“Great,” he would say, trying to be chipper through his coughing fit. “What’s next?”
Danny’s mom and dad stopped in the middle of the path, their arms wrapped tightly around each other as they looked up at the final ride, the Chariot of Osiris, with its nearly two-thousand-foot pinnacle that would launch the train to a speed of 200 mph through several inversions. Jamie had told me this was one of the hardest parts of my job, waiting for the parents to say goodbye, maintaining the illusion of cheer and merriment all employees were supposed to project. Tears streamed down the mother’s cheeks as she exited the Maze of Tickles.
“Thank you for giving us a way to say goodbye. We didn’t want him to die in some hospital overflow center,” the father said, pulling me close, whispering in one of my giant mouse ears. “I know you’re just doing your job, but you gave us one more day with our boy.” He squeezed my furry mouse shoulders and crouched beside his son.
“We love you, Danny,” he said. “My little Dan the man.”
“We’ll be right here, watching,” she said. “You’re such a good boy.”
I couldn’t imagine being in their place. I thought about the tiny body bags lining the streets in the early days of the Arctic plague, how crying parents could be heard at all hours of the night, the white buses that took away the deceased to be stored or burned or studied. At first, nobody knew what was happening. There were rumblings of illness in Russia and Asia. We expected that any viral outbreak would warrant a simple trip to the pharmacy or a walk-in clinic, until the first American cases revealed something much more serious. Breaking News: Children Collapse on the Beach in Hawaii. Aerial footage played on a loop, parents and lifeguards and bystanders circling the bodies lying in the sand.
“Are you seeing this?” my father asked. Having grown up playing on Oahu beaches, my parents felt especially connected to the events. We watched the news together as more and more incidents were reported.
“I feel weird,” a little girl in pigtails and a neon pink swimsuit said to a reporter, before she was carried away on a stretcher. Leilani Tupinio would die a month later from organ failure; her lungs’ cells and tissues had transformed to resemble a liver. Her heart had begun to form the structures of a tiny brain.
“This shouldn’t be possible,” a doctor said in an interview. At Hawaiian hospitals, doctors and nurses labeled infected patients as having the “shape-shifter syndrome,” before the CDC publicized the link to a case in Siberia. By the Fourth of July in 2031, only a couple of months later, children had begun falling ill on the mainland—a case in San Francisco tied to infected oysters, an elementary school outbreak in Portland following a family’s trip to Maui.
Before I pushed Danny down the path to Osiris, his mother gave him one final hug and a sip from his juice bottle before pulling out a syringe.
“Just a little poke of courage juice,” she said, injecting her son with the sedatives that the park sells. Parents aren’t forced to do this, but we encourage them to consider making their children’s last moments as calm and peaceful as possible.
“Are you scared?” I asked, realizing I probably should have stuck to another joke, or made some bullshit balloon animal.
“Yes,” he said, voice barely above a whisper, as I began to push his stroller. He started to sniffle, sucking the snot into his nose, leaving a snail trail above his lips.
“It looks like fun, though,” I said. “For brave boys and girls.”
“Yes,” he said, a bit more chipper this time. As the drugs coursed through his veins, I noticed a final sliver of energy. He smiled as tears ran down his cheeks. He craned his neck upward, seemed to marvel at the height of the coaster as we approached its gates.
I knelt and wiped Danny’s face before joining the other costumed staff with their charges as they readied the ride. When every child was secured, the staff stepped back, creating a wall between the tracks and the crowd of parents, who were cordoned off several feet away, security staff at the ready. The chain and hydraulics of the coaster began to hiss as the train rose to the sky. The staff clapped along rhythmically. At the halfway mark, I gazed at the cars, now at their tipping point, and closed my eyes right as the roar of the tracks and the joyous screams of the children grew to deafening levels and the train plummeted back to earth, through the first inversion, pulling ten Gs—and then the screams stopped. Brain function ceased in the second inversion; their little hearts quit pumping in the third. When I opened my eyes again, the heads of the children were bobbing, as if they were in a deep, impenetrable sleep.