Chapter 115: Back To Where It All Started- Part I
I was dying.
Dead Man Walking as a trope was starting to look like a real bust. I lay there on the ground barely able to move. My statuses were flaring constantly, including the one labeled, “Dead.”
And yet I did not die. My sudden boost of grit prevented me from blacking out. My adrenaline was still pumping so I did everything I could to try to get back to the action even though it was hopeless.
My legs weren't doing what I was telling them to do. My arms though, were at least operational. It hurt to move them but I had to try.
I pushed and I crawled for what felt like an eternity but I might have been able to move 5 yards. Just far enough to see the other side of the bed and breakfast. Useless.
As I watched the zombies surrounding the house, something caught my eye. Laying on the ground next to the busted window where the sheriff had presumably been dragged away from, was Antoine's baseball bat.
I couldn't do anything with it but I still tried to crawl toward it.
I failed. I just didn't have it in me.
Something was happening inside of the house that I couldn't see. An argument or a fight. I heard a loud crack and then less than a minute later, Tim, the quiet young grave robber was being drug out of the house kicking and screaming. He was terrified out of his mind.
And then, to my surprise, even though I had literally predicted it On-Screen with Cinema Seer, the dead started to walk away.
They had claimed their last guilty soul.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My mind was so belabored that I could barely hear when Dina finally made her appearance.
“Riley?” She asked quietly. “What happened here? This was supposed to be a straight-up home invasion or something I thought.”
I couldn't speak. I turned to look at her, hoping that I might be able to summon some information for her that would help us. The Finale wasn't over.
We still had a fight. I could hear something going on in the house. There was one last enemy to be defeated.
With my last bit of strength, I pointed over toward Antoine’s baseball bat. That would have to be my contribution. Dina seemed to understand. She quickly walked over, grabbed the bat, and then took a deep breath before walking around to the other side of the bed and breakfast.
The entire encounter was off-screen. To the audience, I was likely dead.
Soon after that, I died for real.
I woke in a theater watching the remainder of the story.
Merritt stormed out of the bed and breakfast like he was going to chase after the zombie horde. He looked angry in a way I had not yet seen him. All of his tropes were designed to maximize how dangerous he was the more desperate he was. They also made him stronger if his brother was killed. He was probably a real threat in that moment.
He screamed back in the house, “Why didn't they take me? They took my brother; why didn't they take me?”
Samantha walked out of the house with a limp. She had been struck in the face. After a moment it became clear that she was probably hit with the same hammer that Merritt had in his hand.
“You didn’t hurt them,” Samantha said. “They only wanted to get revenge on those who disturbed their peace.”
Merritt didn’t take that well. Unfortunately, he was beyond reason.
“You did this!” he screamed. “You… invited them, didn’t you?”
“No, I swear,” Samantha cried out.
Merritt grabbed her and lifted the hammer over his head. Before he could bring the hammer down on Samantha, something struck him.
He jumped out of the way, reeling in pain from the hit.
Standing behind him, holding Antoine's baseball bat, was Dina.
Merrick didn't hesitate to attack her. She swung at him, but he was stronger and completely unafraid of being hit.
He managed to strike her in the arm with the hammer. She had high grit, so it looked like she would recover.
Then he tackled her. He pinned her against the ground with one hand and raised the hammer. He struck her three times, though I couldn't actually see the blows.
In an instant, one of the dogs that had been in the house ran outside and latched on to Merritt, but he easily threw the dog aside.
It was enough of a distraction for Dina to take the baseball bat and hit Merritt in the face with it. It wasn't a hard swing and she didn't have much leverage, but it was enough to get him to fall off of her so that she could get up.
She then went for another blow onto his back.
She was causing damage, but not enough.
Just as he was about to attack her again, he was struck by a flying coffee table. An entire coffee table.
The camera cut to Antoine standing in the doorway. It looked like he had been badly beaten. Still, he limped out the door, and with each step, he seemed to get stronger and bolder.
Merritt lay on the ground trying to scramble to his feet.
Antoine stopped next to Dina and held out his hand. Dina handed over the baseball bat.
He laid into Merritt screaming and raging. He struck him over and over and over.
Eventually, the muted thumps of the baseball bat gave way to crunchy wet sounds of the baseball bat having destroyed Merritt’s skull.
After that, the camera panned around to the results of the carnage. It showed undead Kimberly lumbering to the graveyard and finding a hole that had been dug. She lowered herself down into the hole, giving one look back toward the bed and breakfast.
It showed Bobby lying on the floor of the upstairs landing. He was dead. I couldn't see his head but from the amount of blood, it looked like that hammer had been involved. Merritt must have killed him while I was lying around useless.
I woke up quickly. I was lying on the ground fifteen feet or so from where I had died. Zombie Riley had been trying to crawl to the cemetery. All healed up, I stood and ran around the bed and breakfast to find Antoine and Dina standing almost in the same place as they had been in the movie.
They had been healed, as had Samantha. It only took another minute for Bobby to make his way down.
“Kimberly's in a grave at the cemetery,” I said.
Antoine looked in that direction and soon we were all walking there, the five of us.
With every step, I started to wonder what the point of all this was. Why had we been summoned to this place?
Wasn't this supposed to be the special storyline that would somehow reveal everything to us? It wasn't so long ago that we were contemplating whether or not we would get rescue tropes as a reward for this storyline but once we got here everything that I had been predicting had been thrown asunder.
This storyline wasn't easy, but Samantha's intervention had probably made things more better, not worse. Those zombies definitely helped us take out the bad guys.
That wasn't supposed to be what happened. This was supposed to be an overwhelming challenge and we were supposed to rise to the occasion and prove ourselves. Wasn't that how this part of the story was supposed to go?
Where was all the information about how we had ended up in Carousel? This was the storyline from our world; it was supposed to tell us things that we didn't know, but aside from getting my theories confirmed we hadn't learned anything new. I started to fear in my heart that this whole quest was just a trick. That this was part of the hellish torture that Carousel had prepared for us. That it gave us hope just take it away.
The cemetery was old and it didn't look like anyone had been buried there in over a decade. It was clear to see the destruction that the grave robbers had made on the cemetery. Corpses were littered about. Many had been strung up in trees and used as target practice. Those in the trees were still alive. Those who had returned to the earth appeared to be dead once again.
The ones hanging from the trees would growl and try to shake down from where they were trapped. It was a disturbing sight to see.
We quickly found the hole that Kimberly had lowered herself down into. She was standing next to it brushing graveyard dirt off of herself.
She wasn't ready to talk when we arrived. I couldn't blame her. That was her first death and though it had been instant I knew that dying took a toll regardless.
Predictably, once we were all gathered together after the storyline, Silas the Mechanical Showman made his appearance.
“Congratulations, you won a ticket!” He said in that tired old tone.
If we were going to get answers, this might be the point where it happened.
We walked closer and as Antoine was about to press the red button, Silas disappeared.
He reappeared 30 yards away eastward.
We looked at each other in confusion. Then we walked toward him.
Before we could get close enough to push his button, he disappeared again and reappeared 30 yards further in that same direction.
And so we followed, our paths lit by the moon and Silas' yellow lights.
As we went I noticed there was something very strange about this cemetery. At first, it appeared to be a regular lot with 100 or so graves out in the backwoods like I had been expecting. But the further we walked, the further the cemetery went.
Soon we had left the cemetery proper and yet we still saw graves in the forest. We even saw bodies strung up in the trees the same as we had around the cemetery. They moved and growled but they didn't seem too harmful.
And it just kept going like that for hundreds of yards.
We walked for 10 minutes. 20 minutes. Half an hour.
More graves and more bodies strung up in trees.
“Is this a glitch?” Antoine asked.
I wasn't sure.
“Maybe,” I said. “Might just be how Carousel manages to get an unlimited amount of zombies. In zombie movies, there are always tons of them and they seem to come out of nowhere. Maybe this is just how Carousel pulls off that trick.”
I wasn't sure though. If it was a glitch, what would it mean?
“I'm so sorry,” Samantha said.
I turned to look at her. My heart raced just from the possible implications of what she had just said. What was she sorry about?
“I told you I would do anything to save you,” she said. She was crying. She looked terrified. “This was the only way.”
“What are you talking about?” Antoine asked.
But before she could answer I realized that something was different. I heard something in the distance and right behind me at the same time. Breathing.
It was the axe murderer. I could hear him back in the direction that we had come from. That was the gift of having been in his presence before. I could detect him.
“Go,” she said. “Go!”
“Let’s move,” I said. I needed to be careful because one wrong word and I would be cut in half.
I ushered the others to move quickly.
“What's going on?” Dina asked.
I didn't have time to think about an answer.
“We need to follow Silas,” I said.
Maybe it was something in the tone of my voice but they stopped questioning me for at least that moment.
Samantha stayed behind. She turned and started walking, then running back in the direction we had come from.
Ten minutes later, the sound of the breathing had faded. I could only guess what had happened.
How many rules had she broken to help us?
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