The Annihilation of Foreverland

There was still going to be an investigation.
    He threw on some clothes and noticed someone sitting at the card table. The camp wasn’t down there throwing cards like usual. It was just one person. One he didn’t expect.

    Zin was lying on the table, hands folded over his stomach. Taking in the sun.
    “Zin?” Danny approached, warily. “Is that you?”
    Stupid question. But after seeing Parker not recognizing them, he worried that Zin would be absent. But then he turned his head and smiled. His eyes were bright and focused.
    “Danny Boy,” he said.
    Danny wanted to hug him. They slapped hands, instead. Zin sat up, stretched. “Man, the sun never felt so good.”
    “What the hell happened?”
    “I woke up in the Haystack before you did. You should’ve seen the look on my Investor’s face! He looked like he dropped a ten pound load in his trousers when I stood up and hugged him while I was still full on naked. The old man was speechless. I wanted to wait until you woke up but the old men were running everyone out of the Haystack.”
    “I don’t get it. What happened?”
    Zin rubbed his face, looked out to the Yard, thinking. “I don’t really remember anything about the last… week, I guess. I mean, I don’t even remember going inside the needle. It just felt like I was… floating, I suppose. Like, I was out in the Nowhere just floating around and coming apart.”
    He stalled.
    “It’s weird, I don’t know how to describe it. I just felt like I was being pulled in a hundred directions, like I was being stretched. It didn’t hurt, really. It was all rather numb. And I just didn’t care.”
    Zin looked good. He was more present. Healthy, somehow.
    “The weird thing? I remember everything, Danny Boy. You know how we remember more when we go inside the needle? I’m Eric Zinder. My parents died when I was little and I ended up in foster care. I ran away and lived on the streets. I was homeless, dude. I was some street rat jacking cars and… and… no good, man.”
    He looked sick.
    “I was no good.”
    Zin recalled robbing some tourists on their way to the theater, some old man and a woman way too young. He remembered getting hauled into a van and a sack over his head. Something over his mouth and vapors in his head.
    And then he woke up in the Chimney.
    But the weird thing was, Danny was remembering, too. He didn’t know his whole life, not like Zin was reciting. But he remembered the stuff he knew inside Foreverland. He forgot things when he came out before, but now he was remembering it.
    “She did it,” Zin said.
    “Who?” Danny said. “Your girlfriend?”
    “A girl with this…” He chopped at his ears. “She had long red hair, these big eyes. She sent me back.”
    “Lucinda?”
    Zin shook his head. “She didn’t say her name, she just came out of the fog and then she was standing in front of me.”
    He put his hand on Danny’s shoulder and bowed his head.
    “‘You don’t belong here’ she said to me, Danny Boy. And then I felt all pulled back together. The fog lifted and I woke up in the cell.”
    She sent him back. Zin was fading from his body, he was heading for Foreverland and she had the power to send him back. Of course, she did. And maybe that’s what she did to Danny, gave him the ability to remember in the flesh. She did the opposite to— “Sid!” Danny said. “What happened to him?”
    “You didn’t hear?” Zin threw his arm over Danny’s shoulders. “Our man Sid set the record for smoking out, brother. He went into that round all normal and came out empty. The Investors were more baffled by Sid then they were watching me walk out of there. I think the rest of our camp thinks I’m possessed, they think maybe I did something. They’re not talking to me.”
    They had to know it wasn’t Zin. They saw Lucinda come out of the ground and hammer the sundial, stick her arm in Sid’s chest. Right? Or did they not see any of that? Maybe they didn’t even see her.

    The sky was nothing but blue. No clouds or streaks or smoke.
    Untouched.
    There was no point going to the Mansion. Nothing was coming. The good guys would never arrive. They were truly alone, now. The Director would figure out what he did in the last round, there was no way they were letting him inside the needle again. Maybe they already knew.
    “What’s going on, Danny Boy?” Zin calmly said. “You expecting someone to parachute into the Yard?”
    Danny shook his head.
    “None of this was