Chapter 32: Chapter 31 – Meet Your Maker

The shooter and Ryan enter an old timey Western Saloon and crouch behind the doorway. The park between Splash Mountain and Frontier Land was a chaotic mess of crossfire between Disney mercenaries and U.S. government troops. Ryan speaks. “I think we got away from him, right?” 

The shooter smiles. “Yeah, and that freak seemed like they had him handled. My sources say there’s some stragglers over in ToonTown, so let’s say we cut through Frontier Land and pick off whatever braindead retard tourists were dumb enough to stick around here while it collapsed into Verdun. It’s time for some hunting, no?” 

Ryan sighs weakly. “There’s probably not enough people to be worth it, what if we just went to Downtown Disney and tried to get at some of the people trying to get out of here? And then take things on the road again?” 

The shooter chuckles. “Naw. I promised my followers revenge. I intend to get it. If there’s a single motherfucker alive here, I’m not leaving until they’re dead.” The shooter clicks the camera on his mask again and starts talking to the stream. “We had some technical difficulties, but I’m not dead just yet. But boy, what do you know? People are trying to kill me? I’m sure you could find some footage of it online, maybe a news chopper got some. But let’s go.” The shooter hops up and cocks his rifle, making sure to hold it up in front of the camera’s viewfinder. He gestures with his head to Ryan, who follows him obediently. Where else could he go? What else could he do?

They run across the black cement of Frontierland, through the thoroughfare between the fake two story Old Western buildings. There’s a BB gun shooting range on the left hand side of the path, and a cough emits from behind the backboard counter. The shooter hears. He slows his pace, and then pounds on the counter with the butt of his rifle. He listens for a few moments. Now, a whimper. “Bingo,” the shooter says aloud. He shoots into the front of the counter, bursting one round after another. Screams emit from whence the whimper came and people scatter out from underneath, like frightened rats. The shooter is merciless, firing expertly into backs and heads as though they themselves were the whimsical targets in the shooting gallery, another decoration alongside the gold mining pans, painted chickens, old fashioned water spigots, and the like. The shooter, in his reflexive shooting mode, even shoots a hole into the neck of the animatronic gold panning range master who, in any other time, would be calling out targets, and gesticulating to the guests of the range when they put in a coin to start their turn. 

“Bonus— hey he was already dead. Oh that one’s trying to crawl away— damn, I need to work on my aim. Must’ve missed his heart.” The shooter fires into the crawling man’s back at the end of the range, over and over again, just above his shoulders, until the clip is empty. Miffed, the shooter reloads again. “Wow… I really need to work on my aim.” He goes to hop the counter, then hears a stampede of fleeing park goers in the thoroughfare behind him. “Never mind, he’s probably gonna die on his own anyway, so let’s say that’s half a point.” 

The shooter swings around and points his rifle at the stampede. He shoots a few stragglers, and they collapse onto the pavement, one after another with each squeeze of his trigger.

The rest escape from view, so he chases after them, and Ryan follows closely in tow. As they run down the thoroughfare, members of the stampede split off at random intervals, down alleyways, into gift shops, over fences. The herd thins as it gets farther along the path. The shooter keeps shooting, and pivots to shoot a couple of the ones who break off, but it’s difficult to keep up with the crowd as it follows the twists and turns of the thoroughfare. 

Ryan half-heartedly participates by shooting above the crowd. An older man trips at the same time one of Ryan’s shots goes off. The man falls hard onto the pavement, and it’s tough to see what happens to his body as the other people in the stampede run over it. Ryan tries to push the thought out of his mind that he killed the old man and attempts to convince himself that it was a coincidence. 

During the macabre marathon, it becomes apparent that the bulk of the crowd were the older ones and the people breaking off were mostly children and teenagers. The adults in the crowd had done this as some last ditch, desperate effort to distract the shooter just long enough to let their young ones get to safety, where they would at least have a chance at getting rescued by a first responder or soldier after the fighting had cooled off. When the shooter realizes this, he remarks on the fact. He also redoubles his effort to “thin the herd,” and makes sure to hit the targets that break away from the crowd before they get too far. “If they get away from me, they’ll have a souvenir for life. They’ll never forget their trip to Disneyland.” The shooter yells after the crowd. The group becomes thinner and thinner until it reaches the end of Frontier Land and into the main square of Disneyland. 

It’s a raging battle… too dangerous to risk open combat, so the shooter stops and turns back into the thoroughfare to try to pick off the young who had broken off from the crowd.

#

Peter and Karen reach the top of the ladder and find themselves in a pitch black, enclosed concrete crawlspace. The ceiling is smooth, cold concrete, and there appears to be a rectangular tunnel towards a grate on the other side. They take a moment to rest. Peter becomes pensive again.

“It’s funny. One day you start a job, all nerves, trying to make a good impression. Every handshake is an event. You learn the names, get acquainted. You try to do a good job, just not get fired, so afraid that you’re not qualified, and your getting hired was some kind of mistake. And you work hard. And you work hard. And standing in that group of people in the elevator bank is a privilege, and getting in that elevator with the brass doors feels like you’re going to make the world move, and when you drive into work and see the great big building sticking out of the Earth with your company logo visible from 20 miles away, you feel pride. Pride that your building casts a shadow bigger than a mountain’s. But, pretty soon, without you even realizing the moment, that building starts to look more like a tombstone, and you’re not happy to work there at all, just hungry. And instead of trying not to get fired you’re trying to get promoted. And maybe it’s not your dream job but it’s a step in the right direction, and it’ll look good on your resumé if nothing else. And pretty soon, the 12 hour days turn into a year, then years. And it’s hard to keep track of time because the company sends you glass cubes to celebrate the years you’ve been there, but they come irregularly because you were employed as a contractor for the first 9 months and the only real thing you can use to measure time is your hairline creeping back in the photos you see of yourself but it always looks the same when you look in the mirror. And pretty soon the only reason you’re still there is because you’re addicted to the fleeting, sporadic flirtations you have with the endless supply of female coworkers in the company kitchen and there’s always that one thing you want to buy that ceases to matter to you as soon as you’ve bought it and found that next thing you want to buy so you keep working, and keep getting promoted, but you always feel stuck, like you haven’t done shit but get older and more bent over. And you don’t even remember what you were hungry for at the beginning. Just some amalgam of imagery from Entourage, MTV Cribs, and your dad never being home because he was always working and the vague sense that by doing that he was somehow doing his duty…”

“You think he ever found himself in a sewer tunnel?” Karen asks.

They crawl toward the gate. It’s a thin metal mesh and doesn’t look that hard to kick through. Peter starts pushing at it, and it gives way with the pressure of his hand. Karen taps his leg. “Hey, wait. Maybe we should just stick in here for a little while longer. Just hang until everything is clear up there. I mean, what’s the need to rush out? It could still be dangerous, with all the shooting. Let’s just wait a while till it’s cleared up.” 

Peter hesitates, “I don’t know, this tunnel is giving me the creeps. And who knows, maybe if we come up too late, they’ll arrest us or something, or pour concrete on us and we’ll be buried down here.” 

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“We already got arrested once, that wasn’t so bad.” 

“I know, but I just can’t hide any longer. I know he’s fucking killing people up there and I’m safe and sound in here. I just can’t hide any more. If there’s even a chance I can stop him, I have to try. I gotta do something to try to absolve myself of this shit, just something so I can at least say, at some point in my life say, ‘I tried to do the right thing.’ I can’t live like a coward anymore.”

“Okay. Okay. Let’s go. I’ll go with you.” 

“You can stay here. I can’t let you die on my behalf. As far as the moral/ethical scoreboard goes, I don’t know where I’d stand if you got killed because I wanted to do a foolish suicide mission to make myself feel less guilty.”

“Why don’t you just stop thinking about it. Let’s go through the grate. You’re right, this place is giving me the creeps. I don’t want to be down here any longer.”

They push the grate open. It allows for a large enough opening for them both to crawl through with ease. On the other side is a short tunnel leading to an employee exit with a push bar. Peter pushes on it and light from outdoors floods the tunnel. He takes a step and he’s outside of the tunnel, somewhere above ground, in the main park. He checks back and forth, and the coast appears to be clear, aside from some fleeing tourists. He looks back into the shadows and nods to Karen, “Come on. I think we made it.” Peter runs outside to get free, and whether it was a trick or fate, coincidence, or just really bad luck, the shooter walks around the corner the moment Karen exits the tunnel door. He recognizes her from her LinkedIn profile picture and approaches. “Karen,” He calls out to her. 

She turns her head, frozen. She’s confronted with the unseeing. unfeeling, front slat of the charcoal black wading helmet that so many before her had seen at the moment of their deaths. It approaches her rapidly. The door has shut behind her, she turns to open it, feeling hot urine run down her frozen legs. Her jaw trembles. She’s unable to answer. The shooter brandishes his pistol lazily as he picks a target on her body. 

Peter sees him walking toward her. He’s far enough away that he could keep running with the scattered park goers and escape. He’s behind a fake tree. For one moment, his gut screams at him to keep going, to move his feet, and knees, and make a run for it, that he was already running anyway and there was no way anyone would ever know he saw the shooter approach Karen after they’d gotten out of the tunnel. She’d just be another casualty of hundreds of casualties, and he’d be considered a lucky but devastated survivor. 

Yet his feet, seemingly with a mind of their own, run towards the shooter. Peter rushes the shooter, spearing him from behind, his shoulder driving into the soft part in the shooter’s lower torso that houses the kidneys (of course, protected with a layer of kevlar). The shooter slams to the ground with a concrete thud, the butt of his pistol clattering against the ground. It fires and puts a bullet hole a foot above the top of the door frame that Karen is standing in front of. Peter uses the momentum of his tackle to climb on top of the shooter’s prone body, but the shooter reacts quickly. He twists onto his back like a crocodile, pulls out his backup sidearm, and squeezes four point blank shots into Peter’s stomach. 

Even so, Peter grabs the shooter’s wrists and arms, and twists himself and his arms into the shooter’s, like a mess of sticky goo caught in the gears of a taffy machine, so the shooter ’s gun is trapped, pointed into Peter’s stomach, which hemorrhages blood rapidly. The shooter head butts him, breaking his already broken nose with the heavy metal welding mask. 

Karen watches in horror, still planted to the ground by fear. Peter turns to her and screams, “Run! Fucking run! Now!” The popping bubbles of blood she can hear projected from his voice are enough to break the hold between the bottoms of her shoes and the pavement beneath them. She spins away from her position, following the straggling fleers. The shooter empties the rest of his clip into Peter’s torso and manages to free an elbow. He clobbers Peter again in the face, pulls another backup pistol from his ankle holster, and shoots it at Karen. It hits some park goer in the back, just as Karen turns the corner, free from his sights. 

The shooter looks down at Peter, who grins up at him with glistening red, wet teeth, still holding onto the shooter’s arms, but weakly now, like a child who is falling asleep. The shooter stands up wordlessly. He grabs Peter by his shirt collar and drags him to the tunnel door. He opens the door, and drags Peter back into the pitch black darkness. 

He drops Peter in the corner near the tunnel fence he had pushed open minutes ago. Peter coughs and utters the last words another person ever hears him say: “Let me at least die in the light.” 

The shooter turns to him before letting the door shut. “No.”

Outside the door, the shooter picks up a twisted piece of scrap metal and wedges it into the door jamb, ensuring no one could possibly push it open from the inside. He loads fresh clips into his pistols, then jogs off to the rendezvous point he’d set up with Ryan.

Peter is surrounded by pitch black. Struggling to hold his hot intestines inside the flesh of his perforated midsection, the rest of his body, especially his hands, become very cold and numb. He is utterly alone. As he crosses the threshold from life to death, it is impossible for him to discern the darkness of the tunnel from the darkness of death. He whimpers as he goes.

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