Chương 365: Book Eight, Chapter 32: No Right Choices

"What am I supposed to say?" I asked.

"I can't prove any of this, but surely if you look at the situation we're in, you can't say this is all random or a coincidence. We have been put in a very specific position. If you looked at all of our behavior up until now, you would predict that we would make the sacrifice play. We have before, but for the first time, I think we would be wrong." I expected arguments. Heck, I was already arguing with myself. It turned out I wasn't the only one ready to change course on a hunch.

"Yes," Andrew said, standing up from where he had been kneeling next to Cassie.

"They expect us to use brutal, naked logic, and that is the very rope they intended for us to be strangled with as we sacrifice Cassie for our own safety." Who was the 'they' behind it all? Carousel, maybe. The audience, perhaps. Whatever antagonistic forces were trying to manipulate and kill us, that was who. For a moment, everyone was silent. I didn't have to convince them to spare Cassie; they wanted to spare her. We had practiced watching our friends die so much that it became second nature.

So if I didn't have to convince them, then what did we have to do? Well, we had to make a plan, and we had a lot of experience with that.

"You're asking us to keep her here, even if it risks triggering the apocalypse?" Logan asked in his most skeptical tone. I could see what tropes he had equipped. He was using the Voice of Dissent, giving us the ability to justify and explain our plan so it would stand the best chance of success.

"I didn't say that we could keep her here," I clarified.

"We just don't have to kill her."

"We don't keep her here, and we don't kill her? What's the third option?" Logan asked.

"If you haven't noticed, we are surrounded. One step out of this castle and we might trigger the apocalypse, or even get killed by a rogue enemy who has been running from it." Everyone looked at me to give the answer, even though they most likely already knew it.

"We take the river," I said.

"We learned about it when we were investigating Lucky's throughline, but we don't do his throughline. We take it as far as we can. We get out of town, far away from the apocalypse. We run a storyline so that we can have a place to stay, and we wait it all out."

"You'll be cut down before you even make it across the meadow to the river," Logan said.

"I never said anything about crossing the meadow," I said.

"I was talking about the river in the dungeons." No one thought it was a coincidence that we just happened to find an entrance to the river beneath our base. And it just so happened that events conspired while we were doing routine maintenance, which led us to discover the river. Carousel was giving us an answer, even if it was the answer we didn't want.

"It'll be impossible," Logan said.

"Surviving. We all know that. We established that two months ago when we all decided the river was too dangerous."

"Not exactly," Andrew said.

"We concluded that Lucky's quest was too dangerous. But in the variation that Riley has suggested, we would only be on the river long enough to find a storyline far away from town, where we could stay safe. That would mitigate many of the risks."

"Sounds like it would double the risks," Logan said.

"Splitting the party, splitting our resources. Let's not forget that some of us have a lot more narrative momentum than others. That was the momentum that we planned to use to survive." Oddly enough, narrative momentum was one of the few forces of Carousel's magic system that the Consortium had never actually codified or fully gamified within its rules. It was always ethereal, to be understood intuitively, not logically. It was the very type of magic that we had to invoke to survive.

"That's exactly the reason that we should split," I said.

"Putting all of our eggs in one basket is inviting trouble. If we die, you'll be able to rescue us, and if you die, we'll be able to rescue you eventually. If we all stay here, there's a chance we all lose, and hope dies with us." I wasn't a good enough performer to give that line the gravitas it needed to be impactful, but I knew that painting our new plan as something bigger than a desperate attempt to skirt getting blood on our hands wasn't enough. We needed a positive reason to make this choice. Logan nodded.

"Well, if that's what you're doing," he said, "then you'd better pack, because when Cassie wakes up, she needs to be gone, or dead." I almost said she couldn't wake up dead, but that wasn't true. There were zombies in the dungeons, after all.

"Thank you," Andrew said.

"The only question," Kimberly said, "is who's going." It was funny that everyone automatically assumed I was. No one even questioned it.

"I am," Andrew responded.

"It is my responsibility to take care of my sister. Plus, any voyage on the river is going to need emergency medicine."

"I'm going too," Isaac said. Andrew grabbed him by the shoulder and said, "No, you are not. You're staying here. Endangering Cassie's life is necessary, but putting you at risk is not." They pulled away to bicker some more as Isaac did his level best to argue that he would be an asset on the trip, but for the most part, it was like shooting an unloaded gun. While his interests in Omens—tracking them, understanding them—were useful, his performance in storylines wasn't as defensible.

"All right, hold on," I said.

"We need to make sure this is balanced. How many volunteers to set out on the river?" I looked around the room. Several hands were raised. Michael's shot up first before anyone else's, as per the usual.

"We need to pick a strategy," I said.

"Straightforward, savvy-based narratives with a couple of heavy hitters." We talked about it for a while.

"I'll go," Antoine said.

"My tropes lend themselves to adventure better than most. I can be melee, and I passively boost Grit and healing."

"Then I'm going too," Kimberly said; there was very little surprise there.

"Somebody needs to figure out the hard storylines after you get yourself killed," Camden said with a wink.

"I guess that'll have to be me." The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. It wasn't a bad team. While I would have liked to have had Lorne join us for his size and the strength of bruiser tropes, I couldn't ask Nicole's group to split themselves in half. We didn't know them as well. Dina wanted to go, but I asked her to stay behind. She had multiple rescue tropes and a strong interest in bringing us back from the dead when the occasion called for it.

Bobby didn't volunteer, but it was clear he intended to go. He was packed before everyone else. I got the impression that, back before Janet abandoned ship, he might have been planning to abscond with her. Packing didn't take as long as we expected. We were always packed for an adventure of one kind or another, and I had a change of clothes and toiletries in my hoodie pockets, using my vast collection of luggage tags.

As for weapons, I took my hedge clippers and the cue ball with the Comedian trope that let you control where it rolled. My roles rarely required me to bring weapons in, and I didn't want to take too much from the joint arsenal. I stared around my new room in the castle. I barely got to know it, and now I was leaving. We all gathered our things quickly and quietly. Something I had been dreading since I knew we needed to leave was saying goodbye to Ramona.

Leaving her at the castle felt wrong, but I couldn't advise her to come. I went to the room she was staying in, and before I could knock, she opened the door and was wearing the shoulder bag that held her luggage tag.

"You ready?" she asked.

"As much as I ever will be," I said. She assumed she was going where I was, and I wasn't going to argue. While her level was still pretty low, her narrative tropes were powerful, so she would be an asset. I also liked her as a person, whatever our ambiguous relationship might be. As I scanned the horizon one last time from the castle walls, things had gone unchanged. The circus went on without any regard for us.

"Do you think we'll ever be able to live normal lives?" Ramona asked. I didn't know.

"I don't even remember what that means," I said. She nodded.

"What if we die trying to save Cassie?" she asked.

"Will it still have been worth it?"

"Not all deaths are the same," I said.

"That's my experience, at least. I've died for less." She didn't seem sure about our little excursion, and I couldn't blame her.

"Time to go!" Michael called up once everyone had prepared to leave. So down we went, first to the ground, then even further. There we were, ready to delve further than we had before. As Logan triggered the secret door into the dungeons, I giggled to myself at the possibility we might be dead by the end of the day for good. Bobby was next to me. He didn't look anxious. He looked angry. I thought about making sure he knew we weren't searching for the NPC sanctuary, but I thought better of it.

We could hash that out once we found refuge of our own. Anna walked with us, carrying a machete she had found weeks ago during one of her rounds in the dungeons. It was going to be a bit of a shift planning around a Final Girl again, but having one would be a boon in uncertain times. We got into formation. We had all taken turns in the dungeons by now. Logan, Isaac, Kelsey, and Lorne were there to see us off.

"What the hell are you doing with that?" Antoine asked, looking back at Michael. Somehow, I hadn't noticed he was carrying the propane tank from the roof of the loft. It had the Backyard Bomb trope that transformed the household object into an explosive.

"Just in case," Michael said. We rolled our eyes at him. The last thing we needed was something that could blow up the boat. We navigated our way through the dungeon floor after floor, chopping skeletons and rats to bits as we went along. The river was right where we had left it. The boat was too. It hung limply from the rafters. Oars were stored nearby. It was all going according to plan. In Carousel, that was the time to get nervous. Cassie was unconscious, so Antoine had been carrying her.

Kimberly had done her best to pack her things. Were we really doing this? It felt like we were blindfolded, with nothing but trust in my vague intuition that the next step in our path would be there when we took it. It took several of us to drag the boat into the water. The stream was moving fast enough that we had to tie it off so it wouldn't float away. Camden looked down the path the river took.

"I was expecting something more of a canal," he said.

"Nope," I said.

"Just a river through the belly of Carousel." He tried to say more, but nerves got the better of him. It was his turn to load into the boat. Michael helped him in, then Anna and Andrew after that. Next, they helped lower Cassie down and secured her between two benches, like she was cargo. The boat was big enough for all of us, but it was also heavy and rough. It would be hard to control if we hit rapids. It was good that we had enough people to help with that.

"We could have taken a riverboat," Antoine said, referencing the way Lucky's team had entered the river.

"I'm just saying. Could have been a nice cruise—wait…something's wrong." I wasn't using my scouting tropes because there were no Omens, and I didn't want to be psychic right then. But that meant I wasn't using I Don't Like It Here to sense general danger. Antoine, however, was using his Gut Instinct trope, which was specifically designed not to work through psychic power.

"Where's the danger?" I asked.

"Behind us," he said.

"Get in!" Logan screamed as he began forcing us onto the boat.

"I can hear them now," Lorne said.

"Fight's coming our way." We were too late. I expected a monster attack. What I didn't expect was for it to come from the dungeons instead of the river itself. I thought it would be an attack on the forward party, not those staying behind. Maybe I was being a bit egotistical. I jumped on the boat as Logan pushed me. Antoine and Michael followed.

"This is not good," Kelsey said as she heard the roar of the undead coming from the corridor we had just passed through.

"Push off!" Logan screamed, turning and brandishing his sword toward where the enemies were coming from. He sliced right through the rope tying the boat to the dock. I cursed as I reached out for Ramona, but we were quickly too far away for her to jump. We were underway just as a horde of zombies burst through the door. They weren't the gooey, rotten kind. They weren't the mummified kind that Dr. Halle created, either. They were sick humans, crazed humans. They were fast zombies. The most dangerous kind.

Kimberly was further down the platform when the zombies poured out. She followed the path of our boat quickly, trying her best to outrun the zombies and jump aboard.

"No!" Michael screamed as he looked back at Logan, who was slashing and slicing away. The boat had not yet cleared the far side of the docks. Time stood still as zombies ran out, filling all walkable ground. Michael looked back at us.

"I'm sorry!" he screamed. Then, he jumped from the boat, clearing a foot of water and landing on the far side of the platform with his weapon drawn and ready in no time.

"Kimberly!" we all screamed, willing her to run faster, to get to the far side of the platform before the zombies overtook her. She almost did. As she ran along the platform, a wave of zombies crashed into her, almost knocking her into the water, but she managed to regain her footing and push back with the cudgel she was carrying.

She raced toward the end of the platform, pushing the undead back desperately, and just as she was about to be overwhelmed, Michael arrived, slicing a nearby zombie and running interference so she could reach the edge and leap onto the boat. She barely made it. Antoine had to reach out and grab her hand to pull her aboard. Logan sliced at zombies as Lorne pushed them back with his shield. Michael began cutting his way toward them. Antoine cursed.

"We have to help them," he said. It was nearly too late. Luckily, Camden was on the ball. He stuck an oar out to catch on the stone wall, holding us in place for a moment. All I could do was watch.

"What do we do?" Antoine asked.

"Throw them the bomb!" I screamed. They needed it more than we did, with dozens of fast zombies attacking. Antoine stood and got the best footing he could as he grabbed the propane tank by its handle, aimed, and chunked it at Michael.

"Catch!" he screamed. Michael turned his head just in time to grab the tank out of the air. Without movie magic, none of that would have been possible. Ramona and Bobby had been left behind. They stood on the dock with Isaac and Kelsey as Logan and Lorne fought on the left side of the platform. Michael fought to the right of the horde. Ramona, Bobby, Kelsey, and Isaac were cut off, with the undead overwhelming them.

"Ramona!" I cried out. She couldn't afford to look my way. There were too many enemies. I didn't hear what was said, but the four of them made an agreement. They inched closer to the edge of the dock and jumped all at once into the river, holding onto each other as they did it.

I looked for them to reappear from beneath the water, but before they did, Camden's hold on the side of the stone wall slipped, and we carried on downstream, out of view, with only the echoes of fast zombies to tell us what was happening to our friends. I had always said that every decision in Carousel was the wrong decision. You just had to pick the wrong decision you could live with. This time, I wasn't sure we had.