The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Kimberly sat on a crossbeam just under the elevator door. She leaned back against the wall. Directly above her, Camden peeked out through a crack between the doors.

“It looks like there is no one near the elevator,” Camden said. “They’ve moved the Mercers somewhere else.”

“What about Dina’s family?” Anna asked.

“I have no idea,” Camden said.

“I hope they haven't found them yet,” Kimberly said. “That little girl is so precious. She reminds me of myself at that age. It's strange. It's like I can feel her down there somewhere. She's scared.”

I wondered what it was they were planning with that narrative line. They were trying to form a sort of psychic connection between Kimberly and the Mercer girl. If they used it well, there was no telling what they could pull off. I hated not knowing their plans.

“They’ll all be fine,” Antoine said, reaching out from his position to grab Kimberly’s hand. Kimberly held his hand back.

“When I was her age, Grandma told me I was like her. You know, gifted,” Kimberly said. “Guess she was telling the truth. All this time, I thought I was just good with people.”

Was she trying to use Convenient Backstory to reinforce her psychic background and give her a Moxie boost?

She put her other hand to her stomach. “With Riley gone… It’s just us left to carry on that part of her,” she said to Anna.

Anna closed her eyes and nodded.

“We need to make a move,” Camden said. “I’m going to go look for an exit.”

“No,” Antoine said, “I should go.”

“As much as I would like to agree, I think I’ll be better at hiding from the guards,” Camden said. “You need to stay here and protect them. If I can find an exit or make a distraction, I’ll make sure you know about it. When it’s time, you need to come ready to run, fight, whatever.”

Antoine reluctantly nodded.

He leaned over and, with the combined effort of all four of them, pried the elevator doors open as much as possible.

Antoine needed to stay with the group. Antoine’s Playbook trope would alert him automatically when it was time for them to exit the elevator. That would ensure they knew exactly when things would be safe.

Not to mention, I doubted they could get the doors open without Antoine's Mettle.

Camden quickly squeezed through the gap in the silver doors.

“I’ll scope things out. I’ll take the left hallway toward the front entrance. If you hear gunshots… maybe you try the other way,” Camden said.

The doors closed behind him. He took a deep breath and started creeping down the hallway. With low Hustle and High Savvy, his ability to sneak was not good, but his ability to find a place to hide was great, especially with his Hide and Seek trope.

The question was, could he find a place to hide before he was caught?

He glanced up at the camera on the hallway ceiling. He didn’t know if he was being watched. He ran as fast as he could down the hallway while still attempting to stay quiet.

From that vantage, it was difficult to see further than the reception desk, which blocked much of his view. He started looking for somewhere else where he could get a better look at the front door.

Further down the hall, he could see into a room that appeared to be empty. He took a chance and ran across into the room. Success. He hadn’t been spotted.

The room was one of the small offices like the one I had been interviewed in by Dr. Mentes. It held a small amount of furniture—a desk, a cabinet, some chairs, and a couch.

As he stopped to catch his breath, some voices could be heard in the hallway. Camden grew alarmed and scanned over the room for somewhere to hide.

Moments later, the guards entered the room. Camden was nowhere to be seen.

“These missing kids,” one of the guards said, “They’re small, right? What if they hid in a cabinet somewhere? Do we really need to check every crevice they could have fallen into when that thing—whatever it is—is hunting us? Why not just sit back and wait for them to try to escape?”

“Orders are orders,” the other guard said. “Now where did Mentes keep those extra sedatives?”

“The cabinet.”

The man walked across the room toward a large cabinet and jerked open the door.

He found rows of shelves stocked neatly with various medical supplies, including a tub filled with small, single-use packages which contained syringes of the sedative. They were the same ones used on the Mercers after they had been captured.

I had worried Camden might have been hiding in the cabinet. To my relief, he wasn't.

“Check the date on those,” the other guard said.

“I know the protocol, dammit.”

The first guard plopped the syringes on the table and took a seat at the desk. He started to check each of the syringes for the date.

The camera panned down under the desk in the little area where the user’s legs were meant to go. That wasn’t where Camden was hiding either.

He hadn’t hidden under the desk, or in the cabinet.

Where was he?

The camera moved down to ground level. I could see the guards’ feet and… Camden. He was lying face-down underneath the couch. He must have lifted it up and let it drop down on top of himself in order to fit under there, as the opening was not big enough for him to get under normally.

I wasn’t sure if his Hide and Seek trope was doing the heavy lifting there, or merely his high Savvy. Hide and Seek required a chase scene to work. There was no chase seen. That meant he had one less layer of protection as he hid from view.

“See, I checked the dates,” the guard said. “You happy?”

“Let’s just get out of here sometime today, huh? Pass those syringes out. We need to be ready.”

The guard got up from the desk and took the container of sedatives with him.

Underneath the couch, Camden breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like he had been holding his breath the entire time.

“I apologize, ma’am,” one of the guards said as he guided Nancy Cartwright down one of the dark hallways underground. “We need your optical scan and other credentials to reinitiate the HQ override.”

“You said you would have it on in a few minutes,” she retorted.

“We didn’t foresee these circumstances. It looks like the Subject blocked us out after he rebooted. We couldn’t have anticipated that level of sophistication.”

I certainly didn’t remember doing that, but I was willing to take credit for it.

Nancy attempted to hide her fear of being two floors underground, trapped with the Distortion by adding extra vitriol to her voice. “Well, I think we should have hired operatives with… more… skill.”

The guard rolled his eyes behind her back.

She was led into the control room and taken to one of the terminals.

“Do you remember your code?” the man sitting at the terminal asked.

“Of course I do,” Nancy said. “Let me see the keyboard.”

As Nancy was guided through the process of fixing the problem I had caused, the camera floated over to the surveillance monitors. The man that had been posted there was working on one of the terminals. The monitor that showed Camden sneaking down the hallway into the office where he hid under the couch went unwatched.

The screen fast-forwarded through the scene of the guards checking the date on the syringes while Camden hid under the couch.

After what had been a few minutes in real time, Nancy said, “There, is that all you need?”

“That will do. We should have our override in just a few moments.”

“Now take me back upstairs,” Nancy said.

Camden lifted the couch off of himself and rolled out into the room as quietly as he could.

He peeked out into the hallway. The coast was clear back the way he came, but, in the other direction, he could now see fifteen or so guards moving the unconscious Mercers in the direction of the exit. He cursed under his breath.

Just as he was about to cross the hallway to report back to the others, a voice sounded over the intercom.

“Subject 4 spotted in room 113.”

The message sounded again.

Headquarters was back in control of the surveillance system.

Camden glanced back at the door number next to the room. Room 113.

“Shit,” he said aloud.

He appeared to consider running back to the others but thought better of it. He must not have wanted to reveal their location to those watching on from HQ.

He slammed the door, locked it, and started moving furniture in front of it.

A group of five soldiers broke off from those near the exit and ran toward the office he was hiding in.

They began attempting to force the door open.

“Momma?” Bethany Mercer asked from within the small closet where they were hiding.

“Yes?” Dina answered.

“Kimberly needs our help.”

“Kimber-“ Dina started to say. Her face glistened with sweat. “One of the test subjects?”

“I don’t know. She's a nice lady. She’s hiding. I think she needs us to find her.”

Dina’s husband interjected, “How do you-" shook his head, dropping the subject. "We’re hiding, honey. We can’t help anyone else right now.”

Bethany looked her mother in the eye. “She needs us.”

Dina looked at her daughter and then up at the door. They had sealed it very well with trash bags.

As Dina considered what her daughter had told her, the camera panned out to show that the closet the family was hiding in was directly below the control room that Nancy Cartwright was standing in at that very moment.

As Nancy Cartwright moved to leave the control room, one of the guards sitting at a terminal started howling in pain as he grasped his head.

“It’s here!” Nancy yelled to the two guards nearest to her. “We need to go!”

She started to run back toward the elevator where the secret stairwell had been, but instead waved her credentials over a light switch and yet another stairwell opened up, this one leading down.

“Why would we go down?” one of the guards asked.

Nancy started to run down the tiny stairwell. As she did, she said, “The remaining Mercers are likely on this floor. The Distortion is trying to escape to above ground. It has no reason to follow us downward.”

As they made it down to the floor below, Nancy opened the hidden door and piled out into the hallway.

“We need to go east. There is another stairwell that will take us up to the building across the street from the facility,” Nancy said. “Let’s get a move-“

Nancy stopped short as she looked down the hallway and saw, to her horror, Dina and her family.

“Shit!” Nancy yelled, realizing her plan was fatally flawed. She was still assuming that the Poltergeist couldn't manifest through the floors, as had been the case when the Mercers' powers were weakened by their drug regimen.

One of her guards grabbed his head in pain. The Poltergeist had tethered to him. Nancy began running down the hall to the east. Her guards followed, abandoning their orders to capture the Mercers out of fear.

“Don’t follow me, you idiot!” Nancy screamed as she realized what was happening.

They continued to run, but the camera didn’t follow. Screams could be heard in the distance. Then, silence.

“We need to go upstairs now,” Dina said, as she limped forward toward the stairwell Nancy had just climbed down.

Her husband helped support her weight as she went, their children sticking to their mother in order to protect her should the Poltergeist return.

They climbed the stairs.

As they did, the camera zoomed out to show that they were almost directly underneath the very room that Camden was being dragged out of. The further they climbed the stairs, the closer they became. They had him on his knees in the middle of the room. They had managed to break the door off its hinges and drag the furniture he had stacked up out into the hallway.

Their guns were drawn on him as they awaited orders.

As the shot refocused on him, Camden winced and balled his hands into a fist. The Poltergeist must have either killed Nancy Cartwright and the guards.

It had apparently now remanifested and found a new host: Camden.

He was immediately aware of it.

He looked around the room for a plan, suddenly less worried about the guns. His eyes rested on the white packages sticking out of the guards’ pockets—the syringes filled with sedatives the guards had collected earlier.

As he stared at the syringes, two of the guards were forcefully slammed together by an invisible force.

The Poltergeist made its presence known.

“Kill the Host!” one of the men screamed, aiming his gun around looking for some evidence of which of them was tethered to the monster.

Before the guard figured out who the host was, an invisible blade cut a deep gash across his chest, slicing through his bulletproof vest and exposing his muscle and bone. He dropped to the ground and started to shake, either from some sort of seizure, fearful shock, or the influence of the psychokinetic phantom.

The Poltergeist was powerful with Camden as its host.

The other guards didn’t do any better. They were tossed around the room with ease as they fired their guns into the air, hoping to somehow kill the entity.

The Poltergeist worked through the men one at a time, many of whom were trying to escape, inflicting injury after injury.

The men would drop to the ground, still screaming from sheer terror and pain. Like in the surveillance video, the Distortion wasn't killing anyone. It was keeping them alive as long as it could so it could tether to them.

Camden crawled to one of the downed men and grabbed a handful of syringes from his vest pouch and began injecting each of the screaming men. As he did, they quieted down, their eyes closing.

“What are you doing?” the last uninjured security officer asked as he watched Camden work.

The entity lifted one of the sedated men into the air and started shaking him around.

“Getting rid of potential hosts,” Camden answered. He continued to disseminate the sedative. He looked at the last guard. “You need to sedate yourself!”

The man was terrified. “Won’t it kill us in our sleep?”

The Poltergeist shoved the floating guardsman into the ceiling, causing a loud crack.

“Not if we use this stuff,” Camden said, turning the package over and reading the label. “Our minds won’t be usable for a long while,” he inserted the needle into the thick of his bicep and pushed down the plunger. “Not by us. Not by that thing.”

His eyes began to droop almost immediately. “They should have hired me… for real.”

With that, he was unconscious. The man floating in the air dropped to the ground.

His plan had worked.

The guard, having seen the sedative successfully nullify the Distortion, grabbed a syringe from his pouch and considered following Camden’s warning, but his hands shook.

He winced.

He grabbed his head with his free hand, realizing that he had become host to the Poltergeist. As objects around the room started to float and the walls began to shake, he injected the final syringe into his arm. As he did, the shaking stopped.

He fell unconscious.

Nothing in the room moved. The Poltergeist had dissipated.

He had taken a lot of the KRSL Agents off the board with that move, but there were still a dozen more to go.

They stood between my friends and the exit.