In a way, it was a blessing that the Manifest Consortium never treated us as true partners in their Carousel ventures. As much as I despised these people for their callous attitudes and patronizing behavior, I could feel inside myself a desire to have someone to rely on. I felt a pull toward any hand in the darkness that was there to help.

I feared that if they ever treated us with respect, I would be tempted to give up our independence. The meeting with Lucky had made it clear to us that we were still on our own, and we could not forget it.

In the end, it was all the same because our next step never changed. We were going to rescue Kimberly, and it was going to be difficult, but luckily, it was the kind of difficult that I could deal with, the kind I could really sink my teeth into.

We just had to beat a storyline, and not some mysterious cosmic horror storyline that we were tricked into joining by a misguided ally. This one had monsters that could die and a plot that could be charted out without worrying about interference from a narrator.

We were going to beat the storyline Dead Pursuit.

Fortunately, those who came before us had battled this particular beastie and lived to tell the tale.

"So from what I can tell, if we were all under level thirty, we would actually get an easier version of the storyline," Camden said. "In fact, that's where a lot of the information we have comes from, so we have to take that into account."

We were back in the drawing room of the inn we had been staying at. Nothing changed on Saltspar Island, and nothing was ever meant to. We could have picked the worst place to plan our next move.

"What changes between the different difficulty levels of a storyline? It’s not just the plot armor or stats, is it?" Antoine asked. He paced back and forth, holding his Quarantine Quarry ticket in his hands, reading it over and over again, mentally preparing himself for what would be next.

"Enemy tropes," I said. "Whatever gimmick they had in the lower-level storyline, they'll still have. It'll just be a little bit more advanced. Plot might get more complicated, too."

"All right," Antoine said. "So what's their gimmick?"

Camden and I looked at each other. The entry in the Atlas for Dead Pursuit had plenty of information on the storyline. It was hard to spoil the movie. The challenge was fast zombies. You didn't really need a gimmick when you had fast rage-virus-style zombies. There was not much to hide. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

But it still had a gimmick.

"It takes a while for an infected to turn," I said, "which means that they probably have a trope that makes it hard to tell when someone's been infected. People will be more aggressive, more agitated, maybe. I'm guessing, it's similar to The Crazies remake, where there's a bit of mania and sadism before they go full rage zombie."

"Great," Kelsey said.

She had a fireplace poker, holding it like a baseball bat, posing for her rookie card.

"If it's a slow-turning thing, that means that it'll be harder for our characters to justify killing them at first. I hate that. Carousel will punish us if we kill someone before it's clear that we need to. We may even get attacked by NPCs."

Despite having stagnated in her leveling after years in Carousel, she was still very experienced. All the vets were. They were just experienced at the lower end of the difficulty spectrum.

"We can plan around that," I said. "Make sure that we establish a pattern of how these things turn so that we only have to go through that dilemma in the beginning of the storyline, and then we can be more decisive later on."

It was weird that we needed to establish that zombies are bad guys at all. What audience doesn’t understand zombies?

"Maybe we shouldn't," Anna said softly.

She was looking out the window toward the sea as the storm got closer and closer.

"How do you figure?" I asked.

Personally, I thought Kelsey's point was pretty good. As a viewer of zombie movies, the longer it takes the main characters to realize they have to fight for their lives, even if that means killing, the worse my opinion of them gets.

"Because we're trying to keep Kimberly alive," she said. "She's going to be infected, and if she doesn't make it to the end of the movie, we don't get her back."

That was a wrinkle. The original storyline was certainly not designed with Antoine's rescue trope in mind. The idea of keeping one specific zombie alive was going to be a hurdle.

"The trouble here," Camden said, "is we don't actually know the starting position. Will Kimberly already be turned at the beginning of the movie, or will she slowly turn over the course of the film? I could see either happening. We're going to have to prepare for both scenarios…"

He trailed off at the end of his sentence because he noticed that we were not alone. The caretaker of the inn had joined us. He was standing there, not spying, exactly. It looked like he was completely out of it, off in his own imagination.

He had a grizzled look with silvery mutton chops, and the last remaining ring of brown hair on the top of his head was quite thin. Whatever script the Consortium had given him did not sit well with him, and he was prone to malaise and absent-minded bouts of reflection.

"The storm's blown a ship into harbor. A strange boat. I don't believe I've seen its kind before," he said.

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He wasn't looking directly at any of us, but he seemed to know that there was an important message for us.

"An Omen?" Cassie suggested as she jumped off the couch.

"I don't see anything," Anna said as she looked out the window. "The trees are in the way."

I was thinking through the possibilities, and really, only one sprang to mind. It must have been a ghost ship. Even in real life, abandoned boats sometimes arrived with a storm or the tide, and all it meant was that it had been abandoned. In Carousel, explanations were rarely that innocuous.

We ended up leaving the inn and following the caretaker down to the docks, where we saw the ship he was referring to.

"Strange boat, wouldn't you say?" he said. "Like a barge, I reckon. A barge on two silver canoes."

The boat was not a ghost ship, and it wasn't an Omen either.

"She came home!" Camden said. "She found her Papa."

Camden held a license for the research vessel his character had used in Breathing Deeply. It was a party pontoon, a double-decker, twin-engine vessel that we had sailed miles and miles of the Carousel River on.

We had not seen it since The Sunken Cradle Part II, but somehow, it had found its way back to its master. It floated in the middle of the bay, not going anywhere in particular.

We had to steal another boat to go out to it, but when we did and got it all fueled up, it was just as we left it.

"The current brought her back to you," the caretaker said. He had stuck along with our group without saying much. "The sea has a wisdom and a wicked sense of humor. If you wait long enough, you'll hear its laugh."

It was a shame that the Consortium had put such a first-rate harbinger on an island where nothing bad was supposed to happen.

We all stayed silent for a little while, except for a little nervous chuckle.

Then the caretaker seemed to snap out of his walking daydream.

"They say this storm is supposed to wipe the island clean, to sweep us all out into the sea," he said. "What do you think?"

"I think we'll be fine," Antoine said. "You have nothing to worry about."

The caretaker shrugged his shoulders, turned, and walked back down the path toward the inn.

-

We had access to boats, but having our own boat, one that we owned in writing, felt different. It felt like our own little island. We had a place we belonged, and the research pontoon was big enough that we could stretch out and sleep on it if we chose to.

But instead, we chose to take it back out on the river and slowly map out some prime locations to trigger Kimberly's rescue storyline.

It was strange to be able to choose the setting of a movie, but that was a perfectly reasonable thing for a zombie movie to include. In fact, lots of storylines in Carousel were flexible, especially zombie films.

There was something about the subgenre that made people want to watch each iteration of the monster in different settings and different time periods, with slightly modified lore and weaknesses.

If we could find the right setting, not only could we put ourselves in a great position to win, but we could also really give the audience a show.

We just had to pick the right venue.

Carousel wasn't exactly giving us the best stuff at first. We weren't in Carousel proper. The geography here made even less sense than it did there. There was what appeared to be a Roman Colosseum-type setting with a fiery bull that ran around its interior, knocking down walls, enough that we could see the structure collapsing in real time as we passed.

Of course, like many other things we saw in the river, after a few moments, the Colosseum and bull reset, this time in the form of a proper setting with an Omen format. I never got to read what the storyline was called because it was in Latin and had not yet been translated before we moved on.

"I'm not doing fast zombies in an era before firearms existed," I said.

The Colosseum was certainly an interesting venue for a zombie movie, but it wasn't right.

And neither was the SeaWorld knockoff that we saw next, a place filled with aquariums, dolphin shows, roller coasters, and mutating fish crawling out of their tanks.

We actually sailed right through that one. The river was part of the theme park.

Not a bad setting, actually. We would have to consider it.

"It's enclosed," Camden said. "Those big wrought iron gates. I could see a quarantine happening in a theme park like that."

"Definitely an exciting opportunity," I said. "It goes on the top of the list."

I had my objections to it. There were too many wide-open spaces, and I wasn't quite sure what weapon availability there would be.

We sailed on, keeping a very good record of every turn and twist that we made in the river so that we could backtrack if needed. Luckily, getting back to Saltspar Island was as easy as clicking the ticket that the Consortium gave us again. I didn't know what would happen once we ran out of space to punch holes, but at the moment, we were good.

We sailed onward, past farms, small sections of towns, a livestock auction, all sorts of places, all of which would do just fine as a setting for a zombie movie.

But then we found it. The perfect location.

The only thing was, at that moment, there was a bit of turbulence going on.

"What is happening?" Anna asked as she stared ahead. "Is there fire in the sky?"

"No," Camden said. "You have to relax your eyes. It's kind of invisible."

Anna did as he said, and then she began to laugh as she saw the gigantic UFO on the side of the river, bright lights coming down from it, almost like a tractor beam of some kind, but fuzzier, like maybe there was some sort of sandstorm happening at the same time. It wasn't quite clear.

We sailed closer, ready to turn around and bail the moment we needed to. Carousel was rapidly turning the situation from a chaotic one into a peaceful scene with a very powerful Omen, but in the meantime, it was a heck of a thing to see.

The dust wasn't dust when we got a good look at it. It was more like silver pencil shavings, which didn't really explain much until we saw what they were doing.

Whatever these things were that came down from the UFO, they were attracted to metal, specifically to machines. Even simple things like a stoplight. The little silver pencil shavings would be attracted to it as if it were magnetic, and then they would begin to possess it, working their way inside to control it.

They did it to cars. They did it to motorcycles. It was a busy street. They would have continued doing it to every single piece of technology in the scene if Carousel hadn't sucked them all up into an Omen, making the alien spaceship disappear, too.

The last we saw of them, a sedan had begun driving itself, and more than that, it had begun to mutate as its pieces started to rework themselves like a Transformer that didn’t care about appearing humanoid.

But all of that disappeared pretty soon, and what was left was the perfect setting for our zombie movie. With the UFO gone, we could really get a look at the structure itself.

"There's no way," Antoine said as Carousel finished cleaning up the carnage of the possessed-machine storyline it had just finished putting together.

"It's perfect," Camden said. "It's an enclosed space, so we can quarantine there, but it's big enough that we can move around and hide. There are all kinds of tools. I don't know about weapons."

"There'll be guns there," I said. "I mean, there's not supposed to be, but in a movie, they'll be there."

It was a vast compound, completely enclosed with tons of different buildings and set pieces. Everything we would ever need to build traps could be found easily. There was fuel for burning zombies.

"We can't do this one," Antoine said.

"Yes, we can," I said, "and we will."

Now that the alien spaceship and the possessed machines had disappeared, along with all the NPC screams which we had learned to tune out, something else could be heard from within the compound.

Engines roaring.

A large sign with the checkered background and big, brightly colored letters stood before us at the entrance to the venue.

Carousel Motor Speedway, it said.

We had found our setting.