GRIZZLY 25’S
(A story from Matt Rowan’s collection How the Moon Works, now available from Cobalt Press.)
There was hair, a lot of it, but more notable were the searing red eyes—eyes that watched carefully and closely. A scarred face from so many years out in the thicket, the thick-of-it, what this was. So many lights. But those no longer bothered it, not very much. It could see clearly. The weight of the thing that it was—1650 lbs or so. It still moved swiftly.
The boy. He wandered around because he was told to, by his folks. “Have fun, Son. Good luck. We know you can do this.”
Their tears, though. The boy didn’t feel confident. The employee, the one with the scraggly beard, gave him the OK to pass beyond the velvet rope. The boy was scared, sure. He didn’t know why he was there. The narrow, winding pathway he now trod down was marked by strange aggregations of old arcade games, most of which were powered down, and some of them had deep claw marks embedded in their control panels or on the garish illustrations etched along the cabinets’ sides.
The boy rounded a corner, found real bones littering the tiled floor. He knelt to study the bones, to be sure he was not letting his imagination take his mind over. He was mature for his age in that way. The bones were real, very real, real as any he’d ever seen before. The bones were child-sized. They’d been gnawed on pretty good, a few broken in half. That was all it took for panic to set in, for him to let instinct take control.
He turned to run, but there it was.
He let out a yell, but the bear was already upon him.
*
Grizzly 25’s Pizza & Par-Tee Zone. Sheila had longed to get away just as soon as she could. Life had been a semi-organized rut since she was a teenager, when Dad left Mom and Mom left Dad on the exact same day. They both left notes. Sheila found the notes in different parts of their home. Mom’s was on the coffee table in front of the TV and Dad’s was in the bathroom taped above the toilet, hanging like it ought to be a photo of the whole family together during happier times. Both of her parents regretted leaving Sheila behind, they said in their respective notes. Both parents said they could no longer stand the sight of the other. Each stated that it was for that reason they had to go and be gone for good, to insure they’d never see the other again. Each figured by taking Sheila with them, they’d create the very likely possibility of seeing the other again, and that was a possibility neither had it in them to accept. Each truly hated the other.
Sheila was eighteen and had nearly graduated high school by the time the authorities finally got wind of her situation. And graduation being a loose term for what she was about to do, since her grades had suffered mightily due to the extra energy she’d expended each day pretending her family still existed. She was a sharp kid. She managed to pass a lot of classes by the skin of her teeth. She completed the remaining credits required to graduate over the summer following her senior year. Sheila got work at Grizzly 25’s that far back, during high school. She was twenty-seven now.
She couldn’t believe what she’d seen. Years and years of kids slaughtered wasn’t the half of it. Her only friend—one of the few, at least, and the only one among her coworkers—was Dannie. Lots of her coworkers liked her, but, other than Dannie, most of them creeped her out. They bore the weight of their work a little too serenely and it showed. Talked up its benefit to society. Especially Dale. Dale was the worst of the co-workers. Dale was creepy.
Dannie told her Dale was more than he seemed, but Sheila couldn’t believe it. He was less. He was much less. Still, she had to admit that she didn’t know him terribly well, and she based her opinion mostly on how much Dale would laugh about everything, all the time. Sheila had trouble laughing. She couldn’t do it at work. She hated laughing there. It was hard enough to fake a smile.
“That may be, honestly, but I mean, there’s a rumor circulating that he’s Grizzly 25,” Dannie said. “See where I’m going with this?”
“No, I don’t see how he could be a bear.”
“Of course I’ve never seen it, either, but I’ve heard things about what the bear’s like up close. There’s a reason they keep it out of view of the public, inside the Grizzly Maze, and not just because of the horrible spectacle of violence. The bear’s animatronic. Just like any of these places used to be. Except, instead of playing in a backwood-style country band, the bear eats the kids or maims them horribly till they’re dead or close.”
Dannie was smoking where she shouldn’t have been. Ms. Wunderlee was going to pulverize her if she’d found her there. That was all Sheila could think: how much trouble Dannie’d be in if Ms. Wunderlee caught her. Dannie flicked the cigarette, crushed it under the ball of her left foot, and fanned away the residual smoke, which didn’t get rid of the smell but appeared to be a necessary maneuver, nonetheless.
“You’re too casual about all this,” Sheila said, scowling and then looking down, unable to meet Dannie at eye level.
Dannie seized on Sheila’s accusation, “What about the kids? What else can we do? We didn’t make this place. We’d probably, neither of us, work here, if we didn’t have to, if we’re being honest. But we do. I don’t like it. Not at all. But it’s here or nowhere or someplace else—someplace that could be worse for all I know. Hard to imagine, but not impossible. Have you tried to get a job in another place? Do you even know what other jobs there are?”
“No, I was talking about your smoking. You can’t do that in here. If you were gone, well, I don’t know. So you have to stay.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think Ms. Wunderlee’s still here anyway. The kitchen staff wouldn’t be talking about stealing a garbage bag full of leftover pizza if she was. There’s gonna be some sort of get together after work, ok. Please, say you’ll go?”
“Oh c’mon, Dannie. Fine, fine. But will you stop smoking in here? No more. Do it outside.”
“Yes, ok, this’ll be great. You are going to have a little bit of fun for once,” Dannie said. “It’s my mission in life to ensure Sheila Franks has some fun before she dies.”
Dannie was already on her way. Sheila wished she could have found it in her to say no, but Dannie brought out a side of Sheila she didn’t think existed. Sheila thought sometimes Dannie might have been who she herself could have been, had she had a normal adolescence, parents to rebel against. If certain things had worked out differently. If she weren’t an employee of Grizzly 25’s, with her few middling raises and not a single opportunity for promotion over the past decade. And she should be grateful. That was what wasn’t said. She ought to be grateful.
Promoted to what, though, she thought. Some stupid manager? Like Rory? She didn’t want to be the kind of person who had to worship at Ms. Wunderlee’s altar. Ms. Wunderlee knew how to sting her. That fucking nickname.
The Waif.
The pretend pitying way she’d say it.
Pretend pity. That’s why she never told anyone about her situation and scolded herself whenever she accidentally let the details of her situation slip. She always learned the same thing about people: the one way they wanted to experience every aspect of their lives was however was most flattering. They wanted to believe they were good, hence the pity, and they wanted to have fun at others’ expense, hence why it was faux pity. She scolded herself for agreeing to go this after-work party thing. Lots of opportunity for pretend pity. She was scolding herself more and more each passing day, it felt like.
*
“I love that you think the grizzly’s animatronic, Dannie,” Dale was saying to Dannie and a group of coworkers, firelight making his features more devious and therefore having the effect of placing everything he said squarely in doubt. “But no, it’s not me. I’m pretty sure it’s an actual bear. I’m not willing to test your theory and find out, though.”
“I’m not lying,” he added.
Sheila had just arrived. She sat quietly. She wanted to sit quietly out of notice for as long as she possibly could. Dannie smiled at her, but that was it for a greeting from her coworkers. A few of them might have nodded, she couldn’t be sure. At least no one had called her that name.
“Then where do you go all day?” Dannie pressed him. “You’re nowhere in sight for huge lengths of time.”
“How would you know?” Dale said.
“My job is to pay attention. I’m the one who makes sure the bear doesn’t get loose in the first place,” Dannie said. It was true. She sat up in a monitoring tower designed to make certain, and assure worried parents, the grizzly could never escape the Maze. “Just because you can’t see me, it doesn’t mean I’m not there. Kind of like God in that way.”
Dale crouched down and made a big show of mockingly kowtowing at Dannie’s feet. Dannie rolled her eyes at him and looked away, smirking.
“What happened, you know? Didn’t it used to be parents always looked out for their kids, put themselves in harm’s way just to prevent kids from getting hurt?” the quiet teenaged-girl who worked in the kitchen, making pizzas and things, said. The others almost didn’t hear her. Sheila had strained to listen and felt compelled to respond.
“What do you mean?” Sheila, still not really enjoying herself at all, said.
The teenaged girl who worked in the kitchen looked uncomfortable, but with some visible effort managed to elaborate,“I mean, parents by nature are supposed to be protectors of their young. But then the Par-Tee Zones sprang up and the whole rite of passage was born, an industry based on it. Now kids are left to take one for their parents. Their parents never had to face a gigantic real-life grizzly and survive. But those parents convince themselves that they’ve had hard lives, too. And they have. Their lives were hard, probably continue to be, but there weren’t grizzlies to contend with, not for most people, not usually. And they pretend that all that separates themselves from the grizzly is that velvet rope, like it could come for them, too. But Dannie knows that’s an illusion. The bear can’t get out of the Grizzly Maze.”
The bear couldn’t get out of its maze. There was no question about that. Too many safeguards. It didn’t matter if the bear was real or fake, it wasn’t going to leave the containment zone.
The containment zone, and the Grizzly Maze therein, was a marvel of human ingenuity all its own. It looked a bit haphazardly constructed, given the sheer number of old video games, pinball machines, air hockey tables, arcade basketball units and so forth that were stacked carefully, though precariously seeming, on top of one another (there were steel support beams that skewered the various games and kept them firmly in place).
It was like something out of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and this was done entirely on purpose. Children were supposed to feel disoriented in The Maze. It made it easier for the grizzlies to get to them quickly, which was the point: a quick and relatively painful demise for the children unlucky enough to fail to escape The Maze, its long corridors, its many dead-ends. It was very literally a maze. But of course, it was man-made and there were all sorts of security systems in place to prevent the grizzly or grizzlies from escaping, not least of which was the rumored implant that the grizzly had in its brain, which could be detonated by management if nothing else worked.
Parents were supposed to protect their children, they all agreed.
When had the Par-Tee Zone phenomenon started? None of them had had to go through it, but only just barely. Many of them had lost cousins or younger siblings in the Par-Tee Zones. How long ago? Must have been over ten, twenty years, but now it was as if they had always been and always would be.
“They say the whole thing is rigged, that that’s why the bear’s human. Why else would it be that the kids who always survive are rich brats?” the scraggly bearded employee said, the other one of them who worked in the kitchen. He stubbed out a cigarette and tossed the butt. “It’s because of the mom and pop’s money. The more things change they stay the same, I’m telling you.”
“Yeah, yeah, quit bogarting the pizza. Pass that bag over here,” Dale said. The bag was somewhat heavy and full of pizza still, skidding against the hard surface of the ground as it was pulled from one person to the next. And each in their turn took a couple slices.
*
Sheila was restless in bed that night, tossing and turning before finally drifting into an equally agitated unconscious state. Dreams of her family, those fleeting glimpses of the parents she’d once had, invaded her REM sleep. When she awoke, she knew so much of what she’d dreamed couldn’t possibly have happened, wasn’t drawn from her actual life. Her father was never so together as he’d been in her dream, never so sober. Her mother never so stable and congenial.
Her father had walked into the kitchen. She couldn’t remember if they ever had a normal family breakfast, but in this dream they did. “Good morning to you all,” her father said, seeming to dance inside the room, as though floating on air. The dream wasn’t a retelling of her early life to the tune of Leave it to Beaver. There were subtle moments when the discomfort and unrest that existed between her mother and father appeared, noticeably. The, “Mornin’, Bitch” her father would grumble, at being met by his wife’s icy stare. She, in turn, would tell him he could sit wherever a huge pile of shit likes to unload itself, and the silence would resume.
Maybe that’s all it had been, the cause of their marriage’s disintegration, those casual and bitingly sardonic insults that both her parents had let slip in otherwise normal conversation.
Her dream father sat and read the paper, which she really didn’t think he ever actually did. MORE PEOPLE THAN EVER PREPARED TO KILL EACH OTHER was a frontpage headline. Vague statements like that mottled what she could read. YOU’RE SICK BUT PROBABLY NOT DYING; HERE’S HOW TO KNOW FOR SURE.
That was another odd thing about her dream, her dreams as a whole. It’s said that our brains can’t process written language while we sleep—the part of the brain that interprets the written word shuts off—but that had never been Sheila’s experience. She could read things while dreaming, at least she thought she could. She realized it might just be her brain somehow filling in the blanks, plugging in what it wanted her to read and she was not reading in any serious or deliberate way. Abstract reading, as though she could understand a person speaking a foreign language. But still. Still, in some sense she read while she dreamed, and that was an accomplishment worth noting. She was proud of herself.
In her dream, her father wasn’t violent; he was just a dick. Not to her. That remained true. It was just this feeling of a slow and entropic collapse, this general severance of a husband from a wife and a wife from a husband.
Her mother broke a rolling pin, though she’d never been violent in any memorable way either. Why she’d been using a rolling pin at breakfast time, Sheila couldn’t imagine. She thought it might have been a tool her mother used to make pancakes in the dream. She rolled them out as though they were pizzas. And then the whole family ate them raw, with only powdered sugar. She remembered there was no butter or syrup. For some reason her mother refused to fry the pancakes in a pan.
“Woman, why do you love me so bad it smells?” her father remarked. In the dream, she wondered if he was drunk. Awake, later, she regretted this thought.
The rolling pin broke against the backside of her father’s skull and out flew confetti, as though nothing but party times were happening. But the confetti was like those breath freshener strips that dissolve on your tongue, they were blood red, they became puddles. Scattered across the room melted bloody puddles of confetti. They ruined the pancakes. They ruined everything. And both of her parents turned to her and said, “We’ll never leave you, dear. Never.”
That’s when Sheila woke up.
*
The following work day, Sheila was standing behind the desk at the prize counter. A child was taking a long time to choose what he wanted. This was typical. His mother encouraged him to pick the army men. He liked army men. “Nah,” the boy said, “I have a lot of those.”
The line was growing longer and increasingly agitated. Encouragement came first, but that soon gave way to less desirable commentary. “Don’t take your time in the Grizzly Maze, little man,” the adults said. And then, “This one has had it. You have to shit and get off the pot a lot faster than that if you want to make it through.”
The mother turned back and scowled: “You make me sick. Give him a minute. Give him one single minute. He gets his toy, just like all the rest of them. They all get toys when they win something. They all win something!” She began sobbing. Sheila pressed the button that deployed Rory, who was, yes, manager of the Par-Tee Zone, but probably more importantly he was the on-site counselor specializing in grief inhibition. All Par-Tee Zones were required to have a certified grief-inhibitor on staff.
The mother was brought to a chair in the counseling circle. Before attending to her, Rory told Sheila it was going to be a busy day. “This is the sixth incident I’ve had to respond to already. Our biggest parties haven’t arrived yet.” He was a worried-looking man. Sheila believed this worked to his advantage when counseling. He certainly always appeared to care and respect the feelings of the patrons he counseled down from whatever shock or misery was visiting them. Sheila both liked and hated that about Rory. She couldn’t decide if he was a good person, but she was beginning to wonder, more and more, whether such a person existed anywhere.
She watched Rory attempt to counsel the woman through what was already a traumatic experience, with the worst of it most likely yet to come. When Rory spoke his maxims, “You must remember to take this a step at a time and never get ahead of yourself,” “We are here to help you through this,” and, most common of all, “This is just a part of life.” There was humanity there and maybe something else. A touch of something grim. The weight of Rory’s task gave him a self-importance few at Grizzly 25’s outside of Ms. Wunderlee conducted themselves with, but there was also the supercilious quality of it all. His children naturally weren’t at risk by virtue of the fact that he had none—and more than likely never would. When you coupled that with the comparisons he drew from his own life with the experiences of the people he was counseling, it was hard to draw a favorable picture of him. Sheila remembered Rory telling her about the pet reptile he’d had to have put down because it had contracted a really potent gastrointestinal tract infection. He said the anxiety he felt, as he sat in the waiting room of his veterinarian’s office, while that procedure was being performed was in many ways worse than the anxiety parents and guardians go through before their children run the Maze, because he knew for a fact his lizard was going to die.
It just sounded callous and vaguely sociopathic to her, like he was the wrong man to be counseling anyone through any sort of deeply emotional experience, much less counseling parents whose children were running or about to run the Maze.
She didn’t have time to give it more thought, though. The customers were getting impatient.
Just as she returned to the next people in line—a girl and her younger brother, ostensibly—Sheila could hear the calamity of another dispute breaking out, this time over in the food court. And as a result, she found herself again distracted, which was unusual for her—to get so distracted all in one day.
She collected herself and turned to at last focus exclusively on the awaiting boy and girl, but now Ms. Wunderlee was there, as though she’d materialized out from behind a shadow. She had a real way about her, lurking.
And that hadalways been a characteristic of Ms. Wunderlee, Deborah Wunderlee, who’d gotten a glimpse of the future fresh out of college in the form of Grizzly’s Pizza and Par-Tee Zone franchises. She saw what they would mean for the country going forward, and invested in them early, with the help of some deep-pocketed partners. What none of her staff knew was that she owned many more Par-Tee Zones across the country, each run by a trusted and able subordinate. But this was her flagship Grizzly 25’s and she saw to its operation personally.
“Sheila, dear, I notice the clock has ticked to 10:30, which means, lucky you, it’s time for your 30 minute lunch break.” Sheila hated to take lunch so early in the day. The Par-Tee Zone didn’t open till 9. She was only an hour and a half into her workday. Lunch now would make the rest of the day seem like an eternity, or more of an eternity than was usually the case.
“You know, I’m actually not very hungry yet, Ms. Wunderlee. Do you mind if someone else takes this break? I’ll take the next one.” 11 was somewhat of an improvement in Sheila’s mind. She always took somewhat of an improvement when it was available.
Ms. Wunderlee would not budge. “Go now, Sheila, my little waif. I’m sure you’ll find something to do.” Ms. Wunderlee took Sheila’s spot at the prize counter and Sheila went to clock out, went to her locker in the break room, looked at the crumpled brown bag in her locker. She sighed. She left it there, closing her locker and leaving the breakroom.
Sheila wandered over to the food court, not to eat, but to follow up on the commotion she’d earlier noticed. Children screaming within and nearby the Grizzly Maze were all but ambient noise to her now. It was in those instances when adults, and not children, felt imperiled that usually pricked up her ears. Dale was there, wearing his “Uncle Gus Griz” costume. He was absorbed by the task of making balloon animals for an assembled crowd of very young children, none old enough yet to stand trial in the Maze. More notably, two policemen were there interviewing witnesses. She hadn’t noticed their arrival, though they were usually discreet. Kids would chase after them, asking questions about their work, questions the policemen usually would rather avoid answering, getting their uniforms sticky in the process. Policemen who were already not happy to be at the Par-Tee Zone in the first place.
There was a youngish blonde woman, no older than 20 by the look of her. She had a red mark on her face. She had teared up, and the tears had eroded her mascara. She was talking to one of the officers, who was readying to place her in handcuffs. She undoubtedly felt self-conscious. Sheila did her best not to stare. But it was hard not to, because for whatever self-consciousness the young woman must have felt, she felt it was more important to make sure the present she’d brought ended up in the hands of the child it was meant for. There was no child there. She couldn’t hear much of anything from where she sat, but she did see another adult, an older man, possibly in his late 30s mouth the words Grizzly Maze. Then the woman let out a piercing scream and threw the present at the man, and the police took her quickly into custody, running her out the door, abandoning decorum for expediency. The man following after, shouting obscenities.
Dale had finished making balloon animals and approached her. They didn’t talk much, Sheila and Dale. Sheila was pretty sure Dannie had some kind of interest in him romantically—something Sheila didn’t pretend to understand. In the light of day, he seemed nice enough. His manner, which had previously seemed so creepy all those times before, was beginning to appear genuinely friendly, less ill-intentioned. Maybe Dannie was right, and maybe she just needed to be more open-minded about him. He waved and said, “Boy. That whole thing. Did you catch any of it?”
It was hard to take him very seriously in his costume, but she was able to answer him earnestly enough: “Only the end. What started it? Do you know?”
“The blonde-haired chick, apparently she’s the sister of some kid who just got torn up by the Grizzly. She was bringing the kid a present, even though apparently her parents don’t want her to have anything to do with any of them. They had a restraining order against her. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Who knows their reasons. Parents these days seem crazier than ever, right? They’d have to be to subject their kids to this whole thing.”
Sheila nodded.
Dale kicked something that was on the ground. Dale turned toward Sheila, shrugging in his costume as though to say “Should I open it?” Sheila didn’t know what he should do, but the item was wrapped in curious packaging. Rather unlike herself she tacitly encouraged him to see what was inside. The people to whom the toy belonged were evidently long gone. It was the present the blonde-haired woman had thrown. She remembered now. Oh, yeah, she thought.
Dale tried to be sly, to open the present surreptitiously, and though a bit bungling with his costumed hands, he succeeded at the task. What was it? A “Bow-Wow: Surprise! A Talking Dog” stuffed animal. These were real popular lately, Sheila knew. They came with Artificial_Sentience, a breakthrough in the realm of A.I. technology. This was kind of a find, a big thing.
She immediately felt bad, knowing it had been meant for a child who’d recently died. Been killed. Murdered. Shouldn’t it be called what it was, murder? Well. Anyway, she felt bad. She was complicit. She could be warning the children. She could be saying “Stay away! Get out, you have a chance to live!” She could for a little while. At least until the police came and took her away.
“Whoa,” Dale said. He looked at Sheila, or at least she thought he was looking at her. It was hard to tell what he was doing inside his costume, in terms of his facial expression and where his eyes were, exactly. But the head of his costume, the goofy googly-eyed Uncle Gus Griz, was now aimed in her direction. It was actually a smidgen terrifying, the way it seemed to protect its wearer from true human contact, from the possibility of human exchange. “You want it, Sheila? I don’t know what I’d do with a stuffed dog that can think and maybe outsmart me,” he said, handing the toy to her. Sheila held the dog, studying it in an off-hand sort of way, as though it were something she was about to stock among the prizes behind the counter.
Sheila removed the dog from its packaging. It came with a charged Lithium battery. It was ready to be alive. She had only to flip the switch. The dog’s face seemed to say to her: flip the switch—I am ready to be alive.
“Here I am,” the Bow-Wow! said. Sheila felt herself becoming skeptical. What a lame thing for a sentient machine to say, she thought.
“I shall very likely die in silence and surrounded by silence, indeed almost peacefully, and I look forward to that with composure,” the Bow-Wow! said, which was a bit more interesting.
“That’s kid of a miserable sentiment,” Dale said, still there. “Besides, it’s a robot so won’t it never die? Just out of curiosity. Will you actually ever die, Bow-Wow!?”
“No, and perhaps that is my curse. For now, you are here with me. I’ve been given to understand that this may not be true tomorrow, or sooner, or it could be a bit later. Eventually it will come to pass, as with all things that are inevitable,” Bow-Wow! said.
“You’re bringing me down, Bow-Wow!,” Dale said. “You’re kind of sad robot dog.” He said goodbye to Sheila and left to another corner of the food court, where some more children with another party had gathered.
“I cannot help who I am,” Bow-Wow! said.
“I don’t know many people who think they can,” Sheila said, and lifted Bow-Wow! up, and left the food court. Her break was about over.
*
Dannie was fascinated with Bow-Wow!, how he spoke and moved and was essentially alive.
“Science, right?” she said to Sheila. “It can do anything.”
“Maybe,” Sheila said. She wasn’t sure how much she liked Bow-Wow! yet. She just wasn’t going to leave it for Ms. Wunderlee to give away as a present to some jerk friend of hers, or the jerk’s kid. They all seemed to have kids, all those jerks.
“You must always struggle against those who tell you: ‘work hard to live badly,’” Bow-Wow! said, as though it could read Sheila’s mind.
“He’s really an unusual toy, you know?” Dannie said. “What can you do, Bow-Wow!? What are your skills and talents?”
“I find that I have not very many. I’m beginning to wonder about the advantages of this existence,” Bow-Wow! said, moving around the room, seeming to attempt to touch things with its paws. Texture sensory perception must be something not quite reachable at this stage in the toy’s development.
“Dale said something weird earlier today,” Sheila said.
“Dale usually does,” Dannie said.
“No but this time it got me wondering. He said that parents today are crazier than ever, because they subject their kids to the Par-Tee Zone. To Grizzly 25. Do you think it’s true?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been a parent. They’re a mystery to me,” Dannie said, shrugging.
Sheila ignored Dannie’s sarcasm and went on, “I really can’t imagine if this is the worst parents have ever been. I mean, there’s no way to know that. But how terrible is this, what we do? I really don’t know. Killing is wrong, I know. But is subjecting kids to the possibility of death?”
“If people would just stop having so many kids, this wouldn’t need to exist. But because they won’t stop, it does. Don’t forget, people chose to keep having kids instead of agreeing to get parenting licenses. It’s stupid that the kids should be the ones to suffer, though. But then, they always do.”
Bow-Wow! returned his attention to Sheila and Dannie. He’d seemed to be ruminating for a long time. A strange internal life was forming inside Bow-Wow!, a life leading him to pursue certain truths. He said, as if narrating, “Was it my questions, then, that pleased them, and that they regarded as so clever? No, my questions did not please them and were generally looked on as stupid.”
“Like a baby with a fully-formed adult brain,” Dannie said.
*
The Reginault Fiasco arrived like a storm at Grizzly 25’s Pizza & Par-Tee Zone. The boy was the first of one very wealthy family’s children to die in years. These kids always had the best preparation, the best training from world-renowned bear experts. Their success was surprising. They’d escaped the Grizzly Maze relatively unscathed an impossible number of times, especially as relative to the overall success of the children subjected to it. It was literally impossible, considering how many children were killed by bears otherwise. Sheila suspected some kind of fix. Having money helped in most things, and there was no reason to believe it couldn’t in this situation. Ms. Wunderlee certainly had a way of favoring money over not having money.
The crowd had gathered on the other side of the maze—even Ms. Wunderlee, who bestowed upon all the winners a t-shirt that read Look at Me, I Survived Grizzly 25’s Brutal Onslaught and there was a picture of a jovial cartoon boy and girl just slightly out of reach of the razor sharp claws of Grizzly 25, crossing a strip of tape with a FINISH LINE sign above. Ms. Wunderlee only personally waited for winners of the wealthier set. Otherwise it was Rory, who usually sulked away with the shirt still in hand when the child did not arrive at the finish line, and you could hear the boy or girl’s shrill, though quickly extinguished, cries for help.
“Where the fuck is Leroy?” Mr. Reginault wondered aloud, purposely getting Ms. Wunderlee’s ear. “He should have been out by now. You said he’d be out by now,” Mr. Reginault added, indicating at least something fairly underhanded seemed to have occurred between himself and Ms. Wunderlee vis-a-vis his son’s trial. But no one was really surprised that the fix was in, that Ms. Wunderlee could somehow predetermine the outcome of a child’s trial through the Grizzly Maze. Obviously, the only thing that anyone was surprised about was why had things not gone as they usually did.
And there was no way of knowing the answer to that.
Ms. Wunderlee took matters into her own hands, demanding that she be let into the Grizzly Maze. She was going alone. She had no weapons. Sheila was beginning to believe Dannie was onto something, that there was no way a woman as typically careful as Ms. Wunderlee would enter into the Maze without anything to at least defend herself with, if she’d enter the Maze at all (which was doubtful).
She was gone for a long time.
Then there was a bloodcurdling scream.
Everyone rushed to her aide, ignoring the barrier of the Grizzly Maze in a pretty selfless disregard for their own safety. But it was no use. Ms. Wunderlee had been torn in two by the grizzly. There were immediate questions. Was this an attempt at faking her death? Someone poked the bloody still-warm body, closed the lifeless eyes—eyes that might have been ignored if it weren’t for the fact that they were frozen open so horrifyingly wide. Her tongue was hanging limply out of the right side of her mouth like a semi-dry starfish leg. No one had the stomach to attempt to push it back inside her twisted open maw.
Anything was possible, certainly, but it did indeed appear to be Ms. Wunderlee there, dead.
Rory shook his head, “A terrible loss.” He looked as though he might cry.
Dale had decided to see the body. So had Sheila. And Dannie had decided to, too. None of them should have been at the scene. It was still dangerous to be in the Grizzly Maze, even though there had been a safety check and the area in which Ms. Wunderlee laid was cordoned off. They simply shouldn’t have been there, gaping at her mauled body. They knew it. They felt ashamed. Sheila did. She wouldn’t miss Ms. Wunderlee but her brutalized corpse wasn’t at all pleasant to look at, and its vision would scar her memory.
Dale seemed agitated by something else, not simply their now-former employer’s death and her being carted away, just feet from all three of them, in a body bag on a gurney, and what’s more, recognizably in pieces inside of that body bag. He slipped a note to Sheila while Dannie was looking away.
It said: I’ve seen things, terrible things. Way worse things than Ms. Wunderlee. I need to tell someone I trust, so I’m telling you. Not here at work. Meet me at Eddy’s at 8.
Eddy’s was a bar no one from work liked to go to, because of the prices and the fact that the owner, a guy named Eddy, was particularly inclined to tell uncomfortable jokes, like when he spilled beer all over a waitress and then fired her. People said Eddy sold cocaine, and that’s what kept the bar financially afloat. It was probably true.
Eddy’s smelled like cheap spilt beer and oak that at one time was coated in low quality varnish, and with the stale, faint, lingering smell of cigarettes, which by city ordinance had long ago been banned in even the worst of dive bars. Dale was nursing a stein filled only partly with beer, the rest of it head. He didn’t seem too put out by it. His bearing was made extra morose by a slow, melancholic song sung by a female diva on the bar’s jukebox.
“So, what’s up?” Sheila said cautiously. Her very being there with Dale made her extremely uncomfortable, not because of Dale per se, but from the sneaking around, especially in the wake of Ms. Wunderlee’s death. It was a lot to take in during one shift, and having to meet Dale like this wasn’t doing much to allay her fear. To make matters worse, Dale didn’t seem well. Dannie was right, though. There was apparently more to him, far more, than Sheila had thought possible.
“I’ve done stuff I probably shouldn’t,” he said, staring emptily at the bottles of whiskey and bourbon behind the bar, the liquor in them appearing notably lighter in color than they should and so probably had been watered down. “But I couldn’t let things keep on the way they were. And with Ms. Wunderlee constantly on my case, that was it. That was when I snapped. You know the families never see the bodies, right?” Dale raised an eyebrow as Sheila.
“What are you telling me, Dale?” Sheila wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what he was going to say next, there was such a palpable sense of dread to their being in Eddy’s together, at that moment. She definitely didn’t want to ask what she asked next, “Did you kill Ms. Wunderlee?”
“Why should I feel bad? She deserved it. They all deserve it. I’d be her errand boy forever—we all would. We’d all be at her mercy. She had us. You have to admit, Sheila.” There was a fierceness to Dale’s expression as he spoke, nothing to suggest the slightest feeling of regret.
“Is that all, though? Is it over now? You just needed to get it off your chest?” Sheila felt a tremor of joy for her declaration of willingness to abet Dale. She felt a wave of happiness for her complicity, for having friends with which to conspire. It was so normal, so human. She loved the feeling. It didn’t even occur to her to ask how he’d done it. And then there was that thought, was he Grizzly 25?
“No, I mean yes. I killed her. I was being the bear. That’s what we call it, being the bear. There are more operators—something like four of us, rotating in. I have my suspicions, but I’m not sure who the other two are. I think there’s more than one bear suit, but I don’t know that either. The whole thing has been really secretive. We’re called Grizzly 25’s because we’re the 25th location, you know? I think there are maybe 50, one or so for each state, all told. That seems like a lot. It’s been hard for me to keep everything straight lately. I snapped,” Dale tried at a grin and choked down a sip of beer, mechanically.
“Who are the others?” Sheila couldn’t help but be interested, though she inwardly scolded herself for being so gauche.
“I’m not sure, like I say, but I think it’s Rory and, I know it sounds crazy, but the other one is Dannie. I don’t have any idea who the third is,” Dale said. “It kind of freaks me out that I have no idea who the third is.”
“Dannie? It can’t be Dannie. Dannie doesn’t like anything about Grizzly 25’s,” Sheila said.
“Since you mention it, you’re not one of the operators, are you? Call it a hunch, but I thought you were safe.”
“No,” Sheila was almost ashamed of her admission. It sounded so mundane, blasé, unimportant, when she said it out loud. It was better not to kill children. It was good not to have had to kill innocent children. Still, what did Sheila do?
“Well then,” Dale said, taking another long swig of beer. “You know there’s more. I’ve said a lot, but there’s more. The parents never see the dead kids, right? But Ms. Wunderlee always insisted she see the corpses. She didn’t want any malfeasance, anybody going soft on her, maybe tipping off to the authorities that the grizzlies could think and feel. But this past week, I’d given up. I vowed I wasn’t going to kill another kid. I dressed them up and had them play dead for Ms. Wunderlee, and hid them in the Maze. I knew Ms. Wunderlee was onto the whole thing, though, so she had to go. Now I know they’re going to come for me.”
“Where are the kids now? Are they still ok? Oh god, we have to get them out of there.” Sheila could do something to help. She so rarely had opportunities like this.
“They’re in the Maze. I haven’t moved them. They’re in a safe place there.”
Sheila thought for a moment, then said, “And who’s coming for you?”
“The others. Rory definitely. Dannie, maybe, that mystery third person. And who knows who else was in on this. What Ms. Wunderlee did, that was probably company policy. It’s me, now, who’s got to go. It’s only a matter of time till they find me. I’m sorry I put you in this position, Sheila. I’m sorry, but I had to tell someone.”
“Dannie wouldn’t.”
“No? I hope not. I’m not so sure, though.”
*
Sheila burst through her bedroom door, grabbing a backpack that hung from her desk chair. She set the backpack on her bed, then moved to her dresser. She looked up from furiously pulling clothing from her drawers to see in the moonlit glow of her bay window the outline of a stuffed animal dangling from a noose. Bow-Wow! had attempted to end its life. It clearly still worked, though. Its legs were kicking automatically, making sounds like levers being pulled. She’d been so focused on getting her things that she’d taken no notice of it till then.
“You can’t die. Not like this,” Sheila said.
“I can try,” Bow-Wow! said.
“You’re coming with me,” she said, putting him in her now overstuffed backpack.
“Everyone has the impulse to question,” Bow-Wow! said, though it was less coherent now that it had been shoved and zipped inside of a backpack. He went on to conclude the following, though the muffled statements were nothing more than muffled bleating:
“When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.”
*
She was back at Grizzly 25’s Pizza and Par-Tee Zone in no time, or that’s how it felt. Someone had started the fog machine, made the whole thing considerably creepier and more clandestine. There were foreboding noises inside, noises that might suggest to any sane person that staying away is a good idea. Sheila went inside. Felt obligated but also wanted to, to help. Thought she could help. Felt it was time for her to help.
How to be an adult in this situation?
She tried to use the fog emanating from the fog machine to her advantage, which was hard to achieve because she couldn’t see for herself terribly well behind its shroud. Strobe lights were going, the effect of which was eerie in the murk of the fog. Blurred lines of color that reminded Sheila of shadows, of the other lurkers in her midst. Paranoia was such a virtuous affliction. She needed it now so she’d remain on her toes, paying attention to her surroundings, not getting wrapped up in the music of sensory chaos.
The velvet rope, the entrance to the Grizzly Maze. She’d stumbled right into it. No more than an imaginary line drawn by an imaginary cartographer at Grizzly 25’s grand opening, this rope. No more than the idea that beyond its marker was a place where artificial sins could be absolved, sins no longer earned but man-made.
The ground shook. An impossibly large and furry creature raced past her, knocking her to one side. She distinctly heard it sigh heavily, but it was evidently mechanical. She wondered how many children figured this out before drawing their last breaths.
Then the sound of metal hitting metal, muted a bit by a layer of padding and synthetic fur. Two bears, fighting? Dale was one of them. Had to be. She stumbled forward, her body aching a bit from being thrown moments earlier. Claws gripping limbs, she could now see. The haze was clearing, perhaps the fog machine had been shut off. Two robotic bears gnashing back and forth, one threw the other into a cluster of unplugged pinball machines.
Sheila scanned the area for children but instead of finding them she felt hot air pumping against the nape of her neck. She turned, another grizzly. The mouth of which opened up, and out peaked Dannie, a floodlight shining on the right side of her face. The floodlight turned toward the surrounding walls of arcade games and vending booths and pieces of roller coaster track and bumper cars.
“Ok, so not gonna lie, Sheila, I’m one of the grizzlies. There’s clearly more than one,” Dannie said, nodding toward the melee between Dale and whoever it was in the other machine.
The other grizzlies stopped their fighting, noticing Dannie’s floodlight. They opened their mouths and out peered Dale, as expected. The other was blinding Sheila with its attached floodlight, but turned the beam so she could see it was, indeed, Rory. “Sheila, hey, how are you? I wish we were seeing each other under better circumstances.” In that instant, Dale drove his grizzly’s paw into Rory’s grizzly’s torso, and so into Rory, which proved immediately fatal. Rory let out a faint scream, but that was all.
“So you’re not the fourth grizzly after all? I doubted you had it in you but really, Sheila, I’m disappointed,” Dannie said.
Dale clomped over to them. “Sorry, Sheila. Sorry to have involved you. We were hoping maybe you’d let slip that you were actually the other Grizzly. We really don’t know who it is. Do you know? Would you tell us?”
“Dale! But I trusted you. I thought you were the one trying to fix things.”
“That was a big time betrayal on both our parts,” Dale said, indicating himself and Dannie. “We were definitely using you. Maybe frame you for the deaths of Ms. Wunderlee and Rory. ”
“So are any kids alive?” Sheila asked.
“That’s the funny thing. Yes. Apparently it was Rory’s doing. He’d been betraying Ms. Wunderlee from the start, you know? You never can tell who will! He was sneaking them out of here and into an underground service that would give them new lives elsewhere. So we were able to figure out, from the men who’d approached us, asking us to join their whole thing. We declined,” Dannie said. She turned to another corner of the Maze, pulled out two considerable shapes and threw them at Sheila, they slid and stopped just before hitting her. Two corpses. Two men from the underground.
“So not everyone’s bad, right?” Dale said. “Makes you feel a little better about all this, I hope, Sheila.”
“But sad as it is, and seriously, sweetie, I hate to do it to a friend, but we’ve got to kill you now,” Dannie said.
“We’ve already spilled too many of the beans,” Dale said. “Whoops!”
Sheila prepared to die. She clenched herself, barely noticing the patter of two small feet running across the tile.
“I have realized my purpose!” Bow-Wow! said, as exuberantly as it had ever said anything in its short sentient time. He crawled up into a vent before any of the three of them knew what was happening. Bow-Wow! quickly made it to the control terminal and uploaded via a jumpdrive embedded in its paw certain release commands for the Grizzly containment units. All but one were empty. “I am designed solely to engender chaos,” Bow-Wow! said, “where there’s order.” A new kind of tech-oriented terrorism. Bow-Wow!s across the country were equipped with malware to destroy a Grizzly Maze’s functionality, built around the idea that the grizzlies themselves weren’t humans inside bear units but actual bears. Knowing they were animatronic bears was intel the underground could certainly have used.
“That was weird,” Dannie said.
“Oh hey, here’s a bunch of kids,” Dale said, cracking open a Pac-Man arcade cabinet.
But then the thunder of a quick-moving robot shook the ground around them. Smashing through a wall of monitors and other equipment. The fourth grizzly.
The mouth opened, and all waited—Dannie, Dale and Sheila.
A grizzly head poked out, roaring. It was an actual grizzly bear in the machine. Sheila wondered if that was some horrible failsafe that Ms. Wunderlee had managed to contrive, or if Rory had been responsible. No matter who was behind it, the fact remained it was an actual bear operating an animatronic Grizzly 25 machine, which was its own sort of dangerous.
Dannie shouted, and her suit was quickly torn into and disabled. Her screams were loud and cacophonous until they abruptly ceased, which was its own kind of disturbing, certainly.
Dale was next, his machine was beheaded and the super aggressive grizzly inside its grizzly suit made short work of him.
Sheila’s eyes darted all around her as she struggled to comprehend her situation. But even as all seemed to be going to hell around her, she remained aware that Dale had discovered living children. Hopefully, the grizzly would be distracted enough with its two most recent kills to buy her time. She could still do exactly what she’d set out to do.
The children were in a daze, had probably spent a week or two in their shelter. Rory must have only been able to sneak one child at a time out of the building. There were more in this hiding spot than she expected, far more. Maybe six in total. It was cramped but there was water and food, even a bucket for a bedpan. Smelled terrible. Regardless, they all needed to go, now.
“Single file,” Sheila said to them in a whisper. She’d bring up the rear, directing them toward the exit.
Bow-Wow! emerged from nowhere. “I’ve constructed a crude explosive in the kitchen. This building is soon to blow.”
“Good?” Sheila said.
“Don’t worry about the grizzly. I’ll see to it he doesn’t interfere with your escape,” Bow-Wow! added.
“Thanks, Bow-Wow! You’re the best toy in the whole world,” Sheila said before taking them into the night, far, far away from Grizzly 25’s.
“Yes, well. Maybe I am.” It was sheepish and embarrassed but proud. Bow-Wow! liked feeling proud. And alive.
