Kings Dominion: After Dark

Everyone knows Kings Dominion closes at ten.

What almost nobody knows is that on certain nights, after the last human guest drags their sunburned, cotton-candy-sticky self out to the parking lot, the gates don't stay closed for long.

At 12:01 a.m., the lights come back on.

Ethan Mercer didn't know that either. Not until the night he fell asleep in a maintenance closet and woke up to find out the hard way.

The Last Guest

It had been a fourteen-hour shift, funnel cakes, a broken soft-serve machine, and a thunderstorm that sent half the park screaming for cover, and Ethan had ducked into an old supply room behind the Intimidator 305 station to wait it out. The room smelled like WD-40 and old popcorn. He sat down on a stack of folded tarps.

Just for five minutes, he told himself.

He woke up to silence, which was somehow worse than the thunder.

His phone was at four percent. The clock said 11:47 p.m. He pushed open the door and found the midway dark, empty, and enormous in a way it never seemed during the day, like a stage after the audience had gone home.

He jogged toward the employee gate. Locked. He tried his badge. Nothing. He circled toward the front entrance, already rehearsing the very reasonable explanation he'd give to whichever manager found him wandering the park after hours.

He never got the chance.

Because at 11:59, the speakers crackled on.

And at 12:00 exactly, the lights came up, not the regular lights, but a deeper, richer gold, like the whole park had switched from tap water to candlelight. The Intimidator's chain lift groaned awake behind him. Somewhere across the park, calliope music started playing a song he didn't recognize.

Kings Dominion, which had very clearly closed two hours ago, was opening for business.

The Midnight Opening

Ethan ducked behind a trash can shaped like a giant soda cup, which felt like a stupid place to hide until he realized it was actually working.

Buses were pulling in. Not the yellow school kind, sleek black ones with tinted windows, rolling up to the front gate in a long, silent line. Doors hissed open. People stepped off in twos and threes, chatting, laughing, checking their phones like this was the most normal thing in the world.

At first, Ethan just saw a crowd. A weird one, way too many people dressed like they'd raided a costume shop that specialized in decades instead of characters, a flapper dress here, a leather jacket there that looked suspiciously like it belonged in a 1950s diner, but a crowd.

Then he started noticing the details.

A guy in a letterman jacket walked past a gift shop window, and the glass didn't show his reflection. Just the guy next to him, and the guy next to him, and a gap where the letterman jacket should have been.

A little girl in pigtails handed a bill to a vendor and got back a souvenir cup. Ethan squinted at the label.

BLOOD TYPE: O NEGATIVE.

He read it three times.

Then the announcement rolled over the park, warm and cheerful, in the exact same voice that usually reminded guests not to leave children unattended near the log flume:

"Welcome to Kings Dominion After Dark. Tonight's sunrise is at 6:31 a.m. Please plan your departure accordingly. Enjoy your evening, and please remember: what happens After Dark, stays After Dark."

Ethan sat down hard behind the giant soda cup.

Vampires, he thought. I am hiding from a theme park full of vampires.

A Different Kind of Theme Park

Here was the thing nobody tells you about a vampire amusement park: it is, against all logic, kind of hilarious.

Ethan crept along behind hedges and food carts, and every ten feet he found something new to stare at. A snack stand advertised SYNTHETIC BLOOD SLUSHIES — NOW IN CHERRY. A steakhouse had a chalkboard menu that read RARE. VERY RARE. STILL MOOING. A photo booth outside a roller coaster had a sign that said GUARANTEED VAMPIRE-FRIENDLY PHOTOGRAPHY — EVERYONE SHOWS UP, WE PROMISE.

The gift shop, which Ethan had personally restocked with sunscreen that afternoon, now had a whole shelf labeled EMERGENCY USE ONLY, with a skull-and-crossbones sticker slapped over the SPF number.

And the vampires themselves were normal. Bored, even. Two guys in matching leather jackets complained loudly about the line for the log flume. An elderly woman in an old-fashioned traveling coat sat on a bench fanning herself, saying she'd ridden this same coaster back when it had a different paint job, forty years ago, and it still gave her butterflies.

Ethan had grown up on vampire movies. Fog. Fangs. Screaming. This was fog, fangs, and a forty-five-minute wait for funnel cake.

He was starting to think he might actually be able to sneak all the way to the parking lot unnoticed.

Then a hand closed around his shoulder.

Lena

Ethan spun around so fast he nearly fell into a hedge.

The girl gripping his shoulder looked about sixteen, dark hair, sharp eyebrows, an expression that was somehow both amused and extremely alarmed. She looked him up and down the way you'd look at a raccoon that had wandered into your kitchen.

"You're human," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I, um, work here," Ethan said, which felt like a wildly insufficient explanation.

She didn't laugh, which he appreciated, and didn't bare any fangs, which he appreciated even more. Instead, she looked immediately, genuinely panicked.

"Okay. Okay, this is bad. This is really bad," She said as she glanced around like she expected sirens, "If security finds you, they'll shut the whole night down. Maybe for good."

"There's an 'if security finds me' scenario? Can we not have that scenario?" Ethan bellowed.

"That's the idea, yeah." She responded grabbing his sleeve and towing him behind a popcorn cart, "I'm Lena. I'm sixteen. Also, I'm a hundred and seventeen, but let's not make this weirder than it already is."

"Too late," Ethan said honestly.

A tall guy in a very serious black coat jogged up to them, took one look at Ethan, and went several shades paler than a person who was already, technically, dead.

"Marcus," Lena said, "we have a human."

"I can see that we have a human," Marcus said. "Why do we have a human?"

"Ask the human," Lena replied.

"I fell asleep in a supply closet," Ethan offered.

Marcus closed his eyes like he was praying for strength and whispered, "Of course you did."

The plan they came up with was simple enough, which was to get Ethan to the employee security gate, get him out, and pretend the entire evening had never happened. Lena knew the park's back paths. Marcus, despite radiating an aura of brooding mystery, mostly just wanted to go home before anything caught fire.

Unfortunately, someone else had been listening.

The Secret Agreement

They cut through behind the arcade, and Lena filled Ethan in as they walked, partly because he wouldn't stop asking questions, and partly, he suspected, because it kept her from thinking too hard about how much trouble they were all in.

Richmond, it turned out, had had vampires since before it was really even Richmond. For most of that time, it had also had a lot of very upset humans with torches. Decades back, after one particularly disastrous string of incidents, both sides had sat down and worked out an arrangement: vampires would stay hidden, humans would stay unaware, and everybody would agree to leave well enough alone.

Kings Dominion After Dark was part of that deal. One safe night a week where Richmond's vampire population could ride roller coasters and eat terrible theme-park food without any human ever being the wiser.

"It's worked for years," Lena said, "Nobody's ever found out."

"Until tonight," Marcus muttered.

"Until tonight," she agreed.

Not everyone loved the arrangement, though. Somewhere behind a support beam near the arcade entrance, an older vampire in an immaculate gray suit had been listening to every word, and the expression on his face was not one of quiet agreement.

His name, Ethan would soon learn, was Sebastian Blackwood, and he thought hiding from humans for a hundred years was, frankly, humiliating.

A human teenager wandering loose through After Dark was, to Sebastian, not a disaster.

It was an opportunity.

The Setup

They almost made it to the security gate.

That was the worst part, Ethan thought later, almost. He could see the employee entrance, could see the dim shape of the parking lot beyond the fence, when every speaker in the park erupted at once with a blaring alarm tone and a voice that was decidedly less cheerful than the welcome announcement.

"ATTENTION. HUMAN DETECTED INSIDE THE PARK. ALL EXITS ARE SECURED. PLEASE REMAIN CALM."

The gate in front of them slammed shut with a mechanical clang that Ethan felt in his teeth.

"That's new," Lena said, in the voice of someone trying very hard not to panic.

Worse, when Ethan reached for his employee badge, his pocket was empty. He hadn't felt anyone bump into him. He hadn't heard footsteps behind him, but it was gone.

Across the park, Mr. Whitaker, a man Ethan recognized as the mild-mannered night administrator he'd waved to maybe twice all summer, was holding that exact badge, turning it over in his fingers with a deeply unhappy expression, while a security team clustered around him.

"Somebody planted evidence," Marcus said grimly, reading the shape of the situation from twenty feet away, "Making it look like the kid snuck in on purpose to expose us."

"I didn't sneak in on purpose!" Ethan said, "I fell asleep in a closet! I have told several people this!"

"Sebastian," Lena said, and the name came out like a curse.

The Chase

There is nothing quite like being chased through an amusement park at one in the morning by a squad of very fast, very annoyed vampire security guards, and Ethan discovered this fact firsthand in the next ten minutes.

They ducked through the arcade, weaving between rows of claw machines while flashlights swept the windows behind them. They cut through the haunted house attraction, which Ethan had always found kind of cheesy during the day and found significantly less cheesy while actually running for his life through it. They sprinted across the open midway in full view of a hundred startled vampire guests, several of whom applauded, assuming it was some kind of show.

Finally, with security closing in from two directions, Lena grabbed both boys by the arm and hauled them toward the loading platform of the park's tallest, fastest coaster, shoving them into the very last car just as the safety bar clicked down and the train lurched forward.

Marcus stared up at the first hill, which rose in front of them like the side of a small mountain, and went, if possible, even paler than usual.

"You've been alive for two hundred and forty-three years," Ethan said, gripping the bar with white knuckles, "This is really what scares you?"

"Exactly," Marcus said, his voice climbing half an octave as the chain dragged them upward, "I'd like to make it three hundred."

The drop, Ethan had to admit, was an excellent way to lose a security team, mostly because said team had apparently not thought of checking the ride queue. By the time the train rattled back into the station, they'd bought themselves a few precious minutes, and stumbled straight into a much bigger problem.

Sebastian's Real Plan

They found the maintenance panel behind the ride's control booth wrenched open, its wiring pulled loose and dangling. Lena crouched down and let out a slow breath.

"This isn't just about you," she said to Ethan. "This is the park's automated closing system. It's supposed to lock down and clear everyone out before sunrise." She looked up, and for the first time all night, she looked scared instead of annoyed. "It's disabled. All of it."

Ethan did the math and didn't love the answer. "So, everyone in the park right now..."

"Doesn't know the exits won't open when the sun comes up," Marcus finished.

Hundreds of vampires, laughing, riding coasters, arguing about funnel cake, with absolutely no idea that dawn was coming for all of them at once. And a very convenient human teenager already framed and ready to take the blame for it.

"Sebastian wants it to look like humans did this on purpose," Lena said. "If vampires get caught out at sunrise because of me," she jabbed a thumb at Ethan, "it won't just end After Dark. It could end the whole agreement. Everywhere."

Ethan checked the control panel's dead display. Then he checked his phone, which had, with spectacularly bad timing, finally died.

Somewhere out there, a very old, very smug vampire was watching a sky that would start turning pink in less than an hour.

The Unlikely Team

They found Mr. Whitaker near the fountain plaza, still holding Ethan's badge, still looking like a man having the worst night of a very long unlife.

It took less than a minute of fast talking, helped enormously by Lena vouching for him and Marcus grudgingly admitting he'd seen Sebastian near the control panel, to convince Whitaker that the actual saboteur wasn't the sleep-deprived sixteen-year-old in a soda-stained uniform shirt.

"The system needs to be reset manually," Whitaker said, already moving. "Three stations, spread across the park. We don't have time to do it in sequence."

"Then we don't do it in sequence," Ethan said, "I know the employee shortcuts. Lena knows security's patrol patterns better than they do. Marcus knows how Sebastian thinks."

"I really don't love being described as knowing how a homicidal two-hundred-year-old thinks," Marcus said, "but yes. Fine. I know him."

They split up. Ethan sprinted for the maintenance corridor behind the log flume. Lena ducked through paths no security guard had walked in years. Marcus went, with visible reluctance, toward the one place he was sure Sebastian would be waiting.

One Last Ride

The final control panel sat in a cramped station room beside the park's biggest coaster, and Sebastian was already there when Ethan and Lena arrived, calmly and deliberately ripping out another handful of wires.

"You're making a mistake," Lena said, "This isn't the same as it was a hundred years ago. We don't have to hide behind fear."

"We have hidden," Sebastian said, without looking up, "for a hundred years. I am simply tired of it."

What followed wasn't a fight, exactly, more of a very fast, very undignified scramble through the station and the maintenance stairwell behind it, Ethan diving past Sebastian to snap the last connector back into place while Lena kept the older vampire talking and Marcus, arriving just in time, tackled him into a rack of safety harnesses.

The lights on the panel blinked from red to green.

Every speaker in the park lit up at once:

"SUNRISE PROTOCOL ACTIVATED. ALL GUESTS PLEASE PROCEED TO DEPARTURE POINTS IMMEDIATELY."

The reaction was instant and enormous, vampires streaming toward buses, cars, covered walkways, a few older ones simply vanishing underground through service tunnels Ethan hadn't even known existed. It was, Ethan thought, the single most efficient theme-park evacuation he had ever witnessed.

Sebastian, shoving Marcus off him, did not run.

Lena stepped in front of him instead, and for a second, the anger on her face wasn't for Ethan's sake, or the park's; it was just tired.

"We don't have to be enemies just because we always have been," she said. "That's it. That's the whole thing you're missing."

Sebastian actually hesitated. Just for a moment, like the words had landed somewhere he hadn't expected.

Then the first thin line of gray light crept over the tree line beyond the coaster track, and whatever philosophical crisis Sebastian was having took a sharp backseat to several hundred years of survival instinct.

He ran.

Opening Time

By 6:30, the buses were gone, the vampires were gone, and Kings Dominion looked exactly like it did every other morning, cheerful, sun-washed, and completely unaware of anything unusual. The morning shift trickled in through the employee gate, yawning, badging in, none the wiser.

Mr. Whitaker found Ethan sitting on a bench near the fountain, utterly wrung out, and held out a small plastic card.

Ethan braced for the worst. Fired. Or possibly hypnotized into forgetting the whole night, which, honestly, might have been a mercy at this point.

Instead, he looked down at a brand-new employee badge.

NIGHT OPERATIONS — AUTHORIZED.

"You need somebody human working nights?" Ethan asked.

Whitaker allowed himself a small, tired smile and replied, "We do now."

Before she left, Lena pressed something into his hand, a ticket stub, old-fashioned cardstock, printed in gold.

KINGS DOMINION AFTER DARK. ADMIT ONE HUMAN. 12:01 A.M.

"Does this mean I get free rides?" Ethan asked.

"Sure," Lena said, grinning.

Marcus, already halfway to the bus, called back over his shoulder without turning around.

"We are not riding that one again."

A week later, Ethan reported for his first official night shift. At midnight, the gates opened. The buses arrived, one after another, headlights sweeping across an empty parking lot. Everything seemed, by now, almost normal.

Then Ethan noticed the last bus pulling in.

Its license plate read WASHINGTON, D.C.

Beside him, Mr. Whitaker straightened his tie with the particular nervousness of a man who has just remembered something he'd been hoping to forget.

"What's wrong?" Ethan asked.

Whitaker watched a handful of extremely well-dressed vampires step off the bus, adjusting cufflinks and checking their phones.

"Richmond vampires are easy," he said, sighing. "Tonight, we're hosting politicians."