Ghostland

by Duncan Ralston

"Good times," he said with a chuckle. "Let's get this over with before we piss our pants."

  Lilian entered the washroom first. She held the door for Ben. Three stalls stood directly across from the long, mirror and counter, sinks with automatic faucets and soap dispensers. Despite being its first day of use there was already water splashed on the counters, soap drooling from the dispensers, smudges on the mirror, the trash can overflowing with crumpled paper towels and a few scraps of toilet paper scattered on the floor.

  Lilian headed straight for the last stall on the left. Ben pushed on the door closest to the entrance, obviously hoping for some buffer between them. The stall was locked. Lilian glanced at the mirror but she couldn't see any feet under the door in the reflection.

  She closed the door behind her and twisted the lock. Ben entered the middle stall as she unzipped her fly, wriggled her jeans down over her hips and sat down on the cold toilet seat. She heard him unroll a bunch of toilet paper and unbuckle his belt. She relaxed and began to pee, trying not to think about Ben in the next stall hearing her go. As she did, she glanced down at her feet, tapping anxiously, and saw two fresh spots of blood in her underwear.

  Great. I'm not supposed to get my period for ten da—

  A drop of blood landed on the stubby, bitten nail of her index finger. As she twisted her arm to get a better look, another drop struck her forearm and spilled down, mingling with the light brown hairs.

  Reluctantly, not wanting to discover the source of the blood with her pants still around her ankles, Lilian looked up.

  She sucked in a gasp.

  The woman from Guest Services floated above the stalls. She still wore her Ghostland T-shirt over her heavy bosom and her hair hung stringy from either side of her head. She looked frightened and confused and she was weeping softly, a muttered whisper of prayer, holding out her hands to Lilian, the splayed fingers covered in blood from two gaping wounds she'd slashed in her own wrists, the razor blade still pinched between thumb and forefinger, dripping blood onto Lilian's hair and jacket and face.

  Lilian screamed and jerked up her pants, pushing on the door until she remembered it opened inward, then fumbling with the latch, still pulling up her underwear with the other hand.

  Ben hurried out of the stall beside her. He glanced at her crotch, with her pink underwear still clearly visible above her unzipped jeans and then followed her haunted gaze to the ceiling.

  He saw the woman and staggered back against the counter. "Jesus Christ!"

  At the sound of his voice the dead woman from Guest Services spun around in midair above the stalls and floated toward them, still mumbling, still holding out her slashed and bleeding wrists. Lilian turned, looking behind herself, and somehow it was the fact that the dead woman didn't cast a reflection that shocked her into action. She grabbed Ben's sleeve and pulled him toward the door, almost tripping with her jeans still below her hips as the two of them ran screaming like frightened little kids who'd just summoned Bloody Mary in the school bathroom.

  "That was close," Ben said.

  Lilian sighed. Ben watched her wriggle her jeans up over her hips and turned away shyly as she forced up the zipper.

  "You think she'll come after us?" he asked, after a moment of watching his shoes as he ground dirt into the pavement.

  "I don't know. I think she's just scared and confused."

  "Until Garrote gets into her," Ben said. "Then she'll be just as dangerous as the rest of them."

  Lilian went to the fountain, pressed the lever with her elbow and ran her hands under the cold stream. The dead woman's blood had already vanished—it had either been a hologram or a hallucination—but it still made her feel disgusting. Once she was satisfied her hands were clean, she dried them on her jeans and drank a few mouthfuls. She hadn't realized how thirsty she'd been until the cool liquid splashed the back of her throat. It felt glorious.

  Ben approached the fountain. He drank greedily and let out a satisfied gasp.

  "You're not gonna wash your hands?"

  "I didn't touch anything."

  "You touched the doors."

  Ben groaned and rolled his eyes. "Fine." He rinsed his hands briefly and wiped them on his pants. "You happy?"

  "Better. Just because it's the end of the world doesn't make hygiene any less important."

  Ben shook his head and chuckled. Lilian chose to ignore it. They headed off from the washrooms in a westerly direction, following the creek until it branched north.

  A little way further the Museum of Haunted Vehicles stood at the end of a wide courtyard, a flat glass and chrome building that looked a lot like a brand-new car dealership. Lilian thought it must have been built specifically for Ghostland, unlike other buildings that had been shipped here in pieces or like Garrote House, carried on the back of a truck. Aside from a dozen or so scattered bodies, sprawled in various painful positions, an upturned Ghostland-red golf cart and several park benches, the courtyard appeared to be empty. Flies buzzed on and around the corpses but the area smelled much fresher than elsewhere. The wide-open space must have allowed the spring breeze to circulate the air.

  The two of them headed out across the courtyard. It was so quiet they could hear their footfalls echoing back to them from the building.

  As they approached the steps, a large figure bolted out from the hedge maze to the left of the courtyard in a crouch. Lilian recognized the big guy from the front gates, the one with the gun permit and the NO FEAR t-shirt. The man seemed to have forgotten the motto as he crouch-ran into the middle of the courtyard, whimpering and shading his eyes to look up at the sky.

  "Why is he—?" Ben began.

  No Fear let out a blood-curdling shriek, silencing Ben as a dark shadow shot diagonally across the courtyard toward him.

  Without a word, Ben and Lilian dashed up the stairs. Lilian jerked open a door and slipped inside, holding it until Ben got through, then pushing it shut on its pneumatic hinges behind them.

  "Holy hell," she gasped, leaning back against the door. "What the hell are those things?"

  "I don't know," Ben said, sounding utterly winded.

  No Fear stood and ran for the stairs, screaming and panting. Three more dark shapes fell from the sky, looking something like billowing black cloaks or jellyfish made of smoke. One completely enveloped the man. Another missed him and circled back. The third struck the ground and splatted on the concrete, leaving a wet black stain.

  No Fear's terrified scream ended abruptly, like a needle coming off a record.

  A moment later the smoke creature rose into the sky, leaving the corpse on the pavement. Its ethereal limbs fluttered as it rose to join the others, as if it was swimming instead of flying. The creatures circled like buzzards looking for prey, and then they melded into one another, forming a nattering, swirling mass of death.

  "The Swarm," Ben said, and shivered.

  GHOSTS IN THE MACHINES

  IS HE DEAD?" Ben whispered. The two of them were crouched behind the museum directory, peering out through the glass front of the building.

  "He's not moving," Lilian said. "What are they doing out there?"

  The Swarm had broken apart into individual shadow creatures, most of which were circling above the building. The others—and there had to be a dozen of them, maybe more—swam languidly through the air toward the building's glass front. Apart from the Swarm they appeared to be eyeless, completely devoid of features aside from their wispy tendrils. And yet they seemed to be looking through the glass wall, searching for the living beings that had escaped them.

  Were they demons? Ghosts? Some other sort of dark presence? Ben wasn't sure. He supposed the Swarm could have been a literal version of what Sara Jane Amblin had mentioned: an oil spill, a massive pool of raw dead energy stripped to its essence, devoid of any semblance of its former animal state. A pure and lethal entity whose only intent was death, with a one-inch thick sheet of glass separating them from their next meal.

  "I dunno," Ben replied. "Maybe they can
't get through."

  As he said it, he noticed large black smudges on several of the windows further down, where the soul-suckers had likely launched themselves at the windows, rocketing after intended victims, vanishing as they struck the glass the way the one outside had into the pavement. The fact that these creatures weren't eager to do the same meant they'd learned from the mistakes of the others. Intelligent hunters with a hive mind.

  It also meant at least one person had fled inside. They could still be in here, for all Ben knew.

  "Ben…?"

  Lilian was peering further into the building when he turned, breathing heavily with her eyes wide.

  Three vehicles rolled toward them from between the exhibit stands, the buzz and squeak of their small engines and parts growing louder as they approached. In the lead was a slightly smaller than normal tricycle, push-pedaled by a doll[xix] in a dusty white Victorian dress, with long black hair, a jagged crack down its pale face through the missing left eye and a black bowler hat on a slight angle. Behind it was a cherry red car that looked like the car from Christine, and a dune buggy with an old G.I. Joe doll buckled into the driver's seat, the large ones that looked similar to Barbies. All three came to a stop a few feet from the end of the aisle, then buzzed forward and back like kids on bikes trying to intimidate them. Ben guessed they were possessed by poltergeists too uncreative or weak to manipulate something larger and more menacing.

  Before he had a chance to avoid it, Christine buzzed toward him and struck his ankle. "Yow!" He raised his foot off the floor. The red muscle car idled at his feet. There were stickers plastered all over it. Some kid had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it. Ben wondered if that same kid's ghost possessed it now.

  "Little bastard," he said. He kicked at it but the car was too quick, darting back out of the way of his shoe. The other two rolled around to either side, the tiny engine buzzing, trike wheels squeaking as they flanked him and Lilian.

  The dune buggy whizzed up to her. She jumped and it zipped under her feet. "Hey! What gives?"

  The doll on the tricycle cocked its head to look up at them, staring with its one remaining blue eye. "Wanna ride with me?" it said in a hollow recorded voice. "C'mon! Let's be friends!"

  "Get lost, you creepy little shit," Lilian muttered, edging past it.

  Ben stepped over the red car. It didn't move to follow him.

  As they headed down the aisle into the exhibits, the two cars zipped off in different directions while the doll rolled around in a wide circle to face them, its wheels making tiny birdlike squeaks. The doll raised a hand from the handles and waved side to side. Ben noticed several fingers had chipped off. Its right knee rose and fell, then its left, and it rolled slowly off to the right until it disappeared behind the exhibit stand at the end of the aisle.

  Outside the dark entities hovered, patiently awaiting the kill.

  Ben forced himself to look away and not turn back, like a child hurrying up the basement steps, certain he'd seen the bogeyman.

  The building wasn't as large as he'd expected—there appeared to be about twenty exhibits, maybe a few more. Automobiles from different eras stood on platforms to the left and right. A mint-condition Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. A beaten-up yellow VW Beetle. A bright-red hotrod with flame decals on the sides. An antique elevator car on a stand. A large unicycle behind a plexiglass case. As they cautiously headed down the aisle, an '80s rock song he almost recognized drifted from somewhere within. It sounded like music his parents would play in their room when he was supposed to be asleep. That was reason enough for it to give him the creeps.

  Each exhibit bore a sign with its previous owner's name and date of death, like the ones found elsewhere in the park, along with a corny pun tagline and its history printed below. Each sign also featured a button for an audio version. Ben didn't care to stop and check them out but he and Lilian cautiously peered in through the windshields as they passed to be sure no one was inside and to check their gas gauges. Each vehicle sat on Empty.

  On the other side of the intersection, a mobile home, an old train engine that smelled of burnt coal, a subway car covered in graffiti—the sign called it CAR 438[xx], and Ben knew some of the New York subway car's haunted history from an episode of Ghost Brothers—a houseboat and a white van all stood on raised platforms. Over the roof of the trailer Ben could see the dirty shovel of a massive excavator and it offered him a brief glimmer of hope knowing they could probably tear down the whole damn exterior wall of the park if they wanted to, until he remembered neither of them knew how to drive an excavator. He doubted it would be easy to learn.

  Christine zipped down the end of the intersecting aisle to their left, following them. He looked back, expecting to see the doll on the trike had creeped up behind them. But all he saw were the shadow creatures hovering behind the glass, linking tendrils, still waiting for their meal to return.

  The rock music was louder among the marine vehicles. Ben recognized the song from its repeated refrain: "Rosanna," by some '80s band he didn't know. It came from a yacht down the aisle to their right. There was movement up on the deck but from the low angle he couldn't see what it was. Closer to them were the mangled remains of a silver sports car—the exhibit labeled "'Little Bastard,' James Dean's cursed Porsche 550 Spyder!"—and an Econoline van featuring the vanity plate FILTHY and a bumper sticker with the words F*CK GONZALEZ, whoever that was. Ben cupped his hands to peer in through the tinted windows. The orange gas gauge needle floated just above the middle.

  "This one's got gas," he said.

  Lilian was looking up at the yacht, watching the ghosts on the deck. Painted in light blue sea spray on its stern was its name: Sea Dream[xxi]. A gaping hole had been torn in the hull with barnacles encrusted around it. On the deck, a blonde woman in red plastic sunglasses and a high-waisted yellow bikini lay tanning. A tanned blond man in a white Polo shirt, high-hemmed yellow Adidas shorts and tennis shoes stood at the wheel pouring champagne. The man raised his glass in a cheer. As he turned to drink, the barnacle-encrusted skull on the other half of his face came into view, like a mass of gray and black tumors. Frothy liquid spilled out through his exposed teeth. His partner raised her glass and a slippery green eel oozed out from between her cherry-red lips and plunged its snout into the glass, guzzling the golden fluid.

  Ben flinched away in disgust. He flipped open the Econoline's gas cap, urging himself to stay focused on the task at hand and not look back at the ghosts onboard the Sea Dream.

  "Great," Lilian said, watching him work. "Now we just need a hose and a gas tank. Unless you plan on holding it in your mouth."

  "My mouth's not big enough," he said. "Yours might work, though."

  "Ha ha."

  Ben crept around to the back, keeping an eye on the ghost yuppies on their yacht, still lost in a world of their own, drinking champagne while everything around them had fallen into chaos. The back doors wouldn't budge and the window was blacked out. He heard a click and saw Lilian gently open the passenger door. She crawled into the seat. "You gotta be kidding me," she whispered.

  "What?"

  He heard a thump from inside the van. Lilian had disappeared from the windows.

  "Lil? Are you okay in there?"

  A moment later she backed out of the same door she'd entered. "How lucky are we?" she said, holding up a red plastic gas can and a length of hose.

  Ben rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure. Super lucky."

  "Are you gonna take them?"

  "Why me?"

  "I've never syphoned gas before."

  "Neither have I."

  "Well, it's easy," she said. "All you do is stick one end of the hose in the tank and suck on the other end until gas starts coming out, then you stick it in this thing." She shook the empty can.

  "If it's so easy, why don't you do it?"

  "If I do it, I'll puke. I hate the smell of gasoline. I've already puked once today, it's your turn."

  "Nobody likes the smell of gas, Lilian."


  "What about Skylar Peterson?"

  "Do you seriously think she's sniffing gas because it smells good?"

  Lilian considered it and shrugged. "Come on, Ben. Just do it."

  "Fine. But you owe me."

  "Great. If we make it out of here alive, I'll set you up with one of my friends."

  "Oh, please let it be Skylar," he said with heavy sarcasm. He took the can and hose, sat the can beside the rear wheel and unscrewed the top. He removed the gas cap, the pungent smell sharp in his nostrils as he shoved a length of hose down inside. He hesitated with the end of the hose poised before his open mouth.

  This better be worth it, he thought.

  "Don't swallow it," Lilian warned him.

  "I wasn't planning to." He sucked on the hose, feeling the pressure build, like sucking a thick milkshake through a thin straw. The gas fumes started to make him feel dizzy. He sucked harder and a mouthful of awful-tasting fluid filled his mouth. He spat it out. Gas poured out of the end of the hose, splashing on the floor at his feet. He jammed it quickly into the gas can and watched the can grow darker red from the bottom up as the gas began to fill it.

  "Good work," Lilian said.

  Ben worked up a mouthful of gas-flavored spit and hocked it onto the platform. "No thanks to you," he said, though he had to admit he was glad it had washed away any residual taste of the nun's spit from his mouth.

  Somewhere nearby an engine sputtered to life. Lilian looked off in the direction of the sound. "Sounds like someone's got the same idea as us."

  The sound of the engine made Ben nervous. He looked down at the can. It had already filled to the quarter mark but he willed the can to fill faster. How much would half a tank last them? A few hours? The park wouldn't close until nine but late arrivals after work might wonder why the entrance was barred and word would eventually spread to the local police. He guessed it had to be at least three or four o'clock now, maybe even later. It felt like days since they'd left the funhouse and struck out for Guest Services. So much had happened since then. So many people had died.