Book Six, Chapter 4: Rushed Delivery

Since we had all agreed that we would never run Post-Traumatic again—or at least not run it to gain experience points or rewards—we decided to watch the storyline together on my old TV.

It was developing into a sort of tradition. Run a storyline, watch the storyline. That way, we weren’t playing to entertain cosmic voyeurs or immortal sorcerers. We were playing to entertain each other.

At the very least, it had been a lot of fun when we did it with Stray Dawn.

Post-Traumatic was not as fun to watch.

Oddly, the movie ended up pretty good, just brutal. There was lots of footage that Carousel could put together, and as we had predicted, it pretty much ignored all of the specifics about how time travel worked. Sure, a proper card-carrying nerd would figure it out from what remained, but not the casual movie-goer.

The audience would just have to piece it together themselves.

Those films we had found in the wall were genuinely disturbing, and Generation Killer was also very creepy when all you could see of him was a glimpse or a strange phrase.

I got a standing ovation whenever the footage from the other side of time showed me getting killed by a meteor. Those who didn’t know our plan about going to the finale first to create a sort of time loop were amazed when I showed back up.

They were grinning from ear to ear.

That didn’t make the brutal kills more palatable. Whenever Generation Killer was filming, he really liked to get a lot of footage of the pain and suffering and bleeding.

Really didn’t like that guy.

But still, at the end, we all clapped—and none of us acknowledged how close we came to losing. Those of us who knew, at least.

Some people broke off and decided to go play Reply The Departed upstairs. We still had the board game, and while it didn’t seem to have magical powers, it was a fine party game.

I sat alone sorting through the various posters that we had collected of deceased players so that we could compare the number against the number of deceased players reported in the newspaper I had found.

Their number was about forty or so players too high.

To me, that meant that forty players had likely been killed by the axe murderer. If I showed this to the others, that would start too many questions.

Or would it answer questions for them?

How much exactly did the Manifest Consortium know about the victims of the axe murderer? Could I even tell the others that the Consortium reported 40 more dead players than we had posters for? Would that be a way to cheat around my limitations?

I wasn’t going to risk it. And if the others wanted to find out about the discrepancy, they could—the same way I did.

I was a bit relieved. Forty was on the low end of what was possible.

Almost three hundred players from our world had been brought to Carousel, and only forty tried to quit or cheat.

That was remarkable.

I stared around the loft.

How did I end up sitting alone?

We were supposed to be having fun. We were supposed to be distracting ourselves from the storylines we were going to run the next day.

And I was counting the dead.

What was wrong with me?

I put the posters back into the cabinet in the kitchen where we kept them. Nothing else went in that cabinet. It was a hallowed place.

Up on the roof, people were eating food from the restaurant down below, drinking, and laughing.

I could do that too—even if I had to pretend at first. If the others didn’t have to worry, then neither did I.

Camden didn’t look worried.

He seemed thrilled not to be dead. I supposed that there was a time when he was looking at the long dark, and begging whatever gods had been brought to Carousel that one day he’d get to see life again.

He smiled and joked with the others.

I found Ramona with Isaac, Bobby, Lila, and Michael. Isaac had taken his fishing pole that could detect omens, and he was letting it hang loose over the side of the building onto the street below, where people were still filtering in and out of the bars.

It was funny to watch the metal weight that Isaac had stuck on the end of the line catch the trail of one omen before getting jerked away by another.

He didn’t let it hang far enough to interact with anything.

It was crazy to think how dangerous our living situation was. Any number of those omens were too powerful for us to complete, and we were hiding from them—and yet it had become so normal.

There was a zombie down there in the very early stages of being a zombie, where he could have been confused with a very drunk person or an avid gamer. The omen magnet really liked that zombie.

One little bite from him, and this would all be over. His storyline was too powerful for us to even dream of. I couldn’t even see it on the red wallpaper.

That was one benefit of the fishing rod. It could detect how powerful something was regardless of the user’s stats. The weight on the end would pull toward the strongest omen.

After the zombie came by, their little game of watching the fishing rod follow omen to omen stopped being as fun because there were none around that were as strong as that one.

The little weight just pointed straight to him and nowhere else, no matter what Isaac did.

I could see the rod straining. Michael grabbed onto Isaac’s shoulder to help make sure he didn’t get dragged off the roof.

It must have been a fast zombie situation. Slow zombies didn’t get that kind of reaction.

“It’s kind of thrilling if you think about it,” Ramona said.

I stared as Isaac reeled the line back in like he was pulling in a swordfish.

“Thrilling is a word,” I said.

“Death in the midst of life,” she said, as the zombie bobbed and weaved, seemingly unable to decide which bony skull it wanted to crack open and slurp the brains out of.

“Things are gonna be so boring if we get out of here,” I said.

She didn’t respond—because, of course, we didn’t even know if she could get out of here. She was born in Carousel, and while she didn’t have anywhere else to go, she didn’t exactly want the same things we wanted.

In fact, I wasn’t sure what she wanted at all.

But that was true of most women.

I probably should have asked her about it at some point in time, but instead, I told her that the dancing woman with the glittering shawl down on the street—who held some college student by the hand and lured him away—planned to sacrifice him.

“Death and life,” she said.

“We’ll get plenty of both tomorrow,” I said.

She smiled faintly.

 

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The next day, we all worked as a team to distract all of the car salesmen at a used car lot so that Dina could steal a rough and tough Jeep-like vehicle from the lot.

Stealing was supremely bad luck unless you had a strategy. Even then. Some omens only popped up to track down thieves. I didn’t know if that was a moral statement by Carousel or just game balancing.

Our plan was pretty simple. We just had to pretend that we really wanted these cars that were on the west end of the lot while she snuck into the store and stole the keys for the vehicle they were after.

Easy as pie. Took two days to scout out and plan. Had to know where the omens were in the area. That was nothing new.

She gave us a lift back to Kimberley’s loft, and we gathered outside.

“We gotta be quick,” I said, noticing that the very zombie we had seen the night before was groaning somewhere in the alleyway across the street from the loft.

Antoine and his team quickly loaded all of their gear.

They were excited, like this was some vacation. And maybe it was. I hadn’t gotten to do much research with them.

“Remember to keep things clean,” Kimberley said, as if we were going to trash her loft while she was off swinging from vines around ancient ruins.

They loaded into the Jeep, sitting on each other’s laps because there just wasn’t a lot of room. Then they headed south, waving to us as they went.

I had this weird feeling I couldn’t place as they drove away—a strange longing.

By the time they got to the end of the block, I could see their map omen activate. They were in their storyline.

I silently wished them luck and turned to my team.

“Would you like to do the honors?” I said to Ramona, handing her my phone.

My team was huddled around me, afraid that nearby omens might find their way out into the street. I was keeping an eye out as best I could—but of course, I had to change out my tropes before we activated the omen for By the Slice.

“Just call this number and seal my fate?” Ramona confirmed. She had a trope that guaranteed she would be Second Blood if she triggered the omen.

I nodded and looked around at the others. Locked eyes with them. We were ready. I was confident. They were a little under-leveled, but I was over-leveled, though not quite enough to trigger a difficulty jump in this storyline.

Stolen story; please report.

I switched out my tropes as the others confirmed theirs, and Ramona dialed the number.

The phone was on speaker.

No one answered—not exactly. They didn’t say hello or ask what we wanted.

What they said was:

“Confirming five pizzas at normal charge and one for free to 657 D’Angelo Street, care of Isaac. Is that right?”

Ramona looked up at me. I shrugged.

“That sounds right,” Ramona said.

“It’ll be there in 30 minutes or less,” the woman on the other end said in a heavy Italian-American accent. “And you should be, too. Have a good night.”

And like that, we had made our choice. The omens around us disappeared from the red wallpaper. The zombie man was just a man.

“Wait—where’s D’Angelo Street?” Isaac asked.

“North,” Camden said, starting to back down the street one step at a time as he stared at the red wallpaper.

“Way north,” he added as he turned to run.

We knew the storyline would likely take place in that direction because the address for the pizza place was in northern Carousel.

That meant one thing: suburbia.

Beyond suburbia were some fields and a gorge with a bridge over it (usually). And beyond that was Carousel Heights, where the rich people lived. But we wouldn’t go that far.

Where we were going was the middle-class neighborhoods, and back to a time when middle class meant well off. It meant chain restaurants, back before that was considered tacky. Or at least, before tacky was a bad thing.

It meant quiet nights and neighbors who relied on each other.

Yes, that was the place we were going to find Hell—or at least one of the various Hells within Carousel. We didn’t know a lot about this storyline, but we knew enough.

We ran down the streets as the day turned to night around us with every step we took. The air grew cool. It was a beautiful summer night, and everyone we saw was smiling and dressed like it was the late ’80s or early ’90s.

We laughed as we ran because we felt so silly and free.

We felt young.

“It’s right up ahead,” Camden said. He literally had a map of Carousel in his mind, on the red wallpaper, where some presumably immortal magician must have placed it on his part of the wall in the long hallway—a concept I still refused to understand the logistics of.

The cars got older as we ran.

I kept pace with Ramona, and to my shock, I noticed that as we went along, she was getting younger.

Not much younger—teenagers rarely played teenagers in horror movies—but she went from late 20s to early 20s sometime around the first mile.

I really hoped I didn’t get sent back to my actual teenage years.

“Oh my God,” Cassie said. I feared she was talking about me, but she wasn’t. I knew it was a big deal because she said God in the singular.

It took me a moment to see what she was looking at.

It was Isaac.

In teen movies, there were often two different age tiers of teenagers—one played by people in their 20s, and the other played by actual teenagers meant to represent freshmen and sophomores.

Isaac was the latter.

While the rest of us were meant to be older teenagers—probably 17 or 18 years old—Isaac looked like he was just north of puberty. He was a few inches shorter than he had been, and his baby face had come back with a vengeance.

His physical age was probably something around 16, but for movies, that was basically a child.

He even had braces.

We laughed into the night as we rounded corner after corner and made our way into the suburban sprawl—and then into the neighborhoods.

“It’s just up ahead,” Camden said.

We ran until we could see the house at the end of the street, and we knew it was the house—because the lights were on, and people could be seen inside. It was framed perfectly.

The door stood open, and there were some NPCs there waiting for us.

“Avery’s gone,” Anna said, the first to notice.

“We didn’t lose her,” I said. “Carousel must have taken her.”