It’s embarrassing that I actually hoped we would get another short break once we got into the safe room. It wasn’t exactly a hospitality suite, but it had big, heavy doors, and it was fairly silent. Those hopes were dashed almost immediately because the slow, steady ticks on the Plot Cycle suddenly doubled in speed, and I knew that if we were all still in that room when Second Blood hit, it was going to be a massacre.
“We need to split,” I said. “We can move faster if we’re not trying to bring her along with us.”
I glanced over at Kimberly sitting calmly next to the wall, unable to hear or see anything. She had been quite a suitable passenger in all of this.
Antoine looked at me and nodded. He had picked up a tire iron at some point along the way, not a bad weapon, especially since the plot had not escalated to the point that we had to kill zombies yet.
“You get that video sent out,” he said. “I think she’s getting better, but moving her around isn’t helping her recover any. How could it?”
“It should take us about an hour at most to broadcast the video,” Camden said to Antoine. “If we don’t radio back to you after that, you may have to assume the worst.”
“I’m staying with Kimberly,” Anna said. She, too, had found a weapon in a heavy pipe. We were using whatever we could. In truth, what we really needed was the thing we could never get: early scenes with Kimberly to establish how much we cared about her.
I just had to hope that what we had was enough.
“So that’s me, Camden, Danny, and Kelsey making a run for it,” I said.
“Sounds right to me,” Kelsey said. “I’m tired of waiting. I wasn’t born to sit still.”
We took some time to exchange lines like that, just little character moments that Carousel could pick and choose from. We didn’t have long.
After a brief, largely unsentimental goodbye, we made our way out of the safe room to a nearby staircase that would take us up to ground level underneath the stands.
“Am I going to have time to cut any of this footage together?” Danny asked. “Or are we going to try to send out the raw footage?”
“We send everything,” Camden said. “And we send it to everyone. If TOMB realizes they can’t contain the story, well, they might stop trying.”
Danny nodded.
There was a single zombie standing in the shadows near the stairway, but I was pretty proficient at distracting them. We moved slowly at first, and then I grabbed a piece of a cinder block and threw it off into the distance, hoping not to attract zombies toward us.
My simple tactic worked, and the zombie under the stairs went off to investigate the sound.
Easy stuff. But Second Blood drew nearer and nearer.
-
We managed to make it out the doors to the surface quickly, and I expected to be surrounded by zombies attracted to my low effective Plot Armor, but we weren’t. The place looked abandoned. There were some bloody spots here and there, but most of the victims, all but a very few, had gotten up and walked away after they had been attacked.
The zombies must have been elsewhere. I could hear them in the wind, their constant chosen phrases almost sounding like seagulls in the distance. Such strange creatures.
Though most of the horde was far away, five or six remained down the western corridor under the stands. They weren’t interested in us.
We found the path to the front of the stands. Moments later, we emerged into the sunlight and made our way up to the broadcast booth. Our travel was uninterrupted. If anything, that only made me nervous.
If we weren’t being attacked, that meant the other group surely would be.
-
I almost let out a cry of relief when I finally figured out Carousel’s game. We were halfway up to the broadcast booth when we saw them. It was those good old boys, those NPCs armed with a variety of melee and ranged weapons that they had scavenged up. They were coming from the opposite direction we had when we left the tunnels.
I heard them first, as they beat a zombie to death with their melee weapons. I had to maneuver myself to be able to look out past the stands and down to where the NPCs were.
“They’re headed toward the tunnel entrance near the safe room,” I said.
This was a problem. Technically, I was next on the targeting priority because of my low effective Plot Armor, but these NPCs weren’t after uninfected humans like me. They would be targeting Kimberly.
I looked around to find the zombies. It wasn’t hard. They were on the opposite side of the Speedway in three or four large groups. It was almost like they were grazing. Maybe searching, even.
It looked like Carousel was going to make a jab at Kimberly for a Second Blood. That would be disastrous.
I breathed in deep and then looked up at Camden. We were On-Screen, so we had a chance to take some initiative.
“You guys go ahead. Get that video uploaded and sent out. I’m going to make sure that these people don’t stumble upon our friends downstairs,” I said.
I left Camden, Kelsey, and Danny to go do their work. It was my turn to kick the bucket, and I was going to kick it really hard.
-
I crept down to the bottom of the stands and then took the pass back toward the concessions, beneath the stands where the NPCs were double-checking a corpse was just a corpse.
I pushed the button on my headset to activate my radio and said, “Antoine, there’s a mob of some angry people with itchy trigger fingers tracking down zombies. They’re nearby. I’m going to try to lead them away, but you get ready to go if needed.”
“Will do,” he responded.
I hid behind some trash cans after I went Off-Screen, but I wasn’t exactly trying to hide well. I wanted to get caught. All I needed was to go back On-Screen. It didn’t take that long.
Bruce, the big mechanic who had tried to keep us locked out of the garage not that long ago, was the one to see me. If ever there was a minor antagonist looking for a fight, it was this guy. He was tall and beefy, not particularly well-defined in muscle, more of a massive hulk.
“If it isn’t Mr. Lawrence,” he said. “I thought you and your friends wandered off. Did you get lost? Kitty thought you were dead. I wonder if she’ll be happy to hear the news… if we decide to tell her.”
Had they not seen us in the tunnel? It would make sense if they hadn’t. It was pretty dark down there. They had certainly seen one of us, though.
I didn't want to portray my character as so kind-hearted that he'd sacrifice himself; I aimed for a display of righteous fury instead.
“You’re murderers,” I said so loudly one of the NPCs shooshed me. “We saw what you did to Cassie Hughes. You killed her in cold blood.”
The NPC that had actually shot her was immediately pushed forward to the front and said, “I didn’t mean to. She was moving like one of them monsters. How was I supposed to know that she wasn’t? It was her fault. Why was she doing that?”
He was a good actor.
“An accident? Killing the infected is no better,” I said. “You know as well as I do that they’re going to get better. That’s no excuse.”
“None of us are getting out of here alive as long as those things are still skulking around,” Bruce said. “The only chance we got is to put a bullet in each of them.”
He wasn’t arguing with me so much as he was trying to encourage his little gang of very nervous zombie slayers.
“And when they question why there were so many gunshots coming from in here, and they find these bodies filled with bullet holes, the military is going to deny anything about that zombie virus. They’re going to blame you. They’re going to say that you killed those people. They’ll burn you and put you somewhere you could never tell anyone the truth. And you’ll deserve it.”
It would really help if we knew what TOMB’s objectives were more precisely.
In all honesty, I wasn’t really trying to get the moral high ground. I kept glancing back behind the stands near the entrance to the stairs down to the tunnels, where I had seen that handful of zombies.
I just needed to say something loudly to attract them.
And attract them I had.
Bruce was saying something dumb and aggressive when the zombies charged the group of NPCs. They caught them totally by surprise thanks to the way that we were all angled. The little squad broke up almost immediately as they began fighting the fast-moving zombies. It was quick carnage on both sides.
It was time to make my exit, but I couldn’t risk running back toward the broadcast booth. I had another plan. The spotter’s tower wasn’t that far away, and it had been cleared of zombies thanks to the military’s use of the loudspeaker to distract the horde.
For the first half of the trip, it looked like no one had followed me, but soon, Bruce alone appeared out of nowhere behind me. It was literal teleportation worthy of Michael Myers.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
He was faster than he looked, but I still managed to make it all the way up to the spotter’s tower before he caught up to me.
“You think this is easy?” he asked as he grabbed after me. “We all decided that we had to kill these monsters. It wasn’t just me. Why did you have to go and make things so complicated?”
“Yeah, well, if your policy wasn’t shoot first and ask questions never, you would have learned that these things aren’t always dangerous. They’re just sick people,” I said.
He was forcing toward the front of the spotters’ tower. In fact, he was forcing me to the exact same place where Danny and I had to jump to safety only hours earlier. We were at the very front of the spotters’ stands at the top of the tower.
That was exactly what I wanted.
Bruce moved toward me. He had that sociopathic stare that let the audience know he really just wanted to kill people, even though he was saying all the right words to justify what he was doing. He would have been a fun character in a slow burn, but this wasn’t a prestige zombie television show. It was a gnarly zombie movie.
So even though we didn’t have time to establish animosity toward each other, we could make up for it by being nasty to each other.
I let him catch up to me at the bottom of the tower platform. The only thing behind me was a drop-off into the grandstands.
“I guess murder really doesn’t weigh on your conscience, does it?” I asked.
“I guess it doesn’t,” he answered. “I’ll just tell people I thought you were one of them, because we kill zombies on sight around here.”
“Do you?”
“We do.” He pulled out a handgun.
That was lame. A gun? Didn’t he notice how big he was compared to me?
He aimed the gun at me and fired, catching me right in the gut. I needed to be attacked to trigger Cutaway Death, but I wasn’t expecting to be shot.
I grabbed at the wound and blood slipped through my fingers. Grit dulled the pain, but not as much as I wanted.
“Too chicken to kill me with your own hands?” I asked, not quite sure if taunting him would work.
I had arranged things so that he would try to throw me off the ledge down into the stands below, and I could wrestle with him and pull him over with me. It was one of my favorite things to do when fighting someone way bigger than me, and it was always satisfying to watch.
The plan was that we would both land down below, and I would act as if the fall had killed me, and it would be the end of the scene.
But I was going to have to improvise. He wasn’t trying to throw me off the ledge.
“One shot was enough,” he said as he put the gun back in his pocket and closed in on me to finish me off.
We met hand to hand, and I was completely outmatched. His entire build must have been melee oriented. But that was okay. As he attempted to strangle me, I showed how overwhelmed I was physically.
I was a gonner, and the audience would know it. Blood poured out of my wound. My eyes hurt from the strain. Then, just as he was about to get his hands around my neck and I was starting to get dizzy from blood loss, I leaned in close and bit him right on the face.
It was a big bite. As disgusting as it was to think about, I took a chunk out of his face, peeling away the flesh with my teeth, leaving a huge gaping bite wound.
I quickly spit out his skin and pushed off of him as I fell over the ledge. He threw me as hard as he could, just trying to stop the pain of my bite.
Cutaway Death triggered. I was written off and given the Dead status before I even landed. I made sure to scream until abruptly stopping at the bottom. Strangely enough, I didn’t even feel the landing. It was completely painless, as was the bullet hole in my torso. Dead Nerves had kicked in the moment I got the Dead status, and all the pain went away.
But that was not the end of the scene.
Bruce started climbing down from the spotter’s tower to make his way back to his group, who had just shown up after dealing with the zombies I had sicced on them.
When they looked at him, they saw him bleeding from the face, and they trained their guns on him.
“I’m not infected,” he said as he raised his hands up high. “I promise, I’m not infected.”
But they could see clear as day a bite mark right on his cheek.
That was all the evidence they needed. They each fired a shot or two into him, because no one had told them about conserving ammunition. Luckily, my frustration over that oversight was easily overshadowed by my joy at my plan working, as Bruce fell to the ground dead and his friends moved along.
Second Blood had come. I had to hope it had just taken me.