The End Has Come

Amy’s smile was small, quick, and bitter. “I was the last person alive in Guest Relations,” she said. “All I was ever trained to do is make sure that everyone at Disneyland has a magical day.”

* * *

At the end of everything, when there was no place left to turn, the Cast Members who survived came home. Custodians and princesses, ride operators and stage show dancers, one after another they came to the gates. Some had shown up while the Park was still technically open — before humanity’s season had been declared over for good. They had formed the skeleton crew that kept things running until everyone else could arrive. Amy thought of them as her family. They had done things together, seen things together, that could never be unseen. They had done them for each other. They had done them for the children they knew would come, eventually, the orphans of the world that was being born outside their gates. And they had done them for Walt.

He might not have anticipated his Park’s future as one of the last strongholds of mankind. But as Amy walked down the access corridor that would lead her back to Town Square, she couldn’t help thinking that he would have been pleased by what they’d been doing in his name.

Tiffany and Skylar were waiting in front of the Gallery. As always, Tiffany was dressed in her Guest Relations uniform, so crisp and perfect that she must have spent half her waking hours ironing the creases into her jacket, while Skylar was wearing something she’d looted from one of the stores on Main Street. They were holding hands. Amy felt a brief, sharp stab of envy.

Not everyone made it through with their sister by their side, she thought — not for the first time, and not, she knew, for the last. Her own sister had stopped answering the phone two days after she’d first complained of a sore throat. Nikki was long dead, and all Amy could do to honor her memory was keep on fighting for a future.

“Is it true?” asked Tiffany.

“That depends on what ‘it’ is,” Amy replied. “Use exact terms and phrases and maybe I can calm your mind.” That wasn’t likely, all things considered.

“Michael said one of the generators blew,” said Skylar. “He said it wasn’t fixable.”

The trouble with being a closed community — there were fewer than five hundred people in Disneyland, and more than half of them were living in the buildings on Main Street and in Adventureland — was that rumors couldn’t be controlled: they could only be predicted, and chased down. “We did lose a generator today, but Anthony says we have options,” said Amy carefully. “We should be able to run on what we have for three or four days before things become critical. By then, we’ll hopefully have located a replacement.”

“We can’t scavenge any more from California Adventure, can we?” asked Tiffany.

Amy shook her head. “They’re down to three generators for the whole park, and they have their own problems to take care of,” she said. “If the air conditioning goes out in Ariel’s Undersea Adventure . . .”

Tiffany looked sick. “That would be bad.”

“Yes, it would,” agreed Amy.

“Is the power still on in the Mansion?” asked Skylar.

“For now.” Amy shook her head. “Tiffany, get the rest of Guest Relations and tell them we’re having a mandatory meeting at the Big Thunder Ranch tonight. Skylar, can you get Michael to tell the rest of the ride operators?” Between the three of them, Tiffany, Skylar, and Michael knew most of the Park’s population by name, and knew where to find them during the day.

The sisters nodded. “Okay,” said Tiffany, clearly relieved to have something to do. Skylar looked less eager. The assessing way she studied Amy made it clear she knew something was up. She just had the good grace not to say anything about it yet. Amy smiled, relieved, and watched them walk away down Main Street.

She was lucky; there was no one inside the firehouse. She made it all the way up to the apartment that had belonged to Walt Disney, and was now hers, before she started to cry.

* * *

Amy hadn’t intended to wind up in charge of the survivors who took refuge in Disneyland; it was an accident. She’d just been the highest-ranking member of the Guest Relations team still standing when the doors officially closed to the public for the last time, and the only member of management who’d been willing to get her hands dirty along with everyone else. By the end of the first day (an endless string of cleanup and sanitation, until it seemed like none of them would ever be clean again, until they were all family forever, bound by things their hands could not undo), she was already being referred to as “Mayor” by almost everyone. It stuck. People wanted to feel like they still existed in a world with structure, and she was the closest thing they had to a face to put on their new existence.