COORDINATES

“Have you heard of this app before?” Alex’s best friend, Jessy, said, shoving her phone into his face at their lunch table. A black screen with COORDINATES in red chiller font with a begin button stared back at him.

“Nope.” He replied as he took another bite of his pizza.

“It claims to take you places after you set an intention. People say they’ve found dead bodies and other creepy things with it!” her tone sounded a little too excited for such a macabre subject.

“Oh, come on, you know that’s just some kind of sensationalism. I doubt an app that takes you to dead people would stay up on the app store.”

“C’mon, Alex. Don’t you want to at least try it?”

Alex rolled his eyes, “Not really. That’s some creepy shit.”

In truth, high school was boring, and he could use a bit of a thrill, but he seriously doubted he wanted that thrill being a damn dead body somewhere dangerous. He was a horror buff, sure, but for films. Not real life. Well, maybe just not his life. She was looking at him, her blonde hair and brown eyes making the case that she was definitely the perfect murder victim. After all, serial killers love blondes.

“Please, please, pleeeeease!” She was now giving Alex a pouty face with wide puppy dog eyes.

“Fine.”

“Eeeeeeeeh! We don’t even have to do something scary. Let’s see.” She pressed the begin button and a text box appeared, prompting her to Set an intention. “We’ll just put something small like ‘thrill’ in.” It then popped up another screen: Will any friends be joining you? to which she entered Alex’s name.

Alex had an uneasy feeling- but that’s just how thrill-seeking feels, he thought, brushing it off. She hits the large START button and she immediately receives a set of coordinates: 30°3’4.0”N 89°56’3.9”W. Alex typed the coordinates into Google Maps, pulling up an amusement park about twenty minutes away from their hometown of New Orleans.

“Is this a joke? You put ‘thrill’ and it’s sending us to an amusement park.”

“Hold up. Isn’t that place closed and abandoned?” she said, looking at my screen. “That could be fun, let’s go tonight!”

Despite the uneasy feeling Alex had, he resigned to her excitement. After all, what's the worst that could happen?

* * *

They pulled off of Michoud Boulevard onto the driveway to the now-abandoned Six Flags New Orleans. Ahead, a concrete barricade sat firmly in front of green gates. From there, they could see the admissions booth and the peaks and valleys of a large roller coaster. A lonely, dark-colored Ferris wheel towered to the left.

“Why have we never heard of this place before?” Jessy asked from the driver’s seat. She chose to bring her dark blue Prius because of how quiet it was, and it would blend in with the darkness of the coming night.

“According to the internet, it has been abandoned since Hurricane Katrina. It was only open for five years before the devastation. Apparently, Katrina flooded the place for an entire month, eventually making the company deem it ‘too expensive to repair,’ and it has been this way ever since.” Alex said, reading about the event across various news websites. Not too keen on being on the road, he directed her, “Pull off into the trees a bit.”

She reluctantly obliged, tentative of causing damage to her precious car. The grass was tall, so Alex didn’t judge her hesitation. She pressed the button to turn the car off and took the keyfob from the dash. “Let’s go.”

For a place such as this to have little to no security really bothered Alex. They walked through the ajar gate, with nothing securing it closed after all of these years. They now stood in the vast parking lot where weeds ate ravenously away at the cracks in the cement. Making their way across the ghostly lot towards the main entrance, it became obvious that this abandoned place was not as deserted as they had thought. In the quiet of the increasingly violet sky and among the hum of insects, Alex felt eyes watching him from the dark: rabbits, snakes, or deer, he hoped.

The overhang of the ticket booths was a light greyish-blue. The waist-high gates behind them were nothing to deter their trespassing. As soon as Alex’s feet hit the ground, something gloomy seemed to grip him. The world around the pair of friends seemed frozen in time, save for nature reclaiming what once was hers. Grass, bushes, trees- they all forced their way through the concrete buildings, finding a way to live.

It was like a ghost town. Restaurants and stores all sat dilapidated and graffitied. Windows were busted out and broken glass littered the street. Somehow, the creepiest parts were the rides. Not the vines encircling every rail of the coasters or even the dried pools of the water rides- it was the electric hum that resonated from them. There wasn’t supposed to be power.

As the sun sank even lower, they took out their flashlights. Jessy looked over, “What’s that?” she motioned to a light bobbing up and down ever so slightly.

“Shit! It has to be security.” Alex’s anxiety was taking over. They ran toward the closest building: Jocco’s Mardi Gras Madness. As they were nearly there, Alex stumbled, dropping his phone loudly on the concrete. The beam of light turned in their direction.

“Who’s there?! This is private property.” A masculine voice called into the night.

Jessy, ever the scaredy-cat when it came down to it, was about to stand up and surrender when her pocket vibrated. She took it out and the color drained from her face. She turned it for Alex to read, You wanted a thrill, didn’t you? Alex’s heart started pounding, hard.

“Who is that?”

“I don’t know, Alex. It came from a random number.”

They then heard a shuffle in the street. “Wait, who are you?” the masculine voice said, followed by what sounded like a body hitting the ground. “Get off of me!” Gaining the courage to look, Alex and Jessy peeked around the corner to find the light lying on the ground with two figures silhouetted, one above the other. The next part left them traumatized: a glint of silver before it was buried in the man on the ground. The presumed security guard cried out in pain as the other dark figure stood up, unsheathing the knife from the man’s body.

“What the fuck, what the fuck, what the FUCK,” Alex began panicking. Jessy was on her phone about to dial 911 when she received another message that covered her screen. How’s that for a thrill? :)

She typed a response, simply ‘what do you want’ and sent it.

You and your friend. Dead.

Alex motioned to her to enter the building, leaving his phone behind as he crawled towards the entrance, towards perceived safety. The door creaked as they opened it. At this point, they lost sight of the killer. Slowly getting inside, Alex closed the door and set the attendant’s podium against it as a barricade. He turned to Jessy, “Look up this app. Who made it?”

She fumbled through her phone to the app store, her fingers shaking. Pulling up the app, there was no reported developer. She typed the name into her phone’s search engine. A Reddit page came up, full of conspiracies about a mysterious app that comes and goes from app stores and people whose friends disappeared after using it.

Deeper down the page, she found what seemed to be an origin story. A man sought to create an app that mimicked an old activity called geocaching but took it a step further by using an AI to send users to places of interest. Upon release, it was a huge success but some time passed and people began to get sent to weirder and more dangerous places. People wanting to find friends were ending up being sent to morgues and cemeteries. Eventually leading users to death, the app stores banned it, believing that the AI had gained a mind of its own.

Looking away from the screen, her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. The room around them was gutted aside from a few animatronics: zombies and jesters from its time as a dark ride. Rails in the floor led only one direction.

“Jessy, look! If we follow these rails, we can find the way out, away from whoever is out there killing that guy.” Her only reply was a shaky nod as she slowly got to her feet. As he did the same, a sharp knock came on the door behind them. They began to run.

Jessy’s phone vibrated. Don’t worry, I’ll find you. Suddenly there was light; power was restored…somehow. Around them, the dreary animatronics’ eyes began to glow a sinister red as they began to come back online after lying dormant for so long. They seemed to reach for Jessy and Alex, surely just programming from back in the day. After years of neglect, their parts were rusted and some even fell to the ground with a startling metal-on-cement scrape. Jessy and Alex began to pick up the pace while not losing sight of the guiding rail.

Soon, the rail in the floor grew less pronounced as they approached a door with a sinister jester painted on it. When Alex pressed up against it, he came to the conclusion that it was electronically closed, waiting for a tram to come through. He felt a sense of defeat. “Can you help me open this?” he asked. Behind them, there was no sign of the terror they were running from.

With the two of them pressed against the door, it still wouldn’t budge. Grasping at straws, Alex suggested, “Let’s slam into it at the same time.” As they hit the door, it slowly began to give. “Again.” This time, the electronic resistance gave and they stumbled forward and out into a paved area. Looking straight across to the other end, a green, swampy lake holding who-knows-what beneath its surface. To their left there was a towering roller coaster surrounded by tall trees. Alex began walking that way, not favoring the jaws of the possible alligators in the lake.

The trees were dense and wet. Each low leaf left streaks of water on their legs, leaving them with the feeling of the blades of knives lightly kissing their skin. On the other side of the small forest, they found a fence that prevented them from going under the rails of the coaster. There was a dirt path covered in vines going both ways along the fence. Knowing one way led back to the entrance of Jocco's, they chose the other.

They ended up next to a ride dedicated to some Batman villain when they saw the sign pointing to the exit, covered in mildew, but pointing to salvation all the same. Believing themselves to be close to being safe, Jessy pulled her phone out and finished dialing 911.

“Please help us! We’re at the old Six Flags and there’s a killer out here!” she pleaded with the dispatcher. Alex was watching behind her, not paying attention to the world around him. As Jessy explained their location, she noticed movement in the bushes behind Alex. Before she could say anything, a silver point was through his chest, blood beginning to drip along its edge. He screamed in pain.

On the line, the dispatcher asked what had happened. “He just stabbed my friend. He’s right here! I’m going to-” her last sentence was cut off by the killer’s knife. He took her phone and threw it on the ground. He stomped it into a shattered mess.

As she fell to the ground, he took out his own phone. Unlocking it, his own COORDINATES app popped up. With his intention set to ‘Kill’ and a button below it asking Complete?, he hit it, confirming that he got both thrill seekers. With a sinister grin, he hit begin again.