Inferno Park

by JL Bryan

  “Maybe. She could be out.” Carter passed a fried-chicken stand that looked like a small red barn with an oversized red rooster perched on its roof, its recorded voice crowing about “cheap prices” and “cluck-a-licious flavor.”

  “That Tricia girl’s a freak. She probably doesn’t come out until after dark,” Jared said.

  “She’s not a freak!”

  “Anyway, who cares? You’ll be too chicken to talk to her. Come on, let’s get some pizza.”

  Carter frowned as they walked into Sharkfin Pizza, where the big sign featured a shark and claimed the place was “Home of the World-Famous Salt-Crust Pizza.” They each bought a big, greasy wedge with pepperoni, plus a large paper cup of Coke to share. The outdoor dining area consisted of two picnic tables already crammed full of tourists, so Carter and Jared stood while they ate. The pizza crust, as advertised, was sprinkled with big chunks of salt.

  He looked over the crowd. Conch City attracted visitors from all across the Southeast, generally those who couldn’t afford to spend a fortune visiting the big Orlando resorts like Disney World. You saw a lot of run-down trucks and rusty cars, dads in the wife-beater tank tops, moms with big hair and fanny packs, kids in flip-flops and faded promotional t-shirts advertising country music radio stations or movies from three years ago. Carter had never been to Disney World or Universal Studios, but he doubted they could be as cool as his hometown.

  Then Carter saw her—just for a moment, passing in the crowd along the street, but time seemed to stop for the half-second she was visible, before a big man in a t-shirt that read “Conch City: Come for the Beer, Stay for the Beer” blocked his view.

  “That was her!” Carter nudged Jared. “Tricia.”

  “Oh, come on.” Jared shook his head, chewing slowly.

  “Let’s go.”

  “I’m not done with my pizza.”

  “Bring it with you.” Carter pulled his arm. “Let’s go after her.”

  “So you can stalk her like a creep?”

  “No...”

  “You’re going to go up and talk to her?” Jared smirked.

  “Maybe...come on, let’s see where she goes. I’ll talk to her when she gets there.”

  Jared made a big show of sighing and rolling his eyes, then trudged along behind Carter.

  “You’re moving too slow!” Carter whispered.

  “You’re crazy.”

  Carter caught another glimpse of her up ahead, passing by the parking lot for Dinosaur Mini-Golf, where tourists took pictures next to the big green concrete triceratops out front.

  “There,” Carter pointed. Tricia Calhoun was a long way ahead. She wore a simple white dress she’d hand-painted with unicorns and dragons. Her pale blond hair was braided and hung with beads. Her skin was a ghostly color, probably the reason Jared said she only came out at night.

  “I can’t believe you get all stupid and drooly over the weirdest girl in school,” Jared said. “There are tons of chicks hotter than her.”

  “Like who?”

  “Uh, Kelly Maples? Carly Overby? Morgan O’Shea? Anyone?”

  “You’re just naming all the cheerleaders.”

  “So? I saw Carly on the beach a few weeks ago. She’s really popping out.” Jared cupped his hands in front of his chest.

  “Those girls are boring. Tricia...isn’t.” Carter couldn’t explain how Tricia made him feel—like he was sweating on the inside, like his brain was short-circuiting. She usually sat in the back of the classroom, doodling wild fantasy creatures in her notebook, ignoring everyone while she focused on her own little world. She didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. She didn’t giggle and gossip all the time like the popular girls Jared had mentioned. Carter knew there was something special about her.

  He couldn’t put it all into words, and Jared would probably just make fun of him if he tried.

  “You better hurry, man,” Jared said. “Looks like she’s going in.”

  Ahead, Tricia veered into the sprawling blacktop parking lot at Starland Amusement Park, which was the center of everything along the glowing strip of attractions. High chain-link fence surrounded the park, enclosing a world of glowing lights and spinning rides. Directly ahead, a train of screaming riders raced down one tall hill of the Starland Express, the mammoth wooden roller coaster so long it took up the entire western edge of the park.

  The front gate looked like a casino palace, the ticket booths topped with white castle towers glowing with rows of neon stars. Tricia stood in a short line, clutching her purple velvet purse, which also looked homemade—two pieces of material unevenly stitched together, the strap made from an old artificial-leather belt.

  Carter stopped where he was, trying to work up the nerve to approach her.

  “Go ahead,” Jared told him.

  “What do I say?”

  “You could start with ‘hi.’ Or maybe ‘hey’ if you want to be folksy about it.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know, but you’re almost out of time...” Jared nodded toward Tricia, already buying her ticket.

  “Let’s go.” Carter hurried toward the star-studded front gate. He hoped to catch Tricia before she went inside, because admission to the park was twelve bucks. His mind was whirling, his nerves were jumping...but he was excited to go and talk to her.

  Seeing her out on this perfect August evening felt like a happy kind of fate to him. Not many kids from school were out on the Starwalk this late in the summer. As with swimming pools and the beach itself, the gaudy strip of games, rides, and flashing neon, this permanent beachside carnival redolent of fried sugar and car fumes, had grown too familiar to most of the local kids by late August.

  Carter never grew tired of it, though. This section of town was filled with magic. Even though he worked here every day with his family, and sometimes work was not fun, he never lost sight of the magical environment they were helping to create for all the tourists.

  He reached the front gate of Starland, but he was too late. He could already see her inside, walking up the midway between the food stands and the game booths, her back to him.

  “Tickets?” A gate attendant, dressed like a clown in a cop uniform with a Starland starburst logo in place of a badge, held out one hand.

  Carter backed off, watching the girl thread her way into the crowd inside the park. Soon he would lose sight of her.

  “Tickets,” the security clown said again, in a less friendly tone. “You’re blocking the way, kids.”

  “Let’s go to the beach,” Jared said.

  “No way.” Carter’s pulse was up. He had made his decision to reach out to the girl he liked, and he didn’t want to back down now. “Let’s go in.”

  “Sorry, hombre, I only got six bucks,” Jared said.

  Carter sighed. “I can loan you the rest.”

  “Sweet!” Jared’s face lit up. “And let’s ride Inferno Mountain this time, okay?”

  “Shut up.” Carter led the way back to the ticket booth, annoyed. Jared knew Carter was too scared to ride Inferno Mountain. The big devil face on the front of the ride had given him nightmares since he was little.

  They waited in line, which seemed to take forever. Jared chatted excitedly, happy to visit the amusement park on somebody else’s dime—Jared himself was always short on money. Carter’s impatience grew and grew. The park was growing crowded, and it would be hard to find one girl in that mob.

  When they finally stepped inside, the park had begun to glow with neon and flashing lights while the sun set over the Old West town of Fool’s Gold.

  They walked along the crowded pavement, past the glowing green marquee of the Whack-A-Frog, the Lucky Darts balloon game with its jolly trombone music and slide-whistle sound effects, and the Knock ‘Em Dead bowling game, in which the balls resembled skulls and the bowling pins looked like bones.

  Carter and Jared ignored the game operators trying to lure them with promises of huge prizes that were basically impossible to win. The s
mell of cotton candy, popcorn, and French fries washed over them, pushed by the warm, salty breeze off the ocean. For the rest of his life, Carter would associate those mingled scents with childhood and death.

  “Ride the world’s greatest Tilt-A-Whirl!” shouted a ten-foot-tall woman in a jester hat, her stilts hidden inside super-long pants decked with glittering stars and moons. She juggled glowing green balls as she barked her spiel, and little kids gaped and pointed while their parents snapped pictures. “See the future in Space City! Ride the Starland Express, Florida’s fifth-oldest roller coaster! Or visit the Dark Mansion, if you dare...guaranteed to scare the pants right off your legs! And believe me, I know about legs, folks.”

  They passed a booth selling glittering star-studded caps and t-shirts emblazoned with the fiery face of a cartoon devil, which bragged I SURVIVED INFERNO MOUNTAIN!

  “Do you see her?” Carter asked, gazing anxiously at the thick crowd.

  “Who?” Jared asked. “What do we ride first? The Swingin’ Scalawag?” He pointed toward the water attractions in the “Pirate Island” section of the park to their right—the Log Drop, Crashdown Falls, the green dome of the Jungle Land boat ride covered with fake tropical plants. The Swingin’ Scalawag was a pirate ship that swung back and forth, higher and higher, ultimately turning upside down.

  “Come on, this might be my last chance to talk to her before school starts,” Carter said.

  “So what? You can talk to her at school.”

  “That’s different...tonight would be better.” Carter didn’t want to explain how awkward he felt talking to her at school, surrounded by everyone. His conversations with Tricia had never gone far, and he always felt like everyone was watching him. If he caught up with her tonight, they could actually have fun together. Almost like a date.

  They passed under a temporary banner strung across the midway:

  STARLAND AMUSEMENT PARK

  “Forty Years of Fun in the Sun!”

  Struggling to reclaim an ever-dwindling tourist trade, the park had advertised its forty-year anniversary all over the Southeast, which had brought a bumper crop of business this year. This had provided a slight but noticeable bump in visitors to the Eight-Track and other nearby attractions, too.

  “I haven’t been to Starland all summer,” Jared complained. “I don’t want to waste the whole night helping you chase some girl.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  “Seriously? This place is huge.” Jared grinned and pointed ahead toward the space-themed attractions of Space City. “Hey, let’s go on the American Rockets! Then you can look down on the whole park at once. Maybe you’ll see her.”

  “That’s actually not a totally bad idea...” Carter looked to left, toward Fool’s Gold, the “Old West” town that was the lamest area of the park besides Tyke Town. It was mostly food and drink stands, a few game booths like Shoot-Em-Up Puppets, one kiddie ride called When Pigs Fly, and a roofed pavilion with a stage where bands sometimes played country and oldies music. Fool’s Gold was clearly laid out to snag money from tourists on their way to and from the old-timey depot station at the mock town’s west end, which was the boarding station for the grand attraction, the Starland Express roller coaster.

  “Or we could do Inferno Mountain,” Jared snickered.

  Carter didn’t say anything. He glanced to his right as they passed Haunted Alley, which only had two real attractions. The first was the haunted-house maze called the Dark Mansion, a two-story structure with bats and spiderwebs hung from the eaves and ghosts and skeletons peeking out through rickety window shutters. Recorded screams and wolf howls boomed out from the imposing, ramshackle house. The line for the haunted house was already long, snaking back and forth through the graveyard waiting area out front.

  Behind Dark Mansion loomed the black mass of Inferno Mountain, glowing red at its peak.

  Aside from the Starland Express, Inferno Mountain was the park’s signature attraction. It looked like a towering black volcano, complete with fiery red light and smoke pouring out of the caldera at the top. The roller coaster train would climb a steep hill into the open, fanged mouth of a two-story devil face at the top, a face adorned with curving goat horns and vertical black pupils. The interior of the devil’s open mouth was dark, but it occasionally strobed with flickering red light accompanied by deep, devilish laughter and cheesy recorded lines like “I will eat your soul!” or “Who dares face the devil?” that echoed through the park as if to personally taunt every customer.

  Carter had never ridden it, but he knew the mountain’s interior was a horror ride and the train spiraled down through alternating darkness and hellish scenery. When the pitchfork gates opened at the bottom, the riders on the train came out looking terrified, and there would always be a few crying kids among them.

  He glanced up at the devil’s enormous face, which had an eerie way of always seeming to look right at you no matter where you stood. He quickly looked away.

  “Scaredy-cat. Still scared of Hornsby,” Jared said, using a common local name for the big devil face.

  Carter didn’t say anything, but his heart was racing. He felt stupid for being scared of something that everyone else above the age of ten seemed to find cheesy and funny, but his fear dated back to a very young and impressionable age. He didn’t understand why everyone didn’t find the giant horned face at least a little scary.

  They reached Space City, which took up the northeast corner of the park, featuring glowing high rides like American Rockets and the big rotating Moon Robot. The line for American Rockets wasn’t too bad yet, so they only had to wait a few minutes before riding.

  They climbed aboard a ride car shaped like a fat, silver 1950s-style rocket lined with rows of glowing light bulbs. The ride’s four rocket cars were arranged around a central tower, and Carter made sure to pick one that faced inward toward the park rather than out toward the highway and the ocean.

  “This is going to be awesome,” Jared said as the safety bar descended to their laps.

  A recorded voice played nearby, along with the sound of rumbling rocket engines: “Three...two...one...BLAST-OFF!”

  The rocket cars shot upwards, gaining speed as they rose above the park. Teenage tourist girls in the next rocket over screamed—prematurely, Carter thought, since they weren’t even to the good part yet.

  “First-timers,” Jared snickered.

  The rocket moved up, up, up until the entire park spread out below them like a map, with the Starland Express roller coaster running across the far end. Carter couldn’t see some of the big Space City rides behind him, but he could see everything else. He found himself at eye level with the huge red devil face of Inferno Mountain. It still seemed to look right at him, even from this height.

  Directly across the park, on the opposite side of the midway, a few tamer rides stood between Fool’s Gold and Tyke Town—the carousel, the Ferris wheel, the swings. If it had been a few minutes later, with the sun a little deeper behind the horizon, he wouldn’t have seen her at all.

  Tricia rode one of the swings, her blond braids streaming out behind her. She wasn’t gripping the chains, either, but holding her hands above her head, whooping in excitement as she circled high above the park. The flashing neon lights painted her in flaming hues of red, orange, and yellow.

  “That’s her.” Carter pointed. “On the swing.”

  “How can you tell this far away?”

  “I can tell.”

  The rocket car soared up ten stories above the ground. Then it paused. Carter had a couple of seconds to feel his adrenaline pumping and his hands turning sweaty on the safety rail as he took in how high up they sat.

  Then the car gave a loud squeal and tilted sharply forward as if it were about to spill them out and send them falling toward the pavement far below. The teenage girls in the next car screamed, and it was genuine this time—no need to fake or exaggerate their fear. It was the killer moment of the ride, that half a second when even veteran riders
nearly believed the rocket car was about to break loose and plummet a hundred feet to the solid concrete below.

  The rocket car dropped, blowing Carter’s hair back and sending his stomach up into his throat. It plummeted faster and faster toward the ground below, the wind whooshing past his ears, and he could feel his whole body cringing in anticipation of a sudden deadly impact.

  At the last possible moment, the rocket car slowed for a soft, safe landing back on the launch pad.

  “Oh my God!” screamed one of the girls in the next car. “I thought we were going to die!”

  “Let’s ride it again,” said one of her friends.

  “You’re crazy!” the third girl squealed. “I almost peed myself!”

  The ride operator released them, and Carter hurried out of the car, jogging past the three tourist girls who were falling over each other, laughing.

  He ran across the midway, dodging around sloth-like tourists. He was vaguely aware of Jared running behind him, but at the moment he didn’t care whether his friend was coming along with him or not.

  Carter dashed past the Ferris wheel and the rotating carousel, where calliope music played as kids and senior citizens rode on gaudily painted horses, lions, and elephants.

  “Slow down!” Jared breathed as he caught up to him. “You don’t want to be all sweaty and weird when you talk to her.”

  Carter took the advice and slowed to a casual walk as he reached the exit gate for the fence around the swing ride. He wiped his sweat-damp face on his shirt. Despite the setting sun, it was still a hot day, and he was nervous.

  “What do I say?” Carter asked.

  “Compliment her on something,” Jared said. Jared had no more real experience with girls than Carter himself—between them, they’d had a total of zero girlfriends—but Jared did have two older sisters. “But don’t be like ‘you’re pretty’ because that’s cornball. Say something about her clothes. They think about their clothes all the time.”

  “Okay. Just don’t make fun of me when I’m talking to her.”

  “Don’t be such a wuss.” Jared rolled his eyes. “I bet she shoots you down, anyway.”