Chương 364: Book Nine, Chapter 11: Readjusting

Was it enough? The audience knew that the infected would be able to recover. We established that with Camden's radio friend, and even as that scene was going on, I began wondering if it would be enough to make the audience care about our efforts to save Kimberly. I had made a mistake. I had assumed that, at some point early in the film, we would be able to establish a strong bond with her as a character, but all she ended up being was a name, as far as I knew. Where's Kimberly? Do you know where Kimberly is?

I had to hope that Carousel had shot some footage with her because, if the first time the audience got acquainted with Kimberly was when she was halfway through succumbing to infection, I wasn't sure how much support they would have for our goal of saving her and getting her out of the Speedway alive. Treating zombies like people got you killed. I couldn't even think of a serious counterexample. We had some downtime after First Blood. That was to be expected.

It was plenty of time for me to start planning our next move. I knew that we couldn't stay in the owners' suites. This place was just too good to be true. Food, water, and a great vantage point. We had to be ready for the next move, and that was up to Camden and me to figure something out. But while we were Off-Screen and I was trying to figure out where we should go when the plot demanded we make a move, my mind kept coming back to the question: Will the audience care about Kimberly?

There was one thing in our favor. While most of her tropes were unequipped, the only one that remained on her was her Hall of Fame trope. It was her Celebrity aspect trope, so it made sense. It made her the center of attention regarding the story's meta elements. It couldn't hurt. It might have been more useful to have the Beauty aspect, which had more to do with relationships, but this would do nicely. It meant we had the pull of her high Moxie to help reframe the story around her. That had to be our strategy.

Rescuing Kimberly could not be Antoine's subplot. It had to be hers. When I went down into the garage to check on what Antoine had done with her, I found that she was locked in a large metal tool closet with a giant industrial-sized fan next to it, covering up any sound she might make with its groaning motor and shaking frame.

"How much footage did Carousel get of you two?" I asked Antoine, who looked at me with tired eyes.

"Pretty much everything," he said.

"It wasn't filming the whole time, but it got all the elements. It got our first embrace. She was still there a little bit when I first pulled her into the car, you know, her personality. It got me setting up this," he said as he pointed to the tool closet she was currently trapped in.

"Did you talk to her Off-Screen?" I asked.

"Did she say whether or not she had filmed any scenes, established her character at all?" His face fell, and he shook his head.

"We didn't have the time. Maybe I could have. I'm sorry. I was distracted." I could tell he was feeling a lot of emotions. Saving Kimberly would be more difficult than some of the rescues we'd done in the past, which only required completing a storyline. Here, we actually had to keep her safe despite her infection. I filled him in on everything that had happened upstairs, including the brewing anti-zombie sentiment.

"If they find her here, they're going to kill her, aren't they?" he asked. I looked over at the closet she was in. It wasn't moving, but there was a tap on the door, a slow one that matched the methodical rhythm of the fan as it rocked on its stand.

"I don't know," I said.

"I thought the mere fact that these zombies can get better would be enough to change the game, but I've got this awful feeling that it doesn't really matter. These zombies look terrifying." I stopped talking as I realized that Kimberly also must look the same way that the others did, with the broken blood vessels in their eyes and the strange, bloated faces.

"I don't think the audience is automatically going to get behind our plan to save her. In every zombie movie where someone tries to save a zombie, they end up looking like idiots and dying because of it. I'm not sure we have enough going for us to counter that. Not yet." Antoine looked up at me. He was sitting on an upturned five-gallon bucket.

I could tell he was emotionally wrecked after having watched Kimberly slip away into the madness of her disease, the very thing we had avoided as cowards when we left her on the side of the river. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"What do we need?" he asked.

"It's going to be a hard thing to balance, but we need to prove that these things are still human, that she's still in there. If we can do that," I said, "I think the audience will support whatever we have to do to save her. Try to think of it as if the story is from her point of view."

"A zombie film from the point of view of a zombie?" he asked.

"Not sure it will have mass appeal." He was probably right. We really just needed enough footage for Carousel to make her story compelling in and of itself.

"Well, many would argue she's not technically a zombie. They'll say she's just a sick person, that it doesn't count unless you're undead. So at least we'll have the pedants on our side," I said. Antoine nodded. We had prepared for this as much as we could, but at the end of the day, this was a hot mess. All zombie movies were, and this one had added layers to mess things up even more.

"Do you think the military will get violent?" he asked.

"Yep," I said.

"Otherwise, a lot of what they're doing doesn't make sense. As weird as it sounds, I feel like Kitty Lincoln is kind of on our side. Her paranoia and panic are almost prophetic, like she's warning us about what's about to happen." Hysterics, after all, had some overlap with Psychics, but unlike Psychics, they didn't need the supernatural to be a part of a story in order for their powers to work. It turned out that when you were always expecting the worst, you were well-equipped for a horror film.

I still didn't know if Kitty was on our side or an enemy. She may have been a bit of both, but the way she talked about the military made it very clear that they would be involved. The character she was playing would not be made to look like a fool in that regard. She may choose the wrong way to react to the situation, but I trusted her read on it.

"What do we do if soldiers break in here and start shooting at us? I can't imagine a world where we could fight them off."

"Me neither," I said.

"But that's not the plan right now. We need to worry about the next scene, and that, well, that's all on you." We talked through what he was going to do, and he knew how important it was. I left him to prepare and moved back upstairs, where everyone else was adjusting to the changes in the story and thinking about how they would play their characters. Isaac found me as soon as I walked into the owner's suite." Hindsight is 20/20 is going off," he said.

"We shouldn't be in this place. Not enough ways in and out. A tower with only one way down. It's a mistake." I nodded because he was right. Unfortunately, whatever we did would end up being a mistake. It was so early in the movie that we couldn't get a solid shelter that would last until the end.

"I'm planning our next move," I said. He nodded.

"How's Cassie handling it?" He shrugged his shoulders.

"She's upset. There's not much psychic mojo in this storyline. Really, the only insight trope of hers that's working is the one where she can hear stuff on the radio before it happens in real life, but that's not much." That sounded about right. There weren't zero supernatural elements to this storyline, but it was next to that. I could barely sense anything with my psychic background trope, and I was pretty sure it was a false positive. That didn't mean she had no role.

Unfortunately, she ended up looking like the wicked stepsister. She sat on the couch next to Camden's radio and listened to its crackling. Occasionally, we would go On-Screen, but only for moments at a time because the NPCs were talking about us, and when they would glance over at us, well, Carousel would capture some footage. It wasn't looking good. The next time it happened, I was ready. I had found Camden, and the moment I was On-Screen, I started to speak.

"Some tension's rising in here," I said. He was busy compacting his improvised mega-radio into something handheld. This involved a lot of duct tape.

"I don't like this location," he said.

"It's too central. Even if we had an opportunity to evacuate, we would have to run through the herd to get there."

"You have any other ideas?" I asked.

"Unfortunately, I think a lot of the Speedway is occupied by those folks out there."

"I have some thoughts," he said.

"Whenever this started, the first thing we did was lock down the broadcasting room. We thought it was a terrorist attack, or at least that's the protocol we went through. That room is heavily secured, and I'm betting if we can get to it, it'll be empty." It would probably cost us to get to it, too.

"I like the sound of that," I said.

"But there's another issue." At this point, Danny was filming me to make sure that, even if I went Off-Screen, Carousel would still get footage of me and our plan.

"What other issue?" he asked. I glanced down toward the garage below us.

"Ah. The PR woman, right? She was infected. Your driver is pretty attached," he said.

"In a major way," I said.

"And now he knows that she's going to get better, so we're not talking him into leaving her here."

"Look," Camden said, "just because the disease can be beaten does not mean she isn't a goner. If the virus doesn't get her, a bullet will. Those guys out there aren't here to supply us with fresh water and blankets. They are here to clean up the mess." I nodded.

"The broadcast room," I said.

"I assume it has equipment that could help us get a signal out, like you were able to break through their radio blockade." He eyed me curiously.

"I might be able to make something happen, but even if we get a signal out, it's not like there's someone out there who can break through the military line and come get us. If there were, Jeremy would have gotten them here by now," he said.

"Our worry is that they're willing to kill to protect their secret. Well, what if there was no secret?" I glanced over into the camera that Danny was holding, and Camden did the same. Off-Screen. We had set it up. Now we had a reason to get humanizing footage of Kimberly, which was something we desperately needed to show the audience. Admittedly, it wasn't exactly a fresh idea. Our last storyline had placed the concept of getting the truth out squarely in my mind.

I didn't know if it would be an actual endgame, but it was definitely some fuel to help push the plot forward.