Chương 360: Book Eight, Chapter 27: Evasive Maneuvers

"Are you guys all right?" Antoine called from the other side of the door as he struggled to lift it.

"We're fine," Michael said. He went to hack at the zombies in front of us. I grabbed his arm because we didn't need a fight at that moment. More undead were coming, and I feared Michael's instincts were born in battles where death was an option.

"We have a lot of monsters over here!" I called out.

"Be careful opening the door." Then I turned to Michael and Kelsey and said, "Let's go." We had two door options. I led us to the right because it was further away from the undead.

"They're slow zombies," I said as I took out my flashlight. Preserving batteries was not a priority at that moment.

"We avoid the fight if possible, and if we have to fight them, we do it on our terms. Let's take them for a walk—see if we can find a better venue." There was no fear quite like the fear of zombies in the distance. Their moans filled the air. And so we went, anticipating a fight around every corner and being right more than we were wrong. The first thing we ran into was a ghoul, which in Carousel usually described something very similar to a zombie but not as human, and usually with some level of intelligence.

"Come here, my little rats," the ghoul said from its eyeless face. His face had no eyes because his eyes were floating in two glass mason jars affixed to his chest. They swam around in their little containers like fish, keeping watch of us. Kelsey speared it in the head, and when that appeared to have no real effect, Michael chopped off one of its legs, and we moved on.

"Oh, no!" the monster cried after us in a silly voice. With every step we took, we came across more low-level dungeon fodder. Giant rat: Michael chopped it in half. Giant spider: Michael chopped it in half. Cardboard cutout of Silas the Mechanical Showman: Michael chopped it in half. It was becoming his signature move. We had missed whatever turnoff would bring us to Hale's laboratory, as far as I knew, but the dungeons were completely different than the movie version. They were dirty.

The farther we went, the louder the sound of running water became, so loud it even drowned out the moans of zombies behind us and the scratching of rats in the distance. We were getting closer. Soon enough, we broke out into a room that roared with the sound. In front of us was a large canal, similar to those in the sewers but different. This one smelled of earth and living things; it smelled like a real river.

There were no monsters in that room except for some kind of half-octopus, half-man mutant who was pinned to the ground with a bayonet mid-transformation.

"Trope item," Michael said. He was right. The trope was called Putting Down Stakes. It was a Monster Hunter trope, and it was simple: anything you killed with that weapon would stay dead if you left the weapon in it.

"Maybe we grab it later," I said. The implication was that if we took the bayonet out, the octopus man would cease to be dead. Unfortunately, the living dead were still following us. I looked around to find a way out, but there were no other exits except, of course, wherever the canal led. I could even see ambient light shining from both directions. Above us were wooden rafters with loose boards laid across them to form a floor.

Stacked on those boards were boxes and ropes, and across the room, a large rowboat hung safely. I knew immediately what the plan would be.

"Follow me," I said. Soon, the zombies were upon us, at least eleven of them. They made it into the room and quickly managed to sniff us out through their rotten noses, which never made sense to me. We were hiding in the corner, and as they made their way over to us, we didn't react at first. I slashed at any that got near, Kelsey attacked them with the torch and her spear, and Michael batted a few away with the shield. When they had sufficiently grouped up by us, I said, "Now!"

and Michael sliced his sword through a rope behind us, causing the rowboat above to swing down as we all hit the deck. The boat knocked all of the zombies off the stone floor and into the river as it fell from its resting place in the rafters. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The zombies weren't such great swimmers, and they were swept away quickly. Plan A worked. Plan B was to climb to the rafters and take out the zombies one by one with Kelsey's spear.

The danger wasn't over yet. There were a few remaining zombies who weren't as good at cardio as the main group, but Michael was able to do away with them very quickly. He cut them in half. One giant zombie approached at the end, and when Michael slashed into it, his sword got stuck in the enemy's skull. Kelsey jumped forward to take her turn, impaling the giant in the gut with her spear so she could keep it at a safe distance. It was a tried and true technique.

The zombie raged forward, but luckily, its bulk was caught on the barbs of the spear, and Kelsey could hold it away. Theoretically, that would make it my job to come in and clip its head off, but as I was brandishing my hedge clippers to boost my Mettle with a satisfying Sha-Shing sound that blades make in movies, Michaels was back in the mix, puncturing the undead giant's head with a newly acquired bayonet from the body of the octoperson. The zombie suddenly lost coordination as it turned to attack him.

Just as the octopus mutant began to rise up from the grave by the canal, Michael kicked the big zombie in that direction, sending both of the monsters into the water, where they disappeared quickly.

"I knew you were going to grab that bayonet," I said.

"I knew it the moment I saw it."

"Yeah, well, congratulations," Michael said as he got a better look at the weapon. It was designed to fit onto a rifle of some kind, but it worked well enough as a long knife.

"Now we've taken the self-tour, I say we return to base," I said.

"Roger that," Kelsey said as she stared at the river.

"Where in the world does that lead? There's no runoff running in or out of the castle. We've walked around it enough. The castle has a well. Why does it need this?" She was right. Wherever the start and end of that canal were, they weren't visible from the outside. The Carousel River, if this was indeed part of it, didn't need logic.

"You forget," I said.

"Carousel isn't a real town. It's just plays one in the movies." Back we went, tracing our steps by looking at the disturbance in the dust on the floor, all the way back to where we started.

"Come here, my little rats!" the ghoul screamed at us from his place on the floor as we walked by. He had managed to put his leg back on, but that wouldn't do him any good because he attached it to his chest. We made it back in time to see that the others had managed to reopen the door and set a barrel underneath it to hold it up for us. Kelsey was through first, then me, then Michael. He insisted on it.

"Where did you go?" Camden asked.

"On a stroll," I said.

"We really should get more exercise. The sights down here are something else." Lorne pulled the barrel out from under the door, which caused it to drop shut. Some magical force would repair it so that it could be opened by the time we needed to come down here next, but we didn't need to worry about that.

"Kelsey, if you die down here, Nicole is going to kill me," he said as he embraced her.

"Come on, buddy," she responded.

"You've seen me kill worse than that." He sighed.

"Were any of you bitten?" Antoine asked. I hadn't even thought to ask. He started inspecting all of us. We had just tussled with some good old-fashioned zombies, so I couldn't really blame him for being worried.

"Are you doing this for show?" I asked.

"Just look at our status on the red wallpaper."

"I just have to be sure," he said. If one of us was infected, were they really going to make us stay down here, or just put us out of our misery? Luckily, no one had been bitten. It turned out, though, that Michael had been burned when the exploding slime had gone off, but it was only a few dribbles on his arm. It looked like he had been burned with a cigarette. Back in formation, we made our way out of the dungeons as I explained how we had survived like it was no big deal.

"What happens when we find one enemy down there that we can't beat?" Camden asked.

"We go without electricity for a little while longer," I said.

"If we're able to," he said.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. Sure, we didn't want to go without electricity, but it was technically a luxury in a circumstance like this. He shook his head and said, "Never mind. Maybe I'm getting paranoid."

"Paranoid about what?" I asked. As we put our weapons back down on the shelves and he disabled the mechanism that allowed the door into the dungeons to open, he looked at me and said, "What if there's not just some magic that flips those switches? I was looking at those breakers, examining them. I don't think they were overloaded; I think they were manually switched off. Now maybe it's Carousel doing it, maybe it's, heck, one of the Consortium for all I know.

Or maybe something or someone is trying to lure us down, learn our weaknesses, and eventually outsmart us." There was something strategic about the positioning of the exploding slime creature being in just the right spot for the zombies to stumble onto it, but I hoped he was reading too much into it. He was seeing ghosts, as it were.

"Let's hope not," I said. I wished that I could dismiss his fears as paranoia, but he was right in that it was kind of weird that something down there was sabotaging things. Even if it was an extremely meta situation, there must be something down there that could flip the switches. Technically, yes, Carousel could script the zombies to flip the switch—or maybe the enchanted armor—but it could be something else too. Some would say that the castle having monsters and loot was a benefit to a camp like ours.

It would keep us sharp and give us practice. Maybe that was all that was happening.

"Do those cameras record?" I asked.

"Not right now," he said as he switched the setup back off.

"Something to think about," I said. We made our way back up to the dining area. I had to stop and wash my hands first, but then I was back in my chair, eating very soggy cereal and listening to circus music in the background. At the other end of the table, Antoine and some of the other players had put out some cards and were playing spades. The losers had to clean up the kitchen. Life at the castle was different and familiar all at the same time. It was good overall. I wondered how long it would last.