Book Five, Chapter 51: Shopping

I stood in the middle of a large stone corridor, like something out of Hogwarts to my eye. Fancy stonework. No formed concrete. Yet, these walls were not for some royal courtyard. They were storefronts. On either side, there were eight to ten glass doors with big glass windows packed with goods to draw customers in.

The only exit out of the corridor I could find was the same way we came in.

This was a kill box.

If something were to chase you into this place, you’d have to gamble on which door you entered, hoping there was an exit hidden from view.

To my right, I saw a large glass window that had once been filled with mannequins dressed for a 1970s summer at the beach: bright colors, a fair amount of modesty, and a wave of nostalgia I had only experienced second hand through movies.

All of the displays had been crushed, however, and standing on their remains were dozens of aimless zombies—the blue and green kind from back when rotten flesh was considered too obscene for movies—who pressed against the glass half-heartedly. I always thought the non-rotten ones were creepier.

Maybe that was because as people rot, they get lighter. A fully desiccated corpse only weighed about forty pounds. I would know; I wrestled with one.

These zombies were still wholly hydrated. They were barely dead. I’d hate to mess with them.

They didn’t draw in any customers. This store, the only one whose door was locked (and chained), had once sold summer water sports equipment and beach attire but was now a monster lair for wandering cretins waiting for their storyline to be triggered. I could feel the monster lair with my Hysteric scouting trope so easily with all of the monsters right in front of me. If only the werewolves were on display like this.

“Are you sure that glass is going to hold?” I asked, looking over at Kimberly. It was flexing.

“It always has,” she said. “It’s best just not to look at them. Lara said the only way to clear them out is to either open the door, break the window, or run their storyline, but honestly, I don’t really want to shop there anyway.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Summer’s coming up.”

“That’s a good point,” she said. “I do like that shawl.”

I followed her eyes to a pink zombie wearing a sheer floral robe of some sort. It gave her that “just out of the pool” look.

I laughed.

Kimberly would know better than I would about whether the glass would hold the undead back.

The Mangler Outlet Mall had been a go-to spot back in the days of Camp Dyer.

I never went, but Eye Candies, Final Girls, and anyone who cared about the clothes they wore knew the routine. We couldn’t go to the actual mall because we’d die swiftly, but the outlet mall was a great alternative, a small taste of the kinds of stores that could be found in the real world.

Of course, the place was designed like a nightmare.

From the outside, it was a building with ornate stone walls defaced with advertisements for the stores inside.

The problem was that the building wrapped around a corridor that was shaped like a U, with the shops wrapped around the corridor where the shoppers were. You entered at one end of the U, and the other end was a dead end with two blind corners to get both in and out.

I hated it as a scout.

Though it would make a fine base.

We could only get to the stores by entering the corridor. It would be a terrible place to get caught in an apocalypse, a storyline, or heck, if somebody busted that glass and let the zombies out.

I led the charge at first, getting a lay of the land and an idea of where the Omens were and then opening it up for shopping for the others. It really wasn’t too bad if everyone was on the same page.

In fact, there was something oddly ASMR about listening to the moaning zombies mixed with the soft shopping music of the outlet mall.

I didn’t care what Kimberly said—I couldn’t stand near them.

I moved, careful to keep all of the players and Omens in sight.

The others were a lot more interested in the stores than I was. When I said that we were going shopping, I was talking about going to the special shops related to the actual game at Carousel, not to these superfluous retail outlets.

But Carousel had revamped these stores from their previous state; with the addition of trope items, even these mundane shops could be interesting.

“There’s a dollar store up on the right,” Kimberly said. She had this place memorized. Back in the days of Camp Dyer, players would go here to shop in huge groups; they would be loaded to the gills with firearms and other weapons, of course.

We were the same way.

I carried my special hedge shears in my hands, gripped tightly, ready for the moment I had to lop a head off.

We weren’t all clumped together like we normally were when we traveled—this was largely a safe place, and it felt safe because there were lots of NPCs just going about their lives here, ignoring the shop filled with zombies, of course.

Traveling had recently become even more manageable, given that we now had three whole people with scouting tropes capable of seeing Omens with little difficulty.

Lila’s trope was on par with mine as far as showing omens, and Isaac’s was usable if he paid attention. He would probably have to increase his Savvy stat quite a bit before it became as usable as ours, if it ever would.

Lila was taking a joy in being helpful. Maybe she thought that was her path to true forgiveness. It wasn’t a bad theory. I already appreciated her.

Her teammates needed time. Andrew was civil and even friendly to her, but he wanted his missing teammates back. That was all he cared about.

“There’s a candy store over there,” Kimberly said, “and an electronics store up here.” She pointed further down the corridor.

At first, I thought she was talking to everyone, but she was talking to me. Maybe she thought that was my jam: candy and electronics.

The electronics place was called The Bare Wire. While it had a showroom at the front of the store, I could see through the window that there were stacks of electronics in the back. Even at a glance, there were trope items, although I couldn’t quite focus on them enough to know what they were.

I wanted to go in there. It was odd. I felt I needed to look around. I didn’t know where those feelings came from. The place was depressing, frankly.

Still, I knew I would make a voyage there.

“The dollar store looks like it’s been wrecked,” Bobby noted.

“Yeah, all dollar stores do,” Isaac said.

From what I could see, the dollar store didn’t have any trope items—or any good clothes, obviously—but it did have toiletries and other quality-of-life items that couldn’t be found in any of the retail stores.

Kimberly’s goal was a clothes store at the very end of the corridor, which apparently had a wide variety.

We were still on the first arm of the U and needed to make two more turns to get there.

I didn’t have the freedom to shop wherever I wanted because I had to keep my eyes open for omens.

Not only were there Omens inside the stores, but occasionally, mobile Omens traveled around with the NPCs—like the man, hastily dressed, who ran through the crowd, being chased by men in suits who yelled for him to stop and radioed each other government-agent jargon as they went along.

The secret with him was not to let him bump into you because he would slip something into your shopping bag. Later, the government guys would do whatever it took to retrieve it from you after they viewed the security footage and realized you had it.

Luckily, that omen was easy to diffuse because even if he put whatever the object was inside your shopping bag, you could just take it out and drop it on the ground, and no bad would happen.

You’d be off the hook. The Atlas had told me that.

As I was reading that omen, I must have been smiling because Ramona gave me a funny look.

I told everyone in earshot not to let the guy bump into them or put anything in their bags, and then I continued watching for other omens.

“So that’s an omen, too? They’re literally everywhere,” she said.

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“They are,” I said. “Just gotta keep an eye out, and we’ll be fine.”

I thought that she was scared, but that wasn’t quite right.

“We used to come here when I was a kid,” she said. “’ Course, there were no zombies. It was just an ordinary place.”

She had grown up in a slightly altered version of Carousel, where Omens were either nonexistent or subdued—that was never made clear.

“I imagine this place really lights up around Christmas time,” I said. I had memories of Christmas shopping in a place like this.

She nodded.

“This is a great place to grow up, as funny as that might sound now,” she said.

We talked for a while as people browsed. We were making our way forward, and Ramona was only interested in buying new clothes, even though she didn’t have that much money.

“So you guys have Christmas?” I asked. They didn’t have our brand names, but they somehow shared some of our holidays. They also had a bunch we didn’t, of course.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And what is that holiday about?” I asked.

“Mistletoe and presents and caroling,” she said, “that sort of thing. If you’re nice, you get gifts from Santa; if you’re bad, you get dragged out of your bed and eaten, you know, just things that parents tell children.”

The more she talked, the more I realized that when I said Christmas, she didn’t understand it to mean the same thing I did. Christmas was not a holiday here, not really; it was a setting for horror movies synonymous with winter and the solstice. Religion was incidental.

I tried to probe deeper into this subject, but it seemed that we were so far apart in our understanding of what religion was that I just got more confused. After all, Carousel had bundled together thousands of cults and scripted them to act like a pseudo-monotheistic culture. It was a dense and confusing subject, but hey, religion always is.

“There are lots of religions,” Ramona said, “the Children of Yashina, the Followers of the Hooded God. I was raised to believe it was rude to ask about that kind of stuff, though, and they mostly keep to themselves.”

The more she talked, the more it sounded like Silas Dyrkon’s version of Carousel was deeply complicated. At least Carousel Proper didn’t pretend it was a real town beneath the surface, but whatever Silas had created for his throughline had barely been coherent—and yet, to Ramona, it was perfectly normal.

“Do you want some candy?” she asked, glancing over at the window front where a man was pulling pitch-black taffey.

“Absolutely,” I said. “We just have to stay to the back of the group to watch out for omens.”

The candy store had a bunch of Omens, as would be imagined. They were simple to avoid.

“Just so you know, I’m not eating anything from here,” I said, “but I do like the idea of looking at the candy.”

“Oh, that’s probably a good point,” she said. “I didn’t even think about that. Some of these are omens, aren’t they?”

“Like 50% of it is Omens,” I said.

“That is a bummer. Show me,” she said.

“Do you see this apple with the glistening green candy coating?” I asked.

We stood in front of a small display where lots of apples, apparently freshly made, were stuck out on sticks. Each of them was collectively an omen, yet little NPC children grabbed them and put them in their bags.

NPC privilege was real when it came to not triggering Omens.