The End Has Come (48 page)

His body had been found on a bench in New Orleans Square about six hours later. The Cast Member who found him said that he looked peaceful. It only bothered Amy a little that she’d never learned his name.

• • • •

“What do you mean, we can’t fix it?”

“I mean, we can’t fix it.” The chief engineer was a patient man — he had to be, when everyone on his work detail was untrained. He had two mechanics and one Imagineer, but Clover spent most of her time being hauled off to fix malfunctioning animatronics, and that left him with his makeshift crew of car-jockeys and well-meaning custodial staffers. “The piston’s shot. We’d need a whole new engine if we wanted to get number three up and running again, and at that point, we might as well wish for a whole new generator, because we’re not going to find it.”

“There has to be something we can do.” Amy forced her hands to stay down by her sides, fighting the urge to clasp them together and beg. “We’ve lost power to Town Square. Half of Main Street is running on emergency backup. And the Castle —”

“Mayor, I don’t know how many ways I can say this. The generator is dead. The engine is fried. We’ve been pushing them way too hard. These were meant to cover for rolling blackouts, not supply power to the whole complex.” The chief engineer shook his head. “Maybe if we shut down Tomorrowland, we can shift some of the load between the generators we still have. That could keep us up and running for another month. Two if we’re careful, and if we stop running the dark rides.”

Amy stiffened. “You’re talking about the Mansion.”

“I am. The air conditioning alone —”

“You have to understand why we can’t turn off the air conditioning inside the Mansion.” The idea was enough to make Amy’s flesh crawl. If the Mansion stopped . . .

“It’s July, Mayor. The hottest month of the year, and you’re turning one dark ride into an icebox. Now, I know you’ve got your reasons, but the fact remains, we don’t have the power.”

Amy paused. “Look — Anthony, wasn’t it? Have you been inside the Mansion recently?”

“I don’t like closed spaces.”

“I thought it might be something like that.” She looked away, toward the back lot buildings that the guests were never meant to see, all of them painted that same bland shade of go-away green. A few seconds passed before she looked back to him, eyes hardened with resolve. “I want you to go ride the Haunted Mansion. If you come out the other end and agree that we don’t need to run the air conditioning anymore, then fine, I’ll listen to you. But if you change your mind, we’re going to need to find another way. Do we have a deal?”

Anthony frowned. “You know, I never quite understood how you wound up in charge.”

Amy’s smile was small, quick, and bitter. “I was the last person alive in Guest Relations,” she said. “All I was ever trained to do is make sure that everyone at Disneyland has a magical day.”

• • • •

At the end of everything, when there was no place left to turn, the Cast Members who survived came home. Custodians and princesses, ride operators and stage show dancers, one after another they came to the gates. Some had shown up while the Park was still technically open — before humanity’s season had been declared over for good. They had formed the skeleton crew that kept things running until everyone else could arrive. Amy thought of them as her family. They had done things together,
seen
things together, that could never be unseen. They had done them for each other. They had done them for the children they knew would come, eventually, the orphans of the world that was being born outside their gates. And they had done them for Walt.

He might not have anticipated his Park’s future as one of the last strongholds of mankind. But as Amy walked down the access corridor that would lead her back to Town Square, she couldn’t help thinking that he would have been pleased by what they’d been doing in his name.

Tiffany and Skylar were waiting in front of the Gallery. As always, Tiffany was dressed in her Guest Relations uniform, so crisp and perfect that she must have spent half her waking hours ironing the creases into her jacket, while Skylar was wearing something she’d looted from one of the stores on Main Street. They were holding hands. Amy felt a brief, sharp stab of envy.

Not everyone made it through with their sister by their side,
she thought — not for the first time, and not, she knew, for the last. Her own sister had stopped answering the phone two days after she’d first complained of a sore throat. Nikki was long dead, and all Amy could do to honor her memory was keep on fighting for a future.

“Is it true?” asked Tiffany.

“That depends on what ‘it’ is,” Amy replied. “Use exact terms and phrases and maybe I can calm your mind.” That wasn’t likely, all things considered.

“Michael said one of the generators blew,” said Skylar. “He said it wasn’t fixable.”

The trouble with being a closed community — there were fewer than five hundred people in Disneyland, and more than half of them were living in the buildings on Main Street and in Adventureland — was that rumors couldn’t be controlled: they could only be predicted, and chased down. “We did lose a generator today, but Anthony says we have options,” said Amy carefully. “We should be able to run on what we have for three or four days before things become critical. By then, we’ll hopefully have located a replacement.”

“We can’t scavenge any more from California Adventure, can we?” asked Tiffany.

Amy shook her head. “They’re down to three generators for the whole park, and they have their own problems to take care of,” she said. “If the air conditioning goes out in Ariel’s Undersea Adventure . . .”

Tiffany looked sick. “That would be bad.”

“Yes, it would,” agreed Amy.

“Is the power still on in the Mansion?” asked Skylar.

“For now.” Amy shook her head. “Tiffany, get the rest of Guest Relations and tell them we’re having a mandatory meeting at the Big Thunder Ranch tonight. Skylar, can you get Michael to tell the rest of the ride operators?” Between the three of them, Tiffany, Skylar, and Michael knew most of the Park’s population by name, and knew where to find them during the day.

The sisters nodded. “Okay,” said Tiffany, clearly relieved to have something to do. Skylar looked less eager. The assessing way she studied Amy made it clear she knew something was up. She just had the good grace not to say anything about it yet. Amy smiled, relieved, and watched them walk away down Main Street.

She was lucky; there was no one inside the firehouse. She made it all the way up to the apartment that had belonged to Walt Disney, and was now hers, before she started to cry.

• • • •

Amy hadn’t intended to wind up in charge of the survivors who took refuge in Disneyland; it was an accident. She’d just been the highest-ranking member of the Guest Relations team still standing when the doors officially closed to the public for the last time, and the only member of management who’d been willing to get her hands dirty along with everyone else. By the end of the first day (an endless string of cleanup and sanitation, until it seemed like none of them would ever be clean again, until they were all family forever, bound by things their hands could not undo), she was already being referred to as “Mayor” by almost everyone. It stuck. People wanted to feel like they still existed in a world with structure, and she was the closest thing they had to a face to put on their new existence.

So she’d tried. She’d tried so damn hard to rise to the level of their expectations, sleeping four hours a night — if that — and racing through the Park every day soothing out conflicts, streamlining processes, and searching, always searching, for the line between Disney magic and the end of the world. It had been Clover’s idea to start running one ride a day to take everyone’s mind off things; the generators were designed to power entire Lands. A single ride couldn’t overload them. Amy hadn’t been sure it would work, but she’d given the okay, and the results had been staggering. People lined up like nothing had changed, and even the act of standing in a line was enough to make them laugh and talk about the old days, finally at ease. It might only last for the duration of one trip through Space Mountain or around the submarine lagoon, but it
worked.

The Disney magic was still there. All Amy had to do was find the balance between the old world and the new one, and everything would be fine.

Supplies were tight, but Downtown Disney had plenty of stores, and she had plenty of manpower for raiding parties. They’d looted the Disneyland Hotel in the first week, coming away with food, bottled water, medicine, and even fuel for the generators. But it was the pillows that had really sealed her place as the Mayor of Main Street, and honorary regent of Disneyland.

“We can’t stay in the hotels; they’re too hard to defend, and there’s not enough power to waste it on electric locks,” she’d said. “That’s no reason people should be uncomfortable.” The looting crews had carried more than five hundred pillows, almost that many blankets, and nearly two hundred mattresses back to Disneyland. Those Cast Members and guests who had arrived after the comfortable sleeping places had been claimed suddenly found themselves with something soft to put their heads upon. Amy had been virtually canonized that night.

It was a hard existence. It was a strange existence, shuffling through the ruins of a place that had never been intended for this kind of life. But it was what they had, and it was amazing how quickly people had been able to adapt to their strange new circumstances. If the woman they called “Mayor” worked herself to death trying to make those circumstances better, well . . .

Heavy is the head that wears the crown.

• • • •

The Big Thunder Ranch BBQ was one of the larger open-air restaurants in the Park, with picnic-style seating and a stage that had once played host to carefully scripted “hoedowns” intended to amuse the guests. Now, it was stripped of all its faux-Old West charm, and was just a place where the majority of Disneyland’s residents could gather without needing to stand, and without forcing their weary Mayor to shout in order to be heard.

Anthony stood at the back, holding the tablet computer used to control the restaurant sound system. It was an odd juxtaposition of modern technology and old-fashioned setting, made stranger by the fact that he was unshaven and wearing overalls that had seen far better days. That was what the end of the world really looked like, Amy thought; like a man in dirty clothes, with equipment straight out of Tomorrowland in his hands.

Maybe a third of the residents of the park had shown up. That was better than Amy had been expecting. They were all survivors, but none of them had volunteered for that honor. They were the ones who hadn’t gotten sick, the ones who found themselves marooned on a ride that never ended, and that never gave them an opportunity to get off. Honestly, the fact that even a third of the residents would come to a meeting like this spoke to the Disney spirit. They wanted to help.

Amy took a deep breath, resisting the urge to fiddle with her headset microphone, and said, “You’ve probably heard the rumors about our power supply. I’m sorry to have to be the one to say this, but they’re not unfounded. Generator three has suffered a mechanical failure, and without additional parts, it will not be coming back online. We will be unable to power vital Park services, such as the refrigeration units in New Orleans Square.”

The third who had come to the meeting were the ones most likely to understand what that meant. Alarmed looks were passed around the crowd, and a voice from the back shouted, “So what are you going to do about it,
Mayor?”

That was the trigger for a wave of discontent muttering. Amy let it come, allowing it to wash over her. It cleaned nothing, and left only more anxiety in its wake. “Citizens of Disneyland,” she said. There was a new snap to her voice, one that brought the crowd to abrupt silence. It was the tone she had once reserved for members of her staff, reminding them that they needed to worry more about creating magical moments for the guests, and less about who was surreptitiously texting who. “We are at the doorway of a crisis, and I need each of you to consider what you can do to help. Some things are simple. Turn off lights, conserve power whenever possible, do your part. Other things are more complicated.” She paused, allowing them to consider her relatively minor requests. They had survived the end of the world, they were living in
Disneyland,
and she wanted them to turn off lights when they left the room? There had to be a catch. Taking a deep breath, she continued:

“There is a hospital facility roughly four miles from here with a generator array of the size and type we need. A party will be leaving Town Square at dawn to cross the city, enter the hospital, and secure the necessary parts to make the repairs. I am assured by the engineering department that we can bring back enough material to keep us functional for the better part of a year.” A year was as far into the future as any of them dared to look. A year would take them through most of their water, and virtually all of their food. None of them were farmers. Even if they could convert the landscaped parts of the Park into gardens, it wasn’t going to be enough.

But Walt wouldn’t have given up. Walt would have fought tooth and nail for that year, for the chance that something might change, and the world might magically come alive again.

Amy looked out at the crowd of battered, weary survivors, trying to guess how many of them would be there in the morning.
Come on, Anthony,
she thought.
They need a tipping point.

And Anthony rose to the occasion, as he had so many times before: “What about you, Madame Mayor?” he shouted. “Will you be sitting safely in City Hall, waiting for your delivery people to come back?”

“I’ll be leading the expedition,” said Amy. A low murmur spread through the crowd. She turned away, allowing herself the shadow of a smile. Maybe this would work out after all.

The next morning, fifteen people were waiting for her in Town Square: thirteen citizens, Anthony, and Clover. Tiffany and Skylar walked them to the gates of Disneyland. The sixteen raiders stepped outside. The sisters locked the gates behind them, and they were alone.