Book Eight, Chapter 41: Well Conducted

And so the finale was set.

The surviving players would race across twenty yards of man-eating plants to get to the pontoon on the other side and do a little shock therapy with electrofishing equipment.

I could make that distance a little smaller by slicing through the tendril that had been used to disable the propellers on the pontoon, but I felt that would be going too far. The last thing I wanted was for Carousel to grant this mutant plant even more powers because I took advantage of my Dead status.

All I could do was float and wait as Antoine volunteered to be the one to make the swim.

He stripped down and jumped into the water, swimming as fast as he possibly could to get all the way to the pontoon.

But unfortunately for him, he was not actually the main character. While I had managed to clear out some of the pods, I couldn’t get rid of all the obstacles, or there would be no tension. The finale may not have had scripted deaths, but it would be foolish to assume there wouldn’t be any in a creature feature like this.

No sooner did he get halfway across the water than he swam directly into the path of one of the lures as it popped up, flailing its arm. There was no way he could have dodged it now that the plant had learned to grab for its food.

He tried to scream an expletive, but the trap pod beneath him triggered, and he, along with all the water around him, was sucked into it at a speed so fast that anyone watching the movie would call it bad CGI.

I wanted to go help him, but unlike me, he didn’t go Off-Screen and get the Dead status the moment it looked like his character was doomed.

He actually had to go through with it. He had to struggle. Carousel wanted the footage.

Though he fought and cut with a knife he had found in his tackle box, it didn’t quite work.

The positive part of high Grit was that it made death painless.

The downside was that it made it last forever. Carousel would get plenty of footage.

The biggest problem was that Antoine just would not give up. He struggled and stretched and pulled his way out of the bladder, refusing to let himself succumb. It was a physical challenge, after all, and overcoming it would give him some peace of mind and healing thanks to his Mountain as a Metaphor trope.

Free of the trap and still the focus of all attention, he swam the rest of the way across the path toward the pontoon, blood trailing off of him so thick it could be seen by moonlight. His injuries were even worse than mine because he had taken his clothes off before getting into the water. That extra layer, it seemed, had saved me quite a bit of pain.

I could see why he might think that was a smart thing to do, not knowing about the digestion part.

He made it to the pontoon, but just before he could pull himself up, something happened that I didn’t see coming and had no words to describe in the moment.

Basically, the lake fell out from under me.

I was under the pontoon that he was climbing onto, but there was something even bigger underneath us. A trap pod so large that when it triggered, it sucked all the water out from under the research vessel for a split second, causing both Antoine and me to get vacuumed into its massive bladder.

Luckily, the pontoon itself didn’t get sucked in, but it was sucked underwater and emerged in a big splash as it basically shot out of the lake and landed a few yards closer to Antoine’s boat, where Anna and Camden watched in horror.

As for me, I was inside a giant bladder again, this time bumping up against the rapidly digesting body of Antoine, who was even more confused than I was.

We were Off-Screen. No one who saw that would expect him to survive, given how much he struggled with the first one. More than that, no one would want him to survive at that point, not with his partially digested skin. A quick death would have been kinder.

Unfortunately, now Off-Screen with me, a quick death was not available. A slow one, where we had to pray drowning beat out melting was ahead of us. I was about to live up to my Dead status.

Quickly, we locked eyes and began struggling toward the door of the bladder. We needed to get out as soon as possible because the digestive enzymes of the pod were rapidly trying to break us down, and the walls were closing in to squeeze us as we were absorbed.

While we worked to get out of the pod, I saw Anna make a desperate swim for the pontoon thanks to Deathwatch, where she was almost sucked into a pod but managed to get away.

Thanks to my efforts to clear things out and Antoine’s sacrifice to give the audience its final pound of flesh, she had a mostly clear path to swim. The blast from the large pod trap triggering had moved the pontoon much closer to Antoine’s boat.

She fought her way there, reached up to the deck, and hoisted herself up just as an imitation Joanne came up behind her.

“You have to lower the metal arms down into place,” Camden yelled as the bass boat he was on rocked violently.

“I’ve got it!” Anna screamed back.

She pulled a cord that had bound two large antenna-looking objects to the sides of the boat. They gently lowered until their ends were barely in the water.

“That’s it,” Camden said. “The panel is next to the driver’s seat. You just have to flip it on and dial it up.

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Anna followed his instructions. She found the panel, which had been equipped with one of those little switches that was covered so it couldn’t be accidentally triggered.

My eyesight was getting murky as my eyes were literally being broken down.

Antoine and I struggled to get the bladder open again so that we could swim out. No matter how hard we pulled or how many times I poked at it with my hedge shear half, it just wasn’t budging. It was too thick.

I looked at Antoine, or at least I thought that’s what I was doing. I couldn’t tell. I was basically blind by the end.

I knew the game was up for both of us.

Anna looked out at the sea of Joanne impostors with a twinge of sadness, then flipped the switch. Sparks rang out from the electrofishing arms, which did not seem realistic. Electricity spread around the entire cove. Suddenly, the trapdoor to the bladder relaxed, and Antoine and I were expelled from its inside.

In fact, every single pod in the area was triggered, and a camera shot from above captured the disruptions in the water as the bladders released their contents and partially digested human bodies floated to the surface, leaving one last horrifying shot.

The needle on the Plot Cycle switched to The End.

I didn’t know if I made it out of the lake. I wasn’t sure whether I was in the water or not after being digested twice.

But I did watch as the movie ended with a flashback of Anna’s sister’s death while Anna quietly contemplated what had happened that night.

Joanne, a beautiful young girl, accidentally inhaled lake water when she and Anna went for an illegal midnight swim in the fenced-off lake. She started to struggle to stay afloat. Anna, her older sister up on the shore, didn’t notice at first. Drowners are quieter than most people would imagine.

The poor young girl continued to struggle to move her arms and lift her head above the water, to no avail. She died. It was a brutal depiction of death. I got the sense it may have been the real one that started this storyline.

The camera focused on a shot of a perfectly still Joanne floating in the water just underneath the surface.

Then there was a shot from below: a much smaller version of the giant plant we had just struggled with was framed beneath her, as if it could see what was happening. It couldn’t have been sonar, not with how it matched her blonde hair and pink skin.

Joanne was face down, and there was this moment where the plant and the deceased girl were facing each other in the moonlight. While the plant didn’t have eyes, it reacted as if it could see her, and it began to wiggle in excitement as Anna jumped into the water to swim out to retrieve her sister.

That was the moment the plant learned how to attract a human into the water. All it had to do was look like a drowning young woman, just as it had to imitate a dying fish to attract a largemouth bass. It just had to look like Joanne.