"Is that it?" Kimberly asked. Her voice was soft, dreamy. She was nursing her head wound. Her eyes were barely open. She leaned against a wall near the computer main frame. I noticed for the first time that the Incapacitated light on her status was flickering on and off.

Whatever blow to the head she had received hadn’t been enough to kill her thanks to her three Grit, but it was enough to do real damage. I couldn’t tell if it was a concussion or simply her bleeding out. She had been struck after the Astralist had ceased taking hostages, so it had been intended as a kill shot, unlike the injuries I had received before being choked.

"No," I said. "He's got a trope called The Parting Shot. It means he set a trap and something bad is about to happen.” I surveyed the room. The machine was toast. I didn’t see how it could be much of a risk.

I looked to the dark corner near the hidden door.

Oh no.

“A bunch of zombies are going to come from over there," I said, pointing to where the shelves of bodies had been. It was the most logical conclusion. There's no use wasting a large supply of well-preserved corpses, not in a movie like this.

Anna, Camden, and Antoine hadn’t seen the bodies. Suddenly, they weren’t celebrating any more.

“We need to make for the exit,” Antoine said. He was right. This was not where we wanted to be for a fight like that.

Anna grabbed her table-leg club in one hand and gestured to Camden, “Help Antoine walk.”

Camden came to Antoine’s side and helped him move across the room. Antoine readied his table leg in his free hand.

I went to Kimberly and grabbed her arm, “Let’s go,” I said.

She nodded, accepting my help.

I looked for something to defend myself as well. I found the metal pipe that Kimberly had been attacking Dr. Halle with earlier.

"Clever, clever, clever," a voice said.

It was a woman's voice. I recognized it as Judy's, but something was strange. She was using an accent different than the one she'd been speaking with before.

She sounded like Dr. Halle.

"You think you can always be prepared for what comes?" Judy said.

Judy's body was still strapped to the chair where it had been when she was killed. Now her head was up, her eyes were fogged over, but her mouth was very much still able to speak.

"When you killed me, it wasn't me that you wronged," Judy said. "It was them. I promised them that I would bring them back. I gave them my word that their sacrifice would not be in vain, but you destroyed everything. Now, we will never bring our loved ones back, my Anastasia... It is not me that you have to face for your sin, it is them."

Judy's body started to struggle against the leather straps, but she was not able to break free. In the darkness where the bodies had been kept, I heard footsteps.

“If you will not let me return their souls to their bodies,” Judy/Dr. Halle said, “I’ll put something else in instead.”

They began to laugh.

Out of the darkness, a dried, desiccated corpse walked upright toward us. It had been a woman wearing a sundress. After that, another left the darkness. A man wearing overalls. Then another. And another, until two dozen corpses in total emerged with a dull gaze.

A final zombie emerged from the darkness. It was wearing a wedding dress. Anastasia Halle back again.

Or at least, her body.

Around me, I saw my friends' Plot Armor jump up by two—one point in Savvy and one point in Grit. My prediction of the zombies had triggered my Cinema Seer—Survive trope and buffed them.

But my ability didn't work on me.

The zombies all had three Plot Armor, which meant they weren't that big of a threat on their own, but their Plot Armor would combine when attacking together just as Antoine and Anna’s had. So, if they each had one Mettle but seven attacked you, that's seven Mettle, and none of us had a Grit score high enough to deal with that.

It turned out that Doctor Halle's Parting Shot ability was essentially Minion Maker, the same thing that Benny the Haunted Scarecrow could do. The distinction, I suppose, was how the ability played into the story.

"Run!" Anna said.

I ran for the exit, dragging Kimberly along, but we were the closest to it, and when my friends tried to follow, the zombies cut them off. They were surprisingly fast, maybe not as fast as a normal human, but far faster than a typical zombie.

They shambled after us in mindless obedience. These weren't brain-hungry zombies or virus-infected zombies. These were reanimated slaves.

They had very little Mettle or Grit and pushing through them was easy, even for me. Behind me, Antoine and Anna were sending them flying with their clubs. Compared to them, these things were made of paper.

That is, until they grouped up together.

Luckily, the secret door only opened a small amount and while Kimberly and I were able to slip through, the zombie horde couldn’t. The few that tried got tangled together in the exit, trapping themselves in the doorway. A pile-on formed, with zombie arms and legs facing every which way and none of them able to move.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that Camden, Anna, and Antoine were still inside.

"What tropes do they have?" Anna screamed over the sound of moaning zombies.

I peered at the red wallpaper in my mind and focused on the nearest zombie to me. The zombie was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts and had a pair of sunglasses hanging from his shirt pocket. No doubt they had been there whenever the machine sucked his soul from his body.

"Magical Zombie” (Chuck):

Plot Armor: 3.

Black Magic Reanimation: Zombies resurrected by magic or spiritual methods can survive without crucial parts of their body, including the head, rendering them immune to traditional methods of dispatch. To defeat them, one must either use magic that is more powerful than the spell that animates them or destroy their body completely. Any remaining portion of their body will continue to attack relentlessly until it is destroyed.

Apparently, the technology that reanimated the zombies was more magic than science.

"You can't kill them by hitting their head," I said. At that moment, I could hear my friends struggling to kill the zombies.

"You have to destroy the whole body or destroy the spell that created them. Do you have any more of that concoction you used on Doctor Halle?" I asked Camden. I had to raise my voice to ensure I could be heard.

"No silver dust!" he yelled.

As he spoke, the zombie nearest Kimberly and I managed to beak free from the knot of zombies and began raising to his feet.

"Anyone got any ideas?" Anna asked.

"Fire!" Camden answered. I couldn’t see what was happening on the other side of the door, but they sounded like they were in a fist-fight.

That made sense. The cool dry air of the basement had basically mummified the corpses. They would probably burn like a Yule log.

"The absinthe!" Anna screamed.

Now there was an idea.

There had been several bottles of absinthe beneath the kitchen sink in the cantina. It was time to solve our problems with alcohol.

Kimberly and I were the only ones who could make it, so I said, "I'll go get it. You guys just hang in here. I'll be right back."

I grabbed Kimberly’s arm and guided her to the cellar stairs.

The zombie (Chuck) pursued us still. As we got to the top of the stairs, I turned and kicked him, sending him falling back down.

Kimberly could run in bursts, but then her Incapacitated status would flare up and she would need to stop altogether.

“Go without me,” she said. “I’ll be fine. You have to help the others.”

That wasn’t that bad of an idea.

“You go that way,” I said. “It’ll chase me because I have lower Plot Armor.”

The zombie emerged from the cellar behind us and barreled straight for me. I whacked it with the thin metal pole to little effect. My Mettle had been buffed by Anna’s Who’s With Me trope when the zombies emerged and the fight started, but the boost had disappeared as soon as I left the basement.

Kimberly ran off to the back of the Main Hall and I went toward the courtyard where the cantina was. As predicted, the zombie followed me.

That didn't matter because I was faster than Chuck the zombie.

My legs were moving faster, my mind was quicker.

He wasn't exactly the lumbering zombie that you might see in the movies, but it wasn't fast.

But the strangest thing happened: I wasn’t getting away.

As I turned the corner and started to run across the main hall toward the cantina, I looked behind me, and there the zombie was.

Magic Zombie (Chuck) Plot armor: 3.

That made no sense.

I was across the main hall in an instant. How had he gotten behind me so quickly? I continued on and wound my way around the castle until I got to the cantina, and when I looked back, there he was again right behind me as if he were keeping pace with me.

I couldn't wrap my head around how he was keeping up with me, but then I realized: he had three Plot Armor. My bet was that one of those Plot Armor was assigned to Hustle.

I also only had one point applied to Hustle.

Of course.

By the laws of Carousel, I could not outrun him. We tied in that stat. No matter how far I ran or how fast, I would always look back and see him behind me because we tied, and I had no trope to help me escape.

I made it to the Cantina and quickly leapt to the cabinet underneath the sink where we had seen the absinthe. Four large, full bottles stood there waiting for me.

I grabbed one of them and quickly opened it up, just in time to turn around and see Chuck the zombie upon me.

I pushed him back and twisted off the lid. I splashed him a few times, but he quickly jumped on me. Fortunately, we were also tied in Mettle and Grit, so neither of us could really get an edge in.

Unfortunately for him, I was smarter, and I had a very flammable alcohol in my hands. A couple more splashes, not too much.

I ran to the other side of the kitchen, pushing him away from me so that I could get by. I got to the stove and turned the knob, hoping to hear a click, and sure enough, the stove came to life. When I turned, I saw that Chuck was back on me, so I grabbed him and shoved him down into the flame. His sunglasses fell from his shirt and landed on my shoe.

As soon as he caught on fire, Chuck started behaving strangely, even for a zombie.

It wasn't so much that he was in pain, but that his body was literally being eaten up by the flame. Whatever was left of his eyes could no longer see me, even with the magic that had reanimated him, and his limbs were not obeying him as the fire ate at his flesh and consumed his dry bones and skin.

Chuck crumpled onto the ground.

Those things were incredibly flammable. Before I had time to get my bearings, he was already charred black.

I needed to get that alcohol back to the others, but first, I bent down and picked up the pair of sunglasses from my shoe. I had an idea for later. I placed them inside my pocket and turned to go grab the rest of the absinthe.

I was back down in the basement in less than a minute.

The crowd crush of zombies were still there, trying to free themselves but being neither strong enough, nor smart enough to succeed.

“Are you guys alive?” I yelled. I knew Anna would be, but I still wanted to check.

“Do you have the absinthe?” Anna screamed.

I didn’t know if they were near the door. I tried peeking over the top of the zombie pile, but I couldn’t make them out.

“Pass them over!” Camden screamed. I had no idea where they were.

Here goes nothing.

I lobbed one bottle over.

Crash. I heard it shatter on the other side. I hope I at least got some on the zombies.

“Try again,” Anna said.

I threw the next one. No crash.

The third one. No crash.

Fourth. A clink, but no crash.

“Got ‘em?” I asked.

“Just a sec,” Camden said.

Ten seconds passed.

A bottle hit the wall above the secret door. It shattered and I could see fire rain down on the zombies through the opening of the door.

I jumped back.

The zombies lit up like tinder.