Inferno Park (13 page)

Carter sipped it. He thought it tasted bitter, and it clearly hadn’t been sweetened at all. He grimaced and returned the cup. “Yep, definitely gross. Good thing you have those...carrots to make your lunch exciting.”

“What gourmet dishes did you bring?” Victoria took his bag and brought out a sandwich in a plastic wrapper. “Watercress and brie?”

“Peanut butter and jelly.
Grape
jelly.” He took the sandwich from her.

“Three ingredients—bread, peanut butter, and jelly—and only one of them potentially healthy.”

“The jelly?” he guessed.

“And to cleanse the palate...Cool Ranch Doritos.” She brought out the blue aluminum-foil bag, which he snagged from her. She cocked an eyebrow as she peered into his bag. “And what complements peanut butter and Doritos? Is it a full-bodied red? A sweet white? No...a Mello freaking Yello.” She held up the can. “Is ‘Yello’ with no ‘w’ even a real color?”

“I think it refers to a specific greenish shade of yellow.”

“How do you even drink this stuff?”

“It’s the second healthiest drink after Mountain Dew.” Carter popped the can open. “Try it.”

She took a hesitant sip, then grimaced and passed it back to him, shaking her head.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“
You’re
crazy.”

This led to a quiet truce while they ate.

“I was looking at your blog last night,” he said after a minute.

“Really? What did you think?” She smiled, looking a little nervous.

“Rusty playgrounds, burned-out houses, overgrown streets...”

“That’s what the Eye of Tori sees. Or what I saw back home.”

“The Eye of Tori sees a lot of desolate and depressing things.”

“It does.” She bit her lower lip for half a second, looking him in the eyes. “I was thinking about those missing kids.” The principal had mentioned Reeves and Kevin in the morning announcements, too.

“Yeah?”

“They’ve been missing for like a week, right? No sign of them?”

“That’s what people are saying.” Carter tore open his Doritos bag and offered her one, which she declined.

Victoria cleared her throat, then asked in a very careful tone: “Do you think maybe they went into the old amusement park, or somewhere around there?”

“Why would they do that?”

“It seems like it would be a huge temptation, wouldn’t it? I mean, I find the place tempting and fascinating, and I’m not as impulsive as a teenage boy. But I still want to go in there.”

“Maybe if they were from out of town,” Carter said. “Local kids wouldn’t go in there. It’s too...intense, if you have memories of it.”

“Would the police look there, though? Or would they say what you just said, that local kids would stay out?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll check. Look, I realize you want some cool pictures for your blog, but it’s not a good idea to go in there.” Carter shifted uncomfortably. His appetite was fading, though he’d only eaten half his lunch.

“It’s not just about me, Carter.” She scowled a little. “You can’t imagine that those kids would want to go exploring in there...but if they did it and they got hurt, nobody would ever find them. I know everybody’s used to trying to forget and to pretend that place isn’t there, but maybe that turns it into a kind of blind spot for the whole town...”

“They’ve probably checked there,” Carter said.

“How can we find out?”

“I don’t know. Those kids probably just ran away.”

“That’s what everyone
else
is saying.” Victoria shook her head. “‘They were delinquents, they just ran away.’ They’ve been gone a week. They brought nothing but their bikes and skateboards. So what did they do? Stay at a hotel? Join the merchant marines? They’re only thirteen and fifteen.”

The end-of-lunch bell rang, and Carter tossed the remains of his lunch into the trash. She shook her head and picked up her lunch box.

“How do you know so much about it, anyway?” he asked.

“I read the newspaper article. Look, why do you want to become a doctor?”

So if I’m ever surrounded by people screaming and dying again, I won’t just stand there clueless with no idea what to do about it
. “I guess to help people.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” She smiled and gave him half a hug before going to class. “Think about those kids, okay?”

“Yep.” Carter watched her enter the cinderblock school, trying to figure out just how he felt about her. He definitely had no idea how
she
felt about
him
, if she felt anything at all.

Chapter Seven

The Science Club did not waste time. Their first meeting was on the first day of school, and they had to debate their group project for the year. David Huang wanted to study environmental effect on the beach as the old businesses along the Starwalk decayed. Sameer Upadhyay proposed a sociological study on the impact of the park disaster on the town. Emily Dorsnel suggested a parapsychological investigation of the park.

“I don’t understand,” Mr. Plum said, looking among them. He was a beanpole of a man with a thinning brown comb-over and cheap glasses. “Why so much interest in the old amusement park this year? Has something happened?”

“It’s the five-year anniversary,” said Wes McKinley, a pimply junior with bright red hair. “Simple-minded people find a kind of numerological significance at certain essentially random intervals.”

“Why do you say ‘simple-minded’?” Emily Dorsnel asked. She was a chunky senior with frizzy hair, a painfully prominent mole on her cheek, and a flawless academic record. “Five years since it happened. It’s on everyone’s minds.”

“Why is five more significant than four or six?” Wes McKinley asked her. “Because your astrologer says so?”

“I don’t believe in astrology,” Emily said.

“But you want to go ghost hunting in the park,” Wes snorted.

“That’s different. I want to do it scientifically,” she told him.

“I should point out that any access to the park would require special permission from the authorities,” Mr. Plum said. “Permission we can safely assume they will not provide.”

“Definitely not for ghost hunting,” Wes said. “If you want to do something that really matters, we should try to assess the risk of any additional sinkholes in the area. If we determine where it’s safe to build, it could revitalize at least some of the beach.”

“Wouldn’t the town have already done that study? Or the state? Or somebody?” David Huang asked.

“The town is run by a bunch of ignorant rednecks,” Wes said. “And so is the state.”

“Then we could try to determine why the biggest sinkhole in Florida opened here in the panhandle, instead of in central or south Florida like most of them,” Sameer added.

“What about you, Carter? Did you want to propose a project?” Mr. Plum asked.

“I’m okay with whatever,” Carter told him.

Later, as Carter started walking home, he happened to glance back over his shoulder and see the fresh graffiti on the back of a stop sign in front of the school. It was a crude shape in red paint, little more than a stick figure, but it had horns and gripped a pitchfork in one of its red stick arms.

Maybe there was some kind of renewed interest in the park stirring deep down in the small town’s subconscious. If so, Victoria had a point—maybe the missing kids had gone exploring in the park, even though it was taboo for locals. Maybe they were too young to understand.

With his phone’s browser, he located the small article in the Tallahassee newspaper that mentioned Reeves and Kevin. It was only a couple of paragraphs long, and he didn’t learn anything new from it, but a week was a long time for a couple of kids to be missing, even if they were known delinquents who might have run off intentionally.

He thought it over for a minute, then touched Victoria’s phone number in his contacts list.

“I’ll go,” he said when she answered. “We can at least walk around the outside fence and see if we find anything.”

“You know we can’t see much through the fence,” she told him.

“We aren’t going to break in—”

“Never mind,” she interrupted. “We can do whatever you want. Are you at home?”

“I’m still at school.”

“You got detention on your first day?”

“Worse. Science club meeting. Come pick me up before I change my mind.”

While he waited, pacing the sidewalk in front of the school, he felt himself beginning to shiver. He glanced at the devil graffiti again.

We’re not going inside
, he reminded himself.
If we see anything crazy, we’ll just call the police.

The sky was gray and overcast, which matched his mood as he watched Victoria’s little black Fiesta approach along the street. She smiled when he got in, but he couldn’t bring himself to return it. He sighed as he placed his heavy backpack between his feet.

“This is exciting!” she said as she drove away from the school. “Isn’t it?”

He shrugged. “We have to be quick. It looks like it’s going to rain. Plus we want to get out of there before dark.”

“Why? Is that when the ghosts come out?” A little smile played around her lips, and it annoyed him.

“Do you care at all about the missing kids, really?” he asked. “Or do you just want something exciting to post on your blog?”

“Of course I care.” She scowled at him. “You think I’m that shallow, don’t you?”

“I was just asking.”

“Sounded more like accusing.”

He sighed and looked out the window as they passed through the center of Conch City. There was no “downtown” area, just strip malls that had sprouted up along the Gulf Coast Highway, most of them half-vacant now.

They turned south off the highway and down Beachview Drive toward the ocean.

“We can’t park at Starland or the cops will see your car,” he said. He pointed at a crumbling pink motel on the beach. “Pull around and park behind the Fancy Flamingo Lodge.”

“You’re the tour guide,” she said.

They found a shaded spot in back of the old motel where her car wouldn’t be seen from the road. Victoria lifted her camera bag and a flashlight out of her back seat. She took a picture of a faded aluminum sign that read BEACH CLOSED.

“Nobody’s allowed on the beach, either?” she asked.

“There’s a public section at the east end,” Carter said. “Not many people go there, though. We don’t get many tourists anymore, and for those of us who live here...when you live by the beach, you don’t really think about going to the beach.”

“Because you can go anytime.”

“Pretty much.” He didn’t feel like explaining how sad the empty dunes were to people who remembered throngs of visitors in years past. Tropical storms had churned up and eaten away the big white beach, leaving only a brown strip of sand in its place.

As they hurried across Beachview Drive, Carter cast a worried look at the heavy gray clouds above.

“We need to finish up fast,” he told her.

“We’ll just look around and go. It’ll take less than an hour.”

“I was thinking less than ten minutes,” he said.

A knot of fear formed in his belly as he crossed the broad expanse of the Starland parking lot, where weeds jutted up through the cracked blacktop. Sand filled the concrete gutters around the perimeter of the lot, and would eventually bury the whole place, given enough time. The devil grinned at them over the fence as they crossed the open wasteland toward the overgrown front gate.

We are not going inside
, he reminded himself, but he could feel Victoria’s determination to do exactly that.

When they reached the rotten castle towers of the front gate, she lifted a rust-speckled padlock in her hand.

“I’d say the police haven’t been here,” she said. “These locks and chains are old and rusty.”

“Not so rusty they wouldn’t work. I’m sure Chief Kilborne has a key.”

“Do you see any sign they’ve been inside?” Victoria crouched by the gate and ripped away a small patch of the thick vines. “I can see weeds growing on the other side. They don’t look like they’ve been trampled down.”

“The weeds around here are pretty tough. They spring right back.”

“Now you’re a botanist?” She stood up and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Kevin! Reeves! Are you guys in there? The whole town’s looking for you!”

Carter doubted that. Most of the students at his high school, anyway, seemed to have lost interest in the missing kids long before the day was over. He supposed his town might be more hardened to tragedy than most.

“We should check around the fence,” Victoria told him. “Maybe we can find where they went inside.”

“
If
they ever did.” Carter looked up at the thick clouds again. “Which I doubt.”

“We at least have to look.”

“And if we don’t find a hole in the fence, you’ll be satisfied, right?”

“They could have climbed over.”

“Even with barbed wire along the top?” Carter pointed.

“Maybe that’s how they got injured. Come on.” Victoria started walking along the fence, toward the high hill of the Log Drop jutting up over the vine-infested chain link.

They followed the fence into a stand of palm trees thick with undergrowth and insects, where the fence turned and continued on into a wooded area. Despite the buzzing cloud of mosquitoes and the swampy, muddy ground, Victoria plunged onward. Carter reluctantly followed, wondering how he had let the girl talk him into doing this.