I shut the camera off for this time jump.
We had already described what we were going to do, and frankly, it was possible that our entire detour to the hospital would get cut from the final film. So I didn't really see it as important to be filmed.
I was also tired. So very tired.
While we had technically had a night's sleep, in theory, it had not been a full night. Time moved forward as Carousel deemed fit, and while we had some breaks, I had never rested my mind.
So, as we slid through time with my camera off, I could focus on nothing but watching the infinite shores of time.
Once my brain was able to comprehend what was going on beyond the kaleidoscope and start to see the overall structure of everything around me, I started to see the true beauty—and ferocity—of the network of timelines we were a part of.
I was mentally drained. And in pain. And numb.
I just stood still, opened my eyes, and stared at Infinity.
Until it stared back.
I couldn't describe to you what it looked like. I could feel my brain seeking to comprehend it, to reduce it down into dimensions of height and width, to describe its shape, its color. But it didn't have any of those things.
Time was time.
Time contained all of the scary things—and the endings of all the good things.
Time contained serial killers and hopeless college kids.
Time contained blood and despair.
Time contained haunted scarecrows and mutated bedbugs.
Time contained a little boy who saw the reflection of a dark figure in a TV screen and thought it was his father.
Time contained no happy endings.
Foll𝑜w current novℯls on ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm.
Time
Plot Armor: --
__________
Tropes
Inevitable
Don’t all stories become horror stories in the end?
Infinite Additional Tropes not Perceptible
And when my brain was done failing to comprehend it, what it looked like—
It looked like rivers in the sky. Like the many-fingered God of Death.
I traveled down one of its streams, holding tight to Camden. Holding tight to a terrible little history book about tragedies.
Time was a lattice like a rainbow stretched every which way across the sky.
Time really did contain everything. And if someone was standing on the black shores, they could look up and see it.
But I wasn’t standing on the shores.
I was moving in the currents.
Bobby stood upon the shores. His dogs stared up at me.
Dead generation killers lay at the shores.
Every black grain of sand was a broken thing—something that didn’t flow where it was supposed to.
Something that didn’t flow to the end. To Event B. To the moment that had to happen for reasons I didn’t understand.
Time…
Time contained a bridge collapse.
🔴 REC SEP 25, 2018 13:52:02 [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]
"Come on, man! Let's go!" Camden screamed to me as the earth beneath us started to shake.
My camera had turned on—on its own.
I supposed Carousel wanted this footage after all.
Camden pulled at me.
I snapped out of my cosmic daze and began to run after him.
We were off the bridge long before it collapsed. But that couldn’t be said for everyone.
More death. More destruction.
I was so sick of it. It was worse than the torture.
It was inescapable.
But I couldn't dwell on that now. If I was still alive, then I was still playing the game. And people counted on me.
We ran halfway across town on nothing but fear and fumes.
If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.
That little kick of Grit I had added really made a world of difference in a lot of ways. Not only did I not feel as much pain as I should have from the torture, but I didn’t even feel pain as I struggled to get air into my lungs when we finally stopped running.
We were at the hospital.
According to the book, we had around a week and a half before it burned down.
Now, my theory was that because the hospital was about to burn down, maybe the records of who went there would also burn down. That might buy us some time.
I saw two possibilities.
Either that would help hide us from Generation Killer…
Or he had figured out this exact thing before, and we were about to walk into a dozen of him getting treatment for various ailments they had incurred over an infinite, loopy timeline.
But as we ran into the hospital—
I didn’t see him.
■ STOP
Finally, I could rest.
🔴 REC OCT 05, 2018 15:35:11 [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]
"So you're saying that these Frenchmen in tracksuits pulled you off the street and tortured you… but didn’t take any of your money?" the police officer asked as I lay back in my hospital bed, freshly bandaged.
"Yes," I said, with as much conviction as I could muster. "The Frenchmen."
The police officer didn’t look like he believed me, but I had more Moxie than him, and I didn’t care if we were docked points for not coming up with a good excuse.
I was going to say we had gotten the injuries in the bridge collapse, but having a wooden armrest nailed to your arm is… not a common injury from such a disaster.
I still should have done it. Instead, I needlessly slandered Frenchmen across the multiverse.
"They were in a white van," I added. "If that helps."
"Yes, I’m sure that it will," the officer said as he closed his notebook and went to have a word with the doctor.
Honestly? I felt great.
They had pumped me full of whatever cocktail of pharmaceuticals was appropriate for my condition. They had sewn my ear back on, which I wasn’t even sure was medically possible. The wooden armrest was no longer nailed to my left arm.
I was doing great.
Best of all, my hair was long enough to cover up an ear injury, so I looked good, too. If there were a makeup department for this shoot, they would be really glad.
If this was a movie, of course.
I looked to the table left of my bed, where my camera sat, having turned itself on.
I wanted to believe that Carousel just wanted to hear the tail end of my lame excuse to explain away my injuries.
But I knew the drill.
In horror movies, you hardly ever got to check out of the hospital. Instead, you’d sneak your clothes back on and run before the monster caught up with you.
That was just how it worked most of the time.
I sighed, removed the IV needle from my arm, and quickly found my clothes.
I grabbed the camera, and I was off down the hall to where Camden had been placed.
He was already dressed.
Without missing a beat, he pointed to the window.
I made my way over to it and filmed outside.
Finally, a Generation Killer had shown up.
Even from the fourth floor of the hospital, I could see that he had bullet wounds. Even then, I couldn't risk him seeing us and remembering us. I didn't want to stop and think about whether that was a logical fear.
It was time to go.
There was a screech over the intercom. And inside that screech, I could have sworn I heard the barking of dogs interrupting an announcement calling for a nurse in the ICU.
Perhaps Bullet-Hole Generation Killer wasn’t the only one there and Bobby was somewhere around to warn us.
"Why can't they just go to the hospital in their own broken hideout timeline?" I asked.
"They do," Camden said. "But that doesn’t mean they always did."
Of course, it was possible that the Generation Killer outside didn’t even know we existed.
It was best not to think about it.
It was around that moment that I realized there was another reason the dogs were barking. And it had nothing to do with the Generation Killers.
With a quick glance at the time displayed on my camera, I realized that our week and a half before the hospital burned down was gone.
Carousel had just skipped us ahead. The Audience would have no idea.
On the bright side, that did explain why my wounds felt like they had healed longer than they had.
The downside was that we had to get out of the building.
I grabbed Camden and said, "Get the book. The fire should start any minute."
He wasn’t exactly on top of the acting department, but he was pretty sharp. So, after a brief look of confusion, he understood what I was saying.
Our little medical oasis was about to go up in flames.
And Carousel wanted footage.
We made our way out to the nurses’ station. I took a wide look around the room and tried to absorb every detail I could before closing my eyes and trying to remember what I had seen.
Sure enough, Bobby and his dogs were standing there, waiting for us—in my memory.
I was never going to get used to that.
Bobby was pointing for us to take a particular staircase. And who was I to argue?
The question was, how was I supposed to attribute this knowledge?
Oh, right. I was one-quarter psychic on my mother’s side.
"Wait," I said, putting my injured arm in front of Camden.
"What?" he asked.
"Bobby’s here."
"Bobby?" Camden asked. I couldn’t remember if we had established that Camden knew who Bobby was or not.
"The security guard who got lost on the other side of time."
"Oh. Right," Camden said.
"This way," I said, leading him toward the back exit—just in time for the alarms to start going off.
We ran downward. But the further we ran, the more smoke we found, and the hotter things became.
I kept looking for Bobby because there was no way we should keep running. When I finally saw him down a flight of stairs, pointing for us to continue downward, I wasn’t sure whether I could believe him or not; it was just so hot and smoky.
But I made sure to get some footage of him.
Because presumably, he would show up in some way in the final cut.
"It’s getting hard to breathe," Camden said.
"Just trust me," I said.
And he did.
As we continued down.
When we got to the first floor, it seemed that following Bobby’s orders had been a dumb idea after all—our escape was completely engulfed in flames.
I could see the exit, not twenty feet away.
But the ceiling above had collapsed.
And all around was fire.
Still, Bobby beckoned us forward.
"What are we supposed to do?" Camden asked.
I wasn’t sure.
I physically could not do what Bobby was asking me to do—to walk across a debris field with flames taller than me.
Above me, I could hear creaking as the hospital teased its collapse.
I closed my eyes and looked again into my memories.
And sure enough, Bobby was putting all of his effort into getting me to walk forward.
I didn’t have that much farther to go before I’d start becoming a roasted marshmallow.
But Bobby had to have a reason.
"Come on," I said, grabbing Camden and pushing him forward along with me.
And that’s when the damnedest thing happened.
The path we were taking—the one engulfed in flames—was right below a gaping hole in the ceiling where things had collapsed. And just as we were about to reach it, just as we were about to find ourselves unable to pass, a large water cooler—the kind with the big blue jug on top—fell from the gaping hole above and blasted water every which way.
Clearing a path for us to walk on.
How long had Bobby been planning our escape?
We quickly took advantage of the temporary reprieve and ran across the wet floor toward the exit.
"Thanks, Bobby," I said aloud.
We ran out into the parking lot, but we couldn’t go too far.
There were only two types of jumping points in Carousel—the kind where you get your ear ripped off and the kind where you witness a huge mass death event that causes a notable divergence in the timeline.
Seeing as we had one of those notable divergences happening right around us, there was no reason to resort to the other.
I looked and looked, but I didn’t see Bobby again. He must have left, having secured our safety.
I had to wonder what things looked like from his point of view.
I took my little shard of meteorite and held it up. The sparks that would eventually turn into a desaturated red haze had begun to flare within the jewel.
"You know where we’re going, right?" I asked.
"2010," Camden said. "To save your coworker."
"That’s right," I said. "I would never leave a coworker behind."
But then, as I searched for Bobby, I saw someone in my memory—someone I had only seen before on film.
He was wearing a tie-dye shirt with the sleeves ripped off and surfer shorts. He had shaggy brown hair and a shell necklace. A pair of rollerblades, their laces tied together, hung over his shoulder, and he walked barefoot.
I didn’t have to look at the red wallpaper to know who had just appeared in my memory.
It was Gabriel Cano, the NPC playing Dina's son in this movie.
I was wondering when he would show up.
■ STOP