Free Web NovelOnce I was confident that Danny and I had captured all the footage we needed of me doing my job as a spotter, it was time to check out the other parts of the Speedway. My vantage point had given me some good leads on where things were, but unfortunately, that did not mean it would be easy to navigate the place from the ground. freewebnσvel.cѳm
Luckily, we had the tried-and-true system: we could ask NPCs.
In fact, one of the first NPCs I talked to, I wasn't even asking for directions.
"Oh, you're here," I said once I was Off-Screen, when an NPC with a large mustache walked by me in the spotters’ stands. "Good. I needed somebody to take over."
I handed him a pair of headphones with a microphone, just like the ones I had, and got up to leave, taking whatever documents I thought might be useful along the way.
Like most NPCs, he was very pliable. He sat down right in my seat and started talking to Antoine almost immediately without skipping a beat.
The man that he was supposed to be walking to see looked down at him, disappointed, because it took a little while for his script to get updated.
"Where to next?" Danny asked as we made the long trip down to ground level.
“Need to make a pit stop,” I said.
Looking back at the stands I had been in, they were a literal tower rising above the rest of the seating areas. That might be strategically valuable.
I would know more once I had explored the place.
We walked around, and Danny filmed some, but it wasn't urgent. We still had plenty of time before First Blood.
Then we passed by some hot dog vendors. I saw a couple of people who were acting agitated and possibly drunk. My mind flashed back to what Camden had said about the wire they got from the feds, whichever government group that might have been, to be on the lookout for such characters.
It was a man and a woman, both dressed very warmly for the hot weather. They stayed together, though they didn't seem to acknowledge each other. They stood at one of the hot dog stands as if they were about to order, but they didn't, and the vendor got mad at them for whatever it was they were mumbling. Instead of ordering, they just walked off.
I turned to see that Danny had captured footage of the two of them, and he had also captured me observing them. I couldn't tell if they were infected. On the red wallpaper, they just looked like normal NPCs to me, but that didn't mean anything.
It took a while to find the garages, though it should have been obvious, since they were near the pit lane where the cars stopped to refuel and have their tires swapped out.
The issue was that the area was on the interior of the track, while the spotter's tower was in the grandstands on the exterior. I didn't know exactly how I was supposed to cross the racetrack during the race, but I knew the answer wasn't jaywalking.
Fortunately, this problem had been solved many times over. Not only did they have a program for shuffling people across the track during breaks, but they also had pedestrian overpasses and multiple tunnels.
I decided to go with the overpass because there was exactly zero part of me that wanted to try walking through a tunnel during a zombie movie, even if it was the very beginning.
Standing on the overpass as cars zoomed below me was exhilarating. It was loud, but I could also feel the force coming off the cars. They got my heart racing faster than some of the monsters in Carousel.
We made it across and down to the pit lane as fast as we could. I pushed the button on my headphones and said, "Antoine, it's time to come in for a substitution."
Other teams were doing it. Each one had three or four drivers who would trade off different stints during the race, with the first and last stints being the most important.
I found the Hughes Racing team pretty easily by looking for the Wimpaway brand logo, a Band-Aid over a cut on someone's palm. It was as if someone had made a blood pact and, for whatever reason, chosen the worst place to cut.
I didn't recognize any of the pit crew, and they didn't waste time looking at me. They were only interested in changing out the tires, filling the gas, and doing it as fast as possible.
When Antoine pulled up in that number thirteen car, they had it prepped and ready to go in seconds. The thing that took the longest was removing the steering wheel so they could get Antoine out of the car.
His replacement was Kelsey. She looked absolutely thrilled to be able to do this. She smiled from ear to ear. It may have been the first time I had ever seen it. I was thrilled that she got to do something that made her happy, but in truth, I would never want to be in a car that took that much work to get out of when I knew zombies were coming. There weren't any windows in the door. The bad guys could just reach in.
Clearly, the folks at the car design company didn't think about that when they built it that way.
No sooner was Antoine out and Kelsey in than one of the pit crew waved a flag for her to take off again, and she hit the gas.
All of this was On-Screen, even without Danny's help, although he did film some of it. I had to wonder if he was doing that because he thought Carousel might need the footage, or if he was just being thorough. At some point in time, we were going to have to actually talk to each other. I wondered how much of his real personality would be available to meet.
Antoine was smiling just as broadly as Kelsey had been. He was also shaking. Apparently, even his elevated Grit wasn't enough to handle his first time in a racecar.
He was laughing as he pulled his helmet off and found the nearest folding chair to fall into.
Unfortunately, because we were On-Screen still, we had to stay in character, and the next person to be featured in the film was Anna. From what I could tell, she was also a driver. She would be doing one of the more boring stints later on. The race started at about 1:30 PM, so she was going to do some night driving. The large lights over the track would help with that, but still, the stands probably wouldn't be as rowdy at 3 AM.
"You did great out there," she said. "How's the car handling?"
"Like a dream," Antoine said. "Like a freaking dream."
Anna smiled, but there was a sadness there too. This must not have been her first scene. It was interesting because both she and Kelsey had a background trope that, in my mind, would have kept them from becoming drivers.
Anna's was called The Second Choice and basically made her into a second-rate chosen one type character. We still weren't sure what that meant. We figured it could help build character conflict.
Kelsey's background was Girl Detective, which made her an amateur detective whom adults underestimated. She was an adult herself.
Whatever the case, she ended up as the number two driver, and Anna was left on the sidelines, looking sad. I trusted them to help set up the dynamic that would pay off later. We needed Anna to feel like she had something to prove.
"Have you seen Kimberly?" Antoine asked.
"Not yet," I said. "I'll keep an eye out. You know how busy she is."
We didn't actually know what Kimberly would be cast as, but logically, she had to have a role in the story before the zombie breakout. We had to wonder if we'd get to see her before she was all bitey.
Antoine had an RV he could use to shower and rest before it was his turn to drive again.I filled them in on what I had learned, which wasn't much, and I headed out, leaving Anna down at the pit lane and heading back toward the garages.
I wasn't so interested in what was inside the garages. I knew there were car parts and lots of things that Camden could make go boom, but I was actually headed toward the owner's suites, which were in a tower above the garage. It had a good view of the pond in the interior of the track, as well as a view of most of the track itself.
I didn't know for sure where everyone was, but I knew that our team was called Hughes Racing, and I happened to know two siblings with the last name Hughes who were in this story.
I figured the owner's suite would be the place to find them, and I was right.
I made my way up, followed by Danny, and that is where I found that Camden was not the only person who had been aged up. Both Cassie and Isaac were at least five years older.
They were arguing with Ramona quietly in their ring of couches while waiters walked around serving entrees.
Funny enough, they were not the first group that I clocked, nor were they the ones I was most interested in learning about.
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I recognized one of the people in the room. I had seen them ever so briefly during the fake Centennial. When I had seen her, she was wearing a yellow raincoat and was the founder of CARP, a strained acronym for a group of neighborhood hall monitors who often harassed the local government for various reasons.
Her name was Kitty Lincoln. She was level fifty, and I knew she was some type of Hysteric Paragon, but she was dressed completely differently this time. Instead of being an uptight middle-class professional complainer, she appeared to be upper-class. Her straw-blonde hair had been treated to look elegant. She wore a dress or something like that. It was definitely a business outfit, clearly expensive, and she had an entourage around her.
I turned to Danny and asked, "Is that who I think it is?"
"If you think that it's Kitty Lincoln, the wife of Charles Lincoln, the bedridden owner of Wimpaway Bandages, then yes, that is her."
I looked back at her and tried to get a read on the character she was playing. Definitely an entitled type. The picture-perfect successful gold digger with something to prove.
She had a severe look on her face, and I had this strange desire to gain her approval, but I knew I would never have it.
I decided not to interact with her and made my way over to the Hughes siblings.
They were bickering and On-Screen, so I decided to stay away for a little while and let them do their thing. I trusted them to establish who their characters were. Not like it would be super important in a zombie movie, but even if you were a stereotype, you needed to come across very strongly as that stereotype.
I didn't hear much of what they were arguing about, but I did hear the last part.
"We are not trying to take away your birthright," Cassie said. "We just won't let you self-destruct. Can't you see this is for the best? You've always been reckless, Ramona. Mom knew it. Dad knew it, God bless him. Why do you think it is that he left me in charge of the trust? If you were left to your own devices, who knows what would happen to you? You'd be dead in a week."
Ramona glared at her. I hadn't noticed how good she was getting at acting, because for a moment there, it felt like something Cassie had said really hit a nerve, and Ramona was legitimately ticked off at her.
What had actually happened was that Cassie had used her Death Disorder trope to subtly move Ramona from Second Blood down to First Blood, a change that we thought would debuff the enemy quite well according to the terms of the trope.
It would also prevent me from being First Blood, something I was pleased about.
We didn't want to get too greedy with Death Disorder just yet because we hadn't used it before. It was tempting to try to use it on Anna or Kelsey, whose Last One Alive tropes would guarantee they were one of the last two people in the death order. We thought we had a better endgame set up with those two alive, so Ramona was on the chopping block.
Before Ramona could respond to what Cassie had just said, the group acknowledged me by clearing their throats, and suddenly I was On-Screen.
"How's it going, boss?" I said, walking toward the three of them. "Or should I say bosses? I'm not calling you my owners. I have too much pride."
I reached out and shook Cassie's hand, then Isaac's, and finally Ramona's, although she was pretty emotional at the moment and didn't want to socialize.
It was a pretty basic situation. Cassie was an empathic character from a wealthy background, and Isaac was her goofball brother. Ramona was their sibling in one way or another.
"If they're falling behind out there, don't be afraid to tell them to slip it up a gear, just to find that extra burst of speed," Isaac was saying.
"Or even down a gear," I said with a smile. I was pretty sure both were needed on the race track.
“There you go,” he responded.
He was trying something new. Instead of trying to make jokes like some sort of stand-up comedian, he was just going to be a character people laughed at. It was far easier and just as effective, unless you were in some sort of clever movie, which I doubted we were.
"Does everyone seem rested and relaxed?" Cassie asked. "This kind of race can be very stressful. I'm worried about our drivers."
"Don't be," I said. "This is what they live for."
She smiled, but I could tell she was still concerned.
On the other side of the suite, Kitty Lincoln was verbally eviscerating a server because her diet cola was flat. She tossed the drink onto the ground, and it bubbled up, revealing that it was not in fact flat, a point that the server decided to make out loud.
"This is the last time you will ever work in this racetrack, dear," Kitty said, as she looked to one of her assistants, who immediately started trying to figure out how to get the server fired.
I could already tell what kind of Hysteric Kitty Lincoln was. She was a Defiant.
-
I ended up leaving the owner's suite and making my way back toward the spotter's tower, where I belonged. In truth, that was the place I wanted to be when the zombies broke out. While the owner's suite had its perks, the spotter's tower was harder to reach and didn't have Kitty Lincoln in it.
I handed Isaac a radio so that we could contact them. It was small enough that he could slip it in his pocket, and I told him to make a point of using it On-Screen to say something silly, just to show he had it.
I asked them if they had seen Kimberly, and they hadn’t, though they did imply she was a character in the organization. She was some kind of public relations representative. She was arranging an interview for Antoine according to Cassie’s day planner.
As I headed down from the owner's suites, Ramona joined me, continuing in her acting performance. She wasn't at Kimberly's level, but she did a good job of looking upset and a bit mysterious. But then again, she had a lot of practice with that.
"I'm sorry you had to see that," she said as we walked. We were On-Screen, but Danny wasn't filming. We needed to fill the scene with something.
"Yeah, that seemed very private," I said.
Ramona laughed. "I wish it was, but everyone knows."
She paused, waiting for me to ask what everyone knew, but I was playing my character as if he didn't want to be involved in the owner's drama, because that's how I felt I would be in real life.
"My mother married their father. They're my half-siblings, you see," she said. "Can you believe it? They actually contested the will. Forced me to undergo psychiatric evaluation."
"That's pretty heavy," I said.
"I mean, even if I did have something wrong with me, that doesn't mean that he wasn't my dad. I mean, he adopted me. I can't believe the worst part of my parents' dying wasn't them dying. It was what my siblings turned into afterward. All under the guise of caring about me."
I saw where she was going with this. She was doing an oversharing kind of character, you slowly realized, had a little excess baggage. She was also trying to make me break character. The mental health angle was a tough one.
To be honest, I was not at all sure what to do when it came to mental illness On-Screen in Carousel. The subject was a real mixed bag when it came to real-life horror movies. Unfortunately, people prefer fantasy versions of mental disorders that only affect you when it's convenient for the plot, and that can be overcome through sheer willpower.
Ramona was putting a lot into this character, but that made some sense. We wanted the audience to care about her, though I wasn't sure it would work. It was worth a shot. If she was going to be an Eldritch Conduit one day, she needed to find a balance of madness and grace.
I dropped Ramona off at the pit lane with Anna, and I made it back toward the overpass so we could get to the spotter's tower. Danny followed.
We were only about halfway through the Party Phase, which is why what happened next really threw me for a loop.
I took over for the man with the mustache who had been doing my job for the last forty-five minutes and started guiding Kelsey as she drove.
All of a sudden, I found myself telling her to slow down. I wasn't the only spotter saying something like that.
Down on the field, someone in an orange reflective vest had climbed over the stone wall that protected the audience and was running out toward the track.
"Is he drunk?" one of the spotters leaned over and asked me.
"He'd have to be," I said.
He was definitely acting inebriated, judging by the way he walked, but he was going full sprint toward the track.
When the next car around a nearby bend in the track approached, he ran right toward it.
The driver was taken by surprise, and while he tried to avoid the man, he didn't anticipate the man jumping up toward the windshield.
I expected to see the man splattered across the road, but what actually happened is he managed to break in through the front glass and get stuck, continuously grabbing at the driver.
He was seriously messed up. His skin was almost completely peeled away from his skull. I could see it through my binoculars.
The car then turned sideways and started spinning. Luckily, it stayed on its wheels. Unfortunately, the cars behind it couldn't evade it perfectly. After the first few, a collision was imminent as a symphony of screeching tires and crashing cars broke out on the track below.
I kept an eye on Kelsey and told her how to avoid being hit by the cars behind her while helping her navigate onto the grass so she could stay out of the fray.
It was a huge wreck, filled with an unreal amount of smoke from both the tires and the engines.
But the part that concerned me the most was that the man who had gone shoulder-first into the windshield was still moving, struggling to reach the driver, though the impact had injured him.
I could see him on the red wallpaper. He was a zombie all right.
I was Off-Screen, so I whispered to Danny, "This is too soon."
We weren't even close to First Blood yet. We shouldn't have been seeing the enemy.
Sleep Talker (Infected)
Plot Armor: 28
__________
Tropes
Fungible Enemy
This enemy is composed of countless largely interchangeable units whose numbers will not diminish until the scene is concluded. There always seems to be more to come.
Zombie Apocalypse is a Setting
This enemy is not a true antagonist but rather forms the setting of the storyline. Efforts to eliminate them will be hampered. The true conflict of the story is exacerbated by them.
The Madness
This enemy infects characters with an assortment of mental ailments, including paranoia and sleep deprivation.
Gradual Infection
After this enemy is infected, it can take several scenes for them to completely turn.
Join Us
This enemy has some means of increasing its numbers through conversion.
Far Gone
This enemy has lost their humanity, but not all at once: Something remains.
Strength In Numbers
The enemy is at its strongest in groups. Singling its members out will weaken them substantially.
Thoroughly Dispersed
This enemy’s group can instantly occupy the entirety of a set area, making it appear omnipresent and unpredictable to characters.
Hive Mind
This enemy’s mind is linked to that of similar creatures.
Chatty Kathy
This enemy was cursed with the gift of gab. Perhaps you can make them pay for it.
Occasional Contagion
This enemy’s infection is not guaranteed to take hold; victims remain in suspense until the reveal, which depends on the needs of the story and nothing else.
Light Sleeper
This enemy may shut its eyes on occasion, but if you aren’t quiet, it can open them right back up.
With the Rising Sun
This enemy will no longer be dangerous after a specific moment in time.
