Chapter Eighty-Three: Curtains
The elevator doors opened slowly.
“Something is wrong,” Antoine said. “I told you he should have been back by now.”
The hallway was empty.
Antoine squeezed his way out and held the doors open for Anna and Kimberly to leave.
“Hush,” Antoine said. “Someone is coming.”
He brandished his bat and hid near the corner, ready to bash whoever appeared
As the footsteps got closer, Kimberly held out her hand and grabbed the bat. “Don’t.”
Antoine wasn’t sure, but as the first figure rounded the corner, it was revealed to be Dina’s husband.
“Please!” he begged when he saw Antoine’s bat, “We have children with us!”
“Miss Kimberly!” Bethany Mercer cried out and ran around the corner to greet Kimberly.
“Oh my god, Bethany!” Kimberly said, taking the little girl in her arms. “You’re okay!”
Dina limped around the corner. She was standing on her feet better, likely because of her choice to come to help her allies in the Finale, which buffed her Grit and helped combat her Hobbled status.
There was a silence between them.
Dina's husband was unsure of whether he could trust my friends. After all, they were wearing KRSL uniforms.
After a moment of sizing each other up, Dina asked, “Are we escaping or what?”
Antoine and Dina's husband nodded.
“I'm guessing there's no exit back the way you came,” Antoine said.
“Not that we could see,” Dina said.
“Our coworker, Camden, just went around the other direction. He hasn't come back.”
“Toward the entrance?”
Antoine nodded.
Dina looked past them in the direction Camden had gone. “I would check it out,” she said. “But my right foot is out of commission.”
“I'll go,” Antoine said. “Be ready to run in the other direction.”
He hugged Kimberly and told her that he would be back soon.
He turned and followed in the direction that Camden had gone.
It only took a little while for him to find the path of destruction that the poltergeist had left when attacking Camden. One of the guards was thrown out into the hallway along with all the furniture that they had yanked out of the room in order to get to him.
As soon as he saw the guards and the blood, Antoine ran to the room and quickly looked for his friend. Camden and all of the surviving guards lay sleeping on the floor.
Antoine rushed to Camden’s side. He would have been able to see on the red wallpaper that Camden was still alive. He was simply unconscious. A needle from the sedative still hung out of his arm.
Antoine pulled it out and looked at it. Between the needle and the unconscious guards, he put together what had just happened.
“Clever.”
He picked Camden up and threw him over his right shoulder, easily carrying him.
He glanced at the exit. He didn't see any of the guards.
What to do?
Antoine quickly made his way back to the others.
“Oh my God is he dead?” Dina's husband asked.
“Just knocked out,” Antoine said. “I didn't see anyone up by the exit but that doesn't mean they're not there. There are some dead and unconscious guards. We might be able to get some weapons off of them. They had these weird-looking cone-shaped things as well as some handguns.”
“Those weapons that they carry are sound-based,” Dina said. “I learned about them while I was locked up. One of the guards was really talkative. They tried to use them against the invisible thing. It didn't work.”
Dr. Mentes had mentioned that. The weapons they designed to harm the entity had no effect despite previous indications that they ought to.
“I say we take their handguns and make for the exit,” Anna said.
With me dead and Camden unconscious, there were no high Savvy players to make a plan. That wasn’t to say the others were incapable of making a good plan. On the contrary, they all had their own strengths when it came to strategizing. But the added security of having a high Savvy player make a plan really made things feel safer. That’s what Savvy was for, after all. It helped your plans work better.
“Are you going to lug him around with you?” Dina’s husband asked.
Antoine looked offended at the question. “We can't leave him. He helped us.”
“Let's just go,” Anna said.
She headed off toward the room where Camden had been.
They found three handguns, but only a few rounds of ammo apiece for them. They were lucky to find that much with the way the guards had been blind firing at the Poltergeist.
While each of them was armed, Antoine took the lead. His high Hustle and Mettle was the lethal combo with firearms.
Truthfully, I was concerned. While having the guns might make them feel safe, I worried how Carousel would respond.
As they move closer to the exit, it almost seemed like they were going to make it, but of course, that would have been too easy.
As soon as they exited the hallway and entered the main lobby, the dozen or so remaining guards emerged from the other hallway to the left, their firearms trained on my friends.
“Go back!” Antoine screamed as a hail of bullets started to pelt the wall behind them.
As he followed them back, he fired a shot at one of the guards, striking him in the face and getting a kill. His next few bullets weren't so well-aimed.
As they rounded the corner back the way they had come, Antoine said, “I'm out!”
He had used up all the bullets that his gun had. Kimberly was quick to give hers up, giving Antoine another chance.
Antoine gently placed Camden down against the wall.
“We'll have to come back for him,” he said.
“Steven!” Dina yelled.
I didn’t know who Steven was. I hadn’t seen the first part of the movie.
“Daddy!” Dina’s kids screamed.
Dina’s husband slumped to the floor. A tranquilizer dart was sticking out of his back. He had strayed too far from the group. One of the gunmen must have been aiming for the Mercers with the goal of putting them to sleep.
“What do we do?” Dina asked.
They couldn’t escape, not together. Dina couldn’t move quickly on her own. Camden was unconscious. With Dina’s husband down, their options narrowed incredibly.
“Kids,” Dina said. “Where is the ghost?”
Bethany and her brother looked at each other.
“He’s tired,” Bethany said sleepily.
As she said that, I realized what that really meant was that Bethany and her brother were tired. Even with a host, the Poltergeist still relied on the Mercers to exist. They were down to the two exhausted Mercer children.
Kimberly spoke up. “You know about the Distortion?”
Bethany nodded. None of the other Mercers had appeared to understand the presence of the entity as well as Dina’s children. Knowledge of such things often faded after adulthood in movies. Psychic kids often had greater knowledge or wisdom than their age might suggest.
More shots were fired.
“We need the ghost,” Dina said. “Can you find him?”
Bethany started to cry. “He’s hurt.”
Even psychokinetic entities needed rest, apparently.
More shots were fired. Antoine fired back, hitting one guard in the neck. He was out of bullets again.
Kimberly got down on her knees with the kids. “What if I helped you?”
Bethany looked at her strangely.
“My family has powers too,” Kimberly explained. “I’ll help you find the ghost.”
“I’m scared,” Bethany said.
“He attacked Mom,” Dina’s son said.
“I know he did,” Dina said. “But he will protect you. That’s all that matters.”
Kimberly grabbed onto the kids’ hands. “We’ll do it together,” she said.
She was going to try to improvise. She had high Moxie and some narrative foundation. Still, I felt this was far more extreme than my improvising a system reboot.
If this didn’t work, they would be dead.
If it did work, they might still be dead.
“We can do it,” Kimberly said, tears filling her eyes.
Kimberly and the two Mercer children focused their minds. Bethany started to cry even harder.
More shots came over them. Antoine had spent all of the bullets. The guards were getting braver, making their way across the room toward the place where everyone was hiding.
“He’s here,” Bethany said softly. She pointed to a space ten feet away from them. Right in the line of fire.
Anna looked at the place where Bethany was pointing. Then she looked back at Kimberly.
Then they were gone.
~
The screen flashed back to the moment of my death. The Poltergeist wasn’t visible to the camera. All that could be seen was me about to die.
“Protect Kimberly,” I yelled through the pain. “Protect her kid!”
~
It was a flashback used to show what Anna was thinking.
I knew that because moments after the Poltergeist remanifested in its weakest form, Anna ran across the room in the direction Bethany had pointed. I wasn't expecting her to do that.
As she did, she cried out in pain as a bullet grazed her left thigh. Then she cried out again as an intense headache overcame her and she trembled to make contact with the Poltergeist.
None of the other bullets seemed to hit her. They were stopping mid-air, bouncing off of some unseen thing.
“Oh my god!” Kimberly screamed as she looked at the Poltergeist. Kimberly could see it. So could the Mercer children, if their looks of terror said anything.
Of course, Anna saw it too.
And it horrified her.
From my vantage on Deathwatch, I couldn’t see it. It was invisible on-screen.
The gunmen continued attempting to shoot her. The bullets couldn't get past the Poltergeist.
Breaking through the gunfire, a crackle came over the intercom system.
“Tell us!” a frantic voice yelled out, “What does the Distortion look like?”
Anna took a moment to answer.
~
The image changed. I didn’t see Anna any longer. Nor did I see the armed guards or the exit.
I saw myself. It was another flashback.
I was standing in the control room alone, staring at something with a look of abject terror on my face.
It was the scene where I died again.
The Poltergeist still wasn’t visible to the camera, nor were the spectral shades of the Mercers.
It was just me, staring at some invisible thing in the center of the room.
“Don’t picture it in your mind! Don’t look at its claws or teeth,” I yelled. “It needs us to see it to exist!”
~
My view was back on Anna. Again, Carousel used a flashback to illustrate what Anna was thinking about.
She held her hands up instinctively, blocking out the creature as I had. She had anger in her eyes as she appeared to contemplate the words I had yelled before my death.
She lowered her hands. She wasn’t going to block the creature out any longer.
“Tell us what it looks like!” the voice over the intercom screamed. Someone at KRSL was desperate to know more about the Distortion.
I could tell she was working things out in her head, watching the creature take form as it drew power from her mind.
“It’s… enormous!” Anna screamed.
The whites of her eyes turned red as the blood vessels in them broke. A stream of blood started to trickle from her ear.
In the center of the room, a row of security desks started to move across the floor with a deafening screech. Overhead, a hanging light fixture was knocked to the side. Cuts dug into the ground as the invisible creature’s claws grew long and sharp.
The Poltergeist was getting bigger. Anna wasn’t trying to kill it like I had been. She didn’t have the Moxie for that anyway. She was making it stronger.
“Kill the host!” the commander of the guards screamed as he ran down the left hallway away from the Poltergeist and my friends.
In one fell swoop, three of the guards were cut into ribbons and thrown across the room.
The creature easily destroyed the security area that blocked the exit. My friends would have a clear path to leave as soon as the monster was gone.
The remaining seven guards turned to follow their commander, sending back shots at the Poltergeist, at Anna herself.
One brave guard fixed his aim on Anna as the creature attacked again with its claws, skewering two more guards before they could flee.
The guard pulled the trigger.
A spray of red mist burst from the back of Anna’s head. She dropped to the ground, dead. My heart nearly stopped when it happened.
The guard that had shot her was shaking, wide-eyed with fear. He turned to the center of the room where the Poltergeist had been.
There was stillness.
The guard looked at Kimberly, Antoine, and Dina. It looked like he was about to spray them with bullets when he spotted the two Mercer children. Panic overcame him and he turned to follow his comrades.
The camera followed him as he ran through the halls and caught up with the other guards.
“The host was terminated,” he said with a quiver.
“Do we go back and apprehend them?” one of the other guards asked, his eyes on the commander.
The commander looked back the way they had come. “Maybe we wait for…” he was wracking his brain for a reasonable excuse to avoid getting near the Mercers.
Just then, a desk moved across the room and struck one of the guards.
The commander assessed his men and saw that one of them was holding his head in pain.
“Kill the host!” he screamed, as he shot the afflicted guard in the head.
The desk stopped moving.
Another of his men winced in pain.
The commander raised his gun to them.
“No please do-“ the guard yelled as the Commander executed him.
There was silence again.
The remaining three men looked at one another distrustfully.
The Commander closed his eyes and raised his left hand to his temple in pain. Horror spread across his face as he realized that he had become the host.
One of his two remaining subordinates motioned to fire at him. They had been instructed to kill the host, after all.
But the Commander was quicker. He shot the guard in the head first, unwilling to die, regardless of whether he was tethered to the creature.
His efforts were in vain.
A red hole appeared in the center of the Commander’s head as the last remaining guard killed him and was left alone.
The grand irony: the camera panned around to show that all of the guards had the same sedatives Camden had used to sedate himself and his assailants. They carried them in their vests to use on the remaining Mercers. They didn't seem to realize they could be used to quell the Poltergeist.
The large military vehicle that the Mercers had been loaded into was parked right outside the door at the entrance to the building. When Dina limped up to the cabin of the truck, she found the vehicle on with the keys in the ignition.
“Come on!” she screamed.
Antoine carried both Dina’s husband and Camden as he made his way toward the exit. The kids were nearly wiped out from exhaustion. That was good. It meant the Poltergeist was unlikely to remanifest.
Kimberly worked to rouse them out the door.
Red lights started to blare and the doors to the entrance began closing.
“Shit!” Antoine said. He dropped his cargo and ran to the door.
At first, he tried to hold the doors open with his own strength, but that didn’t work well. He got an idea.
He took his baseball bat from its improvised holster and held it longways between the closing doors, propping them apart.
He and Kimberly worked quickly to get everyone outside and into the vehicle.
They succeeded in doing so before the bat broke under the pressure.
As the credits rolled, they drove away from the facility, having escaped.
THE END
They did it! It wasn’t perfect, but they had pulled it off. Even in my dark existence watching the film play out in my mind’s eye, I was clapping and cheering.
Red curtains closed, blocking off my mental view of the screen.
Then, for the first time since I had started using Deathwatch, I realized I wasn’t alone.
Other people were clapping and cheering too.
I was in a movie theater after all.
As I turned my head to see who it was, all went dark. My true eyes opened. I found myself walking out the door of the facility, resurrected on my feet wearing my old clothes.
“Congratulations,” Silas said. “You’ve won a ticket!”
I couldn’t pay attention to him at that moment.
Who were those people?
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