The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

We moved down into the garage: Camden, Danny, Anna, Kelsey, and me, while Cassie and Isaac stayed upstairs to help quell any curious NPCs.

Before Danny started recording, we took all the proper precautions. Antoine, Anna, and Kelsey were already pretty well protected because they were dressed as race car drivers, and between their gloves and thick coveralls, they could likely withstand a few bite attempts, and scratches were out of the realm of possibility.

But just to be sure, Anna stood by with a racing helmet, ready to muzzle Kimberly at a moment's notice.

But that wasn't entirely necessary.

When we opened the tool cabinet, we found Kimberly sitting down with her knees to her chest. Her eyes were open, but other than that, it seemed like she was asleep.

Except for what she was whispering.

"These meetings are always pointless," was what she said. Something mundane and completely stripped of all narrative weight, just like every other zombie.

She wasn't attacking. She was barely even responding to us. We were quiet, and we didn't move quickly. Just as I theorized, some combination of that kept her pretty calm. One of these zombies was not much of a danger. It was the groups that were scary.

Her face was bloated and red, as were the whites of her eyes. It wasn't a pretty picture. She didn't even look at Antoine when he moved to get closer to her. He was being cautious and gentle with his gloved hands, making sure that she couldn't grab him or claw at him, and he was always ready in case she bared her teeth.

The lights were off. We held our breath in hopes that she wouldn’t attack.

She didn’t attack. In a way, it was worse. She ignored us.

Danny had already started filming, and Antoine was acting as one would in a found-footage film. He occasionally looked at the camera.

"Kimberly," he said softly.

Whatever we did, we needed to speak softly. I didn't know the specifics, but I knew these zombies reacted to tone.

"Kimberly, it's Antoine. Look, we can't stay where we are for long," he said. "And these folks, they aren't sure about you, about whether it's worth trying to move you or if we're just leaving you here. So I need you to talk to me. Please."

Kimberly ignored him, although the way she said her canned phrase, "These meetings are always pointless," changed to match his manner of speaking.

"These meetings are always pointless," she said in a soft voice.

"Kimberly, you need to say something. Show us that you're still in there," Antoine said. "You have to fight through this."

He continued like this for another five minutes with no success.

I signaled for Danny to stop filming, and he did.

"Kimberly," I said, "if you're in there, we need you to fight, to use your Grit. Antoine has his Willpower Is Magic trope, which means you can fight through this disease. You just have to do it. It'll hurt, but you have to do it. We need to make yourself sympathetic to the audience, or we are going to lose."

I spoke clearly, as if she was in there somewhere, struggling.

We had been through a lot together, and I could always count on her to follow my direction, and she would always exceed expectations. I had to believe in her the way she believed in me.

"Action," I said.

Danny started recording again.

"Kimberly," Antoine said, "please help me convince them that you're in there, that you're not just a monster. Please."

"These meetings are always pointless," she said, but it was different. She slurred her words. I had to believe that was Kimberly fighting on the inside.

Antoine apparently believed that too.

"Kimberly, please, just say something. Let us know you're in there," he said.

He was crying at this point, and it wasn't acting. He was genuinely distraught.

"These meetings," she started to say.

"Kimberly," he said as he kissed one of her hands.

She started to mumble. I couldn't tell what she was saying, but it wasn't the canned phrase that her feverish mind was caught in a loop, repeating.

She was fighting. Antoine continued to plead with her.

"Kimberly, we need to survive this if we are going to do the things that we planned on. If we're going to escape, if we're going to be happy together, I need you to show us that you're in there. Please."

A moment passed, and then suddenly, her eyes, which had been lazily affixed forward, darted toward Antoine. Everyone tensed up, including him, because we thought she was about to go in for a bite.

But what she did instead was grab for her stomach, her hands trembling.

"Save the," she started to say.

Antoine leaned in, trying to hear what she was whispering.

"Save the baby," she said as her hands cradled her stomach.

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Kimberly, you old cliché. I couldn’t blame her for being repetitive in her current state.

"A baby?" Antoine asked. "Kimberly, are you pregnant?"

"Save," she started to say, but she was fading away. A bloody tear fell from the corner of her eye. "Save the," she tried to say again.

But she was gone.

"This meeting was pointless," she said as if she were in great pain.

How many times had she used the I'm Pregnant trope to give herself a little extra Grit? If memory served, I had bought that for her at the pawn shop, and it had become, I wouldn't say a crutch, but definitely an old standby.

She didn't have it equipped, and yet somehow, her Grit went up all the same.

Maybe Carousel was hiding her tropes, or maybe something else was at work. It didn't matter because she had just given us exactly what we needed.

Just a little extra nudge to get the audience on our side.

It was strange when I thought about it. The trope of a woman being pregnant during a zombie outbreak was actually more common than I realized. The problem was, it didn't always work. I hoped that this time it would.

We got everything we could have hoped for and more. Kimberly had fought through the disease and maybe given us enough to save her and ourselves.

We quickly put her back in the tool cabinet, just as Antoine had her previously, while we worked up a plan in case we needed to make a quick getaway.

At that point, my headset, which I was still wearing around my neck, sounded with Isaac's voice.

"You guys had better get up here," he said.

He didn't elaborate, but that was typical for movies, so we found our way up to the owners’ suites to see what all the vagueness was about.

The sun had set far enough that it was beyond the grandstand, but there was enough light in the atmosphere that we could still see around.

And what we saw was shocking, but then, so was what we heard.

It was a person talking, and what they were saying was dreadfully unimportant. They squealed and then said, "It's just my size!"

That was all I heard. It was a recording playing over some speakers on the north side of the track. I didn't know exactly where the speakers were, but I could hear them over there. It was possible that they were outside the fence.

Squeal. "It's just my size!"

Squeal. "It's just my size!"

The recording continued on a loop. Maybe the military had found the clip in a TV commercial. It was high-pitched and high-energy, and the zombies reacted to it like catnip. All of them did. They started moving toward that side of the track. They ran, and when they got there, they searched in vain for people to infect.

At first, I didn't understand what was happening. I thought maybe some NPCs had come up with a plan of escape. It was incredibly unclear. At that moment, we were just an audience to whatever was going on.

Kitty Lincoln was sure to find a way to interpret it as good news, that we were being rescued, and then immediately bad news, because she didn't trust the paramilitary organization surrounding us.

She continued doing this Off-Screen, and I looked over at her just to admire her work. It was seamless and very well-practiced.

"They're setting some kind of trap," she said. "I can just tell. If they wanted to help us, they would have done this from the beginning."

The way she said it was annoying, like she was trying to be annoying, but what she was saying made sense.

In fact, she was confirmed to be right because, on the exact opposite side of the racetrack, there was activity happening at the far gate. We couldn't quite tell what was going on because it was obscured by advertisements. We knew that there were vehicles out there and multiple large cranes moving something that we couldn't see.

"They're going to open up the gate," one of the NPCs said. "They're going to let us out. We need to go down there now."

"You'd be walking to a slaughter," Kitty said. "I would sooner trust the raging freaks."

After a few minutes, the gate opened wide. If we had been right there, we could have walked outside and been free of this place.

The cranes were hoisting a metal shipping container, moving it slowly toward the open gate but not letting it pass all the way through.

While I was interested in the cargo container, I was more interested in what I saw coming from the deluxe RV park south of us. We could barely see it because of the position of the windows in the tower we were in, so we all had to squish together to get a good look.

It turned out there were more groups of survivors than just us, and one of them had been holed up in some of the RVs. That must have been a truly terrifying experience because I knew for a fact that some of the infected had been wandering through that area.

Those survivors left their RVs and started running as fast as they could across the field, jumping the barrier onto the track and then climbing the slanted track to the best of their ability to get up to the grassy hillside between them and the open gate.

This place really was a kill box, wasn't it? We had chosen it knowing it would give Carousel lots of opportunities, and we hoped it would repay us in kind. I still wasn't sure whether that was working out.

The group had maybe nine people in it, and they were working together to get across the barriers and climb the hill, but before they could get to the exit, men in gas masks with firearms and ghillie suits stepped into the gap between the fence and the cargo container and pointed their weapons at the survivors.

Several of us gasped. We were expecting the worst to happen, but shots never rang out. The survivors merely raised their hands and began begging to be let out. This went on for minutes, and they were incredibly tense, though being unable to hear anything happening because of the loud recording on the other side of the Speedway took some of the tension out.

Squeal. “It’s just my size!”

Soon, the armed commandos moved out of the way as large barriers were placed between the outside gate and the cargo container, creating a seal so that nobody could walk through the opening in the gate anymore.

A soldier climbed onto the top of the container and leaned over, using a long implement to unlock it from the top. Then he twisted some sort of crowbar-like mechanism, and the doors to the container flung open.

For a moment, all I could see inside was darkness.

But then people started to emerge from the container. Well, they weren't quite people. Not at the moment.

They were infected. There were probably fifty of them total. Two of them were dressed like soldiers, three of them were cops, and six were in scrubs, maybe doctors or nurses.

"Most of them are dockworkers," Cassie said.

She was right. Their clothes told a story. The infection must have come from somewhere on the docks, which I knew were near the Speedway.

"They're pouring all the infected who got out back in," Kitty said.

Danny had been filming the whole time, but I realized we were back On-Screen. Carousel wanted to see our reaction to this.

The new zombies were dazed at first, but then they heard the recording and started moving toward it.

The group of nine survivors had long since started trying to flee back to their hiding spot.

Unfortunately, they weren't fast enough.

While the zombies were interested in the recording, as soon as they saw running people, they did what they always did and started copying. Then, when they got close enough, some instinct within them compelled them to tackle and start biting the survivors.

I could already see it happening before it did. One of the victims screamed, which triggered something in all the others, increasing their bloodthirst and speed, and soon all nine of the attempted escapees were overtaken.

"That's it," Kitty said. "Don't you see? They're dumping all the infected here. They want all of us stuck here. They don't care whether or not we're one of them. They don't care if we're not infected. Didn't you see that?"

The NPCs were stunned. In fact, I was a little stunned. I didn't expect the military to be so active in the story. TOMB was more than just a secretive quasi-governmental entity. They were downright antagonists.

All I could do was sit back and watch as Kitty explained how obvious it was that the only solution, the only way out, was to eliminate the infected. Good sense had nothing to do with it. She was appealing to fear.

She had been harping on that for quite a while.

I looked over at Antoine, and he looked back at me, and we knew we had to get Kimberly out of there as soon as we possibly could.