Inferno Park Read online

  The Starland Express, the long wooden roller coaster with its high hills trimmed in light bulbs, cracked and snapped as the sinkhole spread beneath the support columns midway through the ride.

  The train of screaming roller coaster riders charged down a splintered hill where the track had broken away. They tumbled off and corkscrewed down out of sight, landing somewhere in Tyke Town. Carter heard crunching metal and a fresh batch of screams at the impact.

  The largest hills of the roller coaster broke apart and fell inside the park, smashing into rides, buildings, and the crowd watching the band or playing Shoot-Em-Up Puppets in the fake town of Fool’s Gold. A fire erupted somewhere in that direction—Carter could only tell by the sudden red glow above it.

  From his vantage, there was a great deal that Carter couldn’t see, but he would hear about all of it in the days and months to come: how the two-story clock tower in Tyke Town fell over, crushing a couple of kids on the Tick-Tock Train. At the same time, heavy beams from the Starland Express rained down on the Tiny Teacups and the Funtime Firehouse, battering kids and breaking their bones.

  Screams and cries sounded from all corners of the park, and a panicked mob rushed toward the front gate, many of them bleeding, burned, or clutching broken arms.

  “Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” laughed the enormous face of the devil as the chaos and destruction spread below.

  Carter watched as the black mass of Inferno Mountain heaved upward while everything else sank and toppled, the two-story devil face rising as if to survey the destruction with his glowing red eyes and frozen fanged grin. Cracks spread downward from the glowing caldera at the peak of the volcanic mountain, and Carter half-expected hot lava to come rushing down the side—though of course there was no lava inside, only fire-red lights and a smoke machine that seemed to be working overtime, chugging out clouds of dark gray smoke that curled up around the devil’s horns.

  “Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” The devil’s maniacal laughter went on and on, as though the sound equipment had been jarred and the recording was stuck. That laughter would continue for hours while survivors and rescue workers dug through the wreckage in search of lost children.

  “We have to get out of here!” Jared pulled Carter to his feet and tried to drag him along with the rest of the panicked crowd boiling past them, but Carter remained where he was, staring at the shuddering, shaking Inferno Mountain. He was waiting for Tricia.

  “Come on!” Jared shouting, pulling his arm.

  “Wait.” Carter’s voice was flat and cold, his eyes locked on the red pitchfork gate where the tracks curved out of the mountain. He ignored the overweight lady in the red “Roll Tide!” shirt who nearly flattened him in her panicked jog out of the park.

  The pitchfork gates finally opened, and Carter took a sharp breath.

  The train of six black cars rolled out of the gate. Ten of the twelve riders were screaming and shoving against their safety bars as the train pulled around and under the roof of the loading station.

  The two riders in front were not screaming or shoving at all.

  “Holy shit,” Jared’s voice hissed beside him.

  Carter ran up through the now-deserted waiting area for the Inferno Mountain ride. Ten of the twelve passengers squirmed and pushed out of their seats as the train braked. They ran past Carter on either side, barely giving him a glance, their faces and shirts spattered with blood.

  Across the tracks, the ride operator lay unconscious on the ground. It looked as though he’d lost his balance and knocked his head against something, maybe the ride control console.

  In the first car sat Tricia and the teenage boy who’d joined her at the last minute. Neither of them moved. Their hands lay still in their laps.

  Both Tricia and the boy had been decapitated.

  On top of Tricia’s shoulders sat a shapeless mass of blood and gore encircled by her necklace of plastic jack-o’-lanterns and black cats. Bright red blood leaked in thin streams down her white dress and pale arms, pooling in her lap around her curled hands and her heavily bitten fingernails. Her homemade bracelets were soaked in red.

  Her missing head was nowhere in sight. Neither was the boy’s.

  “That’s insane,” Jared whispered behind him.

  Carter stared at her headless, bloody body and said nothing. He felt hollow inside. He felt as if he’d lost his soul, as if he would feel nothing but emptiness for the rest of his life.

  “Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” The devil laughed on and on above them, the small red bulbs glowing in his eyes.

  “We have to go, man,” Jared insisted. “This place is falling apart.”

  In the hours and days to come, wave after wave of fire and emergency workers would arrive from surrounding counties. Rescue workers would dig at the ruins for weeks, but scores of people would remain missing. More than a hundred people would eventually be counted among the dead, the majority of their bodies vanished into the sinkhole.

  The sinkhole was estimated to extend hundreds of feet into the ground, its bottom filled with thick, swampy mud. Attempted excavation was declared too dangerous, and dozens of people, most of them children, would have their final resting place there, beneath the ruins of Starland Amusement Park.

  The iconic picture that swept the national news the next day showed the devil’s huge laughing face leering over a burning ice cream stand as panicked, bleeding tourists ran by in the foreground. The entrance to the park’s signature ride was partially visible, high chrome letters spelling out the word INFERNO.

  That first day, a simple error by a tired, shocked intern at the Associated Press caused hundreds of news outlets to mistakenly identify Starland as “Inferno Park.” The name stuck in the public imagination, until time passed and the event faded from the national mind, lost under the ever-growing layers of new disasters, dangers, and scandals.

  While some of the details would fade from Carter’s mind, he remember the misery and horror of that day for the rest of his life. He would remember them most clearly in his nightmares.

  Chapter Two

  Exactly five years later, Carter stood again at the front gates of Starland. The fake castle towers of the ticket booths were no longer white but a weathered green and brown, sticky with mildew, and the neon stars lay dark. The ticket-taker windows were boarded up. Graffiti had been painted all over the towers and the sidewalk in front of the gate—mostly the names of the dead.

  The gates themselves were chained and padlocked to keep out trespassers and vandals. High weeds and spindly trees had grown up along the fence, and the chain-link itself was thick with catbrier and other prickly vines, as well as poisonous vines like crab’s eye. The dense, overlapping growth had turned the chain-link fence into a jungle barrier blocking any view of the wreckage inside.

  If Carter had ripped away a handful of the thorny growth and peered through, he might have seen a dilapidated food stand with painted starbursts advertising “Tasty Fries!” and “Frosty Drinks!” or maybe the Lucky Darts game booth with deflated, shriveled balloons still hanging across its cork wall.

  He didn’t want to see any of it, so he didn’t try.

  The front gates, and the sidewalk directly in front of them, were scattered with flowers, cards in sealed envelopes, little gifts and toys, and pictures, mostly of children. Some of the pictures were faded, hung carefully with twine and left there for years, to be slowly destroyed by wind and rain.

  That first year, the fence had been papered with pictures of missing children, many printed on fliers with their family’s phone numbers and email addresses, in the thin hope that their kids hadn’t been sucked away down the sinkhole but were somehow lost in the chaos and still alive somewhere. The following August, the one-year anniversary of the park disaster had brought another wave of pictures, flowers, candles, and little gifts like teddy bears and plush bunnies, but no hopeful phone numbers.


  This year, the crop of flowers and cards was smaller than ever. Most of the dead had been tourists from out of town, and a lot of those families had ceased making the pilgrimage—sometimes hundreds of miles—to pay tribute to the lost. Even the yellow signs on the fence reading NO TRESPASSING or CONDEMNED - HAZARDOUS SITE looked faded by time.

  Carter carried a handful of fresh white roses he’d bought at the grocery store on the way to the park. He looked for Tricia’s picture, but didn’t really expect to find a new one. Her family had put up a different photograph of her each August for three years, but they’d since moved away, like countless other families in the dying town. It looked like Carter was the only one left to remember her this year.

  He found a faded photograph of her from a previous year, clamped to the chain-link with a clothespin. The weather had almost worn the image and the photo paper itself away, leaving only a hint of her bright, intelligent green eyes and her sad smile.

  He laid the flowers on the sidewalk in front of it, on top of faded farewell messages spray-painted in years past.

  Carter knelt there a moment. As usual, he could think of nothing to say. He had nearly died alongside her—should have died alongside her, instead of leaving her in the company of some random out-of-town creep. He should not be here, with his heart still beating, drifting through his life like a ghost.

  “Carter, we need to go,” his dad called from the truck. He was in the driver’s seat of a long green box truck with the MOOVIN’ ON cow logo on the side, the cartoon cow looking off into the distance as though expecting greener pastures ahead. Carter’s dad wore green coveralls with his first name, Henry, on a patch on his chest that also featured the MOOVIN’ ON cow.

  Carter wore the identical outfit, as he had all summer. It was made of light cotton, but still grew uncomfortable in the Florida heat—any rational person would wear shorts and t-shirt when moving heavy boxes and furniture during the summer. His dad’s employer was a national company, though, and required the same uniform in every state, whether it was winter in New Hampshire or August in Florida.

  For Carter, starting school the following week would be a relief from his backbreaking summer job. For his dad, though, there was no relief in sight. As Carter shuffled toward the truck, he felt sorry for his dad. Forty-one was just about too old to be moving heavy furniture for a living, and the job had naturally required his dad to cut off his trademark long hair, which had begun to gray.

  “Ready?” his dad asked.

  “Sure.” Carter climbed up into the passenger seat of the moving truck. An old gray station wagon with a Georgia tag pulled into the parking lot, driven by a miserable-looking woman in her late twenties or early thirties, probably another survivor coming to pay tribute to a lost family member. Carter imagined she’d lost a young son or daughter in the disaster.

  “You all right?” Carter’s dad asked. He pulled out into the sparse morning traffic of Beachview Drive. Carter remembered when this road was crammed full on summer afternoons, with teenagers and tourists shouting at one another from their cars.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Carter said, though they both knew it was a lie. He felt shaken.

  “On to work, then. Did I tell you we’re moving Dr. Larson today?”

  “Really?” Carter pictured his old pediatrician, the kindly wrinkled man with Sesame Street toys in his waiting room. Carter’s mom used to take him for regular check-ups at Dr. Larson’s office, but of course those days were long gone. “Where’s he going?”

  “Fort Walton Beach. We’re looking at a two or three hour drive along 98, if the traffic doesn’t screw with us.”

  They fell silent as they drove past what remained of the Eight-Track. Their old go-kart business was chained up and boarded, like all the attractions that had once lit up this section of Beachview Drive. The bank had taken it and stripped it down, selling off the go-karts and anything else useful, then left it for dead.

  The same fate had destroyed Dinosaur Mini-Golf and the other countless little businesses here—nobody called it “the Starwalk” anymore. Some called it Death Row, when they had to speak of it at all. The closing of Starland Amusement Park had dragged down all the minor attractions along with it, killing the tourism on which the town had depended.

  Across the road, the carcasses of the dead hospitality industry lay strewn along the beach itself. Heavy storms and neglect had already reduced some buildings to rubble. Conch City had few true hotels, but roadside motels had sprouted like dandelions, painted eye-grabbing colors like salmon pink, citrus orange, and sky blue, their signs advertising such mind-blowing amenities as “Cable TV” and “Clean Bathrooms.”

  Now those places were locked and boarded, their parking-lot swimming pools thick with slime.

  Carter glanced back at the amusement park. Any motorist passing through town might have been confused or unsettled while passing the high fence choked with weeds and vines. The only elements of Starland visible from the road were a few chunks of roller coaster, the steeply tilted red-white-and-blue tower of the American Rockets ride, and a two-story red devil face looming high above the overgrown fence, his maniacal grin gloating over the wasteland of rusting attractions and dead dreams.

  Carter’s dad steered them out to East Bay Road, into Conch City’s small cluster of upscale subdivisions. Dr. Larson’s neighborhood was lined with old-growth magnolia, cypress and red maple trees, the two-story and three-story houses set back from the road, many with wraparound porches and French doors. Some still had their lawns and flower gardens intact, while others had suffered a creeping invasion of wildflowers and weeds. FOR SALE signs sat in front of at least half the houses; some signs were additionally adorned with large red stickers reading FORECLOSURE or SHORT SALE.

  The pediatrician’s front drive curved in to touch his front porch, then curved back out to the street. A hedge of hibiscus thick with pink blossoms followed the curve of his driveway, enclosing a grassy lawn area with a birdbath-sized seashell water fountain at the center. Hummingbirds were out in the golden dawn light, sipping at the fountain and feasting on the heavy pink blossoms, but they scattered as the big green box truck lumbered up the driveway.

  “Put on your hat,” Carter’s dad said as they parked at the wide front steps.

  “I hate the hat,” Carter replied, looking down at the green cap with the cartoon cow perched over the words MOOVIN’ ON.

  “Corporate rules. You don’t want a citation. QA can check on you anytime. You never know when they’re around.” MOOVIN’ ON corporate headquarters sent out Quality Assurance spies in surveillance vans to check the behavior of franchisees and low-level employees all over the country, including such details as conforming to uniform requirements.

  “I hate working for this company,” Carter said.

  “You’re not the only one.” His dad pulled on his own green cow cap and stepped down from the truck.

  Carter sighed as he put on the green cap. He glanced at himself in the mirror. On the ridiculous cap, the one that would keep his head swamped and dripping with sweat all afternoon, the cartoon cow looked eager to be MOOVIN’ ON to somewhere new and better. Carter understood how that cow felt.

  He climbed down from the truck and joined his dad on the porch, just as Dr. Larson opened the beveled-glass front door. He wore the same horn-rimmed glasses that Carter remembered, though his gray hair had thinned back to a small fringe.

  “Who is it?” a female voice called from somewhere deep inside the house.

  “The movers!” Dr. Larson shouted back over his shoulder. When he turned back to face them, his eyes settled on Carter, then widened behind his glasses. “Is that Carter Roanoke?”

  “It is,” Carter said.

  The doctor took a breath, glancing back at Carter’s dad. “And you’re Henry. Used to have the go-kart place out on the Starwalk.”

  Carter’s dad nodded and mumbled something nobody could hear.

  “I remember when you were this high, Carter.” Dr. Larson
held his hand down close to his knee. “How’s your mother?”

  Carter and his dad glanced at each other.

  “Haven’t heard from her in a while.” Carter shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about his mom running off. It was too embarrassing, among other things.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Dr. Larson leaned back, his mouth open a bit, the reaction of someone discovering his attempt at minor small talk had landed him in a tangled conversational briar patch.

  “Hard to believe you’re moving out, too,” Carter’s dad said. “Seems like everybody’s gone or trying to be.”

  “The practice has slowed considerably. I was lucky to have a good offer from a hospital in Fort Walton.” Dr. Larson wrung his hands. “There’s still Dr. Weisman, if you need pediatric care...”

  “Doubt we will. You already sold this place, huh?”

  “Unfortunately not, but we have some hope.” Dr. Larson nodded at a house down the street, and Carter followed his eyes to a two-story blue and yellow Queen Anne style house with gingerbread trim along the porch and balcony. “The Woodmans finally sold theirs. Took five months, but...it seems like a nice family that’s moved in.”

  “Somebody actually moved into Conch City?” Carter asked. It was his second summer working with his dad at the moving company, and in that time, they’d only moved people away from the shrinking town.

  “He’ll be chief administrator at the new nursing-care facility on Cypress Lane.” Dr. Larson nodded at the gingerbread house again.

  “New nursing home? That’ll bring some fresh young blood into town,” Carter’s dad said, and Larson gave a polite laugh.

  “He has a daughter your age. You should go meet her, Carter,” the doctor suggested.

  “We should get started,” Carter’s dad interrupted, as though Carter were going to walk off the job and go knock on the new girl’s door.