Chapter 115: As I Lay Dying

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 Kimberly lumbering back 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 right where I died. 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 straightforward. 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 and 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.

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?

~-~

Silas continued his game and we continue to follow him.

We walked for a long time. In the end, it was over an hour. It didn't seem like we were getting anywhere. I just saw the same types of graves., the occasional body hanging from a tree that had been used as target practice.

I decided that given the amount of time I had, I would use my Coming to a Theater Near You trope. I wasn't sure if there were any other storylines going on at that moment but if there were I might as well get some insight on them.

I equipped the trope and was soon watching trailers in my mind's eye.

~

Trailer #1

The first trailer opened in black and white as the camera showed a large building with stone columns and a giant banner hung across its face that read

Carousel Museum of Natural History

Join Us for a Limited Time Exhibit:

Unraveling the Secrets of the Sands!

Guests arrived wearing tuxes and dresses. Among them, intercut in flashes, were Roxy, Grace, and Lara, as well as the other players they had brought with them distributed throughout several different flashes of the crowd. They were all dressed for the event, but I could tell they were distressed.

Inside a large showroom, a woman stood in front of a podium and said, “Welcome to the first in a series of exhibits that the Carousel Museum of Natural History will be hosting about ancient cultures from around the world. This year’s exhibit will be an exciting opportunity. We have in our collection the contents of the tomb of the lost pharaoh, Setemkara!”

The crowd clapped and cheered. A red curtain in the center of the room was raised to reveal an ornate sarcophagus.

The camera cut to a man in a fedora whispering to Grace with a smile, “Who did they have to bribe to get ahold of that?”

“It was supposed to be donated from a collector,” Grace replied.

The woman at the podium continued, “We stand here tonight on the very anniversary of King Setemkara’s discovery fifty years ago. We are proud to be the first host of these artifacts in a public exhibit in their entire history. We hope to send the message that history truly belongs to everyone.”

The party went on and people drank and celebrated the exhibit. Suddenly, the lights went out. The entire room went completely dark. There was a loud sound of stone scraping against stone.

When the lights came back on, the sarcophagus was open. There was nothing inside.

Cut to a scene where Grace explained, “King Setemkara was paranoid that someone would exhume his body and use it in a ritual to condemn him in the afterlife. These scrolls indicate that he had a trap built. It doesn’t explain what the trap was, only that it would ensure anyone who disturbed his rest would be punished. But it’s clear it wasn’t a simple booby trap.”

“Then what did it do?” Roxy asked.

“Ladies,” Lara said, shining a flashlight down a dark hallway with an exit sign hanging from the ceiling. At the end of the hallway, there was no exit, only a passage made of stone. Hieroglyphics adorned the walls.

“This isn’t just the museum anymore,” Lara continued, “We’re inside his tomb.”

Cut to scenes of well-dressed people running from something down a museum hallway that transitioned into another ancient corridor. Someone stepped on a stone that they shouldn’t have and the door behind them closed. Sand started to pour down from the ceiling.

“We have to find our way out of the tomb!” Roxy screamed. “We can’t kill it. We have to run.”

She was afraid. Roxy had been a good actress, but I thought her fear looked real.

“The museum has changed,” the man in the fedora said in a panic, “He’s filled it with traps of all kinds. A labyrinth with no way out.”

The familiar narrator’s voice came on over the loudspeaker, “Maybe history doesn’t belong to everyone.”

There was a flash of a figure standing in a doorway. They were only visible as a silhouette, but it was clear that the figure was wrapped in bandages from head to toe. An ornamental crown could be seen on its head.

The screen cut to black. The words “Whispers of Sand” appeared on the screen, but were soon blown away by the wind.

The narrator came back to say, “Coming soon.”

~

That didn't make sense. Grace was cautious. That storyline looked way too powerful for the kind that they were supposed to be running. My understanding was that they picked out one of the omens that led to a storyline where they had plenty of time to snoop around. The storyline depicted in that trailer appeared to be hectic and terrifying. The museum merged with an ancient tomb and ominous figures chasing the cast around the setting.

It was a strange decision for sure. If they picked it, though, it must have been something they could handle.

~

Trailer #2

The scene opened with hundreds of people pushing shopping carts through the aisles of a large warehouse. I recognized it immediately as Eternal Savers Club. That was the store where we got all of our food.

“Look I'm going to need you to come in next Monday. I know it's a holiday and I know I said that you could take it off but we really need you. And you do know that evaluations are just around the corner and this would look really good for you,” a man wearing a red shirt and a tie said to one of the employees wearing an Eternal Savers Club vest with a small circle that had the letters ESC on it.

The employee he was talking to looked completely dead in the face. No emotion at all. He stood up from the chair he was sitting in and walked over to a desk that had a bunch of security monitors on it as well as a microphone.

He reached down, picked up the microphone, and said, “We have a code crimson in the manager's office. A code crimson.”

The man, apparently the manager, said “What are you talking about? There's no crimson on the chart.”

Moments later, several more employees showed up. Their faces were emotionless.

“What are you doing?” The manager asked. Then, the screen cut away and there was a loud scream.

The screen cut to one of the players I recognized but whose name I didn't recall. “Look kids,” she said. “This move is going to be good for us. I finally get the promotion I've been working to get for years.”

“At a grocery store,” a young man said. He was another player.

“Eternal Savers Club is more than just a grocery store. You should know, I just got both of you jobs there,” the woman said.

The young man was sitting next to a young woman and exclaimed, “What?”

This story definitely had horror-comedy vibes to it.

Cut to a scene of the young man, presumably the son in the family, mopping up a floor inside Eternal Savers Club. Underneath one of the shelving units, he found a wallet. He pulled out an employee ID card that showed the wallet belonged to the slain manager.

“What did they say happened to the old manager?” The son asked his mother somewhere off-screen.

“He retired. That's what it says in the system,” the woman said.

The young man mumbled to himself in a different scene, “he was only 45 how could he have retired?”

Cut to another scene inside Eternal Savers Club where the young man is restocking the shelves during the night and sees a group of cloaked figures walking to the store room. He follows them but when he gets there they're nowhere to be found.

There was then a montage of characters running. The brother and sister characters were in a cage next to what looked like some sort of demonic altar.

The player portraying the sister was panicking and said, “This isn't supposed to be here!”

The one playing her brother said quickly, “Well yeah, devil worship paraphernalia is supposed to be on aisle 6.”

The trailer moved on to show a few action scenes that were hard to discern followed by a scene of a cloaked figure wielding a knife. He moved the knife downward and then there was a demonic laugh.

A demonic voice said, “More. I need to consume more.”

A bit heavy-handed with the symbolism.

“What's happening?” The mother character asked in a panic to some other players in a scene. They all looked genuinely confused. Maybe it was just because I had never seen this particular storyline before but it seemed like they were genuinely perplexed by something. It was possible that that was just a necessary scene but still, there was something off about it to me. “Ritual sacrifice. Demons. I didn't read anything about that in the... manual.”

The way she said “manual” sounded unnatural and forced like she was not actually talking about the employee manual. It struck me that she must have been talking about the Carousel Atlas.

Or it was all just a joke because the movie was some sort of black comedy.

The screen cut to black.

The Eternal Savers Club

The narrator’s voice came back, “Coming to a theater near you!”

~

That wasn't reassuring, to say the least. I had never actually learned that much about the storyline at Eternal Savers Club so it was possible that everything was perfectly orthodox. But I had a funny feeling in my stomach.

~

Trailer #3

The next trailer started and instantly my blood ran cold.

I recognized the image in front of me.

I was looking at Camp Dyer.

The familiar children NPCs were playing kids' games out in a field next to the lodge.

“Is it true what they say about this place?” One of the campers asked a shell-shocked Valorie. “That a girl died here?”

Valorie paused for a moment but then tried to regain her composure.

“Yes,” she said. “But that was a long time ago. And it was a terrible accident. You have nothing to worry about.”

There were more scenes intercut of the campers and the lake.

“We came here to do what we have to do,” a male NPC said. I recognized him. He was a camp counselor who slept in one of the cabins to watch the children. “There's no going back. We don't have any time.”

I couldn't see who he was talking to.

I could hear the campers singing their little rhyme:

“Suzy Snyder, six foot five,

Haunts Camp Dyer, still alive.”

That rhyme faded quickly as a little girl was seen walking away from the abandoned cabin.

She walked up to Arthur as he lay back in a reclining beach chair in the shade.

“Mr. Arthur,” the little girl said, “I found this in that cabin over there. Am I allowed to have it?”

She reached out and dropped a large plastic locket into Arthur’s lap. The locket opened.

It started to play a song that sounded like a 90s teen idol was singing, but the locket was low on batteries so the song came out all deep and stretched out:

“Girl, I can’t say no to summer with you,

And I think that you are feeling it too,”

Arthur’s eyes got large, and he screamed, “What the hell is this? Why?”

Cut to a scene of players being chased by an unseen figure. There were so many players. More than I had ever heard of in a story all at once. More than I thought was possible.

The music from the locket continued:

"As the seasons change, one thing will always be true,

That I’ll never say no to summer, to summer with you."

The camera cut to a large, pale hand shoving a piece of rebar down on an unseen target. Then, I saw Chris’ face of surprise, the apparent victim.

The last frame before the title card was of an imposing figure walking out of the water. They were difficult to see, but it was clear that they had long hair and a jacket so large it was too big even on their hulking frame. Their legs and feet were bare. Something was weird about their face, but I couldn’t tell what because it was in shadow.

The title card appeared.

Say No To Summer

“Coming soon.”

~

What had I just seen? The storyline at Camp Dyer wasn't supposed to be a mobile one. As long as we stayed away from the abandoned cabin we would be fine. Players had been there for over a decade without anything happening. Why all of a sudden would a camper drop what appeared to be the trigger for the omen right in Arthur's lap?

None of this made sense. Whatever that enemy was, they defeated Chris easily from the look of it. He was incredibly high-level. Which meant that that monster must have been even higher level.

I couldn't make sense of it. It was only then that I realized I had been standing still and was doubled over from the shock of what I had just seen.

“What's going on?” Kimberly asked.

I looked at Antoine and then at Kimberly.

“Camp Dyer,” I said. “The storyline at Camp Dyer was triggered.”

“No,” Antoine said. He realized the implication immediately. “How strong is that storyline? Do you know?

“I have no idea,” I said. “Grace’s team and the team that went on a grocery run were also in storylines that looked strong.”

I took time to explain all of the trailers I had just seen. We stood there in the middle of the strange woods silently contemplating the meaning of all of this.

This could not have been a coincidence. Storylines triggering for the other players while we were out on Dina’s quest.

Suddenly, a lot of things started to click into place and our Friends in High Places plan started to become clearer.

“How could I not see it coming?” I asked, as I finally realized part of what was going on.

In the distance, Silas the Showman watched over us.