I waited in line nervously. I was already scared of roller coasters but this nearly put me over the top. I’m still bewildered how the park even got the permission to kill one person per ride. I suppose anyone willing to take that risk isn’t doing society any favors anyway. The philosophy behind it was that the thrill of riding a rollercoaster comes from the adrenaline of thinking you’re going to die and the endorphins released when you are alive, but as long as people think there’s no chance of dying, their enjoyment would be limited by their safety.
So with this, the Pandemic was created. The first rollercoaster of it’s kind. Each group that goes on, one person doesn’t make it out alive. This adds to the thrill. As I neared the front of the line I had thought about backing down but my friends kept pressuring me to walk forward with them. To calm myself I repeated the same thing every victim on this ride has thought. “Odds are it won’t be me.”
When I get to the front we begin taking our seats I’m just about to run off when my friend pulls down the bar. It wouldn’t lift up. The four of us our now trapped and at the end of the day only three of us may go home. I look around at my fellow potential victims. There was a young couple, a bunch of college frat guys, two sisters, a mother with her son.
A mother had brought her own son on with her. I was appalled. This mother either didn’t fully understand the situation or didn’t care. I was about to say something when a vile and putrid thought had stopped me from doing so. “With the boy on it’s less likely to get me.”
I felt the carriages start inching forward and I looked ahead. We began heading into a tunnel of some sort. We were in complete darkness. We began going up and then all of a sudden we rocketed downwards. We went around, up down, upside-down, all in complete darkness. The entire time I waited for death. Every time we went down I tensed, but death never came. Until I heard what sounded like strong wind and then a scream. I found myself relieved at the death of another human being.
As the ride ended and we started coming out of the tunnel I looked around. There were no dead bodies. Everyone on the ride seemed to be getting off alive and well. I began to wonder if maybe it was just a marketing trick to get people interested in the ride. There seemed to be no blood, no corpses, nothing out of the ordinary, until I saw a little boy get off the ride alone.