was no way we’d make it to Bart without getting hurt ourselves and, even then, I didn’t know what we could do for him.

“You’re a shitty friend,” Wylie said, banging his hand against the edge of the car. But he didn’t go out after Bart, either.

Bart’s screams were becoming more desperate and I wanted to push my hands against my ears, but that didn’t seem fair. Wylie started calling back to him, telling him it would be okay and I echoed him, hating the lie of it. Bart kept struggling for a handhold to pull himself free, and after a few tries he succeeded in getting one of his legs loose.

For a moment it looked like he’d be able to untangle himself and I wondered if we should go down for him after all. He got his body bent over one of the wide wooden supports and started to yank on his other broken leg when something went wrong.

He wavered, his hand gripping at the empty air, and then he fell. Just like that. His body slid through a gap and the darkness swallowed him whole.

I heard him hit the ground. Wylie clutched at my arm, and from the front of the car Sarah kept shouting, “What happened? What just happened?” But all I could hear was the sound of Bart choking as though every molecule of air had been forced from his body on impact.

And maybe it had. I pictured his ribs snapping, his lungs collapsing in on themselves. He was too far away and the night was too dark to see, but we could still hear him as he tried to wheeze and grunt.

“We should have climbed to help him.” Wylie wrapped his arms around his chest and began to rock.

Bart’s voice drifted weakly from below. “Please.”

I pressed my hands against my face.

Sarah kept shouting, asking what happened.

“We should climb down,” Wylie continued, urgent. “There could still be time to save him.”

Bart repeated the word please like a prayer.

It wouldn’t take long for the dead to find him.

I didn’t know how long it would take for him to become one of them.

Wylie flung a leg over the edge of the car, reaching toward the slick railing and wooden tracks. I grabbed him around the chest and hauled him back to safety. “Not you too,” I shouted in his face, and then he started hitting me, but I still wouldn’t let him go.

Below us Bart begged and I wished for the dead to find him faster, just to make it all stop. Instead his death came slow. At first I was glad for the darkness so I didn’t have to see it, but the sounds didn’t stop my imagination from visualizing every detail. The dead moaned, different timbres of need radiating off each other, and then I heard their teeth ripping into flesh.

Bart’s whimpers sounded wet and he kept choking without ever once inhaling.

Wylie curled himself into the corner of the car, arms wrapped around his ears and rocking. I rested one hand on the back of his neck as I listened to my friend die. Eventually the only sound remaining was a new moan added to the mix, and I shoved the palm of my hand into my mouth and tried to swallow my screams.

When I made it back to the front car, Sarah sat straight and still. I reached for her but she shook her head. What she was staring at, I never knew.

Here’s how we escaped: dawn came oozing in and that’s when the gunfire started. Military men dressed in black from helmet to boots swept through the park shooting at anything that moved.

Wylie was the one to suggest we duck into the cars. Sarah wanted to scream for help, but there was something about the calculating coldness of those men that made me hesitate. In the end I sided with Wylie.

The shooting lasted for a good hour as the sun gained strength. After that was silence. It was probably noon by the time we started making our way down. It was impossible to scale the wooden supports of the coaster without thinking about how Bart had fallen.

I hit the ground first, and as I turned back to help the others I felt something tug at the cuff of my jeans. A hand tried to twist around my ankle and I kicked myself free.

Bart dragged himself from the shadow of the coaster, his fingers scraping raw against the concrete. His legs twisted at wrong angles and the teeth in his gaping mouth were broken and sharp. His moans sounded sickly and desperate.

I didn’t hear Sarah come up behind me. One minute I was facing my former friend alone and the next she was there, a metal stanchion gripped in her hands and the sound of rage on her lips. She swung it at Bart, slamming it against him with a sickening crunch.

It was so unexpected I didn’t know what to say. She brought the stanchion down again and again, screaming as the heavy bottom of it cut into Bart’s head.

Wylie leapt next to her and pulled her away but she fought against him. Ultimately she ended up kneeling on the ground, panting and heaving, with Wylie towering behind her, holding her arms behind her back.

She looked up at me and I couldn’t hide my horror. Bart had been our friend. Not too long ago he’d told us lewd jokes and thwapped me on the back of the head when I got distracted.

Now he was nothing. In the span of darkness everything had changed.

Wylie dragged Sarah back to standing and as a group we ran for the gates. It was easy to find his car in the lot, and the first thing Sarah did was lock the doors once we huddled inside. When the engine turned over, the radio began blasting music and that was the hardest part, remembering that things had been normal once and never would be again.

Wylie reached to mute the volume and Sarah snaked her hand behind the seat, looking for mine. We drove for Vista, each of us trapped in our own mind, wondering what we could cling to and what we’d have to jettison in this new and terrible world.

And then Sarah began to laugh. I don’t know what prompted it, but it was perhaps the most beautiful sound I could have imagined. I joined in and so did Wylie, and we drove down the road, all of us practically crying from the force of our laughter.

We almost felt free.