Chương 392: Book Eight, Chapter 59: The Final Gambit

Familiar Grounds, as a film, had a lot of long, artful shots of the remaining trio of players as they crossed the wasteland in the direction their ArGIS instructed them. For a movie like this, Carousel would have to get creative. It was mostly walking, interspersed with paranoid raving from scared travelers. But the focus of the movie, it turned out, wasn't just on us. The audience also got to see snippets of the daily lives of people back at the Culver's Bay Terradome.

I hadn't actually gotten to see most of the movie, so I didn't really know what narratives were being told about these characters, but I had a feeling that little snippets of their lives had been spread through the movie like breadcrumbs. There were clips of a pair of construction workers and of some sort of traffic controller in front of a big monitor. The camera also followed the life of a woman raising a handful of children, one of whom she was very concerned about, but I didn't know why.

I must have missed that part. The movie flashed forward to Antoine, Anna, and Cassie setting up the tent again as the night grew dark. In the distance, all that could be heard was the wind, and in the wind, a voice. My voice. It called to them, but it wasn't clear what was being said. The wind distorted it.

"Come on, get inside," Antoine said.

"We can't run through the night, not without directions." They quickly jumped into the tent and zipped it up. As they did, the screen went black, and suddenly I heard a beeping sound. - The next shot was of the command center back at Culver's Bay.

"Report," the Arbiter said sternly.

"Have they continued down the path set for them?"

"Yes, sir," one of his assistants said.

"They seem to have ended their detour." The shot was framed so that both speakers' faces were obscured in shadow.

"Good," the Arbiter said.

"I was afraid they had gone mad like the others. Or perhaps they deserted. Have we picked up any footage from the documentarian?"

"No, sir," the aide said.

"Our current theory is that his suit was damaged or compromised in some way that caused his camera to go into safe mode to protect its data." That made sense. I was dragged into water by a giant disembodied arm.

"So we'll need to send the next crew to retrieve it. Will they be able to relay the data remotely, or will they have to find his body?" the Arbiter asked.

"We'll only have to position them close to him; we can have them camp near the area where his suit went offline," the aide said.

"That is, if we don't want the next crew to interact with his body."

"We can't have that," the Arbiter said.

"The less information we've given our scouting teams, the further they've been able to get. It's best they focus on the journey. Once we have a reliable pathing to the other terradome, we can reevaluate, but until then we take the decision making out of their hands. Are those files I requested?"

"Yes, sir," the aide said, as she handed him a big stack of Manila envelopes. He began leafing through them, and it was clear he was looking at new applicants for the next squad to be sent out after us. The cycle continued. As he considered them, his aide left, and he stood from his chair and walked to a nearby counter where a collection of alcohol was kept. He poured himself a glass of something brown and walked back to his desk, staring back down at the files, dejected.

He took a deep breath as he turned his head toward a small radio in the corner of the room, which played a staticky signal that must have been the one they were receiving from the other terradome. He looked tired. - Darkness once again covered the screen, and as it did, I took a moment to look around the theater. Everyone was still staring at me. It looked like they weren't going to stop anytime soon.

Of course, they tried to hide it, but if I stared at any of the moviegoers for too long, eventually their eyes would find mine, and they would look shocked and embarrassed. In the darkness, my voice sounded out.

"You left me behind," the thing with my voice said.

"Why didn't you go in after me? We were a team. We were on a squad, but you left me behind." My voice, but not my words. The thing speaking for me could only be seen as a blurry shape in the foreground as the light adjusted and the tent became visible in the distance. Then the thing moved, and whatever it was was no longer visible. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Inside the tent, Antoine lay down, looking up at the ceiling with a stony look on his face, doing his best to ignore my voice, to let it blend in with the wind. Maybe his character couldn't hear it. Maybe he couldn't hear it, but I doubted it. Cassie covered up her ears. She wouldn't have to pretend; she was a psychic, and the voice of a fallen companion would be something she would be able to hear no matter what.

Anna, however, slept on her side, her head on her travel pillow, staring at the ground, lost in a memory. -"Now remember this, Anna," a kindly woman said, her grandmother, perhaps.

"Your parents loved you more than anything. If they could come back and get you, they would, I promise. But if you're going to see them again, you're just going to have to get out on your own."

"Why don't we go?" a much younger Anna asked. They were sitting in a dull apartment similar to the one my character had been assigned, but larger because it was for a family. Sunlight was coming in through the window, and Anna was playing with blocks with letters on them on the floor. The kindly woman sat in a rocking chair, telling her stories and rocking. It didn't look anything like Anna's real grandmother, or at least the one I had met many years ago.

It was a generic older woman with white hair, wearing a beautiful crocheted blanket as a scarf, as she sat in the chair and relaxed.

"I'm far too old to go," the woman said, "though I would love to see my son and daughter-in-law again. No, it's you who has to make the journey. You have to find a way to leave this place as your parents did, but it won't be as easy. The mines dried up. That's how they used to do it: get assigned to mining duty and then make a break for it. You're going to have to look for a better opportunity." Was this the memory that Anna's character had playing in her mind over and over again?

A memory of her grandmother telling her where her parents were? It seemed so.

"This didn't happen," Anna said forcefully. Not the young child Anna, but the adult who was watching them. She stood on the other side of the room with her arms crossed and tears rolling down her face.

"This isn't a real memory. My grandmother never told me this. My parents died in an accident." She threw her hands to her ears as she continued to cry.

"What are you doing to my head?"

"You think your parents would die in a simple accident?" the older woman said.

"Ridiculous. They used it as an opportunity to flee, to set up a place for you to live once it was your time to escape."

"You're lying. You keep changing your story. Last time you said that we came to Culver's Bay as refugees, but my parents didn't make it, and I don't remember what the truth is, but I know there can only be one truth. You're lying to me." The grandmother stopped rocking in her chair and looked up at Anna.

"You're not that far now. You just have to keep walking a little while, and you'll find them waiting for you," she said.

"I don't believe you," Anna said.

"I don't remember, but this can't be right. None of this can be right." The grandmother got up from the chair and moved across the room in the blink of an eye, grabbing onto Anna, and as she did, her face changed, and suddenly she wasn't a kindly older woman anymore. She was the hag, and she had a big, toothy grin on her face. - Back in the tent, Anna screamed and jumped up from where she had been lying. She was breathing heavily, and tears were flowing from her eyes.

"None of it is real," she said defiantly. As Antoine sat up and Cassie looked at her, there was a moment of silence, and in that silence was my voice.

"You left me behind. I broke my leg. I can't make it up the hill to you. You have to come get me," the thing with my voice said, and this time it didn't get carried away on the wind. It sounded like it was just outside, just down the hill. Anna looked at Antoine and Cassie, then stood up, stormed out of the tent, unzipped it quickly, and stared out into the darkness.

"You are not him. Whatever you are, you are not Riley," she said. Trembling, she walked down the hill. She was still wearing her jumpsuit and her side pack, which, in my opinion, was a bit much, but since Anna must have known what was about to happen, she didn't want to go unprepared, even if she was docked points. She also had grabbed one of the guns from the floor of the tent, so there was that.

"Come out and show yourself," she said. It looked like they were planning to have Anna captured. It made some level of sense. She was the Final Girl, and therefore, she would be the Last One Alive, so if anyone was going to be kidnapped and brought to the witch's hut, she would be a good choice. As long as Antoine and Cassie lived, so would she. How well she lived was a different question to be answered later.

"Show yourself," Anna said as she shone the light on her ArGIS into the darkness.

"That's what I thought," she said.

"You're not him, and I know exactly what we're headed into. Some sort of trap. Some sort of monster's lair." As she shone her light around, at first, it looked like she was correct. There was nothing there, but it only took one moment to reveal that wasn't quite true. Because when she shone her light back in the direction down the hill where my voice had been coming from, she saw it. It was big, yes. Very big. As big as Antoine, but lankier. It had my voice and many other parts of me, I suspected.

My light, the hag had called it, must have been in the abomination, but it wasn't just me. It also had a little Camden, his eyes specifically, and other parts, and the light of all the other bodies that had been in the cage with me. It was funny. This creature made of our light looked like it was made of darkness, like something so dark that a flashlight couldn't penetrate it.

And this creature looked like the fabric of darkness stitched together in the shape of a large cat, with the eyes of Camden Tran and the teeth of Riley Lawrence. Its body wasn't liquid or amorphous, but more like a flexible stuffed animal without quite enough stuffing, made of tube socks stitched together with the bones and souls of humans. Ol' Nonnie was a beast at arts and crafts. It stood on its hind legs, and it didn't feel the need to move as Anna shone her light up at it.

All I could see on the red wallpaper as I looked was the name, The Familiar. It was the hag's familiar, more specifically, made of a hodgepodge of victims, made with the express goal of finding prey.

"You're right, it isn't me," my voice said from the cat's mouth, as its long, tube-like arms reached down toward Anna, and as they did, the material they were made of started to mold around her, while she shot at it with the gun.

"Anna!" Antoine screamed from a distance, but he and Cassie were too late. All they got was a glimpse of what they were up against. The minion of the hag, a golem of flesh and magic. The familiar took her, and I had a pretty good idea where she would end up. I just hoped that once she got there, she would find a way to survive better than I had.