Chương 415: Book Eight, Chapter 82: Arrival

This flight, unlike all of those we had taken before, lasted far longer than five minutes. In fact, it lasted so long that Bones had to land and refuel the plane several times. It was fascinating to watch through the windows, as none of this was On-Screen, so we would land in a place like a monster-ridden, apocalyptic airport, and all the creatures would pause and watch us as Bones got out and refueled the plane. It happened several times, giving us plenty of time to plan ahead.

Even when we stopped to resupply and pick up a few of Camden's men, thoroughly squeezing us in like sardines, it only took a few minutes, and then we were back traveling through the air with no apparent destination that I could see. I began to wonder if traveling through Carousel by air was like traveling through the river, and perhaps this next location was far away even by Carousel standards. Eventually, we shuffled around until I got a seat next to Bones at the front.

It didn't take long for me to start picking Bones's mind.

"So you're meta aware," I said, not asking a question, just making a statement.

"It would appear so," he said.

"But I can't actually know, because you can just be scripted to act meta aware, can't you?" I asked.

"It is a conundrum," he said with a chuckle.

"You could never really know. But then you'll have to ask who would be scripting me." I shrugged my shoulders.

"Given the high population of paragons here, I'm going to bet it's a narrator."

"That might be a good guess." I looked over at him until we made eye contact. His face was old, but his eyes were young, and, like paragons were known to do, his gaze contained some message that I couldn't quite interpret, but I knew it was there.

"Would you call it a lucky guess?" I asked. He began to laugh.

"I might just." I figured. I closed my eyes as the plane hit some turbulence. I focused on the red wallpaper. Carousel had given us a throughline tracker, and while it was useful, it wasn't particularly accurate. It was designed to be dramatic. It wouldn't show you all your progress. That way, it could inform you of how far along you are in some cinematic moment. Which meant that just because we didn't seem to be on Lucky's throughline, it didn't mean we weren't.

At some point, we would make a choice or achieve a milestone, and we might realize that we were halfway through the entire process. That would certainly explain some of the strangeness going on. I opened my eyes sometime later, after a short nap, to find that we were flying over a jungle again. I kept looking for an air strip or road that Bones would try to land on, but that never came. On-Screen"Now, you say that we are to expect an army at Cuyara. If that is to be true, we must arrive from this direction.

The entire valley lies at the bottom of a great cliff. The top of that cliff is our best entry point," Bones said, "but in my heart, I still think we'll find an empty valley."

"I hope you're right," Antoine said as he squeezed up between Bones and me and looked through the windshield.

"Where are you gonna land us?"

"You're looking at it," Bones said. I stared ahead, and I didn't see any landing strip, but then I realized that this was an adventure story, and the landing strip he was talking about was actually another river, one that cut through the highland we were flying over and eventually plummeted off in a great waterfall somewhere in the distance, where I imagined the finale would take place.

"Hold on to something," Bones said as he began lowering the plane closer and closer toward the river. There was no jungle left, just flat lands as we got closer to the edge of the highland, and while it could have been a tense moment, Bones landed the plane with ease and even managed to gently lower the wheels and pull us out of the river while he taxied the plane over behind a large boulder. It was a fakeout. With that, the door opened, and we were out.

We were headed toward the midpoint, towards some reveal that would give us context for the rest of the film. There were a ton of us, over ten including the NPCs, which was dangerous. Something was going to happen to split us up. I was certain. Luckily, we were practiced at this sort of thing. We fanned out, staying together but also creating natural groups.

Roxy, her bodyguard, Camden, and his squad stayed with me and my cameraman and assistant, while Antoine, Bones, Bobby, and Anna formed a group because their characters had worked together before. If disaster struck, we could split up with a fairly even distribution. But that didn't happen. We were very high up on a plateau of sorts, and we had a straight shot to walk toward the edge, where the river ran down to the valley below, and no one was around to investigate us.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Camden had been able to supply us with binoculars, so as we lay down at the edge of the plateau and stared down into the valley below, we had a pretty good view of things. Bones had absolutely been right about the ambiguity of these ruins.

There was definitely a pattern in the large blocks of stone that might suggest human activity, but they were eroded down so much that the naked eye couldn't easily see whether or not they were put there by men or by nature. Maybe if more of the land had been cleared of brush and vines, it would be easier to tell. But that's not what the armed men down in the valley were interested in.

There were dozens of them, largely outfitted like mercenaries, but there were others, too, that seemed to be wearing casual clothing. They had likely entered the valley through one of the forested paths that the river took as it forked off from the great pool beneath the waterfall.

"The Cuyara River," Bones said.

"The ruins were named for the river because history forgot this place. None of the local tribes remembered the people who lived here. It is a place as ancient as it is remote." I took that as an invitation to sightsee. It was beautiful. The land was lush and plentiful, the valley safe and secluded. I could see a city having been there thousands of years ago.

"Look there," Anna said.

"To the right. They have them in cages." Oh, right, the plot. I almost forgot. The funny thing about binoculars and Carousel is that they are ridiculously easy to use. Even with just a twitch, they will suddenly pan over to the thing that you're trying to look at. So all at once, the entire group gasped as they found the cages Anna was talking about. It was mostly what you would expect from a cage built for a human, except that the entire front panel, including the door, was made of solid metal welded together.

"They have no locks on them," Camden said.

"They rely on the prisoners not being able to reach around to unlatch them. We should be able to get them out pretty easily."

"Bottom left," I said.

"Does it look like that cage was blown up?" Several people tried to respond to me at once, which happened less often than one would expect, so everyone took a breath, hoping Carousel would just cut that part out, and Antoine spoke.

"What could have caused that damage?" he asked.

"It looks like a bomb went off, but surely that couldn't have done it." There were no burn marks. It looked like the bars and metal had been pushed outward from someone inside, all of them, all at once. The thing none of us had said yet, until Anna did moments later, was that Kelsey, Isaac, and Ramona were not the only prisoners. In fact, Ramona wasn't even there. There were dozens of people in those cages. Each one could contain at least six people, and there were nine functional cages left.

"What do they need all those people for?" Roxy asked for the first time, sounding like a normal human and not some sort of antagonistic cliché. She seemed genuinely touched.

"Evil," Antoine said.

"Maybe this is a path to the cradle after all. We might get to learn what happened to Andrew after all." It was weird that he could come up with a line like that, but not actually tell me what the cradle was. On some level, I understood there was darkness reeking from this place, and even the least powerful of all of Stephen King's psychic characters could intuit something about what lay beneath, so perhaps Antoine was just going on his gut instinct.

I wished that he wouldn't keep propping up the supernatural force beneath us. Keeping things vague could be very useful to us for a while longer; even suggesting how powerful the entity below was could be dangerous. It didn't matter.

"Do those prisoners look weird to you?" Anna asked.

"They don't even look distressed." To be honest, they looked bored and apprehensive to my eyes, not incredibly out of place. It wasn't like they were being tortured, but I expected that Anna was trying to put into words something that she could see on the red wallpaper. Was she trying to sell us that Kelsey and Isaac weren't worried or upset despite being in those cages? That was odd. There could be some sort of aura keeping them at bay, or maybe they had resigned to their fate.

"I'd sneak down there and let everybody out," Antoine said, "but I'm afraid those thugs might recognize me."

"I think they might recognize all of us," Camden said.

"Look over at that table made from the sawhorses. Does that guy look familiar to you?" The binoculars took me there. He looked a little familiar. He was dressed the same as the gunmen from the speedboats that had been chasing us, basic mercenary clothing, but I did recognize him because he wore a scarf, not that I would have thought to point him out before that moment. One of the large flat stones that littered the area had been cracked open, and the tunnel had been dug down into it.

There was no putting it off any longer. We had found an entrance to the ancient impossible myth beneath the surface of the earth. The question was what would happen when we inevitably made our way down those depths. Actually, that was a later question. The current question came from Anna again.

"Where's Bobby?" she asked. I immediately stood up from my place where I had been lying on the ground at the edge of the cliff and looked over at where I had last seen him. He was gone. Everyone else was there, though.

"Let's search for him," Antoine commanded. One of Camden's mercenaries, in a complete excess of personality, joked that Bobby had probably gone to take a leak. Getting a line at a movie probably upgraded his membership in the Carousel Actors Guild or something. I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about a feeling, an instinct that I had about Bobby from the moment he entered the story. It never sat right with me that he was free in the story. Why had he not been cast as a prisoner like Isaac and Kelsey?

In fact, a lot of Bobby's behavior had been off, and while I didn't have a smoking gun to explain it, I couldn't ignore it.

"We need to leave. Or at least hide," I said.

"Hide?" Antoine asked.

"We need to figure out where Bobby went before he gets captured."

"No," I said.

"We need to find a place to hide right now." I tried to act as if I were following some sort of intuition. After all, my character was more psychic than usual because of Cassie's gift. I looked over at Anna, and she was looking back at me. There was panic in her eyes, and even though she didn't say it, I suspected that her Are You Okay in There trope suddenly lost one of her allies from its display. I glanced over at Roxy.

Ever since she entered the storyline, I had expected a betrayal, but I knew it didn't have to be from her.

"We need to hide now. In fact, we should get to the plane," I said. I needed to express my concerns, even if I couldn't explain them, and a logical person in my position would recommend that we leave, that we fly away. Even though I knew that by this point it was no longer an option. We had to run toward the plane anyway. In the distance, behind the large boulder where we had left the plane, an explosion rang out. It looked like escape wasn't an option. No surprise there.

I had been waiting for the real plot to start, and now all I could hope was that we would survive it.