The funeral of Vanessa's father brought her home from college in the middle of her sophomore year. She'd found out in the worst way. The Facebook message from her uncle Phil had come in the middle of French class. She'd enjoyed watching Goddard movies as a teenager, so instead of taking Spanish and building on the two years of that she'd taken in high school, she signed up to learn the language of romance. Sadly, her affinity for Goddard had proven an insufficient prerequisite, and she was struggling to keep a B minus.
Because of this, she kept her phone on silent and didn't get the message for nearly half an hour after Uncle Phil sent it.
You need to come home. Something's happened to your father.
She stared at the message for several seconds, trying to process it. She hadn't spoken to Uncle Phil since an Independence Day party that fell between second and third grade. Even though she accepted his friend request on Facebook, they never corresponded. His photo was of himself as a much younger man, from his days in the Army. She didn't even like Facebook and only kept it to send funny videos back and forth with her dad during the day, but she blindly accepted requests from anyone with mutuals. Everything about the message was wrong.
What the fuck, she typed back so hard that her thumbnails clacked against her screen. Did your account get hacked?
No, he responded, and before she had a chance to type something back, he called her through Messenger. His voice was grainier than she remembered it, and every other word further subdued her. First sending her against the wall—accident—and then to the floor—instantly. As he relayed further details, how her father had driven his car into a lake, the other students in the hallway became shadows. Their everyday exchanges became indecipherably alien.
That compared little to the funeral itself. It was held in a Catholic church even though her father had rejected religion long before she was born. Seeing all those people she'd written off years ago made the death more real. The family members on her mother's side were not good people. This was according to both her parents. She never questioned it or investigated it herself because her parents were good people.
She met her mom and brothers outside the church. The young men were gathered around the small woman, who sat on the steps, hands folded between her knees, eyes hidden with dark glasses. She looked so defeated there. Must have been so overwhelmed to have asked for her family's help with arrangements. Vanessa's father was an only child, and while his parents were still alive, they were in no position to help.
From spotting her mother on the stairs to seeing all those familiar strangers in the pews, Vanessa got hit with wave after acidic wave from a sea of ugly reality. A reality where her father, who was also her truest and best friend, no longer existed. It wasn't until the drive to the plot where he'd be buried forever that a numb dissociation retook her, reducing the people around her to shadows and their condolences to something indecipherable and alien.
She'd welcomed the return of this state. This impressionistic nihilism had shielded her in the week since getting Uncle Phil's Facebook message. She intended to let it shield her until she was ready to feel her father's absence fully. This grief had to work on her terms. Reality had to work on her terms.
It was a hand on her shoulder that pulled her out of that shadowy place and back down into the acidic sea that dissolved her father but refused to dissolve her. Uncle Phil's meaty, sweaty hand.
______________________________
Cullen climbed first. He was pink in the face. His jaw was clenched tight. Probably embarrassed by Vanessa rejecting his touch. She wanted to feel bad, and maybe did a little, but he was wrong to touch her. Even if he meant well, it wasn't the time.
Hannah climbed up next. She'd left her shoes behind, but she winced and whimpered whenever her feet touched hot metal or splintering wood. Even after running across the infernal pavement, her feet hadn't adjusted.
Vanessa followed, only feeling the burn in her hands. Kayson came next. Werth last. On their way up, Vanessa cast a final glance down at the park. From higher up, the dilapidated, disused place had a sad aura about it, like the feeling she got from looking at such places online. Only now she had memories of brushes with death on its grounds to color her impression. It now looked haunted and sinister to her and not just tragic and strange.
Some of the beams groaned as they climbed. Vanessa had never feared heights. She'd ziplined on numerous occasions, and one of her fondest memories was standing on the balcony of the Empire State Building with her parents and brothers, looking out over the gray beauty of New York City. She'd looked down that day—one of her mother's good days—and relished the butterflies in her stomach the view brought. Now, though, something had changed. Perhaps it had to do with two recent brushes with death. Perhaps it was the stakes of this climb. Whatever the reason, these heights brought a swirling nausea and a bad case of the shakes. It took additional focus to steady her hands on the bars.
At least now they were on their way out, she thought. She did her best to ignore any notions that something would go wrong at any second. The creak of the wood and metal, like moans of a wounded machine, made these doom-and-gloom notions less easy to disregard. But mounting anxiety be damned, they made it to the top of the collapsed roller coaster.
"So, um, who wants to go first?" Hannah asked, eyebrows raised.
"I'll go," Kayson said.
"No," Cullen said, too sharply. Everyone looked at him. He was scowling and still flushed. "I'll do it."
He waited for someone to contradict him. When no one did, he turned.
"Cullen," Vanessa said. She wanted to tell him he didn't need to be sorry. She wanted to tell him he didn't need to prove anything. When he looked over his shoulder at her, she saw a hardness in his expression that told her nothing she could say would change his mind. "Just … just be careful," she said.
He gave her a curt nod and balanced his way across the fallen beams. Vanessa winced every time one of them groaned under his weight. She willed him, willed herself, to not look down. She could feel the yawning space beneath him, though. Beneath her. Empty, indifferent. Though not hungry, not anything, it would devour her or any of the others just the same were one to fall into it. It couldn't help itself. Gravity would force-feed it anything, anyone, who fell into it.
No one breathed until Cullen reached the wall. He pointed at a tree and faced the group again.
"I'm going to jump on that one and climb down," he said.
No one said anything, Vanessa only nodded.
Cullen faced the sprawl of woods beyond the wall and jumped.
With a loud smack, Cullen's body stopped in midair. Orange wisps of light swirled around the impact point. Something sizzled like a downed powerline in a rain puddle. Then the wisps disappeared. The sizzling ceased. Cullen's body hung there, flattened against the barely visible barrier with his arms and legs bent at unnatural angles for what felt like a full minute. Then, he plummeted to the earth behind the wall, striking the ground with a dull thump like tires rolling over a pothole. For several beats, no one said anything. It was an incomprehensible turn of events, an impossibility on a day where impossible got redefined again and again.
"Okay, this is really bad," Vanessa said finally.
No one disagreed. What else could she say? What else could any of them say? They only stared at the blood spatter from where Cullen hit. It hung in the air like insect remains smudged on a windshield.
"All right, what the fuck was that?" Werth said.
On the word was, his voice cracked, but his usual hardness returned in time to finish the sentence. He scanned the others, daring them to call out his wavering composure. No one said a word about it. Why would they? They were all in this nightmare together.
"This can't be real," Hannah said. "No way this is real." She took deep, shaky breaths between each statement. Her lips trembled, but her eyes remained dry.
"It's real," Vanessa said. "No use denying it."
She hated how cold she sounded, but she said what she said for herself as much as for the others. They were becoming shadows, their words alien, and she needed to stay focused. She could retreat into that impressionistic place once they were out of here. Now, she needed to lead. She trusted none of the others to do it for her.
"So, what do we do!" Hannah said.
The sharpness in her last word cut to Vanessa's core. Vanessa made fists and dug her nails into her palms to keep from herself from breaking down completely.
"It's motherfucking aliens," Kayson said. "Like I told y'all. Motherfucking aliens."
"Just shut up with that alien shit," Werth said. "It's impossible and you know it."
"Oh, yeah?" Kayson gestured at the bloody imprint on the invisible barrier. "Then, what the hell do you call that?"
Werth tightened his mouth and took a deep breath. "I don't know," he said. "But it's not aliens. Maybe some government experiment, like I said."
"Then why us?" Hannah said. "Oh God, why us? We didn't do anything. We're nobodies!"
Vanessa could hear the sobs threatening to explode from Hannah in those last few words. She held up her hands. "Okay, let's just wait a second. Let's think things through."
"This ought to be good," Werth said.
"Shut up, Werth."
"Ha-ha, damn, bro," Kayson said.
The officer put his head down. Vanessa scanned the others, then looked back at the impact point where Cullen met his nasty end. The blood remained, seemingly suspended in midair.
"Okay," she said. "Obviously, it's some kind of force field. Maybe there's some way to turn it off."
"Yeah, but where?" Werth asked.
"I'm not sure, but …" She trailed off, thinking about what she needed to say.
"But what?" Werth said.
"Bro, let the bitch think," Kayson said.
Vanessa shook her head rapidly, eyes blinking with agitation. "Don't call me a bitch."
Kayson softened and looked to the side. "Sorry. Bad habit."
She considered admonishing him further, but there were more pressing matters at hand. She collected her thoughts. "Okay, so, Wendy had change in her purse, and it helped us get the music player to keep the rats away. What does everyone else have?"
"Fucking nothing," Werth said, touching the empty holster on his belt.
His voice was still hard, but Vanessa heard an underlying wetness in it. It almost sounded like he might cry. She wondered what kind of cop he was. She and her friends on the outside liked to say ACAB any chance they got, but inside this park—surrounded by a fucking force field—she and Werth and the others were all in this together.
"You have your handcuffs," she said, pointing.
He reached behind him and took them from his belt. "What am I supposed to do with these?"
"I'm not sure yet," Vanessa said.
Werth scoffed and reared back like he meant to toss the cuffs off the roller coaster. Vanessa's breath hitched, but then he reattached them to his belt.
She nodded at Kayson. "What about you?"
He raised his fists in a fighting stance. "Just these bad boys."
Werth groaned. Kayson gave him the finger again.
"You have to have something else," Vanessa said. "Check your pockets."
He patted them. "Nah, nothing."
She stared at him another beat, then sighed and turned to Hannah.
"I have this necklace," she said, reaching into the front of her dress and showing off a small cylinder on a silver chain. "And those heels I left down there."
"What about you, fearless leader?" Werth asked Vanessa.
"I'm not your leader," she said, despite what she thought earlier. "Right now, all I have is this music player. Fuck. This doesn't make any sense."
"What about the writer?" Werth asked.
Her gaze flicked back to the hanging smudge. It had already darkened to a rusty brown.
"Cullen. What about him?" She realized what he meant as soon as the words left her lips.
He clarified anyway. "Maybe he's got something."
"Yeah, maybe."
"Do we have to climb down and check?" Hannah asked.
"Not all of us," Vanessa said. "I can go."
"I'll go with," Kayson said. She looked at him. "Never know what you might run into. Might need someone to watch your back."
"Okay," she said. "Werth and Hannah, do you two want climb down and meet us at the exit? Just watch out for any more of those hooded guys."
"Copy," Werth said.
"Bro, you're such a cop."
"Shut up, Kayson," Werth said.
"Hannah, are you okay with this?" Vanessa asked.
"I don't know. We just climbed up here." No one said anything as she considered this further. She blew out a grim sigh. "And look where it got us. Okay, let's do it."
Vanessa looked again at the blood spattered on the invisible barrier. She tried not to think of it as a bad omen.