Concrete Pool Concrete

The bolt cutters made a dull, heavy snap. Ryu pulled the handles apart, his knuckles white with the effort, and a thick triangle of rusted chain-link peeled back. He stepped aside, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist.

"Get in," Ryu said.

I squeezed through the gap. The jagged wire snagged the hem of my shirt, tearing a tiny hole in the cotton. I ignored it. The heat radiating off the asphalt was thick enough to chew. It was mid-July, the kind of afternoon where the air just gives up and stops moving completely.

We were standing inside Neptune's Chokehold. The waterpark had been shut down since 2014, bankrupt after some kid broke his collarbone in the wave pool. Now it was just a graveyard of faded neon fiberglass and cracked cement.

I looked around. Dead, brown vines choked the base of a giant plastic octopus near the entrance. The teal and pink paint on the main buildings had baked into a pale, sickly white under years of direct sun. Everything was covered in a fine layer of gray dust.

"Place looks worse than last year," Ryu said. He pushed through the gap behind me and tossed the cutters into the weeds.

"It's rotting," I said. "Like everything else in this town."

We walked past the drained lazy river. The trench was filled with dead leaves, crushed beer cans, and sun-bleached fast food wrappers. The silence of the place was heavy. It pressed against my eardrums. Waterparks are supposed to be loud. The absence of screaming kids and splashing water felt wrong, like walking through a house where someone just died.

We headed toward the main attraction. The massive, concrete basin of the wave pool sat at the center of the park. As we got closer, I saw two figures sitting at the deep end, their legs dangling over the edge into the dry, sloping bowl.

Mosha and Tyler.

Mosha had her knees pulled up to her chest, flicking a lighter open and shut. The metallic clink echoed across the empty basin. Tyler was lying flat on his back on the hot concrete, staring straight up at the sky with his arms crossed over his chest like a corpse.

"Look who figured out how to use a fence cutter," Mosha called out. Her voice bounced off the concrete walls, sounding metallic and sharp.

We climbed down the rusted metal ladder into the basin and walked over to them. The bottom of the pool was coated in a layer of fine, gritty sand. It crunched under my sneakers.

Mosha exhaled. The smoke hit my face. It was thick, clinging to the stagnant air, and smelled sharp, like sugar burning dry and black against a hot iron skillet. My stomach did a slow turnover.

"You're smoking that garbage again," I said, waving the haze away from my eyes.

"It's cheap," Mosha said. She took another drag. "And it makes me forget that I have to go back to folding denim at the mall tomorrow at six in the morning."

"Retail is a prison," Tyler said from the ground. He didn't sit up. He didn't even turn his head. "But it beats the movie theater. The popcorn grease gets into your pores. I shower for an hour and I still smell like artificial butter. It's a biohazard."

"Quit complaining," Ryu said, dropping down next to Mosha. He leaned back on his hands. "We're here. No managers. No customers. Just us and a bunch of structural hazards."

Tyler finally sat up. He looked at Ryu, then slowly tilted his head back to look up at the massive wooden tower looming behind the wave pool. The stairs zigzagged up six stories, ending at a cramped wooden platform. Two slides originated up there. One was the yellow speed slide. The other was the Black Hole.

It was a completely enclosed, black plastic tube that twisted around the support beams like a massive snake. The local urban legend was that the construction crew never actually finished it. They said it didn't connect to the splash pool. They said it just dropped off into the dark inside the scaffolding.

"Hey Ryu," Tyler said. A slow, easy grin spread across his face. "I'll give you twenty bucks if you go down the Black Hole right now."

Mosha laughed. "He won't do it. He's terrified of spiders. That tube is definitely a spider condo by now."

"I'm not doing it for twenty bucks," Ryu said, looking up at the tower. He swallowed hard. I could see the muscles in his neck tighten.

"Fifty," Tyler countered. He pulled a crumpled fifty-dollar bill out of his gym shorts and slapped it against the concrete. "Right here. Cash."

Ryu stared at the money. He looked at me. I shrugged. I didn't care either way. I was just hot and bored.

"Fine," Ryu said. He stood up, brushing the dirt off his jeans. "You guys are idiots. It's just a plastic tube. I'll be down in two minutes."

Ryu walked to the edge of the pool, climbed the ladder out, and headed toward the wooden stairs. We watched him go. The stairs groaned under his weight. The wood was gray and splintering, heavily rotted from the rain. He took his time, testing each step before putting his full weight on it.

It took him five minutes to reach the top. He looked tiny up there, a small silhouette against the glaring afternoon sun. He leaned over the railing and flipped us off.

"He's actually doing it," Mosha said, sounding mildly impressed. She tapped her ash onto the concrete.

Ryu disappeared into the shadows of the starting platform. A few seconds later, we heard a dull, hollow thud. Then the sound started.

It was a dry, scraping noise. Sneakers and denim sliding against cheap plastic. It echoed down the length of the black tube. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

We tracked the sound as it spiraled down the tower. It reached the second loop. Then the third. It was getting closer to the bottom.

Then, the sound just stopped.

It didn't fade out. It didn't end with him shooting out the bottom. It just ceased to exist mid-slide.

Tyler frowned. He leaned forward, squinting at the exit of the black tube, which was suspended about three feet over the far end of the dry pool.

"Ryu?" Tyler yelled.

Nothing. Just the flat, dead silence of the park.

"He's messing with us," Mosha said. She rolled her eyes. "He stopped halfway down to make us wait. He thinks he's funny."

"Yeah," I said. But my chest felt tight. The heat suddenly felt heavier.

We sat there in the dry pool. Five minutes passed. Then ten. The sun beat down on the concrete, baking us.

"Okay, joke is over," Tyler called out. "Come down, man!"

No answer.

Mosha laughed, but it sounded thin. "He probably noclipped. Tripped over a seam in the plastic and fell right into the backrooms. He's wandering around endless beige carpet right now."

"Don't say that," I said. I wiped my palms on my shorts. They were sweating. "It's not funny."

"I'm going up there," Tyler said, standing up. "I'm going to drop a rock down the tube and hit him in the head."

Before Tyler could take a step, the air pressure shifted. My ears popped, a sharp, sudden crack inside my head. The temperature plummeted ten degrees in a single second.

I looked up. The sky hadn't changed, but the light was wrong.

And then Ryu fell out of the empty sky.

The 1998 Mall

He didn't come out of the tube.

He dropped from about ten feet directly above the center of the wave pool. He hit the concrete with a heavy, sickening thud. The sound of his sneakers slapping the dry cement echoed like a gunshot.

Mosha screamed. Tyler jumped back, tripping over his own feet and falling onto the dusty floor of the basin. I just froze. My brain stalled, trying to process the geometry of what I just saw. He hadn't fallen from the tower. He had just appeared in the empty air above us.

Ryu groaned and rolled over. He was completely dry. There wasn't a scratch on him. He sat up slowly, rubbing his knee.

"Dude," Tyler stammered, scrambling backward. "Where the hell did you just come from?"

Ryu looked at us. His eyes were wide, the pupils blown out completely, swallowing the brown of his irises. He was breathing fast, shallow gasps.

"The mall," Ryu whispered. His voice cracked.

"What mall?" I asked. My heart was hammering against my ribs. I felt a cold sweat breaking out on my neck, completely at odds with the summer heat.

"The mall," Ryu repeated, staring at his hands. "I went down the slide. It was dark. Really dark. And it kept going. It went on for way too long. And then the plastic was gone. I was just sliding on polished tile. I stood up. I was in a mall."

"You hit your head," Mosha said. She was standing up now, her lighter gripped tight in her fist. Her knuckles were white. "You fell out of the tube and hit your head on the concrete."

"I didn't fall out of the tube!" Ryu shouted. He pointed a shaking finger at the sky. "I fell from up there! I was just in a mall! It had a Sam Goody. It had a fountain with pennies in it. The signs were old. The clothes in the windows were baggy. It was empty. There was no one there. I walked for hours."

"Hours?" Tyler said. "You were gone for fifteen minutes."

"I was walking for hours!" Ryu grabbed his own hair, pulling at it. "The music was playing. Slow, weird elevator music. And the lights kept buzzing. I tried to find an exit. I went into a department store. I walked into the fitting room. And then I fell. I just fell through the floor and landed here."

We all stared at him. The silence rushed back in, heavier this time.

"You are completely capping," Mosha said. Her voice was flat, totally devoid of humor now. She was angry. Fear always made Mosha angry. "You figured out a way to climb out the side of the tube and drop down to scare us. It's a trick."

"Mosha, look at him," I said. "He's shaking."

"He's a drama club dropout," Mosha snapped. She shoved her lighter into her pocket and stomped over to the pool ladder. "I'm proving it's bullshit. I'm going up."

"Don't," Ryu pleaded. He scrambled to his feet, holding his hands out. "Mosha, please. Do not go in that tube."

Mosha ignored him. She climbed the ladder and started marching toward the wooden tower. Her combat boots slammed against the cracked pavement.

I watched her climb the stairs. She moved fast, fueled by irritation. She didn't hesitate at the top. She just ducked into the opening of the black tube and vanished.

We waited.

The silence dragged on. The scrape of her boots sliding against the plastic never happened. She just disappeared into the dark.

That was when I noticed the light.

It was getting late. The sun should have been dipping behind the trees, casting long, soft shadows. Instead, the sun was locked in place. It sat exactly at the horizon line, burning a fierce, saturated orange. The golden hour. But it wasn't moving.

I looked at my shadow on the concrete pool floor. It was incredibly long, stretched out like black taffy, pulling all the way to the far wall of the basin. The edges of the shadow were razor-sharp, unnatural. It didn't look like a shadow. It looked like a hole cut into the floor.

"Hey Tyler," I said, keeping my eyes on my stretched shadow. "Check your phone. What time is it?"

Tyler pulled his phone out of his pocket. He stared at the screen. He tapped it.

"It's dead," he said casually. He didn't sound worried. He sounded bored.

"It can't be dead," I said. "You were just showing me a video twenty minutes ago. You had a full charge."

"Yeah, well, it's dead now," Tyler said. He slid the phone back into his pocket. "Whatever. I need to update my Spotify playlists anyway. The algorithm keeps giving me garbage. I keep getting these weird acoustic covers. I hate acoustic covers."

I turned to look at him. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was talking about. We were trapped in an abandoned waterpark with a broken sun, and Ryu had just fallen out of the sky.

When I looked at Tyler's face, the words died in my throat. My stomach dropped so fast I felt instantly nauseous.

Tyler's eyes were wrong.

The whites were completely gone. His eyes were solid, glossy black, like two drops of wet oil suspended in his skull. He blinked, and the blackness shifted, catching the frozen orange light of the sun.

"I think I need to delete my cache," Tyler said, looking right at me with those insect eyes. He smiled. His teeth looked incredibly white against the black voids. "That might fix the algorithm."

I backed away from him. My sneakers scraped against the sand.

"Ryu," I whispered, not taking my eyes off Tyler. "Look at Tyler."

Ryu didn't answer.

I glanced over. Ryu was gone. He wasn't standing next to me anymore. The dry pool was empty. It was just me and Tyler, bathed in the endless, frozen orange light.

The Reverse Crawl

I spun around in a full circle. The wave pool was massive, at least fifty yards across. There was nowhere to hide. Ryu had just vanished.

"Where did he go?" I yelled, my voice cracking. Panic was a cold wire pulling tight in my chest.

Tyler shrugged. His black eyes tracked my movement with a lazy, disconnected interest. "He probably went to get food. I'm starving. You want to get fries after this?"

I couldn't process him. My brain refused to accept the data it was receiving. I backed further away, my shoulders hitting the sloped concrete wall of the pool.

Then I heard a sound.

It wasn't coming from the black tube. It was coming from the yellow speed slide.

It was a wet, heavy slapping noise. Like wet meat hitting plastic. It was slow and rhythmic. Slap. Pause. Slap. Pause. It was moving upward.

I looked at the exit of the yellow slide, which dumped into the shallow end of the pool.

A hand gripped the edge of the plastic rim. The knuckles were white. Then an arm appeared. Then a head.

It was Mosha.

She wasn't coming down the slide. She was crawling out of it, moving backward. Her movements were totally wrong. They were jerky, stuttering, like a video dropping frames. She pulled herself backward over the lip of the slide and dropped onto the concrete.

She landed on her hands and knees. Her head hung down between her shoulders.

"Mosha?" I yelled. I didn't step forward. My legs felt like they were made of lead.

She slowly lifted her head. Her face was pale, almost translucent in the orange light. Her eyes were wide open, staring at nothing.

A thick, viscous black liquid was dripping from her nose. It wasn't blood. It looked like motor oil. It fell onto the concrete with heavy, distinct splatters. Plop. Plop.

Mosha opened her mouth.

".ereht ni dloc s'ti"

The sound was completely unnatural. The syllables were backward. The inflection went up at the wrong times. It was human speech played in reverse, forced through a throat that didn't know how to make those shapes.

".kcab og ot tnaw t'nod I"

More black sludge spilled over her bottom lip, dripping down her chin. She didn't wipe it away. She just stared right through me.

I snapped. The terror hit my nervous system like an electric shock. I turned and scrambled up the sloped wall of the wave pool. My fingers dug into the cracked cement, scraping the skin off my knuckles. I didn't feel it. I just needed to get out. I threw myself over the edge and hit the ground running.

I ran toward the entrance. I aimed for the giant plastic octopus. I aimed for the hole in the chain-link fence. I ran past the drained lazy river, my breath tearing in my throat.

I saw the fence ahead. I sprinted toward it, slamming my hands against the metal wire. I peered through the gaps, expecting to see the cracked asphalt of the parking lot. I expected to see Ryu's beat-up Honda Civic.

I didn't see the parking lot.

I saw another wave pool.

I blinked, gripping the wire so hard it cut into my palms. I pressed my face against the chain-link.

On the other side of the fence was an exact replica of Neptune's Chokehold. The exact same giant octopus with dead vines. The exact same peeling paint. The exact same dry wave pool.

And beyond that wave pool, there was another chain-link fence. And behind that fence, another wave pool. It stretched out forever in every direction. A grid of endless, repeating waterparks, all bathed in the same frozen, unmoving orange sun. There were no trees. There were no roads. Just the park, copied and pasted into infinity.

I staggered backward, letting go of the fence. The world tilted sideways. I fell onto my hands and knees in the dead grass. I couldn't breathe. The air felt thin, artificial.

Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind me.

I spun around. Tyler was standing there. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets. His black eyes reflected the infinite rows of wave pools behind me.

"Man, you're stressing too much," Tyler said. His voice was perfectly calm, perfectly modulated. "It's just lagging. You just have to wait for the rendering to finish. Sometimes the textures take a minute to load in."

"Shut up!" I screamed at him. "Shut up! What is wrong with you? Look at this! Look at the sky! Look at Mosha!"

Tyler slowly turned his head to look back toward our wave pool. Mosha was standing by the edge now. She was still dripping black fluid. She raised one arm, pointing a stiff, unnatural finger directly at me.

"She just needs an update," Tyler said. He smiled again. "We all do."

Suddenly, the ground beneath me vibrated.

It wasn't a small tremor. It was a deep, structural shaking. I looked over at the wooden tower. The massive black plastic tube of the Black Hole slide was vibrating violently. It rattled against the wooden support beams, making a horrific, chattering noise.

Then the hum started.

It was a low, deafening frequency. It didn't enter through my ears. It resonated directly inside my skull. It rattled my teeth. It vibrated my chest cavity. My vision blurred, the edges of the world shaking apart into static.

Terminal Velocity

I pressed my hands hard against my ears, but it didn't block the sound. The hum was inside me. The plastic of the black slide was buckling, warping under the intense vibration. The air around the tube distorted, like heat shimmer on a highway, bending the wood and the sky behind it.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to fight the nausea.

When I opened them, Tyler was standing inches from my face.

I flinched backward, but I hit the chain-link fence. There was nowhere to go. Tyler's black eyes were fixed on me.

"It's time to go back down," Tyler said. His voice layered over itself, sounding like three people speaking the exact same sentence at the exact same time.

"No," I choked out. I tried to push past him, but his hand shot out and gripped my shoulder. His fingers were incredibly strong. They didn't feel like flesh and bone. They felt cold and hard. They felt like dense, molded plastic.

Mosha was suddenly there, too. She hadn't walked over. She was just suddenly standing beside Tyler, her hand clamped onto my other arm. The black sludge was smeared across her chin and neck.

"!ni kcab teg ew tahT"

I struggled, kicking my legs, but their grip was absolute. They began to drag me away from the fence, pulling me back toward the dry wave pool. My sneakers dragged across the dirt and gravel, tearing up the dry grass.

"Let me go!" I screamed, thrashing wildly. I twisted my torso, trying to break their hold.

As I fought them, I looked at their faces.

The orange light hit them perfectly, and I saw the horrifying truth. Their skin was smoothing out. The pores, the wrinkles, the tiny imperfections were melting away. Their features were flattening. Tyler's nose flattened into a slight bump. Mosha's lips fused together.

They were turning into mannequins. Featureless, smooth, plastic mannequins. But they were still holding me. They were still dragging me.

They pulled me to the edge of the deep end and threw me down into the basin. I hit the sloped concrete hard, rolling down toward the lowest point of the pool. I scraped my elbows, the rough cement tearing away skin, leaving hot streaks of pain.

I stopped at the very bottom, right next to the main drainage grate. It was a massive iron circle, heavily rusted, with thick metal bars meant to keep debris out of the pipes.

Tyler and Mosha slid down the incline after me. Their movements were totally rigid now. Their knees didn't bend. They just slid down the concrete like statues.

Ryu was suddenly at the bottom with them. He didn't look like the Ryu who fell from the sky. He looked like the others. Smooth, blank, plastic.

The three of them surrounded me.

They reached down with their hard, synthetic hands and grabbed the rusted iron bars of the drainage grate. With a terrible screech of grinding metal, they pulled the heavy grate straight up and tossed it aside. It clanged against the concrete.

Below the grate was a hole. It was perfectly round and pitch black. A blast of freezing air rushed out of it, smelling of nothing. Just pure, absolute cold.

"No," I sobbed, crawling backward up the slope. My hands were bleeding. "Please. No."

My brain finally connected the pieces. The broken reality. The repeating world. The lagging physics.

Ryu never went down the slide first.

I did.

I remembered the dare. I remembered climbing the stairs. I remembered the heat of the platform. I remembered sitting at the edge of the black tube, pushing myself forward into the dark.

I never came out.

This wasn't Neptune's Chokehold. This was my brain misfiring, trying to construct a reality while I was trapped in the dark, sliding forever.

The plastic mannequins of my friends stepped forward. They grabbed my ankles. Their grip was like a vice. They pulled me down the slope, ignoring my screams, ignoring my fingers desperately clawing at the concrete, leaving streaks of blood on the gray cement.

They dragged me over the edge of the open drain.

For a second, I hung suspended in the freezing air over the void. The frozen orange sun blinded me one last time.

Then they let go.

I dropped into the hole.

The world vanished. The orange light snapped off. The heat of the summer day was instantly erased.

I woke up.

I was in the dark. It was absolute, crushing blackness. I couldn't see my hands. I couldn't see anything. The plastic walls of the tube pressed in on me from all sides, slick and cold.

I was moving.

The wind roared in my ears, freezing and violent. I was sliding downward at a terrifying speed. The angle was incredibly steep, almost a freefall. The friction burned the skin off my back, but I couldn't stop. I tried to dig my heels into the plastic to brake, but it was too slick.

I opened my mouth to scream, but the wind shoved the sound back down my throat.

I was falling fast, hitting terminal velocity in the pitch black. I didn't know how long I had been falling. I didn't know when the tube would end.

The cold wind howled around me, and the dark stretched out forever.