Makers Part 45

"Your friends aren't getting along too good, is what I hear."

"Really." Nothing was much of a secret in this place.

"The little woman's taken a room of her own down the road. My wife did that to me once. Crazy broad. That's their way sometimes. Get so mad they just need to walk away."

"I get that mad, too," Perry said.

"Oh, h.e.l.l, me too, all the time. But men usually don't have the guts to pack a suitcase and light out. Women have the guts. They're nothing but guts."

Perry cursed. Why hadn't Kettlebelly called him? What was going on?

He called Kettlebelly.

"Hi, Perry!"

"Hi, Landon. What's up?"

"Up?"

"Yeah, how are things?"

"Things?"

"Well, I hear Eva took off. That sort of thing. Anything we can talk about?"

Kettlewell didn't say anything.

"Should I come over?"

"No," he said. "I'll meet you somewhere. Where?"

Francis wordlessly pa.s.sed Kettlewell a beer as he stepped out onto the terrace.

"So?"

"They're in a motel not far from here. The kids love coffins."

Francis opened another beer for himself. "Hard to imagine a kid loved a coffin more than your kids loved this place this afternoon."

"Eva's pretty steamed at me. It just hasn't been very good since I retired. I guess I'm pretty hard to live with all the time."

Perry nodded. "I can see that."

"Thanks," Kettlewell said. "Also." He took a pull off his beer. "Also I had an affair."

Both men sucked air between their teeth.

"With her best friend."

Perry coughed a little.

"While Eva was pregnant."

"You're still breathing? Patient woman," Francis said.

"She's a good woman," Kettlewell said. "The best. Mother of my children. But it made her a little crazy-jealous."

"So what's the plan, Kettlewell? You're a good man with a plan," Perry said.

"I have to give her a night off to cool down and then we'll see. Never any point in doing this while she's hot. Tomorrow morning, it'll come together."

The next morning, Perry found himself desperately embroiled in ordering more goop for the three-d printers. *Lots more*. The other rides had finally come online in the night, after interminable network screw-ups and malfing robots and printers and scanners that wouldn't cooperate, but now there were seven rides in the network, seven rides whose riders were rearranging, adding and subtracting, and there was reconciling to do. The printers hummed and hummed.

"The natives are restless," Lester said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the growing queue of would-be riders. "We going to be ready to open soon?"

Perry had fallen into a cla.s.sic nerd trap of having almost solved a problem and not realizing that the last three percent of the solution would take as long as the rest of it put together. Meanwhile, the ride was in a shambles as robots attempted to print and arrange objects to mirror those around the nation.

"Soon soon," Perry said. He stood up and looked around at the shambles. "I lie. This c.r.a.p won't be ready for hours yet. Sorry. f.u.c.k it. Open up."

Lester did.

"I know, I know, but that's the deal with the ride. It's got to get in sync. You know we've been working on this for months now. It's just growing pains. Here, I'll give you back your money you come back tomorrow, it'll all be set to rights."

The angry rider was a regular, one of the people who came by every morning to ride before work. She was gaunt and tall and geeky and talked like an engineer, with the nerd accent.

"What kind of printer?" Lester broke in. Perry hid his snicker with a cough. Lester would get her talking about the ins and outs of her printer, talking shop, and before you knew it she'd be mollified.

Perry sold another ticket, and another.

"Hi again!" It was the creepy guy, the suit who'd shown up in Boston. Tjan had a crazy theory about why he'd left the Boston launch in such a hurry, but who knew?

"Hi there," Perry said. "Long time no see. Back from Boston, huh?"

"For months." The guy was grinning and sweating and didn't look good. He had a fresh bruise on his cheek with a couple of knuckle prints clearly visible. "Can't wait to get back on the ride. It's been too long."

Sammy had been through a rehab and knew how they went. You laid off a bunch of people in one fast, hard big bang. Hired some unemployment coaches for the senior unionized employees, scheduled a couple of "networking events" where they could mingle with other unemployed slobs and pa.s.s around home-made business cards.

You needed a Judas goat, someone who'd talk up the rehab to the other employees, whom you could rely on. Death Waits had been his Judas goat for the Fantasyland goth makeover. He'd tirelessly evangelized the idea to his co-workers, had found goth tru-fans who'd blog the h.e.l.l out of every inch of the rehab, had run every errand no matter how menial.

But his pa.s.sion didn't carry over to dismantling the goth rehab. Sammy should have antic.i.p.ated that, but he had totally failed to do so. He was just so used to thinking of Death Waits as someone who was a never-questioning slave to the park.

"Come on, cheer up! Look at how cool these thrill rides are going to be. Those were your idea, you know. Check out the coffin-cars and the little photo-op at the end that photoshops all the riders into zombies. That's got to be right up your alley, right? Your friends are going to love this."

Death moped as only a goth could. He performed his duties slowly and unenthusiastically. When Sammy pinned him down with a direct question, he let his bangs fall over his eyes, looked down at his feet, and went silent.

"Come on, what the h.e.l.l is going on? The fences were supposed to be up this morning!" The plan had been to get the maintenance crews in before rope-drop to fence off the doomed rides so that the dismantling could begin. But when he'd shown up at eight, there was no sign of the fences, no sign of the maintenance crews and the rides were all fully staffed.