Chương 281: Book Six, Chapter 43: Photo Op

Whatever we did, we needed to go up a level. It didn't take us long to realize that the first floor was flooding at an increasingly rapid rate. But, of course, it was. The glass doors at the front of the building could be barricaded to keep out people, but not water, and now it was flooding in so fast that, even before it got to the top of my shoes, it had a sort of current or momentum.

"We need to find Ramona and Logan's bodies," I said.

"If we can use those to trigger Second Blood, we can get to the finale without any more of us dying."

"We don't have much more time here," Andrew said.

"This is only going to get worse." People often said that in Carousel. They were always right. On-Screen. Suddenly, I saw a flash in the distance. The light must have bounced around several corners by the time it got to us, and it was still bright. It wasn't the flashlight. It was quick, as if someone had taken a picture with a camera.

"Hide," I said. Logically, our characters should never approach signs of human activity when a killer is on the loose, but we also couldn't run away because we needed to find out what was happening. I looked at Andrew and said, "Kill the light." He quickly turned off his flashlight. Even while hiding, we could slowly and cautiously make our way toward the activity while staying out of sight. Depending on the camera work, the audience might not ever know how close we came to running into trouble.

Finding a place to hide was easy. The way that the casino floor was divided up and the number of slot machines and tables placed around the floor made moving in secrecy far easier than it should have been. I moved closer toward the flashing, which continued to happen every twenty seconds or so.

"It's like there's a camera on a timer," Kimberly said.

"I believe you are right," Andrew whispered.

"The timing is too even." Daphne was beside me, but she was moving slowly, struggling to keep up. I grabbed onto her hand and gently pulled her toward me. As I grabbed her hand, I thought it odd. She had another ring on her finger. Usually, I wouldn't notice something like that, but I had literally just put a ring on that hand. Now she had another on her middle finger. Looting the storyline a bit early, perhaps.

"You stick with me, all right?" I said.

"Okay," she said with a smile. I could tell because her brilliant white teeth suddenly appeared in the darkness right above her wedding dress. We continued moving toward the source of the flash.

"It's the banquet hall," I whispered. We wound our way around the walls and rows of machines, moving toward the flashing lights. As we got closer to the place where the flash was coming from, I could see much better because the bulb remained bright for quite a few seconds after the flash.

"It's not moving," I said.

"It's on a stand."

"That's where the photographer left it," Daphne said.

"He was supposed to take photos of the reception. You know, just regular shots on a timer of everyone being casual and having a good time. Unfortunately, that was ruined by the storm." She sounded bummed out about it.

"And the deaths," I said.

"Those, too, of course," she added. I was almost confident that we could stop hiding, that somehow the camera had triggered itself, when I heard the whispering. It was a full-on whisper fight, that's what it was.

"You idiot," a woman said.

"They're going to think we did this."

"We just found him already dead," another voice said, who didn't quite understand the concept of whispering as well. It was a man's voice, deep and strong.

"They're not going to know that," the other voice said.

"All they're going to see are the pictures of us standing over the body because you had to touch the camera."

"There was a note on it," the man said.

"… we could leave another note. Explain the whole thing." I heard the sound of a hand slapping the back of someone's skull.

"We need to get out of here. Why did we do this job? We should have called it off when we heard about the storm," the woman said.

"Where's Bambi? We were supposed to meet back here a half hour ago." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Every time the camera flashed, I could see two figures standing over a third. As soon as I could see them with my eyes, I could also see them on the red wallpaper. They were background NPCs. One was Ed, the bellboy, and the other was a cook called Chef Champlain. Ed was gigantic, especially in that bright, illuminated framing of him next to the cook.

I suspected they weren't actually NPCs, and I also suspected that the Bambi they were talking about was the fake receptionist lying dead in the kitchen. The body they stood over was only called "Photographer" on the red wallpaper. He didn't stand a chance. I didn't know where we were supposed to go from there. We certainly didn't want to confront them. I turned to the others and whispered as quietly as I could, "Let's get out of here." As we left, Bobby quietly said, "Those were two of the new employees.

I bet she's not even a real chef. And he's probably not even a bellboy." We were leaving as quietly as we could. But then, right behind me, something smacked into the side of one of the slot machines. Those, being the old, non-digital kind, were filled with bells and chimes that could be physically triggered. Or at least that's what I had to assume, because after somebody tripped on it, it made a far too loud noise, a bell ringing. I suppose that anything would be loud in that room.

All I could hear was the rain in the distance and the occasional flash of a bulb.

"What's that?" Ed, the giant bellboy, asked, not trying to whisper any longer.

"Someone's here," Chef Champlain said.

"Bambi!" Ed called out. We didn't dare say anything. He started walking toward us.

"Let's go," Daphne said, too loudly. And then we had to go because Ed was carrying a stanchion, one of those giant metal poles that velvet ropes are often attached to in order to form the area where people could wait in line.

"Go!" I said. We started to run away. And the thing about running when the water was up to your ankles was that you couldn't possibly do it quietly. Taking baby steps where you didn't have to raise your foot out of the water was one thing. If anything, the sound of that was disguised by the water hitting all of the machines throughout the room. But running was loud and messy.

"Lead the way, Andrew," I said. He had a flashlight. We were in the chase scene. I had to hope that Ed didn't have a bunch of Hustle. He looked more like a guy who would have a Mettle build. The cook, however, could have been fast, but probably wouldn't have confronted us on her own. As we began to run, Daphne started to pull away from me. I held on tight.

"We need to stick toge—" I started to say.

"I need to go check on my parents," Daphne said. Again?

"Fine, then that's where we'll go," I said.

"You know where that is?" I asked Andrew, Bobby, and Kimberly. They did.

"We do need to stick together," Kimberly said.

"Exactly," I said, taking one big step after another. Wet carpet was slippery, but flooded carpet was even worse. You couldn't step too far or else all your forward momentum would become a somersault or the splits. Daphne tested my grip as I held onto her hand, but not too much. She didn't want to appear as though she was struggling, of course.

"I love you," I said, and I felt it deep in my heart as we got to the stairwell. She turned and looked at me in the emergency lighting of the stairwell that blinked red.

"I love you, too," she said, and I believed it. All my Moxie told me she was telling the truth. We started up the stairs, but when we reached the second floor and started winding up toward the third, Andrew jumped back, shining the light upward. A figure stood before us, and even with the flashlight and the red emergency lights, it was difficult to make out who she was at first. My adrenaline was pumping, and while my fight-or-flight instincts were keen, my stop-and-identify instincts were taking a break.

Daphne screamed and pulled from my hand just as I realized who it was.

"Jules!" Bobby said, truly overjoyed.

"Calm down, Gilligan," she said. As I stared at her, I realized she had a bloodied lip, a broken nose, and all manner of swelling around her left eye.

"What happened to you?" Bobby asked.

"Customer complaint," she said coolly, taking a few more steps down the stairs even though doing so gave her significant discomfort.

"I met the folks who were blackmailing the fitness instructor."

"Who was it?" Kimberly asked. We shouldn't have been having this conversation so soon after a chase scene, but I was caught off-guard by how beat up Jules was.

"I don't know who they were. They wore masks, disguised their voices. But there aren't an awful lot of suspects. I bet I could pick them out from body size and gait. We need to get everyone in a lineup. There was a man and a woman. Asked me for the safe's combination.

""Was the man huge? Was it Ed?" Bobby asked.

"The bellboy?" Jules asked, laughing.

"No, not a chance. Much smaller than him. Tell you what, I think I'm about to pass out. If we could get where we're going, I'll tell you all about it."

"We're going to check on Rachel's parents," I said, almost saying Daphne by accident.

"Does she know that?" Jules asked, looking past me to the door to the second floor. Only then did I realize that Daphne had run off. I didn't understand why she kept doing that. I didn't want to.

"She must have thought you were one of them," I said.

"I bet she took another stairwell up to her parents. We should meet her there." Bobby climbed the stairs to be next to Jules and let her put an arm around him as she turned around and started climbing.

"I only wish you had found me a few floors up," she said.

"Oh well. Guess I'll get my steps in." It was slow going, but we eventually made it to the fifth floor, where Daphne's parents' room was, or rather, her character Rachel's parents. It really was strange that Carousel cast one of us to play a named character. That had never happened like this before. I thought I remembered Dina's last name being changed when her character was married, but that didn't apply here. I felt like every theory I had was swimming around me, and I couldn't keep my head straight.

Why was Daphne playing a character named Rachel? Was the Hutchins name that important? They had always adapted props around our names and images. Had Daphne not discovered some vital part of her backstory that would explain it all? Or was Carousel messing with us? Had Daphne done something in the past that would make this prank of Carousel's make sense? I had to think about other storylines she had run. Which ones were they again?

"This is it," I said after we'd made it down the hall to their room.

"Right up there." As we got close enough that we could actually see the door, which was standing ajar, a bloodcurdling scream sounded from within. I rushed forward past Andrew until I could see into the room. Inside, I saw Daphne standing over a queen-size bed, holding a lit lighter up so she could see. In the bed were two people who at first appeared to be sleeping peacefully: Robert and Beth Hutchins. I could see on the red wallpaper that they were dead.