Chương 367: Book Eight, Chapter 34: Scathed

We had to pull Cassie from her safe spot at the bottom of the boat so that she didn't get soaked in Andrew's blood. I must have been in shock because all I could think about was how inconvenient it would be for the blood to not disappear like it would at the end of a storyline. Andrew's body was nearly cut in two. The sword that Caleb Rowe had used was still lying right next to him. Our friend was now reduced to one more task on a list of morbid tasks.

"We have to get rid of his body before she wakes up," I said. The boat continued down the river smoothly, and all were silent on board. Anna cried without making a peep. Kimberly was reserved, and all of us were wondering if the cost of one good deed was too much this time.

"Maybe she'll want to see him," Antoine eventually said.

"That was the biggest problem when Christian died with Rewind, and even before that, was that I couldn't see him. That I knew he was out there somewhere, dead probably, but I would never get to confirm it with my own eyes." It was clearly a subjective matter because when my parents died, I did see their bodies, and those were memories I would pay to have surgically removed from my mind if I could.

"We can pull in here," Camden said.

"This is Carousel proper, on the north side of town. I don't see the circus." We didn't see much of anything because the river was set down into the earth, not quite inside a canyon, but it was a good start.

"Just a second," I said as I quickly equipped my psychic background trope to detect if the ethereal pulse of the apocalypse was still near us.

"We're good," I said. We were far enough away from the circus that if Cassie woke up here, she probably wouldn't cause an incident. But in truth, I would never be comfortable until we were back out of Carousel proper completely. None of us were experienced at maneuvering a boat with oars, but luckily, it was a matter of Hustle and Mettle, and we had plenty to get the job done. We pulled the boat up against a small rocky shore.

For us to get up and over to where town was, it would be a fifteen-foot climb or so, but there were plenty of roots sticking out of the cliff that we could make it if we had to.

"Antoine," Kimberly said in a soft voice, "I'm so sorry." He looked at her with deep concern and grabbed onto her hand, thinking that maybe she wanted help getting out of the boat. But after a glance, he knew that wasn't what she was talking about.

"Kimberly," Anna said, having picked up on it too. She didn't have her Are You Okay in There trope equipped for fear that it might be a bit too psychic. Otherwise, she would have been the first to know. I stared at her. Kimberly looked fine, if a little pale. But then I saw what they had been looking at. The slightest, lightest flicker lit up on her Infected status. It disappeared almost immediately, but then a few seconds later it flashed again, and then again, ever so slowly getting brighter and stronger.

Antoine immediately took her up in his arms and started saying something soft and panicked, asking her what had happened, as if we didn't already know. Tears flowed from his eyes in a stream, like they were always there waiting pour out. All she had to do to show us was lift up her arm and reveal a tiny speck of blood. That's all it really was, just enough for a zombie's teeth to get through to the meat of her ribs. Just two or three teeth marks. A scratch, really.

"You should leave me here," she eventually said as the reality started to set in for us. There was a panic in her voice, but a dreaminess too. She was already feeling the effects of the virus. Those zombies that "almost" got her back in the dungeon had gotten closer than I thought.

"No," Antoine said.

"We could clear the storyline, and you'll be okay, right?" He asked, looking back at Camden and I. He had to know the truth. She wasn't bitten inside of a storyline, but by a zombie inside of its monster lair underneath the castle. Monsters in a lair don't trigger their stories when they attack you. There was no clearing a storyline to protect her. She would need to be rescued.

"Antoine," she said.

"It's okay." Immediately, Camden opened up his backpack and pulled out the Atlas copy that we had brought and started flipping through it to find the storyline that those fast zombies had come from. Their movie had been called Dead Pursuit. In our time in the dungeons, it was second nature to try to get a look at what movies the monsters came from. Most of them were either fantasy horror or similar. Whatever Camden might have found in the Atlas, he didn't share out loud.

He just looked up at Antoine and shook his head. Now that the infection was starting to take hold, her status on the red wallpaper continued to blink faster and faster. Because these weren't technically undead zombies that had infected her, her dead status wasn't affected, but incapacitation was. She was losing the ability to think clearly, and suddenly she fell into Antoine's arms. Her ability to stand was going in and out. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

There was something we had observed about zombies outside Carousel: the Omens for their movies were almost universally the zombies themselves. Those in the castle's basement were an exception because they were bound by Avery's writ. Occasionally, you would see some sort of biohazard mutant-type zombie that was triggered by touching a green goo, or you might find a mad scientist creating the undead, as we had experienced in depth.

But for the most part, the zombies themselves started their storylines by attacking when you went into a dark alley that you never should have. I quickly equipped I Don't Like It Here, and my suspicions were confirmed almost immediately as Kimberly's poster started to change, flickering in line with her Infected status.

"Be careful," I said.

"She's becoming an Omen."

"No," Anna said, her eyes red and puffy from tears.

"There has to be something we can do. We can't just let her turn. Maybe we could..." She started racking her brain, trying to think of something that might be able to change Kimberly's fate. She came up short. She went in and hugged Kimberly. So did Camden and I.

"We need to be away from her when she makes the final change," Camden said after a beat.

"You understand that, right, Antoine?" He repeated Antoine's name a few times but didn't manage to catch his attention. Camden looked at me.

"What's the trigger? Obviously it's a bite, but what's the trigger for the Omen specifically?"

"The virus has to spread," I said after glancing at the red wallpaper.

"Bodily fluids." That could be trouble.

"Antoine," I said, backing away, "you're going to have to let go of her." And he tried to ignore me, too, but Kimberly wouldn't let him. She pushed against him with all her might and walked up the rocky shores toward the cliff. She was spending her remaining energy holding back tears and staying upright.

"You have to go," she said.

"Go!"

"Wait," Camden said. He grabbed Kimberly's bag from where she had left it in the boat, reached in, and pulled out a sunglasses case. But there were no spectacles inside. Instead, there was an old-fashioned metal and glass syringe, some spare needles, and a small bottle of the sedative that we had used on Cassie.

"What are you doing?" Antoine asked. Camden didn't answer him directly.

"Kimberly, you're the only one who can use this because you have the license. You need to inject this into yourself so that you'll pass out." He turned to me and asked, "That should work, right?" I nodded.

"Not as long as we want it to," I said, "but technically she's just a sick human." Sedatives could work on rage zombies. Kimberly eyed him suspiciously, but didn't even ask what he was planning. She walked up, grabbed the syringe, loaded it with some of the sedative, and jabbed it into her arm.

"I love you," she said to Antoine.

"I love all of you," she added while looking around at us. There was no time for goodbye. There never seemed to be. Then she fell unconscious to the ground.

"What did that do?" Antoine asked.

"Is it going to stop her from turning? Slowing her heartbeat or something?"

"No," Camden said. He walked up next to Kimberly's body on the rocky shore and grabbed the syringe from her hand. And then he stared and waited as her infection continued to course through her body, faster and faster, and she became nothing but an enemy, an Omen, all without waking.

"That's some quick thinking," I said, realizing what he was planning. At first, I thought he was trying to ease her pain as the disease took hold. Dr. Howard Halle's sedative was sci-fi levels of powerful. After her infection indicator lit up permanently and the Omen was all that could be seen as her poster, he took the syringe, jabbed it into her arm again, and then pulled the plunger, drawing her blood into it. Quickly, he put the syringe back in the sunglasses container and held it out to me. I nodded.

The syringe, or at least the infected blood inside it, was now an Omen for Dead Pursuit.

"Wait," Antoine said.

"So we can run the storyline and save her, right? That's what you're doing?"

"That's the idea," Camden said.

"As best I can tell, it hasn't been infected by the circus yet, has it?" I shook my head.

"This type of storyline is usually localized to wherever you set it off," I said.

"As long as we're not in the circus, the storyline won't be." There was a pause as Camden snapped the sunglasses container closed and quickly retrieved another bag from his backpack to put it inside.

"But what about her poster?" Anna asked. At first, I thought she was asking about the poster on the red wallpape but she wasn't. She was talking about the missing poster for Kimberly. If we were ever going to save her, we would need to run a rescue. And to run a rescue, we needed her missing poster.

"The diner's been overtaken, and I'm sure the police station is too," I said.

"Where else can you find missing posters?" Camden jumped back up in the boat and started flipping through the Atlas. There were several locations where missing posters could be found. We always went to the one near the diner, but that wasn't the only one.

"There's a water tower with a fence around it," Camden said.

"It should be that way," he said, pointing downriver. I nodded.

"Let's get there and hope we're not too late." One day, we would run Kimberly's rescue. But from what I could tell with my Hysteric scouting trope, the storyline was probably in the low fifties. That would be the minimum for a storyline like that. Fast zombies were no joke. It would be another ten levels for me to have a safe chance at it, more for the others. And then it would still be a rescue, so the difficulty would increase.

However long it took us, as long as we had the supplies to make it happen, we would save her. We stood a distance from her body as we said our stifled, rushed goodbyes. Most of what we did to combat the mental toll of the people you cared about dying was simply not thinking about it. That's what the vets at Camp Dyer had taught us after the Black Snow decimated the population. You could hardly ever hear anyone talking about it. They didn't remember their dead fondly; they didn't remember them at all.

And when people died in storylines, focusing on it was only a detriment. So you trained your mind to ignore it all the same. But this felt different. There was no ignoring it.

"We're going to save her," Antoine said as we headed back toward the boat. He muttered more to himself that I couldn't hear. Kimberly lay on the riverbank, her hair blowing in the wind, fast asleep. Whatever monster was in her now couldn't be seen. Sure, she was pale and sweating, but she still looked like Kimberly. Even as she started to drool black goo, I couldn't tell from a distance that anything was wrong.

"Whatever we do, we have to save her," he repeated.

"Whatever we have to risk." We all nodded in agreement. Anna was full-on crying now. For people who saw death so much, we were suddenly having a really hard time dealing with it. The sadness was breaking through the cracks in our walls. It didn't feel right to just leave her there, but what else could we do? Before we left the shores, Antoine and I silently lifted Andrew's body out of the boat.

And we quickly worked to rinse the bottom of the boat with river water and then tip it out in hopes that it wouldn't be obvious what had happened there. We gave him a moment of silence. It was all we had to give. By the time we were back on the river, Kimberly had started to twitch, but I never saw anything more than that. Kimberly was our leading lady. She had stepped up to be a Final Girl when Carousel had called her an Eye Candy.

She became who we needed her to be, and I knew then that wherever we went, whatever we did, our path would wind its way back to her.