Book Eight, Chapter 27: Evasive Maneuvers

“Are you guys all right?” Antoine called from the other side of the door as he struggled to lift it.

“We’re fine,” Michael said. He went to hack at the zombies in front of us.

I grabbed his arm because we didn’t need a fight at that moment. More undead were coming, and I feared Michael’s instincts were born in battles where death was an option.

“We have a lot of monsters over here!” I called out. “Be careful opening the door.” Then I turned to Michael and Kelsey and said, “Let’s go.”

We had two door options. I led us to the right because it was further away from the undead.

“They’re slow zombies,” I said as I took out my flashlight. Preserving batteries was not a priority at that moment. “We avoid the fight if possible, and if we have to fight them, we do it on our terms. Let’s take them for a walk—see if we can find a better venue.”

There was no fear quite like the fear of zombies in the distance. Their moans filled the air.

And so we went, anticipating a fight around every corner and being right more than we were wrong.

The first thing we ran into was a ghoul, which in Carousel usually described something very similar to a zombie but not as human, and usually with some level of intelligence.

“Come here, my little rats,” the ghoul said from its eyeless face. His face had no eyes because his eyes were floating in two glass mason jars affixed to his chest. They swam around in their little containers like fish, keeping watch of us.

Kelsey speared it in the head, and when that appeared to have no real effect, Michael chopped off one of its legs, and we moved on.

“Oh, no!” the monster cried after us in a silly voice.

With every step we took, we came across more low-level dungeon fodder. Giant rat: Michael chopped it in half. Giant spider: Michael chopped it in half. Cardboard cutout of Silas the Mechanical Showman: Michael chopped it in half. It was becoming his signature move.

We had missed whatever turnoff would bring us to Hale’s laboratory, as far as I knew, but the dungeons were completely different than the movie version. They were dirty.

The farther we went, the louder the sound of running water became, so loud it even drowned out the moans of zombies behind us and the scratching of rats in the distance. We were getting closer.

Soon enough, we broke out into a room that roared with the sound. In front of us was a large canal, similar to those in the sewers but different. This one smelled of earth and living things; it smelled like a real river.

There were no monsters in that room except for some kind of half-octopus, half-man mutant who was pinned to the ground with a bayonet mid-transformation.

“Trope item,” Michael said.

He was right. The trope was called Putting Down Stakes. It was a Monster Hunter trope, and it was simple: anything you killed with that weapon would stay dead if you left the weapon in it.

“Maybe we grab it later,” I said. The implication was that if we took the bayonet out, the octopus man would cease to be dead.

Unfortunately, the living dead were still following us.

I looked around to find a way out, but there were no other exits except, of course, wherever the canal led. I could even see ambient light shining from both directions. Above us were wooden rafters with loose boards laid across them to form a floor. Stacked on those boards were boxes and ropes, and across the room, a large rowboat hung safely.

I knew immediately what the plan would be.

“Follow me,” I said.

Soon, the zombies were upon us, at least eleven of them. They made it into the room and quickly managed to sniff us out through their rotten noses, which never made sense to me.

We were hiding in the corner, and as they made their way over to us, we didn’t react at first. I slashed at any that got near, Kelsey attacked them with the torch and her spear, and Michael batted a few away with the shield.

When they had sufficiently grouped up by us, I said, “Now!” and Michael sliced his sword through a rope behind us, causing the rowboat above to swing down as we all hit the deck. The boat knocked all of the zombies off the stone floor and into the river as it fell from its resting place in the rafters.

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The zombies weren’t such great swimmers, and they were swept away quickly.

Plan A worked. Plan B was to climb to the rafters and take out the zombies one by one with Kelsey’s spear.

The danger wasn’t over yet. There were a few remaining zombies who weren’t as good at cardio as the main group, but Michael was able to do away with them very quickly. He cut them in half.

One giant zombie approached at the end, and when Michael slashed into it, his sword got stuck in the enemy’s skull.

Kelsey jumped forward to take her turn, impaling the giant in the gut with her spear so she could keep it at a safe distance. It was a tried and true technique. The zombie raged forward, but luckily, its bulk was caught on the barbs of the spear, and Kelsey could hold it away.

Theoretically, that would make it my job to come in and clip its head off, but as I was brandishing my hedge clippers to boost my Mettle with a satisfying Sha-Shing sound that blades make in movies, Michaels was back in the mix, puncturing the undead giant’s head with a newly acquired bayonet from the body of the octoperson.

The zombie suddenly lost coordination as it turned to attack him.

Just as the octopus mutant began to rise up from the grave by the canal, Michael kicked the big zombie in that direction, sending both of the monsters into the water, where they disappeared quickly.

“I knew you were going to grab that bayonet,” I said. “I knew it the moment I saw it.”

“Yeah, well, congratulations,” Michael said as he got a better look at the weapon. It was designed to fit onto a rifle of some kind, but it worked well enough as a long knife.

“Now we’ve taken the self-tour, I say we return to base,” I said.