Book Five, Chapter 124: Watch your step

🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 13:23:58    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

We had gotten greedy.

In what was supposed to be a torture scene, we had gone on a fact-finding mission, and Carousel had decided to just pause the scene.

We had gotten too casual with our captors. While they were still terrifying to us personally, they had revealed too much information about themselves in our conversations to still be scary to an audience.

That meant that this torture scene was going to last until Carousel got the footage it wanted.

There was no avoiding it.

There was no distracting our enemy.

I had no idea which footage would end up in the final cut, but I did notice that occasionally, my camera—hidden back on the shelf where I had put it—would light up, indicating it was recording.

I had been nailed to that chair for hours, but how much actual screen time had I filled for all of my suffering?

“Tell us what to do,” Bossman said in a disarmingly friendly voice. “Tell us what we need to know.”

I screamed as the big one clamped his pliers down on one of my fingernails.

“We gave your friend three new nails, and now we’re going to take three nails back.”

Big G yanked.

I yelped, pleading for my Grit to kick back in so I could just feel numb.

“I told you,” Camden said, after having explained the entire thing again—but this time On-Screen. “You have to find a way to travel back before the meteor strike. You just need a history book or—”

I screamed as I lost another fingernail.

“Stop that,” Camden said. “We’re helping you. We aren’t resisting.”

“We travel back before the meteor strikes, and then what?” Bossman asked. They had returned to their more disturbing manner. They were no longer the individualistic psychopaths. Instead, they were all portraying the same kind—the same creepy, uniform entity without humanity. The version the audience would see.

“I don’t know,” Camden said. “I don’t know how you ended up in this group of timelines, but it had to do with you going back to before the meteor strike. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Bossman got closer to Camden, looking him up and down, almost with a friendly expression on his face.

“You had better be right,” he said. “Because when we find a way to travel back to the original Carousel settlement, you’re coming with us. And if you’re not telling us the truth, we just might leave you there.”

He laughed.

The three of them started to leave, but then Bossman looked back and said, “I said three nails.”

Big G walked back over to me and yanked out a third fingernail.

When I did not give a satisfying enough scream, he took a knife from his pocket, replacing the pliers in his hand. He grabbed onto my earlobe and started to cut. He was going to remove the whole ear.

I cried out in pain, and a cruel smile moved over his face.

He didn’t finish cutting off my ear, but he did watch me squirm as he walked away.

We had practiced explaining everything to them multiple times, and this was the payoff. While I didn’t appreciate the torture, I was sure glad that Camden had found a quick way to explain it—something that would work for a movie.

It was an important lesson for him. I was certain.

“Wait,” I said.

The last Generation Killer stopped in his tracks and turned.

“I need to know something,” I said.

He looked at me blankly.

There was no way I was going to be particularly realistic, but if I played my character as a curious man, maybe it would work. Or maybe we would get docked points. But I had to establish this On-Screen sufficiently.

“Some of you got injured earlier,” I said. “Some of you got really badly burned. So you time-traveled away and then came back after you had healed.”

He still looked at me blankly.

“Why didn’t you save yourselves?” I asked. “Why didn’t you use your future knowledge to prevent your own injury? We’re in a time anomaly. It shouldn’t have mattered. Why not save yourselves the suffering?”

Big G was certainly one of the dumber Generation Killers, but now he was being fed information by the script, which allowed him to approach the same menacing qualities as the others.

“Don’t want to get washed away,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

He started to laugh as if keeping me from understanding was satisfying to him in some way.

“What does that mean?” I screamed after him.

Most of our discussions about the Shores of Time—if not all of them—had happened Off-Screen. At that moment, I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I knew I needed to get some reference to it, and that was the closest we were going to get.

But what I really needed was to establish that there was a reason Generation Killer was being relatively conservative with his powerful time-travel abilities.

After all, I had not found a satisfying explanation for why they hadn’t just wiped us out from the beginning.

And I was starting to get it. While paradoxes like the Grandfather Paradox might not have caused you to cease existing, logical flaws within your own personal timeline as a time traveler did seem to matter.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

They couldn’t prevent themselves from getting injured.

That was useful information. It could explain some of their odd behavior. So many of their choices revolved around their fear of getting washed away into the Shores of Time.

Meanwhile, we were back in the room with the doors locked.

“We have to get out of here,” Camden said. “Do you still have a piece of the meteorite?”

“Yes,” I said. “I had two of them on me, and they didn’t know that. So I’ve still got one in my sock. But I don’t have any record of a past event that we can travel to. They took the pages I had printed off.”

Camden thought for a moment.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I have an idea.”

“Does your idea involve getting these nails out of my arm?” I asked.

Grit or no Grit, I had been nailed down for a ridiculously long amount of time, and just thinking about my injury sickened me.

“All right, well… can you grab my camera off the shelf over there?” I asked.

“Why are you filming all of this?” he asked as he grabbed it for me. “At some point in time, it just isn’t worth it.”

Every found footage movie needed some explanation for the gimmick.

“I used to think that I was going to be a filmmaker,” I said. “I thought I was going to capture people’s imaginations, maybe make the world better in some small way. I ended up filming weddings and promotional videos for governmental organizations. Some filmmaker I turned out to be. This may be the last opportunity I have to do something important—to show the world something that matters. And I’m not going to miss it.”

I actually got emotional as I said that.

Camden nodded and then got to work.

The first thing he tried to do was help me get my arm off the armrest of the chair I was in. But that wasn’t likely—the nails were sunk deep into the wood. He tried to help pry me off the chair.

“Bite this,” he said, shoving the end of a throw pillow into my mouth.

With his only good arm, he did his best, but there was no way those nails were coming out. Luckily, the second-best option was just to break the chair.

We had to go about it slowly and horrifically painfully—even through my Grit. We couldn’t make any noise, but we managed to get the wooden part of the armrest separated from the rest of the chair.

Fortunately, it was not the most expensive hotel furniture in the world, and the connection was made with some loose wooden dowels and staples.

Still, it hurt terribly.

Even after we managed to get the armrest off, I could barely move my arm. Anytime I accidentally bumped the wooden armrest on anything as I stood up and tried to move, it sent painful reverberations all the way up my arm—right to the bone.

“All right,” Camden said. “I have a plan to get a book.”