The End Has Come

THE HAPPIEST PLACE . . . Mira Grant

The Disneyland generators were intended to keep the Park’s lights on during municipal power outages and emergency situations. They were never meant to power the entire Park for weeks on end, and one by one, they were giving up. Generator #3 had been showing signs of strain for three days. It fought long and valiantly, but in the end, entropy won. Generator #3 died at 6:15 AM on Monday morning, filling the air with the hot stink of biodiesel and exhaust. The other generators whined, struggling to pick up the slack. It was a lost cause. The techs on duty knew it but still grabbed their tools, ready to fight a battle that was already over.

In the Hall of Presidents, the lights flickered before going out. Amy — who most people called “the Mayor of Main Street” these days, despite her best efforts at rejecting the title — ran outside in time to see the brass streetlights that ringed Town Square die, leaving the area in darkness. She stood in the doorway, frozen with fear. People began to emerge from the surrounding buildings, exclaiming in dismay. Amy didn’t move. Even when someone shouted, “It’s dark all the way to the Castle!”, she didn’t move.

It was finally happening. After eighteen months of struggle, sacrifice, and pain, the lights were going out in Disneyland.

It began with the sniffles.

First the sniffles, and then a mild cough, the sort of thing that wasn’t enough for most people to justify staying home from work or keeping the kids out of school. From there, it developed into severe congestion, breathing difficulties, and finally, a cascade of third-stage symptoms that seemed to come without warning, sometimes developing over the course of an afternoon. Bronchial inflammation, rash, fever, all building to internal hemorrhaging and multiple organ failure. Most people who got sick were dead inside of a week, and most people got sick. There were no final statistics published on this epidemic, but if Amy had been asked to guess, she would have said that nine out of every ten people caught the H13N3 flu. And of those nine, at least eight died, leaving two out of every ten people still standing — and one out of every two people weak, sick, and shaky.

It was no wonder things had collapsed as fast as they did. People who were on vacation died in unfamiliar hotel rooms and hospital beds, wondering how things had gone so very wrong. Others staggered their unsteady ways to the places where they remembered being happy. Amy would always remember the last guest to walk up to the gates of Disneyland. He was a little man, old enough to have been coming to the Park since it first opened, and his nose wouldn’t stop running.

She’d been standing on the train tracks above Town Square with a telescope stolen from Walt’s apartment, watching the plaza for signs of movement, when he’d come shuffling into view. She was at the gate to meet him by the time he arrived. It had been two days since she had shown up for her shift in Guest Relations. She hadn’t left the Park since then. None of the Cast Members who had been well enough to come to work had gone any further than the plaza.

“Hello, miss,” he’d said, voice thick with phlegm. “I know it’s irregular, but I couldn’t find my Annual Pass this morning. The wife, she always has them with her. Is there any way . . . is there any way you could see fit to let me come inside?”

“Welcome home,” she’d replied, and unlocked the gate for him. He hadn’t tried to touch her as he shuffled past her into the Park, and she’d been grateful.

His body had been found on a bench in New Orleans Square about six hours later. The Cast Member who found him said that he looked peaceful. It only bothered Amy a little that she’d never learned his name.

“What do you mean, we can’t fix it?”

“I mean, we can’t fix it.” The chief engineer was a patient man — he had to be, when everyone on his work detail was untrained. He had two mechanics and one Imagineer, but Clover spent most of her time being hauled off to fix malfunctioning animatronics, and that left him with his makeshift crew of car-jockeys and well-meaning custodial staffers. “The piston’s shot. We’d need a whole new engine if we wanted to get number three up and running again, and at that point, we might as well wish for a whole new generator, because we’re not going to find it.”

“There has to be something we can do.” Amy forced her hands to stay down by her sides, fighting the urge to clasp them together and beg. “We’ve lost power to Town Square. Half of Main Street is running on emergency backup. And the Castle —”

“Mayor, I don’t know how many ways I can say this. The generator is dead. The engine is fried. We’ve been pushing them way too hard. These were meant to cover for rolling blackouts, not supply power to the whole complex.” The chief engineer shook his head. “Maybe if we shut down Tomorrowland, we can shift some of the load between the generators we still have. That could keep us up and running for another month. Two if we’re careful, and if we stop running the dark rides.”

Amy stiffened. “You’re talking about the Mansion.”

“I am. The air conditioning alone —”

“You have to understand why we can’t turn off the air conditioning inside the Mansion.” The idea was enough to make Amy’s flesh crawl. If the Mansion stopped . . .

“It’s July, Mayor. The hottest month of the year, and you’re turning one dark ride into an icebox. Now, I know you’ve got your reasons, but the fact remains, we don’t have the power.”

Amy paused. “Look — Anthony, wasn’t it? Have you been inside the Mansion recently?”

“I don’t like closed spaces.”

“I thought it might be something like that.” She looked away, toward the back lot buildings that the guests were never meant to see, all of them painted that same bland shade of go-away green. A few seconds passed before she looked back to him, eyes hardened with resolve. “I want you to go ride the Haunted Mansion. If you come out the other end and agree that we don’t need to run the air conditioning anymore, then fine, I’ll listen to you. But if you change your mind, we’re going to need to find another way. Do we have a deal?”

Anthony frowned. “You know, I never quite understood how you wound up in charge.”

Amy’s smile was small, quick, and bitter. “I was the last person alive in Guest Relations,” she said. “All I was ever trained to do is make sure that everyone at Disneyland has a magical day.”

At the end of everything, when there was no place left to turn, the Cast Members who survived came home. Custodians and princesses, ride operators and stage show dancers, one after another they came to the gates. Some had shown up while the Park was still technically open — before humanity’s season had been declared over for good. They had formed the skeleton crew that kept things running until everyone else could arrive. Amy thought of them as her family. They had done things together, seen things together, that could never be unseen. They had done them for each other. They had done them for the children they knew would come, eventually, the orphans of the world that was being born outside their gates. And they had done them for Walt.

He might not have anticipated his Park’s future as one of the last strongholds of mankind. But as Amy walked down the access corridor that would lead her back to Town Square, she couldn’t help thinking that he would have been pleased by what they’d been doing in his name.

Tiffany and Skylar were waiting in front of the Gallery. As always, Tiffany was dressed in her Guest Relations uniform, so crisp and perfect that she must have spent half her waking hours ironing the creases into her jacket, while Skylar was wearing something she’d looted from one of the stores on Main Street. They were holding hands. Amy felt a brief, sharp stab of envy.

Not everyone made it through with their sister by their side, she thought — not for the first time, and not, she knew, for the last. Her own sister had stopped answering the phone two days after she’d first complained of a sore throat. Nikki was long dead, and all Amy could do to honor her memory was keep on fighting for a future.

“Is it true?” asked Tiffany.

“That depends on what ‘it’ is,” Amy replied. “Use exact terms and phrases and maybe I can calm your mind.” That wasn’t likely, all things considered.

“Michael said one of the generators blew,” said Skylar. “He said it wasn’t fixable.”

The trouble with being a closed community — there were fewer than five hundred people in Disneyland, and more than half of them were living in the buildings on Main Street and in Adventureland — was that rumors couldn’t be controlled: they could only be predicted, and chased down. “We did lose a generator today, but Anthony says we have options,” said Amy carefully. “We should be able to run on what we have for three or four days before things become critical. By then, we’ll hopefully have located a replacement.”

“We can’t scavenge any more from California Adventure, can we?” asked Tiffany.

Amy shook her head. “They’re down to three generators for the whole park, and they have their own problems to take care of,” she said. “If the air conditioning goes out in Ariel’s Undersea Adventure . . .”

Tiffany looked sick. “That would be bad.”

“Yes, it would,” agreed Amy.

“Is the power still on in the Mansion?” asked Skylar.

“For now.” Amy shook her head. “Tiffany, get the rest of Guest Relations and tell them we’re having a mandatory meeting at the Big Thunder Ranch tonight. Skylar, can you get Michael to tell the rest of the ride operators?” Between the three of them, Tiffany, Skylar, and Michael knew most of the Park’s population by name, and knew where to find them during the day.

The sisters nodded. “Okay,” said Tiffany, clearly relieved to have something to do. Skylar looked less eager. The assessing way she studied Amy made it clear she knew something was up. She just had the good grace not to say anything about it yet. Amy smiled, relieved, and watched them walk away down Main Street.

She was lucky; there was no one inside the firehouse. She made it all the way up to the apartment that had belonged to Walt Disney, and was now hers, before she started to cry.

Amy hadn’t intended to wind up in charge of the survivors who took refuge in Disneyland; it was an accident. She’d just been the highest-ranking member of the Guest Relations team still standing when the doors officially closed to the public for the last time, and the only member of management who’d been willing to get her hands dirty along with everyone else. By the end of the first day (an endless string of cleanup and sanitation, until it seemed like none of them would ever be clean again, until they were all family forever, bound by things their hands could not undo), she was already being referred to as “Mayor” by almost everyone. It stuck. People wanted to feel like they still existed in a world with structure, and she was the closest thing they had to a face to put on their new existence.

So she’d tried. She’d tried so damn hard to rise to the level of their expectations, sleeping four hours a night — if that — and racing through the Park every day soothing out conflicts, streamlining processes, and searching, always searching, for the line between Disney magic and the end of the world. It had been Clover’s idea to start running one ride a day to take everyone’s mind off things; the generators were designed to power entire Lands. A single ride couldn’t overload them. Amy hadn’t been sure it would work, but she’d given the okay, and the results had been staggering. People lined up like nothing had changed, and even the act of standing in a line was enough to make them laugh and talk about the old days, finally at ease. It might only last for the duration of one trip through Space Mountain or around the submarine lagoon, but it worked.

The Disney magic was still there. All Amy had to do was find the balance between the old world and the new one, and everything would be fine.

Supplies were tight, but Downtown Disney had plenty of stores, and she had plenty of manpower for raiding parties. They’d looted the Disneyland Hotel in the first week, coming away with food, bottled water, medicine, and even fuel for the generators. But it was the pillows that had really sealed her place as the Mayor of Main Street, and honorary regent of Disneyland.

“We can’t stay in the hotels; they’re too hard to defend, and there’s not enough power to waste it on electric locks,” she’d said. “That’s no reason people should be uncomfortable.” The looting crews had carried more than five hundred pillows, almost that many blankets, and nearly two hundred mattresses back to Disneyland. Those Cast Members and guests who had arrived after the comfortable sleeping places had been claimed suddenly found themselves with something soft to put their heads upon. Amy had been virtually canonized that night.

It was a hard existence. It was a strange existence, shuffling through the ruins of a place that had never been intended for this kind of life. But it was what they had, and it was amazing how quickly people had been able to adapt to their strange new circumstances. If the woman they called “Mayor” worked herself to death trying to make those circumstances better, well . . .

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

The Big Thunder Ranch BBQ was one of the larger open-air restaurants in the Park, with picnic-style seating and a stage that had once played host to carefully scripted “hoedowns” intended to amuse the guests. Now, it was stripped of all its faux-Old West charm, and was just a place where the majority of Disneyland’s residents could gather without needing to stand, and without forcing their weary Mayor to shout in order to be heard.

Anthony stood at the back, holding the tablet computer used to control the restaurant sound system. It was an odd juxtaposition of modern technology and old-fashioned setting, made stranger by the fact that he was unshaven and wearing overalls that had seen far better days. That was what the end of the world really looked like, Amy thought; like a man in dirty clothes, with equipment straight out of Tomorrowland in his hands.

Maybe a third of the residents of the park had shown up. That was better than Amy had been expecting. They were all survivors, but none of them had volunteered for that honor. They were the ones who hadn’t gotten sick, the ones who found themselves marooned on a ride that never ended, and that never gave them an opportunity to get off. Honestly, the fact that even a third of the residents would come to a meeting like this spoke to the Disney spirit. They wanted to help.

Amy took a deep breath, resisting the urge to fiddle with her headset microphone, and said, “You’ve probably heard the rumors about our power supply. I’m sorry to have to be the one to say this, but they’re not unfounded. Generator three has suffered a mechanical failure, and without additional parts, it will not be coming back online. We will be unable to power vital Park services, such as the refrigeration units in New Orleans Square.”

The third who had come to the meeting were the ones most likely to understand what that meant. Alarmed looks were passed around the crowd, and a voice from the back shouted, “So what are you going to do about it, Mayor?”

That was the trigger for a wave of discontent muttering. Amy let it come, allowing it to wash over her. It cleaned nothing, and left only more anxiety in its wake. “Citizens of Disneyland,” she said. There was a new snap to her voice, one that brought the crowd to abrupt silence. It was the tone she had once reserved for members of her staff, reminding them that they needed to worry more about creating magical moments for the guests, and less about who was surreptitiously texting who. “We are at the doorway of a crisis, and I need each of you to consider what you can do to help. Some things are simple. Turn off lights, conserve power whenever possible, do your part. Other things are more complicated.” She paused, allowing them to consider her relatively minor requests. They had survived the end of the world, they were living in Disneyland, and she wanted them to turn off lights when they left the room? There had to be a catch. Taking a deep breath, she continued:

“There is a hospital facility roughly four miles from here with a generator array of the size and type we need. A party will be leaving Town Square at dawn to cross the city, enter the hospital, and secure the necessary parts to make the repairs. I am assured by the engineering department that we can bring back enough material to keep us functional for the better part of a year.” A year was as far into the future as any of them dared to look. A year would take them through most of their water, and virtually all of their food. None of them were farmers. Even if they could convert the landscaped parts of the Park into gardens, it wasn’t going to be enough.

But Walt wouldn’t have given up. Walt would have fought tooth and nail for that year, for the chance that something might change, and the world might magically come alive again.

Amy looked out at the crowd of battered, weary survivors, trying to guess how many of them would be there in the morning. Come on, Anthony, she thought. They need a tipping point.

And Anthony rose to the occasion, as he had so many times before: “What about you, Madame Mayor?” he shouted. “Will you be sitting safely in City Hall, waiting for your delivery people to come back?”

“I’ll be leading the expedition,” said Amy. A low murmur spread through the crowd. She turned away, allowing herself the shadow of a smile. Maybe this would work out after all.

The next morning, fifteen people were waiting for her in Town Square: thirteen citizens, Anthony, and Clover. Tiffany and Skylar walked them to the gates of Disneyland. The sixteen raiders stepped outside. The sisters locked the gates behind them, and they were alone.

Most of the cars near the Parks had long since been scavenged for parts and fuel, but the Cast Member parking area was relatively untouched — in part, Amy admitted, because she had more respect for Cast Member property, but also because they had known, almost from the start, that one day raids like this would become necessary. Disneyland was designed to stay operational even during a blackout or other civic emergency. It was never intended to operate through an apocalypse.

They split into three teams, each of them taking the largest operational vehicle they could find. Amy wound up sitting with Anthony, Clover, and two others in a red SUV, wondering even as she fastened her seatbelt whether there was any good waiting for them in the silent city streets. Anthony glanced over at her as he turned the key in the ignition.

“It’ll be okay,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Amy, relieved that he’d drawn the wrong conclusion from her face. She turned in her seat, looking out the window, and tried to make her shoulders unknot as the car rumbled to life and Anthony drove them into the deserted streets of Anaheim.

The first thing any of them noticed was the silence. It was almost a physical thing, so heavy across the deserted city that it felt as if it should have been visible, an obstacle they could see and drive around. The engines of their borrowed cars were obscenely loud, and Amy couldn’t shake the feeling that they were violating something sacred by even being here.

They passed the first body when they were less than a block from the parking lot. It was — it had been — a woman in a flowered dress. She was slumped over on a bus stop bench, so dried out by the weather that she might as well have been mummified. The bodies came quickly after that, until everywhere that Amy looked there was another one sprawled in the street or sitting on a patch of sidewalk, their empty eye sockets turned up at the sky. Crows perched on the wires overhead, watching with casual fearlessness as the cars went rolling by.

“It was never about the meek inheriting the earth,” said Clover, sounding disgusted. “The whole thing went to the scavengers.”

Amy, who had been dealing with reports of coyotes skulking in the landscaped underbrush of the Jungle Cruise for weeks, said nothing, and they rolled on.

The piles of bodies continued to thicken for a while, and then began to vanish as gradually as they had appeared. The last was a man, lying face down in the gutter outside the hospital gates. Anthony stopped just outside the parking lot, frowning.

“What is it?” asked Amy.

“Look.” He indicated the lot.

She looked.

The hospital should have been mobbed during the crisis. Not only patients, but staff and family members should have clogged every available parking space. Instead, half the lot was empty, allowing them a clear line of sight to the glass-fronted Admissions Building. Amy squinted. Nothing was moving on the other side of the glass.

“Do we go in?” asked Anthony.

“I don’t think we have a choice.” If there were people living in the hospital complex, maybe they could make a deal. Some generator parts for Park tickets, or for food, or for a share of the bedding they’d scavenged from the Disneyland hotels. Whatever the cost, they had to try, because if they lost one more generator, they were going to lose a lot more than a few lights.

Anthony seemed to have been thinking much the same, because he didn’t argue. He just nodded, and said, “All right,” and rolled on into the parking lot.

They waited outside their borrowed SUV until the other teams were parked and ready. The volunteers assembled in a loose crowd on the sidewalk, most of them looking substantially less sure of themselves than they had when still safely behind the gates of Disneyland. Amy felt like she should be making some sort of inspirational speech, but all she could really manage to do was clutch her promotional Mickey Mouse tote bag full of scavenging gear and try not to let them see how terrified she was.

The parking lot was the problem. It was too empty. Even the lots at Disneyland weren’t that empty, and the Park had been virtually deserted by the last days of the outbreak.

Anthony and Clover moved to stand at what had become the de facto head of the group. They made a curious pair, the short, slender man and the hulking, freckle-faced woman. There was no better engineering team in the Disney complex.

“You know what we’re here for,” said Anthony. “We’re not sure exactly where in the building it will be located, but structurally, assume you’re looking for ‘down.’ Basements, lower levels, engineering rooms tucked into non-load-bearing parts of the foundation. If you find something, use your walkie-talkie, and call us. If you’re too deep for the signal to get through, move until it can, and call us. Clover and I will come as fast as we can, and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

“If you see signs that people are living in the building, or have been living there recently, do not scavenge anything other than generator parts,” said Clover. “The lights aren’t on inside, so we can safely assume that either there’s no one here, or that anyone who is here doesn’t have the technological skills to get the generator up and running.” Unspoken went the cold, simple fact that if someone didn’t know how to operate the resources they had, they couldn’t be allowed to keep them. Disneyland needed the generator. Disneyland was going to have it.

“Does anyone have any questions?” asked Amy. She didn’t really have anything to add, but she felt she should be seen to be taking part in the process — it would be good for morale if she was involved. Also, talking helped, at least a little bit. It drew attention away from the blind eyes of the building in front of them, where maybe their salvation would be found.

No one had any questions. Two by two, they turned and made their way to the door. Clover was the first to reach it. She tried the handle, then nodded to herself and turned to mouth ‘It’s unlocked’ to the others, using the sort of exaggerated lip motions that used to allow them to communicate across restless crowds and during fireworks shows. Pulling the door open, she stepped inside, her partner beside her. They were visible through the window as they crossed the lobby unmolested and without signs of trouble. Then they vanished into a hallway, and were gone.

That was the cue for everyone else to risk going inside. Amy found herself paired off with Anthony, who smiled at her encouragingly, almost like he could hear the frantic pounding of her heart, and led the way into the lobby.

It was cool and dark inside. The air smelled of old bleach and softly settling dust. It was the smell of dead places. Amy had grown all too familiar with it since they had started being forced to make the difficult decision to let parts of Disneyland close down. They needed the power. They couldn’t keep everything alive. And this building . . . this building wasn’t alive. She took a breath, gripped the strap of her tote bag a little harder, and walked on into the dead zone.

Footsteps echoed more loudly than they should have, like the quality of the air had changed in the absence of people. It was like walking the service corridors at Space Mountain. Amy tried to focus on the comparison. This hospital was just another ride that needed maintenance, allowed to wind down and sit fallow until the people could return. Anthony walked beside her without saying a word, and the soft crackle of voices from his walkie-talkie accompanied them down, down, down into the depths of the hospital.

“We found a maintenance room, but it’s empty — just some tools and a broken boiler.”

“No signs of human habitation in the cafeteria. We got some spices.”

The reports came in one after the other, along with Clover’s calm, impassive recitation of the medical supplies they’d managed to obtain from a locked storeroom — including a substantial supply of Lactaid, which they’d been needing at the Park for quite some time. Amy and Anthony continued to travel downward through the halls, accompanied by their own echoing footsteps.

Finally, Anthony stopped in front of a plain wooden door. It looked just like all the others to Amy, but something about it clearly meant more to him. “Here,” he said, and turned the knob. The door swung open easily, revealing the generator inside.

Amy clasped her hands together, eyes shining. They could save the Park. They could save everyone.

“Clover, we’re on the second basement level; get your team down here. We have visual.” Anthony smiled as he clipped his walkie-talkie back to his belt. “Well, Madame Mayor? Let’s get our hands dirty.”

It took almost half an hour to free the generator parts they needed, along with a few more that Anthony and Clover insisted on taking “just in case.” Everyone was relaxed and happily burdened down with what they had scavenged as they walked out of the hospital.

Perhaps that was why the ambush was so effective.

Gunmen appeared from behind the cars on either side of the parking lot and opened fire on the startled citizens of Disneyland when they were halfway to their vehicles. In the screaming and chaos that followed, Amy saw four people go down, one with half his face blown away, one with four bleeding bullet holes in her stomach. Anthony grabbed her arm. She put her head down and kept running, forcing her feet to move as terror tried to root them to the spot.

Clover was already at the car. She wrenched the doors open, and the others piled inside, accompanied by a hail of bullets.

“Is anyone hit? Is everyone all right?” demanded Amy, as Anthony shoved the keys into the ignition and the SUV roared to life. She twisted in her seat. Three more vehicles were following, leaving six people dead or dying on the ground. Oh, God. Please don’t let this have been for nothing. Please . . .

“Clover?” said Anthony.

“We’ve got all the parts we need,” said Clover.

“Oh, thank God.” Amy closed her eyes. Now that she wasn’t running for her life, she could feel the dull pain of the gunshot wound in her side. She clasped her hand over it, trying to stop the blood. The SUV roared through the silent streets, chewing up the miles between them and Disneyland. “What do you suppose they wanted, if they weren’t living in the hospital?”

“Some people may be afraid to go into medical facilities,” said Clover. “Letting us go in, and then taking whatever we found, would have been the logical compromise.”

“I hate logic.”

“Sometimes I hate logic, too.”

They drove on.

The raiders didn’t pursue them to Disneyland, perhaps content to pick over the bodies of the fallen. Anthony drove straight through Downtown Disney to the central plaza. “Security can stop me if they want to,” he said, and laughed — a wild, bitter laugh that was the only real sign of how much the encounter had disturbed him.

Amy opened her eyes when the SUV stopped. Tiffany and Skylar were running toward them across the plaza, the gates of Disneyland standing open. She smiled and opened the door, almost falling out before she caught herself on the frame. Tiffany and Skylar stopped, eyes wide and horrified. Amy looked down at herself.

“Ah,” she said. “I suppose that’s rather a lot of blood.”

“What?” said Anthony, turning to her. He paled. “Oh, God, Amy . . .”

“There wasn’t time. Done is done.” She undid her seatbelt, climbing down from the SUV before her legs buckled and sent her sprawling on the bricks. Tiffany and Skylar moved to help her up. She clung to their arms, distantly sorry about the bloody handprints she was leaving. “We got the parts,” she informed them. “We can fix the generator.”

“Amy . . .” whispered Tiffany.

“Get me inside,” said Amy.

With Tiffany on one side of her and Anthony on the other, the Mayor of Main Street allowed herself to be half-led, half-carried back into the Park that had become her home.

Anthony was the one who loaded her into a wheelchair from Guest Relations and pushed her through Adventureland to New Orleans Square. People peered out at them from shops and seating areas, but no one approached. Amy chuckled. Even living through the end of days hadn’t made most people any less squeamish about a little blood.

“You don’t have to do this,” Anthony said. “We just scavenged . . .”

“I’ve lost too much blood. I’m not letting you waste the resources.” The world was going pleasantly fuzzy around the edges. “Just get me to the Mansion.”

“Amy . . .”

“I’m still Mayor, aren’t I?” She smiled. “Do as you’re told.”

“You’re an imperious bitch sometimes, you know that?”

“I do.” There was a small bump as Anthony turned the wheelchair and began pushing it up a gentle slope. Amy didn’t need to open her eyes to see the artfully crumbling mansion in front of them, or the overgrown yard.

“Do you need me to carry you inside?”

“All riders must transfer past this point.” Amy grabbed the armrests and pushed, struggling to get to her feet. When she finally opened her eyes, everything was gray . . . but she had a little more in her. “Thank you, Anthony. Keep the lights on.”

“Anything for you, Madame Mayor,” he said. He was crying. She wanted to stop and comfort him, but there wasn’t time; she needed what little strength she had left if she wanted to make her way into the ride.

With a final smile, and a jaunty wave, Amy climbed the two low brick steps and walked into the Haunted Mansion, where the doors to the elevator — the famous “stretching room” — were standing ready. She stepped inside. There was a click behind her as Anthony pressed the hidden button, and then the voice of the Ghost Host was welcoming her to find a way out.

No way out, she thought. Not even your way.

The prerecorded spiel ended, and the door opened in the wall, allowing a gust of frigid air to escape. Aware that she was leaving a trail of blood behind her, Amy staggered through the queue area to the moving walkway, which was still moving; alone of all the rides in Disneyland, the Haunted Mansion never stopped.

The Doombuggies sailed regally by, waiting for passengers. Amy lurched into the first to pass, grabbing the bar and using it to drag herself to the far side of the small black carriage. Then she closed her eyes, and let the Mansion carry her on into the dark.

The smell wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. That would be the air conditioning doing its job, lowering the Mansion’s ambient temperature to something akin to a walk-in freezer. The citizens of Disneyland went about their lives never considering how many people had died there, or in the Plaza, or in the open spaces of Downtown Disney, the promenade connecting the Parks to the hotels. Those bodies had to go somewhere. It was a health hazard otherwise.

The power could never go out in the Haunted Mansion.

By the time Amy’s Doombuggy reached the graveyard scene, she could barely feel her legs. She grabbed her safety bar and pushed with all her strength, finally lifting it enough to bring the whole ride to a halt. She slid out of the buggy and onto the narrow path they had left open between the graves, between the stacked piles of bodies. She pushed the safety bar back down. The ride resumed, and Amy walked on into the dark until walking ceased to be an option.

There was an open space between a pile of bodies and a tombstone. That would do. Sitting down, she closed her eyes, and finally, after the long months of struggle and fear, allowed her shift to end.