Book Six, Chapter 43: Photo Op

Whatever we did, we needed to go up a level.

It didn’t take us long to realize that the first floor was flooding at an increasingly rapid rate. But, of course, it was. The glass doors at the front of the building could be barricaded to keep out people, but not water, and now it was flooding in so fast that, even before it got to the top of my shoes, it had a sort of current or momentum.

“We need to find Ramona and Logan’s bodies,” I said. “If we can use those to trigger Second Blood, we can get to the finale without any more of us dying.”

“We don’t have much more time here,” Andrew said. “This is only going to get worse.”

People often said that in Carousel. They were always right.

On-Screen.

Suddenly, I saw a flash in the distance. The light must have bounced around several corners by the time it got to us, and it was still bright. It wasn’t the flashlight. It was quick, as if someone had taken a picture with a camera.

“Hide,” I said. Logically, our characters should never approach signs of human activity when a killer is on the loose, but we also couldn’t run away because we needed to find out what was happening.

I looked at Andrew and said, “Kill the light.”

He quickly turned off his flashlight.

Even while hiding, we could slowly and cautiously make our way toward the activity while staying out of sight. Depending on the camera work, the audience might not ever know how close we came to running into trouble.

Finding a place to hide was easy. The way that the casino floor was divided up and the number of slot machines and tables placed around the floor made moving in secrecy far easier than it should have been.

I moved closer toward the flashing, which continued to happen every twenty seconds or so.

“It’s like there’s a camera on a timer,” Kimberly said.

“I believe you are right,” Andrew whispered. “The timing is too even.”

Daphne was beside me, but she was moving slowly, struggling to keep up. I grabbed onto her hand and gently pulled her toward me. As I grabbed her hand, I thought it odd. She had another ring on her finger.

Usually, I wouldn’t notice something like that, but I had literally just put a ring on that hand. Now she had another on her middle finger. Looting the storyline a bit early, perhaps.

“You stick with me, all right?” I said.

“Okay,” she said with a smile. I could tell because her brilliant white teeth suddenly appeared in the darkness right above her wedding dress.

We continued moving toward the source of the flash.

“It’s the banquet hall,” I whispered.

We wound our way around the walls and rows of machines, moving toward the flashing lights. As we got closer to the place where the flash was coming from, I could see much better because the bulb remained bright for quite a few seconds after the flash.

“It’s not moving,” I said. “It’s on a stand.”

“That’s where the photographer left it,” Daphne said. “He was supposed to take photos of the reception. You know, just regular shots on a timer of everyone being casual and having a good time. Unfortunately, that was ruined by the storm.”

She sounded bummed out about it.

“And the deaths,” I said.

“Those, too, of course,” she added.

I was almost confident that we could stop hiding, that somehow the camera had triggered itself, when I heard the whispering. It was a full-on whisper fight, that’s what it was.

“You idiot,” a woman said. “They’re going to think we did this.”

“We just found him already dead,” another voice said, who didn’t quite understand the concept of whispering as well. It was a man’s voice, deep and strong.

“They’re not going to know that,” the other voice said. “All they’re going to see are the pictures of us standing over the body because you had to touch the camera.”

“There was a note on it,” the man said. “… we could leave another note. Explain the whole thing.”

I heard the sound of a hand slapping the back of someone’s skull.

“We need to get out of here. Why did we do this job? We should have called it off when we heard about the storm,” the woman said. “Where’s Bambi? We were supposed to meet back here a half hour ago.”

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Every time the camera flashed, I could see two figures standing over a third. As soon as I could see them with my eyes, I could also see them on the red wallpaper. They were background NPCs. One was Ed, the bellboy, and the other was a cook called Chef Champlain. Ed was gigantic, especially in that bright, illuminated framing of him next to the cook.

I suspected they weren’t actually NPCs, and I also suspected that the Bambi they were talking about was the fake receptionist lying dead in the kitchen. The body they stood over was only called “Photographer” on the red wallpaper.

He didn’t stand a chance.

I didn’t know where we were supposed to go from there. We certainly didn’t want to confront them.

I turned to the others and whispered as quietly as I could, “Let’s get out of here.”

As we left, Bobby quietly said, “Those were two of the new employees. I bet she’s not even a real chef. And he’s probably not even a bellboy.”

We were leaving as quietly as we could. But then, right behind me, something smacked into the side of one of the slot machines. Those, being the old, non-digital kind, were filled with bells and chimes that could be physically triggered.

Or at least that’s what I had to assume, because after somebody tripped on it, it made a far too loud noise, a bell ringing.

I suppose that anything would be loud in that room. All I could hear was the rain in the distance and the occasional flash of a bulb.

“What’s that?” Ed, the giant bellboy, asked, not trying to whisper any longer.

“Someone’s here,” Chef Champlain said.

“Bambi!” Ed called out.

We didn’t dare say anything. He started walking toward us.

“Let’s go,” Daphne said, too loudly.