‘Google Maps has made watching ‘The Zombie Mall’ so easy and safe that it’s difficult to conceptualize the danger it represents. ‘The Mall’ originates from the outskirts of Bedford, Nebraska and was called ‘Eagle Mall,’ in a vague nod to patriotism. ‘Eagle Mall’ remains the core of what it has become now: a sprawling and useless structure, still suckling electricity from the grid despite several attempts to disconnect it. The meta-parasitic denizens have established elaborate redundancies the ensure the mall has at least the bare minimum required to support itself and, thus, them. They welcome visitors who follow their ‘laws’ and maintain a fairly healthy trade of organically produced vegetables, marijuana, and ultraviolet koi fish. Those who defy them are offered a choice: banishment to the outside world or some form of restorative justice, approved by a council of trained therapists. 

All right, so ‘The Zombie Mall’ might be something like a living utopia and further research suggests the undead connotation may have been the result of a smear campaign championed by local governments. ‘The Zombie Mall’ is certainly and illegally encroaching upon the lands of those governments but it seems to be improving them. Crime rates in ‘The Mall’ are low, at least, and poverty is unheard of. 

As a tendril of ‘The Zombie Mall’ approaches the outskirts of the capitol, residents of Lincoln are divided. Some believe ‘The Mall’ is a threat, the other believes it is a savior, and both sides believe the opposition represents a sort of death cult mentality. Crime in the city is up as people come to blows over the issue. Families are building mall-proof bunkers which, realistically, will provide residential spaces for mall citizens when it inevitably rolls over the land.

Until that day, it’s recommended that travelers avoid the outskirts of Lincoln, where everyone seems determined to prove the tired zombie trope that humans are the real monsters. 

Do visit ‘The Zombie Mall,’ though. It may be the safest place in the world.’

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

I am unabashed at the urinal- one of my prouder attributes. While some men need a second or two to get going, I am pissing right out of the gate. While some men’s streams falter when they find themselves with a neighbor, I find the company strengthens my resolve. When a line is growing behind me I easily find it within myself to power through a quick pee and make room. I once stopped to pee while being hunted by another human being. I’ve pissed myself on several occasions and would dare anyone to have faced the things I have without doing the same. 

Peeing is not a problem, for me. 

But there is something about ‘The Great Outdoor Urinal’ that gives me stage fright. The lead-up, maybe. The dark. Maybe it’s the smell- not like a bathroom but not quite like a forest, either. Like an old wax museum. Like a cellar. 

Maybe also it’s the bear, which must be tense with inaction somewhere in the room. ‘The Great Outdoor Urinal’ sits in a massive room, but it’s tightened by the presence of that bear. 

‘Some things meant to be fun and folksy become terrifying with age. These are your worn-down statues. Your elderly clowns. Your debatably-safe country zip-line tours. Your rickety bridges. Most communes.

‘The Great Outdoors Urinal’ seems like that same sort of thing but it was built that way in 2023, crafted with careful details to make it terrifying from the start. So, where many animatronic shows use darkness to conceal the unforgiving machinery that puppets their mascots, ‘The Great Outdoors Urinal’ is just a little more dark than necessary. And it’s secluded- the owners have purchased all the land off the shoulder of the interstate but ‘The Urinal’ is a full hour away from the nearest exit with nothing inbetween. 

More than anything else, thought, ‘The Great Outdoors Urinal’ is strangely exacting. Its shell is made of cement and steel. Its faux forest is carefully arranged and always clean. And it only except urine as an activation method. Attempting to pour water or lemonade into the urinal shuts off the lights and upsets the bear. So much as spitting in the urinal before peeing will often result in the same sudden anger. It is reported that bringing a container of someone else’s urine will do, but that animal urine is out, and that ‘The Great Outdoors Urinal’ can differentiate in the blink of an eye.

Come with a full bladder, traveler, and expect a show.’

The bear has only been pictured twice, at least as far as the internet is concerned. Both are frantic and blurry- the bear only approaches when someone has attempted to trick ‘The Urinal’ into accepting something other than urine. In one, a hulking figure is just visible between two false trees and on the edge of a beam of light. In the other, the bear’s face is caught by sunlight from the open exit- unapologetically fierce and mechanical in contrast to the contrived peace of the overall display. Neither picture indicates that the bear is bound by cords or tracks. Nobody that has ventured off the trail to the urinal has found the bear or discovered a hatch from where it might emerge. The somewhere-presence of the bear makes this whole thing very uncomfortable. 

So I think that’s why I falter, at first. Why I struggle to find my stride. It’s the same feeling of guilt I sometimes get when I leave a store without buying anything- afraid that some manager thinks I’m stealing or that somehow, something has appeared in my pockets that will set off the alarm at the door.

I’ve had enough water to need to go. I haven’t had so much that it will be watered down and unrecognizable. The chances of my releasing anything but urine have got to be near-zero. 

But still, I stand dick-out and afraid. 

-traveler

‘Much of the Wayside will appear, to the traveler, prematurely aged. This is mostly due to lack of maintenance (which, in turn, is due to the lack of capital for passion projects). A rare few cases, however, mark the result of failed experiments and these are aged appropriately, though prototypical materials may wear poorly. A traveler will rarely see these experiments in their early days due to confidentiality protocols and a tendency for them to go wrong quickly and so disastrously as to leave no survivors. 

Some suggest this is by design.

‘The Anti-Sleeping Bench’ system in Broadbank, RI has managed to be just durable enough, and just harmless enough, to remain a valid destination since its installation in 2016. More than that, these benches have proven to be something of a seasonal attraction due to their changeable nature.

The pitch is something like this:

Imagine a bench meant to be as inhospitable as possible whilst still performing the minimum duties required for being a bench. Now, imagine all the simple hacks someone might employ to make this bench comfortable enough to sleep on: cushions, stacked boxes, twisted sleeping postures and so on and so forth. NOW, imagine a bench that can alter its design to combat these so-call ‘hacks.’ Imagine a bench system that’s shape can be changed from a central hub accessible only by the local government- a bench that hacks back, if you will (though not literally in this case). 

That is ‘The Anti-Sleeping Bench’ of Broadbank, though it functions a little differently than intended. Broadbank’s political climate is tumultuous and the warring parties have very different feelings about people who need to sleep on park benches. When the liberal party is at the controls, the benches become subdued but still quite uncomfortable. While the conservative party is in power, the benches blossom into wild and everchanging forms to ward off even the loitering sitters. 

The unfortunate truth is that the wealthy in both parties resent the unhomed equally and are only at odds about how massively to inconvenience them. It goes without saying that the voters of Broadbank are roundly depressed. 

-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside

Autumn by the Wayside is much like any other guidebook in that its directions are generally limited to the cardinal, which is to say, it mostly just tells you where things are before delving into the vague and sometimes outright dangerous advice is contains about actually navigating the Wayside attractions. I’ve come to appreciate the book for its consistency, at least. 

The entry for ‘A Food Oasis’ raises red flags almost right away.

‘One week before an attempt to reach ‘A Food Oasis,’ a traveler should begin to cut meals in half, or so, and be rid of snacking altogether. A day or two out, the traveler should subsist on coffee and, if they choose, water. Good and hungry, the traveler should proceed to Goose Lake, MI, where three superstores crushed the local groceries and then collapsed in on themselves, leaving the town wholly reliant on food from elsewhere. 

Unless one counts ‘The Food Oasis,’ which appears only to those who most need it (coordinates follow).’

Needless to say I do check the coordinates on a full stomach and find nothing but a rundown park and several scrawny kids who sell me a few cups of foul lemonade for the absurd price of a dollar-per. When I ask about ‘A Food Oasis’ they waggle their eyebrows and roll their eyes, neither wanting to suppress their contempt at this obvious tourist nor wanting to lose a valuable lemonade customer. I leave and begin the starvation diet. 

A week passes and I am hurting. 

When I return to Goose Lake, those same kids are there, standing outside a farmer’s market and still hawking their neon drinks. I push past them and walk up and down, waiting to see what trick ‘The Food Oasis’ has in store for the hungry traveler. When I break down and dig into my wallet to buy an apple, I hear one of the kids snickering. I look back at him and the illusion of the market dissipates- a mirage. 

From behind their lemonade stand, the kids bring a basket of grainy apples and I buy them happily.

-traveler

‘The Monster Simulator’ is billed as the first of a series of unmanned attractions to be installed all along the country’s interstates but I’ve never seen another and it’s been… a decade or two. ‘The Monster Simulator’ itself doesn’t look like it’s seen much maintenance in that time, its parking lot overgrown and its turnstiles spinning freely in their sockets. The building isn’t much to look at- a rusted tin-looking little shack, like the visitor centers you see at the less frequented national parks. 

The inside, though…

‘If this author were to take the sum of his experiences on the Wayside and attempt to identify some secret piece of wisdom that had been shared between its founders, his guess would be: “Make it underground.” 

So much of the Wayside is underground, reader, and here I am not speaking with double meaning. There seems to be this drive to amongst Wayside entrepreneurs to include some subterranean portion in their plans. Sometimes the fancy strikes right away, as one might see in ‘The Museum of American Darkness.’ Sometimes it strikes late, as with the many hidden passages beneath ‘The Absolutely Mundane House’ outside Springfield, Ohio. 

Often it is done in secret and then presented as a little surprise for the unsuspecting visitor. This is the case for ‘The Monster Simulator.’ There is more to it than presents on the surface.’

Having read this passage prior to stopping, I enter the false-upper of ‘The Monster Simulator’ with a puffy jacket and a flashlight, both of which are almost immediately necessary as the inside attempts no further illusion and descends, on stairs dangerously steep, into the sort of hollow pitch black that indicates a chamber. When the door closes behind me, the darkness becomes absolute. I shake out a glowstick and duct tape it to the bottom stair.

For the first time in a while, I feel like I know what I’m doing. 

‘The Monster Simulator’ has me on edge for about ten minutes before it starts to do its thing, which is to say, it starts to do something other than let me wander in the great vacant space beneath the shake. I begin to hear a voice, distant at first, but unmistakably miserable. As the program progresses, the voice becomes loud enough that I’m able to make out the clear boo-hoos of a small child, probably a boy. 

After about ten minutes, that sadness becomes deafening. I deploy ear plugs.

Dim lights appear at the edges of the chamber, revealing it to be rectangular. There are curtains draped haphazardly along the walls. They shift and sometimes pull up entirely. It’s all fairly eerie but the first real shock I get is when the ceiling above me bulges downward and again when the bulge moves to one edge of the chamber and massive mechanical fingers descend along the wall to tentatively feel along the dusty pavement. 

The fingers retract suddenly and the bulges reappear, pressing downward toward me one after the other until the ceiling threatens to crush me into the ground. I suspect there are safeties in place to prevent this sort of thing happening but the place is old and I don’t want to die alone so leap out of the way, kicking off the sudden protrusion as it begins to retract. With that touch, the room is silent, again, and still and it remains that way for a minute or so- long enough for the fight-or-flight to leave my body, anyway. 

I take the walk back to the exit slowly, in case there are more surprises in store. It isn’t until I’ve stepped onto the first stair that I notice something glowing behind me: two luminous eyes, each my own height in diameter and positioned to form the illusion of a giant, its face upside down, peering down at me from above what I now understand to be a child’s bed. 

I’m the monster, here.

-traveler