She stepped back, mouth open in shock, and pulled Tim and Andrew with her. “I think I’ve heard enough for one day. I’m going back to the hotel. You enjoy yourself, Vince.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Run away. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”
She froze at the door, told the boys she’d meet them outside. They both looked at him like he was a mad man. She watched the entrance closely until the massive doors finally closed. She turned around and faced Vince. “What did you just say to me?”
“Let me just ask you, Audra. Do you think I’m blind? Do you think I can’t see what’s happening to my own wife in front of my eyes? I’m a light sleeper. You ought to know that by now. I heard you that night. I heard you packing and I heard you leaving and I even heard you come back. I thought that was a good sign at the time but I see now it wasn’t.”
“You bastard.” She was crying now. His stomach weakened at the sight but his anger did not recede. She wiped her eyes and left without saying anything else.
Vince kicked the nearest sign, one that he hadn’t noticed until now, and rubbed his foot at the sudden pain in his toes. He was sure the sign had not been there when they first arrived. He would’ve noticed the message written across its center. It wasn’t something that could be easily missed.
Let the bitch go.
He covered his eyes and tried to calm down, sure that he was losing his mind.
Something rustled in the jungle ahead. The leaves and trees swayed. The dinosaurs were calling to him.
***
“The workers are still hungry,” Sebastian said.
The Director nodded, stood up from the throne, and stepped out onto the balcony. “I had hoped to wait longer. Many more will hear about our reopening. They too will come.”
“I know.” For a moment Sebastian sounded like the human he had been in another life. “We can hold out for a while longer if you’d like. Most of the workers fed last night but it was not enough. Our stomachs are already empty.”
The Director smiled. Dark storm clouds moved slowly over the mountains. “Yes, of course. Perhaps it’s best to move forward ahead of schedule. I myself am quite famished.” He rubbed a clawed hand against his scaly flesh. His stomach begged him. It had waited so very long.
The clouds moved closer. He watched the families below, laughing and cheering, having the time of their lives. There were less of them now but still enough.
“Would you like me to give the order?” Sebastian said.
The Director closed his eyes, thought of the screams, the pleas, the flowing rivers of blood. He thought of Dream Woods reaching its full potential once more.
“Yes. Tell them it’s time. Tell them to feed.”
“Very well.” Sebastian left the chamber in a hurry.
The Director watched and smiled and prepared for the real Dream Woods to show its face.
Chapter Thirteen
After they got back to the hotel, Audra gave Tim his insulin and told the boys to hang out by the pool while she went for a walk to cool off.
“Dad sounded crazy,” Andrew said, grabbing his swim trunks. “I’ve never seen him like that.”
“Yeah,” Tim said. He was checking his blood sugar. “I didn’t think he ever got mad. He says it’s his proudest quality.”
“He’s just tired and hung over. He’ll come around.” She forced a smile and told them she’d be back soon. She grabbed the pack of cigarettes from her bag and slid them quickly into her purse. Neither Vince nor the boys knew she still smoked. She’d quit for a while but the urge had crept up on her after only six months. She usually hid them in her bureau back home, underneath her panties and next to a can of Febreeze for good measure.
She hurried downstairs, her heart beating quickly. The truth was she didn’t think Vince was just tired or hung over. Perhaps those two things added to his anger but she’d never seen him like that. It was she that was causing this. He knew her secret, knew she wanted out.
She thought back to that night, packing in a hurry and looking up one last time at the bedroom window to assure no one was watching. She had been crying badly. Perhaps the tears had clouded her vision but she’d been so certain no one was there.
She imagined Vince peeking from behind the curtain and shaking his head. Had he been pretending to be asleep when she’d gotten back? It must have taken every ounce of restraint for him to act like he hadn’t known the truth that night. Let alone all the days that had passed since.
Things would have been so much easier if she’d made it past the highway.
“Going somewhere in quite a hurry, Mrs. Carter.”
Audra froze at the front doors of the hotel, closed her eyes, and wished she was just going crazy. She turned around. Doris was sitting at her desk, the computer lighting up her fake face. “Just getting some fresh air is all,” Audra said.
“We both know you’re not much of a liar.”
“Says the woman who probably isn’t a woman in the first place.” Audra took out a cigarette and lit it, hoping the smoke in her lungs would calm her some. It didn’t. “I know there’s something fucked up going on here. I know that you and all the other employees are not what you seem.”
“That’s very perceptive of you. Where are Vince and your two boys?”
“None of your damned business.” She tried to sound tough but her voice cracked.
“I suppose not but we here at Dream Woods like to get to know our customers. And I happen to know you very well. You’re not thinking about running away again, Mrs. Carter, are you?”
“Fuck you. Fuck this whole theme park. We should have gone to Disney World.”
Doris smiled. Her face stretched. Any farther and the thing beneath would finally be revealed. “I do hope that you stick around for the festivities.”
“What festivities?”
Doris laughed, her smile frozen on her wrinkly fake face. “Looks like rain outside. You should find yourself an umbrella.”
Audra left without saying anything else. Outside daylight had been canceled. Doris had not been lying. A storm was approaching. The cool breeze felt good on her skin after the day’s humidity. She looked around, saw too many attendants and their pale wrinkly skin. She wanted to be alone.
She headed for the front gates.
You’re doing it again. You’re leaving.
She opened the closest gate and stepped into the parking lot. She finished the first cigarette and immediately lit another. She supposed her marriage was over. Things could not go back to normal after this. She gave Vince credit for keeping quiet for so long. She knew how hard it was to hide things from the world.
The wind picked up. Black clouds loomed over the mountains, blocking the sun completely. She finished the second cigarette and threw it to the ground, stomping it with her shoe and nearly falling over as she heard a scream.
It was shrill and pleading and it ended quickly, like something had cut it short. It came from behind her, from the park, and some part of her came alive with a warning. It did not sound like Tim or Andrew but her maternal instincts, however much she despised them, urged her to go and check on them.
She spun around to head back inside.
And froze at what lay before her.
It was a hallucination. She’d had a nervous breakdown. Doris had slipped something into her drink last night and it was just now starting to take effect. She had in fact gone past the highway that night, had gotten back into drugs and was having the worst trip of her life in some dump of an apartment at that very moment.
One of these scenarios had to be the truth because if not then her mind and everything she’d ever known threatened to come undone quickly.
There was no park in front of her. Dream Woods was gone. In its place stood rubble and dust and dirt and a few skeletons of roller coasters that had been working just fine a moment before. In the distance, where the castle should have been, was now just a pile of debris and rocks. Snake-like vines were wrapped around the r
emains of the closest ticket booth and vines, she knew, did not grow overnight. Or in the span of seconds for that matter. It looked as though the park had never reopened.
She swore she heard the rides moving, speakers playing distorted music, but everything lay still and broken. She could smell cotton candy and a million other mixed scents instead of dust and age.
She touched the front gate, now rusty and warped. There was a padlock and a chain along the center, one that had not been there moments before.
Her mouth hung open and she waited for the vision to pass, though the theme park remained abandoned.
It began to rain.
***
Vince walked deeper into the dinosaur park.
He heard movement all around him, things just beyond his vision. He knew the raptors could not be far. He remembered them clearly now, how lifelike they’d been. Back then he’d been afraid they would tear him apart but now he welcomed them. There was no pain in Dream Woods, only endless joy.
He’d said as a child he never wanted to leave this place and in a way he never had. It had always been in his mind and memories, and had never truly left him. It felt good to be reunited. To be back home.
He was with his true family, the only one that mattered.
He stopped for a moment and wrinkled his brow. What the hell was he thinking? He’d just told his wife and kids to fuck off. He had come here to fix his marriage, to reconnect, not tear apart what was already about to crumble on its own.
Bullshit. You came here to enjoy yourself. You knew she was going to leave sooner or later. She shouldn’t have come back that night. It would have done you a world of good if she veered off the side of the road or got struck by a drunk driver. You don’t need her or Tim or Andrew or anyone else. You only need Dream Woods.
Something moved nearby. There came a grunting sound a few feet to his left. The leaves parted for moment, giving Vince a glance at the outline of something large and deformed. He rubbed his eyes, tried to get his thoughts straight, but the only thing that seemed to stick was the certainty that it was not a dinosaur in the bushes to his left. He didn’t know what it was but it was certainly not a raptor. It was something altogether different. He could sense its presence, something foreign, something awful.
He backed away until he was at the doors.
The entire jungle was swaying now and not just from the wind and the oncoming storm. There were multiple things moving closer to him. He heard them sniffing out the air, hungry for their prey. They moaned together, several shrill cries of thirst and hunger becoming a single pulse.
There were no dinosaurs here, he realized. Not anymore.
He turned around to open the doors and head back to the hotel when the world came apart. Everything around him shook. His head collided with the door and for a moment he saw stars. His first thought was an earthquake. He’d never been through one before but he could not imagine any other cause. It felt as if the ground beneath him was threatening to open up.
Outside he heard things falling and crushing. There were countless screams, many of them cutting off soon after they began, and the sounds of people running around and begging for help. Several knocks sounded on the other side of the doors but Vince was stuck in place, his mind begging him not to reach for the handle for fear of what was out there.
There were other sounds too. Grunts and growls and roars that did not match any animals Vince could bring to mind. They sounded a lot like the moans that came from the jungle.
Above all of that was the sound of something ripping, not of paper or plastic or the concrete beneath his feet. It sounded more like skin being torn away from bone.
The screams got worse after that.
Chapter Fourteen
Regina Michaels honked her horn for the third time in a row but the countless cars in front of her didn’t move an inch.
A man in the van in front of her turned around, gave her the finger, and mouthed a sentence with the word “fuck” in it. She smiled and told him to drop dead. Then she honked again.
If it was a car accident the wreckage was too far ahead to make out any details. She’d been edging along for the better part of an hour now, the speedometer never creeping over twenty miles per hour. She should have been at Dream Woods already but the traffic had been horrid since she’d left the city. It felt like something was trying to keep her away but she kept pushing that line of thought aside. Her mind felt fragile enough with everything else that had been going on.
Take for example the billboards that seemed to pop up every ten miles or so, all of them advertisements for Dream Woods. If she saw another picture of Sebastian, the official mascot, she would scream, lose her shit, and veer off the road. She remembered that poor boy. His face had haunted her for years. His voice had been painfully high as if puberty had struck every part of him except his vocal chords. Acne littered his face so badly that he looked like a burn victim. He was persecuted by most of the employees, Regina excluded. They hadn’t interacted much but she did her best to be as nice as possible. Wearing that stupid bear mask had been a blessing. He had jumped into the role of Sebastian like a seasoned actor right up to the day one of the attendants found him dead behind Dream Castle, both wrists slit evenly. He had taken off the body of the costume, the mangy fir on the ground beside him, but the mask remained on his face to the end, the googly eyes open, his own eyes closed for good.
On the seat next to Regina lay the newspaper page with Steven’s dead face and an admission ticket from her time at the park. She had kept it in her wallet all these years. Her therapist said she ought to let it go, that such a symbolic gesture would help her recovery immensely. Regina agreed at the time. She hadn’t been sure why she held onto the damned thing until now.
It was her ticket back in.
The traffic began to move up ahead. She accelerated too quickly and nearly rear-ended the van in front of her. The man gave her another death stare and muttered more cuss words.
In the distance the sky was darkening, the storm clouds getting worse with each mile. She did not think it was a coincidence. She figured she was about a half hour away now, assuming there were no other incidents. She needed only to take the next exit and follow the back roads, winding and twisting along the woods and hills for the rest of the way.
The mountains made her heart skid. Though they still seemed far in the distance, they brought with them a sense of claustrophobia, like any minute they could shift into sky-high walls and trap Regina without any effort.
Traffic picked up and soon she was going nearly thirty. The rental car’s air conditioner felt too cold on her skin, but it was better than the heat outside. Blinking police lights came into view ahead, along with an ambulance and fire engine.
Rubberneckers slowed to see the carnage. Though she didn’t want to, Regina did the same. There were three bodies beneath blood-soaked blankets that had once been white. She closed her eyes and swallowed, feeling awful she’d been beeping for the last half hour.
When she opened them again she saw that one of the bodies had sat up and removed the blanket to reveal a bloodied face that was not much a face anymore. Both eyes had been chewed out and the nose was now an open cavity. Its lips were shredded and dangling and even from this far off she recognized that face.
Steven smiled from his position on the ground. His teeth were chipped. A molar popped out of his mangled gums and fell to the pavement. He held up a crushed hand that lacked a thumb and waved to her.
Behind him and the other dead bodies another billboard appeared, replacing what had been a mile marker moments before. There were three spotlights pointing upward so that the advertisement could be read in the dark.
An image of Sebastian pointed at her and smiled his eternal smile. The wrists of his bear costume were soaked with red. Drops of blood dripped down the side of the sign.
Welcome Back to Scream Woods! We’ve Been Waiting for You!
The exit was just a few yards ahead on her right. She took t
he corner and skidded onto the mountain road, screaming and punching the steering wheel. She did not look into her rearview mirror again until the highway disappeared.
***
Regina noticed her gas was running low. She could probably make it to Dream Woods but the thought of running out of fuel on the way back troubled her, especially if she needed to leave in a hurry.
She pulled into a gas station around twenty minutes from the park, stepped outside, and began to pump.
The sky was blacker than night now. The clouds moved oddly, not quite spinning into funnels but circling the landscape just the same, an infinite loop. She tried to imagine the sun above it all but it seemed impossible.
She finished fueling up and went inside to pay.
A woman stood in front of the counter, screaming at the clerk. For a moment Regina thought she’d walked into a robbery in progress. The woman was covered in tattoos and her hair was soaked with sweat, a single leaf clinging to her bangs.
“I don’t want any trouble,” the clerk said. “But if you don’t get the hell out of here I’m going to call the cops.”
“Go ahead,” the woman said. “Call as many as you can and tell them to go to Dream Woods. Something terrible has happened.”
“Lady, how many times do I need to tell you this? That place had been closed going on three decades now. Either you’re riding high on something or you best call the pharmacy and have your medication refilled.”
“I’m going to say this one last time.” The woman stepped closer to the counter and pointed at the clerk. He winced. “If you don’t call the cops people are going to die. Does that make sense to you? It’s not a difficult concept. I have a husband and two fucking sons in that park. You’re going to have that on your conscience.”
She reached forward and tried to grab the phone but the clerk was too fast. He grabbed it first and picked it up, began dialing. “Okay, lady. You want me to call the cops? That’s just fine. I’ll call them up right now.” He waited for a moment as it rang. “Yeah, hello. I’d like to report an assault. There’s a crazy woman in my store and she’s threatening me. I think she may have escaped from a mental facility.”
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