Free Inferno Park by JL Bryan Page B

natives and their dark rituals. Sometimes they need a human sacrifice or two to prime the pump.”
    He gave them his first real smile, full of perfectly straight, bleach-white teeth.
    “Enjoy the ride,” he added. “I know I will enjoy watching.”
    The boat jerked to life, rolling forward on its underwater tracks. It nosed through cattails and slime toward the entrance cave, where the bamboo doors were already swinging open to admit them.
    Kevin and Reeves shared a smile—and for the moment, Kevin felt like they were real friends, that Reeves might even stop picking on him in front of other people after tonight.
    The boat followed a tight curve through a cave full of stalagmites jutting up through the water, under stalactites thick with moss—possibly real moss. The ride still smelled dank, the water swampy and dark. It was hard to tell what was part of the ride and what was real Florida jungle creeping back to swallow the old amusement park.
    They reached a spacious, tropical cavern resplendent with Jurassic-sized flowers and trees thick with blooming vines. A waterfall spilled into one side of the boat canal. Beside it, a big Venus flytrap munched on an insect the size of a seagull. The insect, with most of its body trapped in the flytrap’s jaws, kept rolling its cartoony eyes as though to say just my luck or ain’t that life?
    In one of the tree limbs, a pair of miniature pink monkeys playfully wrestled a banana back and forth between them. Brightly colored mechanical birds occupied other tree limbs, and as the boat approached, they waved their wings and whistled overlapping rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
    “This is lame,” Reeves said. “It’s so fake.”
    Kevin kind of liked it, though. The look on Reeves’s face said he was enjoying the ride, too, even though he was pretending it was beneath him.
    The boat moved closer to the whistling tropical birds, some of them perched on flowery, leafy limbs that extended out over the canal.
    “Okay, we get it, birds and flowers,” Reeves said. “This the most boring--”
    Three dinosaur-sized alligator heads lunged up out of the water, their jaws opened wide to reveal rows of teeth. There was one on each side of the boat and a third straight ahead, all of them close enough to bite. The whistling-bird sounds above turned into frightened, confused squawking.
    Reeves and Kevin screamed and pulled close to each other, away from the monsters menacing the sides of the boat. It took a moment to realize that the gator heads were fake, the open jaws were not even moving, and the deafening snarls were actually blasted from hidden speakers in the rocks along the tropical shoreline.
    “You were totally scared,” Reeves snorted, pushing Kevin away as though he hadn’t been clinging to him. “Wuss.”
    “You were scared, too!” Kevin squeaked.
    “They could have been real.” Reeves watched the three alligator heads sink back beneath the dark, slimy surface. The boat resumed its slow glide through the water. “There could be real snakes or anything in this place.”
    “But they’ve been working on it,” Kevin whispered. “Fixing it. That guy said.”
    “Maybe he’s lying,” Reeves said. “We don’t know who that guy is. Maybe he’s just a random freak who kills kids in old amusement parks.”
    “Don’t say that!”
    The boat passed through a narrow, dim cavern, its walls and ceiling shaggy with green growth. Unseen things slithered and hissed among the cattails. Kevin glimpsed an enormous water moccasin near one of the sparse underwater lights, but it dove away before he could tell whether it was fake or not.
    The cave grew darker as the boat advanced. When it grew a little brighter—just a little—Kevin saw they were traveling through a rocky cave with no greenery. Instead, hundreds of black spiders with strange red markings scurried among the rocks, spinning thick webs overheard.
    “That’s not real, right?” Reeves was pale. “I hate