Book Five, Chapter 122: Room Service

🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 13:05:12    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

“So, is it safe to assume that right now we’re between events A and B?” I asked.

“I’d hope so,” Camden said. “Seeing as right now, Event A is the most likely the Carousel River Valley Meteor Strike.”

That had actually been my insight, but we were going to let Camden have it. There was no way that the meteor had been brought up this many times without at least being one of the major events in this temporal anomaly.

“I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around this,” I said. “You’re telling me that between Event A and Event B, logical contradictions can exist with minimal resistance by reality itself?”

“I’m not telling you that I understand it. I’m telling you that I observe it,” Camden said. “And what you observe trumps what you understand every time.”

That had been something Camden was struggling with. He wanted to understand everything. In movies, that just wasn’t going to happen. I told him to just embrace it.

“So, every copy of this guy has their own fragment of the meteorite, and as long as they have that, they can jump around time and do whatever they want—and it doesn’t matter?”

“It would seem so,” Camden said.

I had to do some quick and dirty exposition, just to patch some stuff. Camden had said there were no paradoxes. When it came to our team’s battle plan we needed that statement to be amended… suffice to say I had to do some damage control to set it up. This was part of the back-and-forth that came with improvisation.

“But the individual time traveler does appear to have some type of restriction within their own personal timelines,” I said. “I mean, those men that you maimed would disappear and then reappear after healing. They must have been at the same place and time as their past selves but they never tried to help their past selves.”

“Yep,” Camden said. “They don’t try to prevent themselves from getting injured. They just step in after it happens. Gets pretty confusing, doesn’t it?”

The fact that a specific Generation Killer wouldn’t act to prevent himself from getting covered in scalding oil implied that they couldn’t. That meant there was some restriction.

Or Carousel just thought it was a cool way to present things.

“So, outside of this anomaly, time works normal as far as you know? Every decision you make puts you on a different path than the version of you who made the opposite decision?” I asked.

“I have no way of confirming how it normally works, but that is my understanding. Normally, every decision you make matters. But in this group of timelines caught within this time anomaly, only big things matter at all—and they don’t end up mattering all that much.”

“As long as Event B happens,” I said.

“As long as Event B happens,” he repeated.

We had been going back and forth, just feeding lines to Carousel, hoping to give ourselves some flexibility. After all, the decisions we made in the future would depend largely on what we set up in the past.

I had never been more overwhelmed—and that included the werewolf storyline, where there was a trope that made it so the lore could adapt.

I just needed to get it across to the audience that while logical contradictions in the main timelines didn’t matter and would soon be corrected one way or another, logical contradictions in a time traveler’s timeline did matter. That’s why scarred Generation Killers couldn’t prevent themselves from getting injured in the first place.

I just had to hope the audience would get that point.

Suddenly, there was a commotion on the other side of the door. The Generation Killers had mostly left us alone up until that point.

I quickly moved to a shelf where I could set up the camera to film everything that was about to happen. And if Camden was to be believed, a lot was about to happen.

The door burst open, and I went to stand next to Camden.

Three Generation Killers walked in.

“Do you think that they can help us?” one of them—the apparent leader—asked.

Another one, who carried a handheld camera and a large radio, said, “I hear the whispers of our brother across time. He says that they will guide us on our path.”

The leader looked us up and down.

“Uh-huh,” he said. He seemed skeptical. “And did our brother across time tell us exactly how they were going to do that?”

“Our brother across time speaks when the moment is right and only gives what information is needed,” the cameraman Generation Killer said.

He had an almost religious reverence for this brother across time, and I had to assume he was referring to the Generation Killer on the other side of time who had filmed us in the jailhouse.

The other side of time—the place where Bobby was now trapped.

“Just don’t hurt us, and we’ll tell you everything you want to know,” Camden said.

The third Generation Killer, a slightly beefier one, said, “You said that last time.”

“And you believed me last time,” Camden said. “It’s not like I would trick you twice. That wouldn’t be very smart, would it?”

The beefier one seemed to consider this and started to nod.

The leader was not amused.

“The fact is that you seem to have a knack for all of this, like those of me that came before,” he said, eyeing the timeline and map that Camden had drawn on the wall. “Do you know what it all means?”

Camden was hesitant. “Some of it,” he said. “But I don’t know what it is you want.”

“We want to go home,” the leader said. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted. I had a pretty good setup back home—had a girl named Jasmine. Dumb as a doornail. Pretty as a princess. But here? She was never born. I can’t tell you how inconvenient that is.”

“Look, we’re trying to figure it out,” Camden said. “We just don’t have all the pieces.”

“Give me a minute with him,” the beefy Killer said. “I can convince them.”

The leader smiled and then said, “You know what? Let’s do things your way for a minute,” then dropped down into one of the chairs near the door—just to watch.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The religious Generation Killer started to film as the beefy one walked toward us.

He didn’t go for Camden. It was really a 50/50 shot.

He went for me.

He had high enough Plot Armor and likely had very little of that devoted to Savvy or Moxie, so his Hustle and Mettle were enough to stop me from being able to get away.

I felt like a ragdoll.

There was no escaping it. If I got away, they would just hurt Camden.

There was no avoiding what the beefy Killer had in mind.

■ STOP

On-Screen

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the red light on my camera had cut out. So Carousel was likely using footage being filmed by Generation Killer himself. Carousel would likely cut this dialogue down. It wouldn’t want to reveal too much about these enemies. The unknown was scarier than any other force in horror.

It was very clear that these were three distinct entities.

They weren’t just the same person at different ages. Lila was right—they diverged a long time ago.

First, he strapped me down to a chair using duct tape. Camden was helpless to do anything but watch, though he begged from the side for them to just let him work on the problem.

I wasn’t even sure what they expected Camden to do, but these weren’t exactly the type of guys who would think about that.

Even the smart ones seemed thrilled by the idea of cruelty. Carousel sure did know how to pick ’em.

More than anywhere before, this was the introduction of the Killer that the audience would see. As much as I wanted to try to trick my way out of things, slip my hands through the bindings, and run away, I knew this was an important scene.

And my odds of getting away at that moment, with so much attention on me, were low. The odds of Camden and I getting away without a scratch were virtually zero.

After I was affixed to the chair, Generation Killer started pulling implements from his trench coat pockets.

He started with a hammer.

“I bet you’re wondering about the difference between me and my brothers over here—my other selves,” the leader said. “Big G, why don’t you tell him about Grimshaw?”

“Grimshaw?” the beefier Generation Killer asked. “Yeah, I can do that.”

He took the hammer and rested it against my mouth, pressing it hard, flattening my lip against my upper teeth.

“You ever had some old hag try to boss you around? Tell you what to do like you’re some damn dog?” Big G leaned forward, a grin spreading across his face. “That was Miss Grimshaw. My math teacher back in school. Mean, ugly, always yappin’ about rules, about discipline, about how I needed to ‘straighten up’ if I didn’t wanna end up a nobody. Like I cared.”

Holding the hammer to my face, he reached into his pocket and brought out three nails.

Suddenly, I started reconsidering whether or not I could get out of there. Maybe if I made a big enough commotion, Camden could get out, and then…

But my Escape Artist trope did not activate, meaning that plan wouldn’t work.