They Both Die at the End (Death-Cast #1)(39)
“It’s a popular attraction,” Deirdre says. “Wouldn’t you swim with sharks if you knew they couldn’t bite you?”
Rufus sucks his teeth. “I don’t mess with big bodies of water like that.”
Deirdre nods as if she understands all of Rufus’s history. “No prob. I’m here if you have any questions.”
Rufus and I take a seat and flip through the binder. In addition to hot air balloon rides and swimming with sharks, the station offers skydiving, racecar driving, a parkour course, zip-lining, horseback riding, BASE jumping, white-water rafting, hang gliding, ice/rock climbing, downhill mountain biking, windsurfing, and tons more. I wonder if this business will ever expand to fictional thrills, like running away from dragons, fighting a Cyclops, and magic carpet rides.
We won’t be around to know.
I shake it off. “You want to try mountain biking?” I ask. He loves biking and there’s no water involved.
“Nah. I wanna do something new. How do you feel about skydiving?”
“Dangerous,” I say. “But tell my story if this goes south.” I wouldn’t be surprised if I managed to die in a place that promises risk-free thrills.
“You got it.”
Deirdre gives us a six-page-long waiver, which isn’t uncommon for businesses serving Deckers, but it’s also definitely not uncommon that we skim the form, because it’s not as if we’re going to be around to sue them if something does go wrong. There are so many freak accidents that can happen at any point. Every new minute we’re alive is a miracle.
Rufus’s signature is messy. I can make out only the first two letters before the remaining letters get lost in curves that look like a sales chart for a business that is rising and failing regularly. “Okay. I’ve signed away my right to bitch if I die.”
Deirdre doesn’t laugh. We pay two hundred and forty dollars each, the kind of price you can get away with charging people whose savings accounts would go to waste otherwise. “Follow me.”
The long hallway reminds me of the storage center where Dad worked, except inside the lockers there weren’t happy screams and laughter. At least none that I ever heard of. (Kidding.) These rooms are like karaoke rooms except some are twice, even three times as big. I peek in each window as we go down the hall, zigzagging like a pinball, finding Deckers with goggles in every room. Some are sitting inside racecars that are shaking, but not speeding down the racetracks. One Decker is “rock climbing” while an employee in the room texts away. A couple are kissing in a hot air balloon that is hovering six feet, but not in the sky. A crying man without goggles is holding the back of a laughing girl on top of a horse, and I can’t tell which one of them is the Decker, or if it’s both, but it makes me so sad that I stop looking into the rooms.
Our room isn’t very large, but there are huge vents, safety mats leaning against the wall, and an instructor who’s dressed like an aviator, with her curly brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. We dress up in matching gear and harnesses, the three of us looking like X-Men cosplayers, and Rufus asks the young woman, Madeline, to take a photo of us. I don’t know if I should wrap my arm around him, so I follow his lead, placing my hands on my waist.
“Is this good?” Madeline asks, holding the phone out to us.
We look like we mean serious business, like we refuse to die until we save the world from all its ugliness.
“Dope,” Rufus says.
“I can take more photos while you’re diving!”
“That’d be cool.”
Madeline breaks it down for us on how this works. We’ll put on the goggles, the virtual experience will begin, and the room itself will play its own role in making this feel as real as possible. Madeline locks our harnesses to suspending hooks, and we climb a ladder up to a plank that looks like a diving board except we’re only about six feet above the floor.
“When you’re ready, press the button on your goggles and jump,” Madeline says, dragging the mats under us. “You’ll be fine.” She turns on the high-powered vents, and the room becomes loud with wind.
“Ready?” Rufus mouths to me, dropping his goggles over his eyes.
I do the same with my goggles and nod. I click the green button by the lens. The virtual reality kicks in. We’re inside a plane with an open door, and a three-dimensional man is giving me the thumbs-up to jump into the open blue sky. I’m scared to jump, not out of the plane, but into the actual open space before me. My harness might break, even though I feel one hundred percent secure.
Rufus shouts for a few seconds, descending a couple feet away from me, and goes quiet.
I lift my goggles away from my eyes, hoping I don’t find Rufus on the floor with a twisted neck, but he’s hovering in the air, being blown side to side by wind from the vents. I shouldn’t be seeing Rufus like this, but I had to know he was okay, even if it ruins the experience a little bit. I still want that same exhilaration Rufus experienced, so I put the goggles back on, count down from three, and jump. I’m weightless as I hug my arms to my chest, like I’m speeding down a tunnel slide instead of free-falling through cloud after cloud, which I suppose I’m not actually doing either. I stretch my arms out, trying to touch the wisps at the edge of multiple clouds, as if I can actually grab one and roll it around in my hands like a snowball.