Somehow even though she got blasted full in the face with a rock-hammer and I just got hit with an arrow shaft I had a worse bruise than Martialla. Her whole head should have been nothing but a bruise. Granted I wasn’t the one blowing blood out my nose in alarming volumes but still it didn’t seem fair or right.
She swallowed some pills with a swig of White Claw and then rattled the pill bottle at me “You want one?”
“No thanks. Is that how that always goes?”
She raised an eyebrow “Almost dying? No, that’s the first time that happened. I think they were waiting for me. Posted guards I mean. And the big guy on the hog was there to kill me. I guess they figured out that something was going on at the cave.”
“Can they come through to our side?” I asked in sudden alarm.
She leaned back and put a giant bag of frozen pizza bagel bites on her face “I’ve never seen it, but who the hell knows? We’re through the looking glass here right? That’s only the fourth time I’ve gone through, I don’t know the rules.”
“What is it?” her only response was to shrug “How can you not know?”
“Why would I?” she said to the ceiling, her head back “How would I? This is some Philadelphia Experiment type stuff. I know enough to know that I don’t know anything about how something like this could happen, I just know that it did.”
I gestured pointlessly since she couldn’t see me “How can you not be curious?!”
She shifted the back to look at me with one eye for a moment “I am, of course I am, but how am I going to find out? Pedro’s dead, the company that built the coaster went bankrupt twenty years ago, and I can’t find any of the former employees. What else can I do?”
“Who else knows about this?”
“Just you and me boss.”
“How is that possible?”
She grinned humorlessly “I don’t have much of a social calendar. I had no plans to show it to anyone until you popped up here and I just did it on a whim. I don’t know why I did really, you know how whimsical us girls us.”
“We have to tell someone. Don’t we?”
She took the bag off and sat up “Like who? Who would believe it?”
I sat there helplessly trying to think of an answer for a while “How did you figure this out?”
She gestured “There’s a bunch of stuff on my laptop if you want to see it, news articles and blogs. A couple years ago, the park was barely still even open at that point, it was already failing badly, eight kids went on the Dragon’s Breath and disappeared. Poof. They were there and then they weren’t there. Fourteen months later three of them turn up in a cornfield in Iowa dressed like they’re going to a Renaissance fair. All they would say is that the other five were dead, nothing about where they were or what happened. To this day, not a word.”
I shook my head yet again “Haven’t thousands of people rode it? Why didn’t they all go across? Why them? Why you? Why me?”
She took another long pull off her White Claw “I don’t know boss. So there you go, that’s your decision. You want me to tear the thing down I’ll have a crew out here next weekend. I wouldn’t blame you, some things are just too weird to deal with. Did you know that archaeologists sometimes find shit so strange they just bury it again and don’t tell anyone? It’s your portal to Narnia, you want to destroy it that’s your choice, your uncle left it to you.”
My mind was racing “What’s the alternative?”
“I can think of one” she took another drink, smacked her lips, and smiled “exploration. Neil Armstrong went to the moon and people worship him like a god, the ones who don’t think the moon landing was fake anyway. The moon? So the fuck what compared to the opportunity we have in front of us. This is like discovering an inhabited planet in our solar system. Only better.”
