Chương 357: Book Eight, Chapter 24: Six Weeks Later

SIX WEEKS LATER Eternal Savers Club really was quite simple to beat when you weren't doing a rescue. Antoine, Kimberly, Camden, Anna, Dina, and I managed to pull off a win as part of an ambitious shopping project to help us stock up for the apocalypse, the event that had occupied much of our attention ever since our parley with Lucky the Narrator.

This time, there was no cult, and while there was a strange aura in the air, it was nothing like the one that had existed when the story revolved around an unnamed god trapped in an amber prison underneath the building. This one was an armed robbery storyline. It was stuff I had seen before. A thief was on the run from cops who happened to chase them into the store.

Because the thief knew he was about to get caught, he quickly hid the expensive jewelry he had stolen on one of the mannequins in the store's jewelry section right before closing time. Unfortunately, one of the rings he stole was magical in nature and brought all the mannequins in the store to life. To complicate things, the thief's friends showed up to find his stashed jewels. It wasn't a cakewalk, but we made quick work of it. I did spend about thirty minutes of it trapped in the form of a mannequin.

That was the beginning and end of my modeling career. But winning wasn't why we were there. We were there to pick up a freezer. It wasn't the largest model they had, but it was the biggest we could fit on the flatbed cart along with a small emergency generator and some jerry cans of gas (which they sold pre-filled in the store), just in case. Antoine was in charge of pushing that cart while I had one filled to the brim with meat.

It felt risky to purchase perishable goods, but we had put in the effort, and we had earned it. The problem was that we had to get it all the way across town. While Kimberly's loft was central to pretty much everything because it was in the downtown area, Halle's Castle, the place we were going to hold out through the apocalypse, was on the north side of town, while Eternal Savers Club was on the south. We were fine, though. We were just off a win, and we managed to have a great shopping experience.

It really was the small things that made Carousel bearable, like being able to fill your cart with T-bone steaks and lobster. There was barely any traffic left. The Circus had spread so far that we could not safely stay at Kimberly's loft any longer. We weren't worried about the Circus itself quite yet, it was the flood of monsters and killers fleeing the Circus that worried us. They were nearly to Kimberly's loft when we abandoned it. Something strange was happening.

It was as if someone had flipped a switch a month prior, and suddenly the Red Chalk Circus was less of a mere curiosity and more of an emergency. We stood on the freeway at the top of a hill, which gave us a very long view eastward. The way the town changed when the Circus got to it was abrupt and obvious. Not only was there a large canvas-covered fence surrounding the affected area, but everything within it had changed, too.

While there were still buildings, many open spaces had been taken over by high-top tents and other attractions. The colors were so bright they turned the clouds above pink at night.

"It makes you wonder," Dina said, "what the actual story of that one is. Like the Black Rain or whatever it was. I got that story. There was some sort of magic chemical that turned everybody into goo monsters. But what's the story with this Circus?" Dina had been one of the players who had been at Camp Dyer when the Black Snow apocalypse occurred, so to her, it was just a story. She didn't see how terrifying it was.

"My money is on some sort of nightmare parallel universe or dreamscape," I said.

"Unless laughter actually is infectious here in Carousel."

"Don't say that," Kimberly said. She was doing everything she could not to worry. The last apocalypse had weighed on her.

"Sorry," I said.

"I don't know," Camden said.

"Maybe the Circus offers good health insurance." That was it.

"It's just an ordinary Circus," I said.

"But your boss is really great, and it has flexible hours. It has all the balls you can juggle."

"All I know is that my gut instinct is terrified of that place," Antoine said, referencing his vague but powerful trope designed to keep him from danger.

"And it should be," I said.

"I'm not even sure the apocalypse has actually started yet. I think this is all set dressing."

"You know, now that you say it, it would be interesting if the Circus spreads by laughter," Camden said.

"You guys, don't give Carousel ideas," Kimberly said.

"I'm already going to be miserable."

"I wonder how they will redecorate your loft," Camden said.

"Have you thought about that?" Kimberly rolled her eyes and pushed her cart ahead. I got the feeling she had thought of it. I kept an eye out for where she was headed and pushed my cart to match her pace. It was best if I were in the lead. As good as Antoine's Gut Instinct trope was, my scouting trope was still king. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Let's not stay out longer than we need to be," I said.

"There aren't that many Omens on the streets, but that doesn't mean there's no danger." As we pushed the carts forward through neighborhoods where flyers for the Circus fluttered like leaves, we quickened our pace. The flyers were harmless; they had been blowing for weeks. They were yet another thing we had to just put up with. We would go out on the roof of the loft, and we'd find some there, taped to the structures on the roof, as if someone had snuck up there. We didn't want to think about it.

Needless to say, we were overjoyed when Logan's team finally managed to get a Writ of Habitation for Halle's Castle. They had been trying consistently for weeks and had not yet managed to crack it. Like Camp Dyer, the castle was far enough away from town that the apocalypse wouldn't reach it. The Vets and the Atlas itself were clear that an apocalypse only went as far as the edge of town.

For now, we were safe, and with all the food we had managed to stock the larders with, we could outlast an apocalypse even if it lasted a month or more.

"We're being followed," Dina said. While my scouting trope was great for getting information and seeing dangers, her Outsider's Perspective trope was good for alerting her to changes and unusual things, like the man walking a block or two behind us as we made our way across town.

"Wait, is that an Omen?" Antoine asked as he squinted into the distance.

"Nope," I said. A level sixty enemy was following us. No storyline. No lair constraining him. Just a killer out on the town. He fit several different classic slasher tropes at once. He wore a cloth mask over his face, something improvised. A real man of the people. He had greasy, tangled hair that reached his shoulders and drooped over his face. Together with a white T-shirt, jeans, boots, and a katana, he was ready to go on a rampage.

His name was Caleb Rowe on the red wallpaper, and his poster said he was from Killer's Rowe III.

"Of course," Camden said.

"Looks like he didn't wanna join the Circus."

"I guess he didn't know about the healthcare plan," I said.

"All right, he is way over our level. Give me a second." I could only see a couple of his tropes. Out of Sight, Out of Scene: This villain can disappear from view as soon as its prey loses line of sight or looks away. The other one was No One Will Believe You, which would prevent us from contacting the police, but something told me we weren't going to have the time to do that.

"He's easy enough for us to beat," I said.

"At least one of us needs to keep an eye on him, or else he can disappear and be a real problem for us, and I mean that literally," I added.

"He has a trope that lets him disappear once we look away." Living in Carousel really did a number on you. When I told the others how to keep him at bay, they almost seemed relieved—just another day in the office.

"All right," Camden said.

"So we need to go in shifts. Make sure at least two people have an eye on the weeaboo at any given time. Will blinking be enough to let him disappear?" he asked.

"Doubt it," I said, "Usually it's looking away or something moving between us so we can't see him anymore that activates that trope. He probably doesn't have magic powers. He strikes me more as an evil incarnate kind of guy."

"Classic mall ninja," Camden said.

"Why don't you tell him that when he gets a little closer?" I asked. Cracking jokes helped us feel safer. It was a good alternative to panicking. The further we walked, the less able we were to keep up the banter. Caleb Rowe followed us silently. I couldn't see his eyes very well from the shadows cast by his hair and simple mask, but it looked like he was staring straight at us the entire time.

Luckily, there were six of us, and it seemed that the rules keeping him from disappearing were actually relatively favorable to the player.

"I'm probably going to have to keep my eyes forward," I said.

"You look for Omens; we'll keep an eye on him," Camden said.

"We're just lucky that we have a straight shot across town." As we went along, I noticed that strange things kept happening in our periphery, things like the sounds of car accidents or loud machines switching on all of a sudden.

"It seems like he has a trope to try to distract you," I said.

"Loud noises, stuff to make you look away."

"We're not that far away," Antoine said.

"Let's keep it up." And so we went like that for a terrifying twenty minutes as Caleb Rowe followed us from a distance, never particularly eager to catch up, but never getting tired and never quitting. When we got across town and had to turn left to navigate our way toward the mountain road that would lead us up to Halle's Castle, we had to improvise. If we made a turn, we might not be able to see the sword-wielding slasher on our tail.

So Antoine and Camden went wide so that they could keep an eye on him, and then when he got close enough, they booked it up the mountain road after us. They had to leave their carts at the bottom of the hill for a moment.

"He's stopping," Camden said. Of course, he stopped right after we started going uphill.

"He's just staring at us," Anna said softly. She didn't seem as alarmed as the rest of us. Maybe she was too used to being killed last.

"You have to wonder why."

"What do you mean, you have to wonder why?" Camden asked.

"That's not ketchup on his shirt."

"No, that's not what I mean," Anna said.

"He's running from the apocalypse. Why does he do it? And why chase us? What is his script telling him? Is Carousel just using him to freak us out, or is he lost and following us because he doesn't know what else to do?"

"I think evil incarnate covers most of his motivations," I said. Anna didn't seem satisfied with that explanation. She had a point, at least. She had not survived enough of the Black Snow apocalypse to see the roaming monsters and killers escaping the danger, killing each other and others as they fled. It did raise a question about why they would run in the first place. Were they meta-aware enough to know what was about to happen, or was this just some rarely used protocol in an enemy's script?

Finally, we lost sight of the slasher just as we gained sight of the castle gate. Michael was standing guard on the walls with a rifle, the one we had found in Lark House. That gave us some comfort. We ran as fast as we could to get into the castle, where we would be safe. It would seem the slasher had lost interest in us, because if he really wanted to hurt us, he could have. As I entered the courtyard and the castle gate closed behind us, I finally felt safe.

I had to unequip my I Don't Like It Here scouting trope in order to make the anxiety go away. Logan and his team were there waiting for us.

"What happened?" Logan asked, seeing the exhaustion on our faces from having to push our carts at the pace we did.

"Minor complication," Antoine said.

"It looks like the free-range enemies have made it this far. I don't think we can leave the castle again." Logan nodded.

"We've seen monsters roaming the forests around us. They don't try to get in, but we were definitely worried about you out there. Why in the world is this accelerating so quickly? The broadcasts made it seem like we should have another week, at least." All good questions to add to the pile.

"We really have you to thank for getting the Writ to this place," Kimberly said.

"I don't know what we would have done without you."

"Well, it's Avery you have to thank," Logan said.

"She's the one who figured out what we had to do to finally get the keys to the castle after all our attempts."

"And what was that?" I asked.

"You never said." Spoilers weren't an issue because everyone there had played the Astralist storyline at least once.

"I had to marry him. Sort of," she said.

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"Trust me, I understand," I said.