Festival Breakdown

I quit my job on a Tuesday and the plan was to have one last party in the storage unit that Friday. I know that sounds weird. Nobody throws a party in a storage unit. But the storage unit at the festival grounds was basically my break room for the past eight months, and it was the only place on the property where the cameras didn't point, and I'd spent a lot of nights in there eating cold pizza and thinking about how much I hated that job.

I was twenty-three, I'd been a security guard at the haunted house since I dropped out of college at twenty-one, and two years of telling drunk guys they couldn't climb the fence was enough for me. So I quit. Gave notice, did my last shift, and then planned to drink beer in the storage unit with whoever felt like showing up.

My last shift was uneventful, which was fine by me. The haunted house runs only on weekends in October, and this was a Thursday setup night, so I mostly sat at the gate and watched the actors come and go. Kellie worked the second room, the one with the chainsaw. She'd been there about six months and we'd become the kind of friends who complain to each other about the job and nothing deeper. She's twenty-two, fresh out of a bad breakup, and she talks about it a lot.

"So Friday," she said, leaning on the gate while I filled out my last incident log. "Your party. It's really in the storage unit? Like actually in it?"

"Actually in it," I said. "There's a light in there. It works."

"Drew. That's so sad."

"It's not sad. It's historic. Last party at the old job site. People will talk about it."

"Nobody will talk about it," she said, and grinned. "I'll bring a cooler though. I'm not going to let you drink alone in a box full of fake skeletons."

That was the plan, and honestly the plan was going fine until everything went sideways, but I'll get to that.

The storage unit sat behind the haunted house, next to the freight elevator that had been out of order since spring. The company never fixed it because fixing it cost money and the owner didn't like spending money. So the elevator just sat there with its yellow out-of-order sign, and the storage unit next to it held all the decorations and props and boxes of gear nobody wanted to look at. The big festival tent went up maybe forty feet away, on the main lawn, for the weekend festival. That tent was Ellis's problem.

I didn't know Ellis yet on Thursday. That's important. On Thursday I just knew the festival people were setting up next door and their tent was huge and ugly and would probably look better collapsed, though I hadn't said that out loud to anyone yet.

Friday came and I got there around eight. Kellie showed up at eight fifteen with a cooler full of beer and a bag of chips shaped like some kind of ghost, which was on brand for her.

"Happy quit week," she said, shoving the cooler at me. "You're buying the pizza next time."

"There is no next time. I don't work here anymore."

"Then you're buying pizza out of friendship. Move."

We dragged the cooler into the storage unit and cleared off a workbench and set up camp among the boxes of rubber bats and fake cobwebs. I brought two folding chairs. Kellie brought a third from somewhere, I never asked where. It was actually kind of nice in there, if you didn't breathe too deep. Salt air came in from the water, and there was spilled cider smell near the entrance from some event weeks back that nobody had mopped up.

We'd been there maybe forty minutes, three beers in, when someone else walked in.

She didn't come in so much as she stuck her head around the door and scanned the room. Tall, dark hair pulled back, jacket, clipboard under her arm. I figured her for festival staff right away because of the clipboard and the way she looked at everything like she was checking it off a list.

"Sorry," she said. "Is Ellis in here? Tall guy, loud shirt, thinks he runs the whole coast?"

"Nobody's in here but us," I said. "Who's Ellis?"

"Festival organizer. Or he thinks he is." She stepped all the way in and looked around at the boxes. "I'm Alexa, by the way. I compile the tide tables for the observatory, which is the least exciting job on this coast, and I'm looking for him because the tent inspection list says his name and he is not at the tent."

"Sorry," Kellie said. "Never heard of him. You want a beer? We're celebrating."

Alexa looked at the cooler and then at us and I watched her do some math in her head. "Celebrating what?"

"I quit," I said. "Yesterday was my last shift. Security, over at the haunted house."

"Congratulations. Or condolences. Which one?"

"Both, probably," Kellie said, and handed her a beer before Alexa had really agreed to one, but Alexa took it, so that was fine.

She ended up staying. She said she'd wait in case Ellis came by, because apparently he was impossible to reach by phone and she'd been chasing him across the grounds for an hour. She told us about the tide tables. It was more interesting than it sounds, mostly because she made fun of her own job the whole time. Twenty-four years old, had been at the observatory two years, said she'd never once done anything spontaneous in her adult life and that showing up in a random storage unit was the most rebellious thing she'd done since she was twenty-one.

"I'm setting the bar really low on purpose," she said. "That way I can keep beating it."

"That's cheating," Kellie told her.

"That's strategy."

I liked her. I want to note that at this point I just liked her, the way you like someone new who's funny and doesn't take anything seriously, including herself. Nothing had happened yet. Nobody had even flirted, really. We were just drinking beer in a storage unit on a Friday night, which is about as far from exciting as life gets.

Then Ellis showed up, and everything got loud.

I heard him before I saw him. Boots on the gravel, and a voice carrying from thirty feet away, saying something I couldn't make out but could tell was angry. Then he filled the doorway. He was tall, like Alexa said, and he had a loud shirt on, some kind of orange floral thing that hurt to look at under the one working bulb. He looked at Alexa first, then at me and Kellie, then back at Alexa.

"You," he said.

"Me," Alexa said. "Hi, Ellis. Nice of you to finally exist. I've been looking for you for an hour."

"I've been busy. I've been dealing with your mess."

"My mess?" She stood up off the crate she'd been sitting on. "What mess?"

"The tent, Alexa. The guy line on the north corner was cut. Cut, not frayed, not worn, cut. Clean slice through the rope. And guess whose handwriting was on the inspection sheet last."

Kellie looked at me. I looked at Kellie. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking the same thing, which was that this was the best entertainment we'd had all month and we hadn't even had to leave the party.

Alexa set her beer down real slow. "You're accusing me of cutting your tent rope."

"I'm accusing you of wanting the tent to fail so it embarrasses me in front of the committee. Which it will, if the weekend crowd sees it down."

"You absolute, oh my god. I compile tide tables. I don't know what a guy line even is. I learned the words 'guy line' thirty seconds ago from you."

"You've got motive. You've been on my case since spring about the festival layout, saying the tent blocks the view of the water, and now the tent is down and you're standing here with a beer instead of helping."

"Because I was looking for YOU. Because YOU were supposed to do the inspections. The sheet has your name on it, Ellis. Your name."

"Because you changed the rotation without telling anyone."

They went back and forth like that for a good five minutes. I learned a lot just listening. Apparently they used to date, three years ago when they were both twenty-one, and it ended badly, and since then they competed over everything, festival permits, parking arrangements, a chili cookoff that sounded like it got ugly. They were both festival people, Alexa apparently helping with the tide and safety side, Ellis running the main event, and every year they found new ways to fight.

"So the tent's down," Kellie said into a gap in the yelling. "Like, down down? Flat?"

"Half down," Ellis said, without looking away from Alexa. "The north corner. The rest is holding but the corner came down onto the walkway and there's debris all over. It's a disaster."

"And you think she cut it."

"I think someone cut it and she's the person on this property who wants me to fail the most."

"I want you to fail at the festival," Alexa said. "I want you to fail at parking logistics. I have never wanted you to fail at tent maintenance, because I have to walk under that tent, you idiot. If it comes down on people, guess who gets asked about the tide and the weather safety? Me. I'd be burying myself."

Ellis opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked around the storage unit like it might offer him an argument. It offered him boxes of rubber bats.

"Who else even knew about the corner rope," he said, quieter now, but still mad.

"Ask around. That's your job. Not mine." She picked her beer back up. "Also, I'm not leaving until this is sorted, because if you go around telling people I sabotaged your tent, I'll need witnesses who saw that you accused me with zero proof. So congratulations, these two are witnesses now."

Kellie raised her beer. "I witnessed nothing useful, but sure."

I looked at the three of them, Ellis still vibrating with anger, Alexa calm in a way that I could tell was not calm underneath, Kellie delighted, and me, unemployed as of Thursday night. The wind had picked up outside. I remember that, because it rattled the big roll-up door of the storage unit, and Ellis glanced at it, and I remember thinking the weather was turning and nobody here seemed to care.

That was the last quiet thought I had for a while.

The crack came from outside, and it was loud enough that all four of us shut up at the same time. It wasn't thunder. It was the sound of a big piece of canvas and aluminum pole giving up, and it came from the direction of the main lawn, forty feet away.

Then the wind hit the roll-up door like a fist and something heavy slammed against the outside wall of the storage unit. The whole room shuddered. The stack of boxes near the freight elevator, the one that had been out of order since spring, leaned and then went over in a slow avalanche of cardboard and plastic skulls. They didn't hit anybody, but they landed in a pile in front of the elevator doors, and the one working bulb flickered.

"What the hell was that," Kellie said, already up off her crate.

"That was my tent," Ellis said. He went past me to the man door, the one we'd been using as the party entrance, and pulled on the handle. It moved an inch and stopped. He pulled harder. Nothing. He put his shoulder into it and the door just thudded, like something had settled against it on the outside.

"No," he said.

"Is it stuck?" Alexa came over next to him.

"It's blocked. Something's against it. The corner of the tent came this way, maybe, or the scaffolding, I don't know." He tried the handle again, twice, like it would change its mind. "Nobody panic."

"Nobody's panicking," Alexa said. "You're the one breathing funny."

I'll be honest, my first thought was that this was a bad end to a bad week. My second thought was that at least I didn't work here anymore, so technically this wasn't my emergency. My third thought was that Kellie had grabbed her phone out of her jacket and was holding it up like a torch.

"No bars," she said. "Well. One bar. Well, half a bar."

"We're in a metal box behind a haunted house," I said. "Shocking."

Ellis still had his phone out too, and Alexa had hers, and between the three of them they got exactly one text halfway sent before it sat spinning and gave up. The wind kept working on the roll-up door, that low boom every few seconds. The boxes by the elevator had settled into a wall of cardboard about chest high, and behind them you could see the elevator doors with the out-of-order sign still taped on, faded to almost nothing.

"Okay," Ellis said, and I'll give him this, he pulled himself together. "Okay. The roll-up door is motorized and the motor's on the other side, so that's dead. The man door is blocked. The elevator's been broken since April. There's the vent." He pointed up at a grate near the ceiling, roughly as big as a cereal box. "Not a plan. That's a person-sized hole for a very small person."

"Kellie could fit," I said.

"Rude," Kellie said, "but fair."

"So we wait it out," Alexa said. "The storm passes, someone on the grounds crew comes around looking for the organizer who let his tent fall over, they dig us out. Could be an hour. Could be three."

"Great," Ellis said. "Fantastic. Trapped in a closet with you."

"It's a storage unit, not a closet, and believe me, the feeling is mutual."

And they were off again. I swear to god, they picked up the exact fight from before the crack, like a record skipping back to the same groove. The cut rope, the inspection sheet, the chili cookoff of two years ago. Kellie sat on her crate eating ghost-shaped chips and watching them as if at a tennis match, and I stood there in my stupid security polo realizing I was stuck in a metal room with two people who hated each other, one coworker on a breakup bender, a pile of rubber bats, and about fourteen beers.

The worst part was that the fight had a rhythm to it, and the rhythm had a kind of charge to it. They kept stepping toward each other while they yelled. Alexa would get in Ellis's space to make a point and he wouldn't back up, and they'd stand there toe to toe, breathing hard, until one of them broke off and did it again three minutes later. I noticed it the third time. Kellie noticed it too, because she caught my eye and tilted her head at them, and mouthed, are you seeing this.

Around beer number three for them and beer number two for me, Alexa said, "You know what your problem is, Ellis? You think everything is against you. The weather is against you. The committee is against me. The tide charts are against you."

"The tide charts don't hold opinions."

"They might as well, the way you talk about them."

"And you think everything I do is a personal insult," Ellis shot back. "I move a generator, it's a personal