They stood at the entrance to the ride. Moonlight glinted on the tracks. Finn said, “The letters we’re missing could be anywhere. On any stone, any rock.”
“You got it.”
They were surrounded by maybe ten thousand rocks.
“Anything I should know before we start?” Finn asked, knowing there had to be.
Philby said, “There are security cameras. A lot of them. Some are infrared and can see at night. And it’s like Splash Mountain: we can’t leave the track. That’s all we’ve got to worry about.”
Finn knew that wasn’t the case, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to jinx them.
The boys started down the roller coaster’s track. It rose and twisted and turned, extremely tricky to walk. They both wore their 3-D glasses and looked everywhere possible for clues. Philby, in the lead, occasionally stopped and listened and looked around. It made Finn nervous.
They continued along the empty roller coaster track, sometimes walking almost crablike. They made it through two long climbs without incident. The roller coaster rose higher and higher.
“Where are we?” Finn asked.
“A little over halfway, I’m thinking.”
They stopped to rest. The moonlight shone down onto the red rocks. Neither boy saw any letters written on the stone.
Finn said, “Hey, guess what? We haven’t got a clue.”
“That’s a sick joke.”
They entered a canyon with steep walls. It grew darker the farther in they went. Finn felt his nerves tighten. He didn’t exactly love roller coasters. Walking one in the dark didn’t help matters.
The boys lowered themselves down a short drop in the tracks as the canyon widened. The scene was part desert floor, with cactuses and mining equipment, and part rock canyon. Massive stone walls rose on all sides.
“Too cool!” Philby said, lifting and dropping his glasses onto his nose and pointing.
At first, Finn thought he meant the Indian drawings and the dinosaur fossil that stuck out from the farthest rock wall.
But then he looked more closely. The letters: T, P, N. Each letter appeared to be engraved on its own rock in the ride’s rockslide.
Finn checked with and without the glasses. This was definitively their clue.
“Way to go! Okay, that’s it,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We’re closer to the end than the start of the ride. It’s over this next rise. We’ll get off the tracks there without being seen by the cameras.”
“Okay. Let’s just go,” Finn said, wanting to be gone. Something wasn’t right here. He couldn’t identify what it was, but he felt it.
They struggled up the roller coaster track, for it was suddenly much slipperier than before.
“Almost there!” Philby called from the top.
The next scene looked like Yellowstone Park. Geysers spit into the air. There were pools of water in luminous shades of green and yellow.
The ground beneath them shook. Philby touched the rail to see if it was vibrating, meaning that the ride had turned itself on. He shook his head.
“Maybe it’s just an effect. You know: Yellowstone. Earthquakes and stuff like that.”
“I’d have read about that,” Philby declared. “I don’t think so.”
The ground shook even more furiously, and now Finn was scared. Too much weird stuff had happened on the rides for him not to be afraid.
A few yards down the track, Finn felt the first touch of cold creep into his legs.
“Philby!”
“Yeah, I feel it too,” Philby answered.
With his legs going numb, Finn found it hard to walk. He whispered, “The only time we’ve felt this before—”
“Maleficent,” Philby answered.
“Yeah.”
Water at the top of the geysers turned first to ice and then snow, which fell thickly.
Finn’s cold legs were nearly impossible to move. “We’ve got to get out of here!” He could feel the chill seeping into his chest, his breathing tight and difficult. Too much longer, and he wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Philby stopped them both and said, “Listen to that!”
Like something cracking apart, Finn thought. Ice? It didn’t sound exactly like ice.
“We’ve got to hurry!” Philby barked out.
“Hurry? I can barely move.”
The cracking sound grew frighteningly loud. It came from the scene behind them—the Utah desert scene they’d just left.
They cautiously climbed back up the small rise in the track, to look back from where they’d just come. They peered over the rails, following that loud cracking sound.
Across the way, rock splintered around the enormous dinosaur fossil.
“That’s a T. rex,” Philby whispered. “Forty feet long. Eighteen feet high. Fifty-eight teeth. Runs forty miles an hour.”