The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Theoretically, you never had to lose a player outside of First or Second Blood. Baked into that calculation is the idea that you will be taking on storylines that are at or below your current level. We rarely seemed to do that anymore.

I had studied these zombies from the moment I first saw them. I had looked at their tropes up and down and formed a mental image of everything they might do to the best of my knowledge. Despite all my planning, I should have been prepared, but Carousel was always ready to illustrate the gulf between theory and practice.

There is nothing as scary as the dark and things that scurry in it. These infected people were unnerving, not just scary-looking because of their swollen faces or how they bared their teeth like animals. They were uncanny. Whatever this virus did to their minds, you could almost see them reusing habits and muscle memory that the real person had developed over a lifetime.

You could almost piece together the different movements they were accessing in their host’s brain as they began mimicking us moving across the room.

The temperature had gotten warmer in the hours we’d been in the tunnels. All those bodies, all running fevers, breathing the same dim air. It smelled like sweat and copper and something sweeter underneath that I didn’t want to name. The standing zombies swayed faintly in place, and once I noticed it, I couldn’t unnotice that they were all swaying together, slowly, like grass blowing in a wind I couldn’t feel.

Were they attacking? It wasn’t clear at first. But when they saw us moving, they snapped out of whatever sleep they might have been in, and they began moving with us. At first, a few, and then their numbers grew.

Walk calmly. That was the trick. I rolled my shoulders forward, let my jaw slacken open, and drew my breath in through my mouth in time with the infected woman nearest me. These creatures matched pitch. They breathed deeply as their bodies fought through fevers, their feet dragged at the ground, and they stumbled halfway through the mechanics of walking as each new sound seemed to process in their minds, and they had to make a split-second decision on whether to keep going or change course.

All the while, they whispered.

"I can’t lower the price myself," one said as it came up alongside me in lockstep. I thought of this woman as an "it," even though I knew it was just a sick older lady. It really was that quick. I could redefine a person deep down into my subconscious.

She walked to my right as we slowly made our way across the room, and some other zombies joined us, like we were a part of their pack. They even walked in front of us. Whenever we came across an extra bit of light, I would look around at my friends and see their panic-stricken faces.

Antoine was the best at hiding his, but even he couldn’t hide his worry about Kimberly.

We were halfway across the room when I looked back and saw that almost all the zombies that had been in this part of the underground were now a part of our roaming pack. What were we supposed to do? We could no longer go through them to get to the other side. They were following us.

Even if we reached our destination, how would we separate ourselves? If walking slowly caused them to join us and walking quickly caused them to attack us… There were so many questions, and I would have to make the call myself. I would have to figure out the answer while scared out of my mind.

But that was my job.

I wasn’t the only one with a job, though.

Even with the whispers from the zombies as they each said their repetitive phrases, it somehow seemed quiet, like all the whispers blended together to make TV static, and my mind got used to it.

All I could hear were those whispers and my heartbeat, but I focused on the silence between them all, the unexpected things that I needed to hear.

Camden was in the lead because he actually had some general idea of where we should be going from his glimpse at the map of the underground. It was clear that Carousel had not recreated that map perfectly. It didn’t need to. The audience wouldn’t know any difference. What Carousel really wanted were scenes worth the final cut.

As far as I could tell, we only had a straightaway. All other exits out of the room were back behind us, so I could guess where we were going.

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I continued to listen between the whispers, and when the next sound came, I almost yelped.

It was actual static. The kind that came over a radio, not just the kind my mind formed from thousands of whispers.

Camden’s homemade long-range communication device hadn’t made a peep since we went into the underground, but suddenly it started firing up with bursts of violent static. I couldn’t hear any intelligible words on the other end, and Camden was quick to turn it off, though I was almost certain it was already off. Carousel must have been playing tricks on us.

We continued moving slowly, hoping that the burst of noise wouldn’t trigger the zombies, and we got lucky.

I hoped Carousel was getting its share of footage. But if it really was Carousel who triggered the static, then it must have been disappointed, because it seemed like nothing had happened as a result. The zombies stayed pretty chill. But then I remembered that static carried additional meaning on this team.

Cassie had her Déjà Vu F.M. trope equipped, and it was reportedly the one that was working best for her in this low-psychic storyline.

I waited until I got a bit of light and looked back at her. She made eye contact with me. What I had heard as only static had been something more to her. I watched her piece it together in real time, her eyes going first to me, then past me to the door we were headed for, then zoning out as she planned. She gave me the smallest shake of her head. The psychic message must have only been a few sentences, but it was enough to send her into a panic, or so that’s what she wanted everyone watching to think.

She had slowed down from the rest of the group and was veering off to the right, taking a huge chunk of the zombies right behind her as they mimicked her every move.

We probably only had twelve zombies with us after that maneuver. Whatever she had heard in the static, she was trying to do the best with it she could, and because we were On-Screen, she had no chance to tell us what was about to happen.

When it did happen, it was sudden. I heard the gunshot before I even saw the NPCs.

My feet froze in place. The zombies worked up into a frenzy, but they didn’t start running anywhere, because it wasn’t certain where the noise was coming from in the echoey tunnels.

A flashlight beam cut across the back wall of the room, jerking up to the ceiling, then dragging down across the swaying heads of the zombies. A second beam joined it. Then a third.

"Oh, we found a whole nest." That was Bruce, the large mechanic who had mouthed off at us after trying to keep us from entering the garage hours ago. His voice carried across the chamber like he was calling a square dance. "Easy work, boys. Easy work."

Another shot. A smaller voice from somewhere behind Bruce: "Oh damn. Oh damn, I think I hit a real person."

"They’re all real people, kid," Bruce said. "That’s alright. Keep firing."

The second guy didn’t keep firing. Instead, he clicked a button on a radio and said, “I think I just shot a real person. I didn’t mean to. She was just standing there with all the monsters…”

He was right. He had shot Cassie.

She tried to suppress a scream, but failed as she held on to one of her arms, blood dripping down. She had almost no Grit. This was a terrible injury. I could tell even in the darkness.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The moment she screamed, every zombie in the room turned back toward her. That’s why she had peeled away from the pack. She knew what was coming only a minute before we did.

I didn’t know who that shot was originally intended for, but I doubted it was Cassie.

Bruce’s flashlight beam landed on her face and held as the zombies ripped into her.

I held my breath. He knew Cassie. He had known her for years. Cassie was a Hughes. He was a mechanic for Hughes Racing.

Bruce kept the beam on her face for another second. Then he raised his voice so the rest of his crew could hear him.

"Yeah, she’s with them," he said. "She’s one of ’em now. Look at her."

He started walking toward her, and the rest of them followed.

She screamed, and the zombies continued in on her, biting and hacking at her.

More shots rang out. There was a group of NPCs coming from one of the tunnels back behind us, not the same one we had come through. I recognized some of them from their entries on the Red Wallpaper, even though I couldn’t see them well.

The zombies lost interest in Cassie as the gunshots started ringing. The horde turned on the group of NPCs.

More shots rang out, and then they stopped all of a sudden, and I started hearing melee weaponry beating against human flesh.

Cassie had sacrificed herself for us. The first chance she got to be a proper psychic, she took it. It wasn’t even her turn to go. She was always ready to take the pain in place of her allies.

The last I saw of her was her running, with a horde of zombies chasing her as they ran down one of the tunnels adjacent to the ones the NPCs had come from. Cassie was Mutilated and Infected on the Red Wallpaper. I wished her easy travels, but we couldn’t waste the opportunity she gave us.

"Look at her go," Bruce said, breathing hard between swings. "Look at her go." He laughed at something one of his crew said that I couldn’t make out. "Yeah, well. She always thought she was better than the rest of us."

Someone in the crew said something I couldn’t hear, and a couple of them laughed. Bruce told them to spread out. "Two on the door. Couple of you with me. We sweep the room, then we move."

"Run," I said. We needed to look like people, not zombies, and all of the infected were already distracted, so we took off, Camden in the lead. We needed to get Kimberly out of there.

Anna hesitated, but Kelsey pulled her onward.

We were falling one at a time. I just hoped that there were enough of us that by the end, we would still have survivors. If that moment had happened a scene or two later, Cassie could have been Second Blood, perhaps, but unfortunately, the timing just didn’t work out.

We ran into the darkness, and we didn’t stop until we found the safe room and had its heavy doors closed behind us.