The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

My heart longed for a zombie film where everyone knew what a zombie was, how they worked, and could be calm and even-keeled enough to get through an undead flare-up without losing their heads.

Dead Pursuit wasn't that.

We still had to do all the traditional scenes to set up what these creatures were and what rules they abided by, even though, surely, the audience, whoever and wherever they were, already knew them.

I stared out the window as the zombie horde grew, increasing in number as newly infected people slowly but surely lost their humanity. It was a heart-wrenching sort of people-watching because, when they first woke from their infection-induced comas, there was still a lot of their former personality left.

They would wake confused and start staring around, looking for someone to ask what was going on. They were too out of it to realize that everyone around them was infected, but they were aware enough to know that something was unusual. And then, of course, they would go to ask a question, and a blank look would come over their faces as they realized they were having trouble speaking. The flaw wasn’t in the actual noise-making part of speech, but just deciding what to say.

Each one of the zombies, from what I could tell up on the tower, said only one phrase, and it seemed to be completely random. I felt sorry for the victims as they awoke, only able to engage in small talk during one of the most confusing and scary moments of their lives. But soon enough, the confusion would wane, and all that would be left was the walking but not quite dead creature who knew only to copy the behavior of those around it.

"It's a plague," Kitty Lincoln was saying. "Don't you see? They're infecting each other, rising from the dead, and joining the armies of the devil."

I had to admit Kitty Lincoln was quite good at acting. Not only was she playing a vital role in setting up the situation, but she was also creating stress and social fracturing within the group while becoming what I assumed would be a minor antagonist.

In fact, though I knew that paragons could be NPCs, players, or even enemies, I truly couldn't guess what Kitty was. She was certainly adding a narrative framework for us to work within as we filled screen time. If a player who happened to be a Hysteric Defiant was in this storyline, I would expect them to do much the same.

The other Hysteric in the room was having trouble keeping calm as the infection that she had given herself, essentially with movie magic, was starting to take hold, but in a very strange way. She wasn’t losing her humanity. She was losing control of it.

"I shouldn't be wearing a dress," Ramona was saying when we were Off-Screen. "Why didn't I think to change? No one wants to wear a dress as a zombie. What if I get turned over?"

"I'm sure the camera will pan away," I said.

We were far enough away that Kitty Lincoln had all the cameras on her, including Danny's occasionally. The guy was a pro. I knew that he was under my control, but that was only technically true. In fact, he was on the ball without being asked, getting tons of footage as if he had done this a million times, and maybe he had. I felt like I was just sitting around waiting for my close-up while he was out gathering B-roll.

When we went back On-Screen, all of us were On-Screen, and Kitty was kicking her act up to eleven.

"We must be wary of those who have come in contact with these things, these vile minions of the dark."

The zombies were standing in sunlight and seemed to be having a pretty chill time. They didn't exactly fit the description she was giving, but that might have been intentional.

"We must rise up against them, or we will become them. Don't you understand?" she said. "The military locked us in here as a test from God."

One of the NPCs, who was called Doc Rick, looked at her and told her, "Hush your mouth."

I recognized his voice. He was one of the emcees for the event. A sports commentator might be a better term. Now he wasn't acting convivial as he described cars going around in a big circle. He was downright out of patience.

"You're in here filling the airwaves with this garbage while we need to sit here and find a solution. Get a way out of here. If we told the military that we were alive, if we had some way of contacting them, I'm sure they'd let us out while they fix this problem."

He clearly didn’t know who he was messing with.

"They're never letting us out," Kitty said as a tear rolled down one of her eyes. "They're never going to let us out of here, not after what we've seen. Don't you understand? They've clearly seen this before. This reaction is too quick and too coordinated for this to be the first time this disease, this curse, has struck the world. But have you ever heard of it? No, and I'll tell you why. It's because they don't leave any survivors."

Somehow, she had stumbled into a very paranoid but very plausible theory. The military was incredibly coordinated and on the ball. There might be something to what she was saying. Unfortunately, I was not the only person who realized that, because a lot of the NPCs that had been largely ignoring her as an overreacting, entitled, well, hysteric, were suddenly listening closely.

"The only way they might let us out," Kitty theorized, "is if we kill all of the infected. If there's no chance of spreading that disease, no chance of succumbing to it, why, it's not like they could just shoot us in the head. We're Carouselians. They're not going to shoot their own people, not if we're uninfected."

People were nodding and slowly considering her words, and the truth was, I didn't really have a good argument against it. Obviously, the “one of these zombies is a dear friend of mine, and I have it on good authority that she will get better” excuse wouldn't fly.

"Now hold on," I said. "Let's not go making conclusions before we've even gathered the facts. We just wait. I bet the military's going to reach out to us. It's not like they can hold this whole speedway in lockdown indefinitely. We can outlast this situation."

Was I coming across as too naive? If this were an ordinary zombie movie that I was watching, how would I feel if a character said that? I would immediately know that they were marked for death because mercy for the undead, or any creature superficially categorized with the undead, was basically a death sentence.

I would have to risk it. By my estimation, I was already next on the targeting order after Ramona. It wasn't like I could jinx myself any worse than I already had.

All my counterargument had really accomplished was giving Kitty someone to point at every time she said something unhinged.

"And this man would have us die, starving to death, or gnawing at the air like all those creatures out there before he's ready to see the truth."

I rolled my eyes On-Screen, I figured my character would.

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This went on for quite a while. Kitty was really hamming it up, giving Carousel all the footage it would need to help establish a strong argument for the mass murder of those poor, sick people outside who wanted to eat us.

Luckily, Camden came through with a slight change of subject, or at least one of his improvisations did.

Camden's old friend Jeremy, if that was his real name, managed to break through the radio static and reestablish contact on Camden's improvised device.

"Camden, you there?" he asked.

"I'm here," Camden answered. "Although I think you just broke protocol."

"Well, they'll have to fire me. They're already going to if they knew I was digging where I've been digging," Jeremy said.

Like before, the conversation gathered a crowd.

"What do you got for me, Jeremy?" Camden said.

"Bad news, and a lot of it," the other man said. "Wish I had something better for you."

"All news is good news," Camden said. "New information can help us make better decisions."

He looked up at the crowd of NPCs as he said that, as if he was trying to pre-program them to react well. If he had invested in more Moxie, that might have worked.

"We'll see," Jeremy said. "I managed to find one of our boys who's currently working in T.O.M.B. He's just there to observe and report, but he knows an awful lot about what you're going through right now."

The way that this guy was talking led me to believe that he wasn't lying about it being bad news.

"They've been tracking this illness for years now. Crops up, usually during the summer. Usually in crowded spaces. That makes sense. Individuals who get infected tend to go looking to spread the disease. But the good news on that is that they are only infectious for a few days. After that, the virus kind of calls it quits, and the body's immune system can fight back."

"That's great news," Camden said.

"That's not all," Jeremy said. "The thing is, the government is very careful not to let any infected accidentally wander off. Could you imagine if this happened in a city? By God, it would be a disaster. The protocol is to quarantine indefinitely and to ensure all traces of the virus have been vaporized."

"That is bad news," Camden admitted.

It also didn't really connect with what we knew about the storyline. The part where they stopped spreading the disease after a certain amount of time and their immune systems managed to fight it made sense, but how did we get a satisfying win condition if the military isn't going to let us live anyway? Did we have to wait for Kimberly to recover from the illness and then sneak her out of here?

We would have to cross that bridge when we came to it.

"That's not even the worst of it," Jeremy said. "This virus, the reason the hosts are usually cured within a few days, is because it was designed to work that way."

"Designed?" Camden asked. "You're not saying..."

"It looks like this is a biological weapon that's gotten out," Jeremy said. "They're gonna want it concealed with extreme jeopardy. Listen, I'm going to try and get some wheels greased, maybe get you an evac, but I have no promises. You have no idea what our country is willing to do to cover up a fact like this. I'm not even sure that I will go unscathed after finding all this out."

"Sorry about that," Camden said.

"Yeah, me too. I'll be in touch," Jeremy said. "And if I'm not, good luck."

The room was silent after the radio transmission cut out.

"So it sounds like the disease is just going to cure itself," Cassie said with a forced smile, trying to use her incredibly stacked Moxie stat to sway the crowd toward positivity.

But unfortunately, tropes often trumped stats, especially if the stats didn't have a contradicting trope to go along with them.

And Kitty, she had a trope for inciting madness. I didn't even have to see it with my own eyes. I knew it the moment she opened her mouth.

"That seals it," she said. "You heard what the man on the radio said. If there is even one infected person left alive, you heard what they're going to do. Vaporize. They are going to rid the earth of proof we ever even existed."

This got the NPCs riled up real nice.

Suddenly, Doc Rick was very quiet, as was every other NPC that had ever offered a dissenting voice to Kitty's.

"We have to go through every single one of us," she said. "We have to check for any sign of infection."

"Or maybe we could do it on the honor system," Ramona said loudly.

I shot her a glance that said, “What the heck are you doing?” so fast I almost broke my neck. It was obvious that she was becoming infected to the point that she could no longer control herself. Her infected indicator was almost completely solid. She was controlled more by the script now than she was by her own mind.

I felt absolutely awful because I wasn't sure what my character should do.

Kitty glared directly at her. "Check her now."

But of course, Kitty had just spent the last thirty minutes to an hour convincing us that we shouldn't have any contact with the infected, so that particular command went unheeded.

When Kitty realized that no one wanted to touch the feverish, loopy woman who was backing away from the crowd, she pointed her finger at Ramona and said, "Show us your arms. Show us that you haven't been bitten like all those others."

Ramona looked absolutely terrified, but also unable to make an argument for herself.

"Cassie," she said. "Isaac. Tell them to stop."

If there were ever a situation designed in a lab to make Cassie break character, it was this one. How could she possibly betray her character's sister?

"We could just quarantine her," Cassie said. "There's no need for violence."

A noble effort. Definitely helped rehabilitate her character a bit.

"Maybe you should quarantine with her," one of the NPCs said. He was part of the pit crew.

Even though Kitty wasn't the one talking, suddenly it was like several of the NPCs in the crowd had become her talking heads. She sat back and barely suppressed a grin on her face as others started to do her will.

"If you think quarantining is enough, then why don't you do it with her?" another NPC repeated.

"That's not how quarantining works," I said. "We should just let her go. If she's really infected, then she'll be safe outside. Just let her go to the door and climb down the stairs."

But my voice was only one in a crowd and not a popular one. Kitty must have been maxed out on Moxie with a handful of crowd-control tropes to boot. We weren't going to convince them of anything except to kill us, too.

Ramona continued to cry for her brother and sister to help her.

Cassie and Isaac just didn't know what to do, not just for their characters, but as players. What were they supposed to do? They couldn't go with Ramona. That would just lead to them either having to kill her or getting infected themselves.

And the whole thing played out very well for that very reason. The dilemma was real for them. Isaac tried to tell a joke, but I couldn't hear it over the roar of the crowd.

They looked genuinely conflicted. It was a very tense scene.

Meanwhile, Ramona backed away until she was right up against one of the windowpanes framing the nearly panoramic view.

"Wait a second," I said. "Wait a second."

I may not have been able to counter Kitty, but I needed to establish myself as a good guy, even if it made me look a little naïve.

"Look at her. Look at how she's acting. This isn't how those things out there behaved. They couldn't even form complete sentences, or at least not more than one of them. But she's talking to us. She hasn't passed out. She might not even be one of them."

Ramona had begun scratching at the bite mark she had given herself on the arm. The script was telling her to reveal it, and she had to do as commanded.

"Please," she said. "I'll go. I won't hurt you."

An absolute uproar broke out as people argued on both sides, but mostly on the side of killing the sick woman.

It made me wonder where Kimberly and Antoine were. There was no way that she hadn't turned already, but I trusted Antoine to handle the situation. They were down in the garage somewhere. Maybe that's where we all should have been.

Ramona took a step forward, like she was going toward the door to leave, but then a shot rang out, echoing throughout the room.

I didn't see who did it. There were several security personnel there, including Camden, who had guns. In fact, the NPC we had come with, who had broken his leg, also had a gun. Was Carousel going to make us play some sort of social deduction game to figure out who had done it?

In the end, it didn't matter. Ramona grabbed at her side and fell backward toward the glass, which had been shattered by the bullet that passed through her.

The glass gave way as she fell from the owner's suite tower onto the roof of the garage below.

She wasn't moving, but I could tell she wasn't dead. On the red wallpaper, she was fully infected, and with that, First Blood had finally passed.

Outside, the hordes of zombies didn't notice what had happened. Those who heard the bullet were quickly distracted by their more important task of shuffling around.

But I did notice one thing. Their Plot Armor, which ranged from eighteen all the way up to sixty depending on how big a group they were in, had dropped five points here, ten points there, seven points on the other side.

Cassie's trope, which had doomed Ramona, had also debuffed the zeds. And while they were still a threat, especially in large groups, those tiny drops might be just what allowed us to survive.

Some people lost their nerve in their absolute devotion to Kitty's message after the shot rang out. Many people blamed her, but I knew how this worked. They would act like the death of a young woman was appalling, something they didn't want to be connected to, but it was all just an act.

When push came to shove, they were going to choose to be on the side that shoved.