The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

We found a recharging station for the golf carts. It was locked behind a collection of chain-link fence panels on the far wall of one of the tunnels we were searching. The fence formed a tall semi-circular enclosure against the back wall, maybe thirty feet by twenty, with rows of golf carts parked nose-to-tail inside like a livestock pen. At the back of the enclosure was a small wooden shed where the maintenance crews stored spare batteries, jumper cables, and a wall of charging stations that seemed like overkill for the number of golf carts here.

It looked like a rest stop to us.

Isaac had more or less paid his life to buy us this reprieve. It could have just as easily been me. Now, we were down one scout with Second Blood looming on the horizon. Things were only going to get worse from here.

Danny set his camera down on a milk crate inside the station and faced it back at us. We sat with our backs to the inner walls of the shed, our feet stretched toward the middle, as we did our best to get some sleep. Of course, we decided to get some exposition out of the way just in case.

"You really think that’s going to fry them?" Danny asked Camden as he glanced out a crack in the door toward the chain-link fence that surrounded us. A network of jumper cables, golf-cart batteries, and a few random circuits from a disassembled alarm system were wired into the chain-link. "I think we’d need a lot more batteries."

Camden didn’t even open his eyes to answer.

"Isn’t supposed to fry them," he said. "Might give a nasty shock to one or two, I don’t know. Once it draws the current to shock them, the alarm is rigged to go off."

Cassie cried silently as we waited. Anna tried to comfort her, but it wasn’t enough. It was nothing but soft whispers that I couldn’t hear over my own heartbeat.

"How is it you know how to rig something like that so fast?" Danny asked. "You look like you’ve done it before."

"Oh, I’ve done more with less," Camden said. "I thought those days were in the past."

"What are you, military?" Antoine asked, his eyes never straying from the very docile Kimberly.

Camden laughed. "Not originally. They figured it was easier to teach me to shoot a gun than it was to teach a soldier to do what I do."

I suppressed a giggle. Camden was having fun with his new background. "And what is it you do?" I asked.

"That’s classified."

"Even now?" I asked. "I mean, if there was ever a time—"

"Even now," he said, managing to sound both badass and a bit haunted.

We sat in silence for a while. Carousel brought us On-Screen whenever the conversation picked back up. It seemed to know when we were about to say something it wanted to capture.

"So, you used to be like these TOMB people outside?" Kelsey asked. She played her character pretty quietly. Her build was not exactly perfect for this storyline. She was more of a supernatural investigator type.

Camden didn’t answer.

After a beat, Kelsey continued. "You even make people disappear?"

At first, it seemed like Camden wouldn’t answer again, but then he said, "Yes."

"Is that what’s going to happen to us?" she asked.

Again, he waited before he said, "Yes."

Oof. Heavy. Too bad Isaac wasn’t around anymore.

"No," Antoine said. "There’s no way. There are thousands of people locked in here."

"Victims of a truly heinous terrorist attack, I’m sure. They might call it a neurotoxin, maybe radiation. Might even get creative and invent bio-engineered fungal spores. Whatever they call it, no one will know what really happened to us. The thing is, if a conspiracy seems too big and complicated to have happened, people never check whether it did. We have no shortage of enemies willing to claim this death toll. The knowledge of what happened here will die with us if we can’t get it out."

I nudged Camden. I liked how he was developing his character, but if these secretive military folks were going to be our enemies, we didn’t need to talk about how capable they were. That could only help them.

"All I can’t figure out is what they’re waiting for. Why let us sweat it all night long?" Danny asked. "If they wait too long, shouldn’t the infected start getting better? You’d think they’d want to take them out before they’re capable of testifying."

I let Danny start having lines, and he was taking over. There was a bit of a fanatic in him, I could tell.

"Better is relative," Antoine said. "They are still sick. Beating the virus doesn’t mean they’ll be healthy. Dehydration will take them out if nothing else does. Maybe they’re just waiting for easier targets."

"Let’s not be easy targets then," Kelsey said.

"I don’t plan on it," he said.

Off-Screen.

We tried to get some real sleep over the next few hours, but were mostly unsuccessful. We would never learn our lesson. As much as we wanted to sleep, the excitement and anticipation were hard to shake.

The sole exception to this, of course, was Danny, who seemed to be able to sleep on command. All in all, it didn’t seem like he was having that bad a time.

Eventually, I rose up from my place in the circle and wandered outside of the shed to check the perimeter of the enclosed fence. There was nothing but golf carts lined up in neat little rows, but walking felt productive. Practicing the routes we would take when we had to escape eased my nerves.

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It was a pretty standard setup for rest points in a horror movie. No matter from which direction the zombies approached us, we would have an exit. I didn’t know what was happening elsewhere while we were Off-Screen, and I wasn’t looking forward to finding out.

For a moment, I played with the idea of taking a golf cart with us. It would definitely help with hauling Kimberly around, but that was just a dream. At the end of the day, as convenient as they would be, they looked too silly, and I wasn’t sure that they could outrun a human running at full pace.

"This isn’t your kind of storyline, is it?" someone asked behind me. It was Anna. I could tell even though she had to whisper.

She looked sad. It was hard to take her emotions at face value, given that she was wearing a race car driver’s outfit, but I did my best to read her face.

"Not too big on the narrative," I said. "We’re just running around and trying not to die. Not that I’m complaining after that last one. It had an excessive plot."

She spilled out some things she had been waiting to say.

"I told myself that I was going to step up in this storyline, but I can’t ever find an opportunity. I feel like I’m just getting in the way." She tucked her hands into the sleeves of her racing suit and stared at the floor. "I wish that we were actually just fighting the zombies. I think I could do well if we were."

"I’m sure you’ll get your chance," I said. "We need to make whatever narrative momentum we have work for Kimberly and Antoine’s thing. You don’t need to worry about it. Just focus on rising to the occasion in the finale. I’m sure you’ll figure it out. It’s like you said: this is mostly just running around and trying not to die, and you’re pretty good at that."

She smiled, but I could tell she was doing it to humor me. Whatever I had said wasn’t what she was looking for.

"What’s up?" I asked.

"You know, back before I died and got taken out of the game for a while, I told myself that I had to be brave because you guys needed me. Because Kimberly needed me," she said. She crouched down beside a disassembled golf cart and started rolling a loose bolt between her fingers. "But it turned out that you didn’t."

"Trust me," I said. "We sorely missed you. There’s no way we could be where we are if we didn’t have you and Camden back. We were stretched thin there toward the end, before we got you."

Anna nodded. "Camden’s really taken to this. You guys used a lot of Savvy-based gameplay, and that’s his thing anyway. I guess I don’t know what I’m supposed to be. A Final Girl is the main character, but I’m not that. I’m just a backup plan. Even Carousel thinks so. It gave me a background trope to mock me."

She wasn’t wrong. To tell the truth, I blamed myself for her decline. I didn’t know what to do with a Final Girl either. Not without stepping on Kimberly’s toes. We had worked hard to make up for the loss of Anna and Camden, and for Anna’s part, we had done a great job.

"Every time I’m On-Screen, I feel like I’m just stealing from you guys," she said. "I don’t know how to fix that. All of my tropes tell this story that I’m just some friend that you guys have, and yeah, you’re supposed to protect me until the end, but it still feels like it’s all about you, and I’m just in the way. I’m a prop."

There were deeper feelings going on here. I understood what she was going through, but my thoughts on them never managed to pass the brain-mouth barrier. Feeling insignificant compared to the others was something I was used to, at first. I hadn’t felt that way in a while.

"The Final Girl is supposed to take up screen time," I said. "She’s supposed to engage with the enemy and take focus so that the minor characters can do their job in the background. At some point in time, you’re just going to have to embrace it."

My advice came across as mechanical. It was a gameplay tip at best.

I couldn’t see her face perfectly because it was pretty dark, and if I didn’t know better, it looked like she was intentionally staying in the shadows.

I waited, expecting her to say something in response. She was thinking, but she never did say.

All she did was point out toward the fence that Camden had electrified using his nonsense science.

We had company. Luckily, they hadn’t discovered us yet, exactly. It was a horde of zombies, none of which I recognized, wandering aimlessly and slowly through a large open area in the underground. Eventually, they would find us.

They all muttered whatever phrase they were stuck with, softly.

But these were just searching. Even when they got close enough to see us, and we went On-Screen, they didn’t react like they saw their meal in front of them, because we were moving slowly and quietly, too.

I began to wonder how these zombies could be a proper threat in a horror movie. They were easy to manipulate. There was precedent for Carousel to let its creatures act like themselves at first, but by the end of the film, they would act more like their movie counterparts. The Shapeless Ones had been forced into the role of sideshow monster in much the same way.

I wondered what trick or twist might transform these very predictable infected humans into a proper zombie horde for Carousel’s bigger scenes later on.

We slowly walked over to the shed where everyone else was staying and roused them from their fake sleep. They rose quietly, and we all left the shed one at a time, trying our best not to trigger the squeaky door.

The enclosed area we were in was slowly being surrounded by the Sleep Talkers. Their whispers started to echo strangely off the walls, speeding up as they bounced around. The zombies got faster, but only a little.

We moved slowly toward the place where the fence was poorly bolted into the wall. Antoine quickly moved the metal fence end panel just enough for us to walk through. I had to help him get Kimberly through, and she went along with it.

And then the first zombie touched the electrified area of the fence. Its belly hit the wire Camden had strung up, triggering his alarm.

The alarm was the bait. That part of the plan was obvious. Less obvious was what Camden had done to the fence itself.

He had loosened every structural support along one entire row of fence panels and the supports of every panel adjacent to them. They were still standing. They still looked like a fence. But each panel now hung from its neighbors rather than being bolted to the floor.

When the zombies surged toward the alarm, they pushed against the loose panels in a wave. The fence didn’t resist. It folded around them as they moved forward between two rows of golf carts.

The first row of zombies pressed forward, and the chain of fence panels moved with them. The second row pushed into the first. The third pushed into the second. Each panel pivoted on the unsteady joint of the panel beside it, accordion-style, the whole length of the fence collapsing toward the alarm in a series of bends and twists.

The golf carts on either side did the rest. The fence couldn’t spread outward; the parked carts hemmed it in. So as more zombies pushed, the panels closed in on the ones already pressed flat between the cart rows, wrapping the front-rank zombies in a chain-link squeeze until they couldn’t move their arms.

By the time the alarm went silent, most of the horde was tangled in a folded ribbon of fence panels, pinned between the rows of golf carts. A few in the back tried to pull free. One of them saw us and tried to chase, but the others on either side of it were locked in, and it dragged the whole twisted mass with it for half a step before stopping.

It was a bit overkill, but it wasn’t like we could take a nap without setting a trap, and Carousel might like the footage.

We moved forward for a while after that, Off-Screen. This Speedway must have been four times as big underground as above. The next set piece in Carousel’s tale, however, had its own problems.

On-Screen.

We were in a larger, darker room, and this one had its own problems. Apparently, Carousel had lost interest in the zombies we trapped in the fence panels.

"Be very quiet," I said in the most hushed, whispered voice I could. "Act like them."

This room had been filled with dozens of zombies. The thing was, they were asleep. It was like a whole storage room where they had congregated. Some had lain down to sleep, but most stood, and the only reason I knew that was that they weren’t saying their little phrases quickly or loudly. It almost sounded like they were saying them through snores.

We moved forward slowly, spaced out. We had talked about this exact scenario because I knew it would happen. The moment I saw that they were Light Sleepers, we were going to have to do the scene where we tried not to wake the zombies, and right before we got through, we were going to fail. That was how it worked.

All I had left to do was wonder how Carousel would put its twist on it.