Interlude: In Time--Part Two

Interlude: In Time--Part Two

“Can he follow us?” I asked as we ran from the stampede.

Camden shook his head. I could tell he was in worse condition than he pretended.

“They can only—” he stopped and winced in pain. “There’s some kind of limit. I don’t understand it completely. He can only travel to historical disasters. But the magic can only open one portal to a particular disaster at once. Does that make sense? Unless he wants another version of himself to follow him. Then he has to kill a new victim. Whatever--" he winced again, "Just, he shouldn't be able to follow us is all that matters, not until the next recorded disaster."

Time traveling from disaster to disaster.

This disaster... the Stampede.

The 1996 Carousel Summer Days Stampede took over forty lives. A carnival ride—a small, slow kiddie ride—malfunctioned and threatened to derail a car from its spinning track. The ride operator managed to get it switched off, but the loud sound of metal bursting loose within the mechanism sounded much more dangerous than it was. The crowd panicked. Many thought a bomb had gone off.

The Town of Carousel: Horrific Events Through the Ages, the book the Generation Killer (as he was called on the red wallpaper) used to coordinate his time travel, stated that many of the victims had been trampled, but most had gotten tangled together in a narrow alleyway and succumbed to crowd crush. Everyone ran to exit the alleyway with such reckless haste that they jammed up against each other, their limbs getting caught around those next to them. Those in the front were killed as those in the back pushed forward, unable to see the carnage they were causing.

The image of it had been awful, bodies, squeezed, tangled together until everyone involved was stuck so tight they couldn’t breathe. I will never forget it.

The strange jewel the Killer used had brought us right into the midst of the chaos. We were in Carousel in 1996.

“We have two days here,” Camden said. “Then a houseboat sinks on Dyer’s Lake and he can come through to get us.”

Two days until the next disaster.

“Did you say there are other versions of him?” I asked. In the excitement, I had almost missed that.

“Past, present, future,” Camden said. “Several of them. The young ones are fast and strong but also kind of dumb. I managed to trick one and get away for a while before you showed up. The old ones are smarter but weaker and slower.”

We ran until we found a corner between two buildings where we could stop running and hide. Camden plopped down on the ground and pulled out some medical supplies from his pocket. The Killer had taken his arm, but had also patched it up.

Camden must have seen me staring at his recently stitched stump.

“He didn’t want me to die too quickly,” he explained. “That magic pendant,” he pointed at the necklace I was wearing, “It has to be jumpstarted through anguish. That’s why his face and arms are covered in scars. He thought he would use me instead of himself for a while.”

That was too terrible to think about.

Camden started trying to dress his wound. I quickly bent down to take over. I felt so useless, not knowing how to treat an amputation like this.

“These supplies are really old,” I said. The style was not modern at all.

“They were all he had,” Camden said. “He must have picked them up decades ago.”

I dressed his wound as best as I could. The stitches and cauterization that the Killer had done were clumsy, but at least Camden would not bleed out.

Off-Screen.

After I was done, I sat down on the ground across from Camden and we just looked at each other for a moment. We had never gotten the chance to discuss what had happened to us since we started the storyline. The roller rink had collapsed into the earth soon after we arrived, and the story had not slowed down since then. Now, we were finally between scenes.

“Do you think Riley, Antoine, and Kimberly are okay?” I asked.

Camden didn’t answer for a time, but then said, “They’ll be fine. They have Chris and Grace.”

“Are we going to be okay?”

Camden’s eyes dropped.

“What do we do?” I asked. “How do we beat him? Where do we go?”

“Anna...” Camden said.

“What?”

He looked at me with a soft expression. “We won’t survive this.”

I was afraid he would say that.

“No,” I said. A lump rose up in my throat. “There has to be a way.”

“There is a way,” Camden said. “But we can’t do it. Not just the two of us.”This chapter made its debut appearance via N0v3lB1n.

I couldn’t accept that. It was my job to keep us positive when everything looked impossible.

“You just have to take some time to think it through,” I said.

Camden shook his head. “I did. I was in that cell for over a week before you got there. I figured out how to beat him. You split him up. You grab as many of the amulets as you can and you take them to different times. He gets confused. I heard one of the older versions yelling at a teenage version about it. His memories get scrambled. There are ten versions. Used to be twelve once upon a time I think. Strand them in their own time periods and they can’t time travel anymore. Maybe kill them, I don’t know. The time travel continuity in this story is nonsense. Riley would love it. I did my research. Paid the price for it too,” he said, looking over at his missing arm.

“But there’s only two of us...” I said, dejected.

“There’s only two,” he repeated. “And we are horribly under-leveled.”

This wasn’t happening. We were really going to die. My family would never know what happened to me. I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore.

“But I have an idea,” he said.

I perked up at that. Did he have a plan to get us home?

We ran straight to Dyer’s Lodge.

“Please be there,” Camden said. He said it several times. I guess it was our swan song, our Hail Mary. I hoped it was there too.

----

“You don’t remember?” Camden asked.

I shook my head. “Vaguely.”

“Rescue tropes disappeared in Fall 2010. So we go travel back to before that happened.”

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think we’re going to find Rescue Tropes, do you?”

I was fairly certain that Carousel wouldn’t make such an oversight.

He shook his head. "No."

----

As we got to Dyer’s Lodge, we ran past the head camp counselor who yelled something at us I couldn’t hear. It didn’t seem important.

We were inside the Lodge in a flash. It looked different. Fewer couches. A lot of the knickknacks had disappeared along with many of the books.

“Look,” Camden said, pointing to a chalkboard in the center of the common area. The board was covered in plans for a run to the mall. These players were high enough level to plan runs at the mall? We had been told it was way too dangerous.

“Oh my god!” I said.

Camden was right. Carousel recreated the time period down to the last detail, even including the things that players had left behind back then.

----

“If Carousel recreates past time periods exactly,” Camden said. “Recreates it down to the last detail, even going so far as having NPCs show up because some players had run a storyline on that same day, What if Carousel recreates everything?”

“Everything?” I asked.

----

We rummaged through the Lodge. There were no players there, but this was their hideout. Just like it was our hideout over ten years later. Players had been staying at Dyer’s Lodge since before Adeline and Arthur were in charge.

“Found it!” Camden screamed out.

I ran toward the stairs and bounded up them.

He was sitting on a chair at the table where the high-level players always planned their runs.

In front of him was the object of our desire: the Carousel Atlas.

“The player register,” Camden said, overjoyed. “The register is still here,” he said, having flipped to the very back. “It goes back to 1989.”

Players had been in Carousel since 1989?

He sat and read through the book.

Something he read was quite sobering. “I think Riley might be onto something,” he said.

There were all kinds of things in this past version of the Atlas that ours didn’t have. Entire sections. Ticket types I had never heard of were discussed in detail.

Camden pointed to a section of text.

“We’ve discovered a new exploit for Rescue Tickets,” Camden read aloud. “Our ‘Insider’ tells us to be cautious because he cannot keep Carousel distracted for too long, but the more we experiment, the more confident I am that we have found a way to increase our levels dramatically in the coming months. Testing continues. We must not tell the other players until we are sure it is safe.”

"An exploit?" I asked. "Like cheating?"

"Not necessarily. I wonder if Adeline knows about it? I don't see where she's written anything in here. Arthur either."

----

“What if Carousel recreates Dyer’s Lodge exactly as it was in 2010. What if it recreated the Carousel Atlas before it had so many of its pages torn out? Maybe a lot of information would still be there?”

“Whoa,” I said. Seeing the Atlas before it was defaced was huge. “But how does it help? How do we get it to our friends?”

“Oh, I have an idea,” Camden said with a weak smirk.

----

He flipped to a part that discussed player aspects. Then he flipped further to the Final Girl Section, and then the general section.

“This should work nicely,” he said.

“Which aspect do I need to pick?” I asked.

“Doesn’t much matter,” he said. “Pick whatever you like. Just follow the plan."