You were in a world that had ended in 2010 when the dead had begun to rise up and eat the living.

Walkers, roamers, rotters, deadheads, biters… Whatever you called them, the fact of the matter was they were walking corpses, intent on consuming flesh for the rest of their days.

And you were alone.

Maybe you had fought to survive this long. Maybe you had only just stumbled into this ruined place, dropped into a world that didn’t match the one you remembered. Either way, the heat pressed down on you the same.

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The gates of the theme park stood crooked, iron letters missing from their arch, the welcome twisted into nonsense. Beyond, paths buckled and split, paint faded into veins of black where weeds pried apart the asphalt. Rides loomed skeletal against the sky: a Ferris wheel halted mid-turn, its seats dangling like snapped teeth; a rollercoaster curled in on itself, track jagged as broken ribs, the climb frozen halfway to the heavens. The teacups lay scattered across cracked pavement, their once-bright paint dulled to the colour of bone, some overturned like shells, others nesting with rainwater gone green.

Posters still clung to walls in tatters, slogans warped and faces melting into streaks of ink. A snack stand slumped sideways, its striped awning shredded and flapping weakly like a dying flag. Inside, glass cases gaped empty, save for the brittle husks of wrappers and a spill of confetti that would never be swept away.

Off to the right, a speaker crackled with phantom static, whispering through a loop of broken wire. The sound seemed to skitter between poles, like voices trying to find shape in the wind. Beneath it, the shadow of a carousel crouched, its horses missing eyes, poles snapped and leaning at angles. A few still reached upward in eternal gallop, paint chipped into pale scars.

The midway stretched deeper, flanked by stalls slumped in shadow, their prizes long since rotted into shapeless fabric. Glass bottles still stood on a counter, clouded and sticky, stacked in a pyramid that had not yet toppled. Further down, the looming carcass of a ride swayed faintly in the wind—half ferris wheel, half scaffold, its girders creaking like an old ship.

Above it all, banners sagged from ropes strung too high to fall, letters faded to near illegibility. A single balloon, sun-bleached and shrivelled, was tangled in the rigging overhead—its string twitching faintly, as though it remembered how to float.