“Can he follow us?” I asked as we ran from the stampede.

Camden shook his head. I could tell he was in worse condition than he pretended.

“They can only—” he stopped and winced in pain. “There’s some kind of limit. I don’t understand it completely. He can only travel to historical disasters. But the magic can only open one portal to a particular disaster at once. Does that make sense? Unless he wants another version of himself to follow him. Then he has to kill a new victim. Whatever--" he winced again, "Just, he shouldn't be able to follow us is all that matters, not until the next recorded disaster."

Time traveling from disaster to disaster.

This disaster... the Stampede.

The 1996 Carousel Summer Days Stampede took over forty lives. A carnival ride—a small, slow kiddie ride—malfunctioned and threatened to derail a car from its spinning track. The ride operator managed to get it switched off, but the loud sound of metal bursting loose within the mechanism sounded much more dangerous than it was. The crowd panicked. Many thought a bomb had gone off.

The Town of Carousel: Horrific Events Through the Ages, the book the Generation Killer (as he was called on the red wallpaper) used to coordinate his time travel, stated that many of the victims had been trampled, but most had gotten tangled together in a narrow alleyway and succumbed to crowd crush. Everyone ran to exit the alleyway with such reckless haste that they jammed up against each other, their limbs getting caught around those next to them. Those in the front were killed as those in the back pushed forward, unable to see the carnage they were causing.

The image of it had been awful, bodies, squeezed, tangled together until everyone involved was stuck so tight they couldn’t breathe. I will never forget it.

The strange jewel the Killer used had brought us right into the midst of the chaos. We were in Carousel in 1996.

“We have two days here,” Camden said. “Then a houseboat sinks on Dyer’s Lake and he can come through to get us.”

Two days until the next disaster.

“Did you say there are other versions of him?” I asked. In the excitement, I had almost missed that.

“Past, present, future,” Camden said. “Several of them. The young ones are fast and strong but also kind of dumb. I managed to trick one and get away for a while before you showed up. The old ones are smarter but weaker and slower.”

We ran until we found a corner between two buildings where we could stop running and hide. Camden plopped down on the ground and pulled out some medical supplies from his pocket. The Killer had taken his arm, but had also patched it up.

Camden must have seen me staring at his recently stitched stump.

“He didn’t want me to die too quickly,” he explained. “That magic pendant,” he pointed at the necklace I was wearing, “It has to be jumpstarted through anguish. That’s why his face and arms are covered in scars. He thought he would use me instead of himself for a while.”

That was too terrible to think about.

Camden started trying to dress his wound. I quickly bent down to take over. I felt so useless, not knowing how to treat an amputation like this.

“These supplies are really old,” I said. The style was not modern at all.

“They were all he had,” Camden said. “He must have picked them up decades ago.”

I dressed his wound as best as I could. The stitches and cauterization that the Killer had done were clumsy, but at least Camden would not bleed out.

Off-Screen.

After I was done, I sat down on the ground across from Camden and we just looked at each other for a moment. We had never gotten the chance to discuss what had happened to us since we started the storyline. The roller rink had collapsed into the earth soon after we arrived, and the story had not slowed down since then. Now, we were finally between scenes.

“Do you think Riley, Antoine, and Kimberly are okay?” I asked.

Camden didn’t answer for a time, but then said, “They’ll be fine. They have Chris and Grace.”

“Are we going to be okay?”

Camden’s eyes dropped.

“What do we do?” I asked. “How do we beat him? Where do we go?”

“Anna…” Camden said.

“What?”

He looked at me with a soft expression. “We won’t survive this.”

I was afraid he would say that.

“No,” I said. A lump rose up in my throat. “There has to be a way.”

“There is a way,” Camden said. “But we can’t do it. Not just the two of us.”

I couldn’t accept that. It was my job to keep us positive when everything looked impossible.

“You just have to take some time to think it through,” I said.

Camden shook his head. “I did. I was in that cell for over a week before you got there. I figured out how to beat him. You split him up. You grab as many of the amulets as you can and you take them to different times. He gets confused. I heard one of the older versions yelling at a teenage version about it. His memories get scrambled. There are ten versions. Used to be twelve once upon a time I think. Strand them in their own time periods and they can’t time travel anymore. Maybe kill them, I don’t know. The time travel continuity in this story is nonsense. Riley would love it. I did my research. Paid the price for it too,” he said, looking over at his missing arm.

“But there’s only two of us…” I said, dejected.

“There’s only two,” he repeated. “And we are horribly under-leveled.”

This wasn’t happening. We were really going to die. My family would never know what happened to me. I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore.

“But I have an idea,” he said.

I perked up at that. Did he have a plan to get us home?

“Just because we die, doesn’t mean we can’t do something important. I think we can get back at Carousel and help the others. It’s a long shot, but what else are we going to do?”

“Help the others from in here?” I asked. That didn’t seem possible.

“If my idea works.”

I thought for a moment. “Using time travel?”

He nodded.

“But you said you thought this was fake. That we aren’t actually in the past,” I said.

“Oh, it’s fake,” Camden said. “The question is, how good of a fake is it?”

---

After he explained his plan, I felt numb. We were going to die, that much seemed clear. The only thought that kept me from descending into a cycle of self-pity was that we might be able to help our friends.

But his plan… was difficult to go through with.

“We need anguish short of death to activate the pendant,” Camden said. “We’re traveling from the 1996 Stampede to the 2010 Red Hills Massacre. You got that?”

“I got it,” I said.

He had explained it over and over. He made me read the entry for both events at least a dozen times. The traveler had to have a clear vision of where they wanted to go.

The Red Hills Massacre occurred just up the road from Camp Dyer. A group of college kids were found dead. Strangely, all of the deaths were ruled suicides. One student went missing completely and there were few witnesses.

That wasn’t the hard part.

Activating the pendant was. Anguish short of death was more than I thought I could handle.

We had broken into a tool shed in a nice neighborhood. I held an electric drill in my hand.

On-Screen.

“If we stand any chance, we have to get a step ahead of him! Do it!” Camden screamed.

I held the drill over him, but I couldn’t bring myself to lower it. We had talked it over a hundred times. We just needed a shot of the drill breaking the skin. He thought he had enough Moxie to handle it from there, to play up his injury. But if that wasn’t true… I would have to really hurt him.

I held the drill over him. I could barely see through the tears in my eyes.

“Do it!” Camden screamed again.

The drill cut into his arm and he started to scream.

Not long after that, the pendant started to glow as I thought about the strange pictures I had seen depicting the victims of the Red Hills Massacre.

And then, suddenly, we were there. Carousel in 2010.

The drill traveled with us, taking the electric outlet and part of the wall of the shed with it.

I unplugged the drill and put it into a canvas bag I had slung over my shoulder.

We were in 2010. February 2010, or at least Carousel’s version of it.

Camden chose it because there wasn’t another disaster for three days afterward, giving us some time to enact his plan.

~~~~~

I thought back to our conversation in the alleyway as he described the plan to me.

“A young version of him brought me to the year 2002 before we went to their hideout where you rescued me. I managed to escape by pretending I was dead. He fell for it. I ran around Carousel for hours in 2002. There was nothing important to be done. I saw plenty of NPCs, but none of them wanted to interact with me. I kept hoping that Carousel would bring the story to me--that by escaping I could find a way to win. But I was off-screen the entire time. My entire escape was off-screen. It was like it had never happened. I could have screamed. Probably did.

“But as I walked around Carousel I noticed something very strange. There was a restaurant near the center of town that had a bunch of cops and EMTs outside of it. They were just standing around going through their motions of pretending to be real. They were background characters. We see that a dozen times a day but something about it felt oddly familiar to me. They were talking about some death that had occurred there.

“After the Killer recaptured me I sat in my cell and I thought about it for hours until it dawned on me that the last time I had seen cops and paramedics acting that way was when I died in the Ranger Danger storyline. I woke up after it was over and I pulled the sheet off of my face and I looked around and there were all these NPCs just going about their business walking back and forth talking about what had just happened. It was the exact same thing that was happening at the restaurant. That's when I figured it out.” He paused for a moment.

“What?” I asked.

“What I was seeing had nothing to do with this storyline. I was seeing a scene from a different storyline altogether. I think Carousel recreated that day in 2002 down to every detail. I think players, actual players, had run a storyline at the restaurant that day in the original 2002. When Carousel needed to recreate 2002 for this time travel storyline, it just copied them, exactly as they were at that moment in the real timeline."

He was really throwing a lot out there. “So, what's your plan?”

“We go to 2010. Before the fall of that year.”

“What happened in the fall of 2010?” I asked.

He smiled.

~~~~~

We ran from the horror of the Red Hills Massacre. We had been Off-Screen from the time we left the crime scene. Camp Dyer was only a few miles away. We didn’t know if we were being chased, but we ran anyway. Camden looked pale, but curiosity was driving him.

We ran straight to Dyer’s Lodge.

“Please be there,” Camden said. He said it several times. I guess it was our swan song, our Hail Mary. I hoped it was there too.

----

“You don’t remember?” Camden asked.

I shook my head. “Vaguely.”

“Rescue tropes disappeared in Fall 2010. So we go travel back to before that happened.”

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t think we’re going to find Rescue Tropes, do you?”

I was fairly certain that Carousel wouldn’t make such an oversight.

He shook his head. "No."

----

As we got to Dyer’s Lodge, we ran past the head camp counselor who yelled something at us I couldn’t hear. It didn’t seem important.

We were inside the Lodge in a flash. It looked different. Fewer couches. A lot of the knickknacks had disappeared along with many of the books.

“Look,” Camden said, pointing to a chalkboard in the center of the common area. The board was covered in plans for a run to the mall. These players were high enough level to plan runs at the mall? We had been told it was way too dangerous.

“Oh my god!” I said.

Camden was right. Carousel recreated the time period down to the last detail, even including the things that players had left behind back then.

----

“If Carousel recreates past time periods exactly,” Camden said. “Recreates it down to the last detail, even going so far as having NPCs show up because some players had run a storyline on that same day, What if Carousel recreates everything?”

“Everything?” I asked.

----

We rummaged through the Lodge. There were no players there, but this was their hideout. Just like it was our hideout over ten years later. Players had been staying at Dyer’s Lodge since before Adeline and Arthur were in charge.

“Found it!” Camden screamed out.

I ran toward the stairs and bounded up them.

He was sitting on a chair at the table where the high-level players always planned their runs.

In front of him was the object of our desire: the Carousel Atlas.

“The player register,” Camden said, overjoyed. “The register is still here,” he said, having flipped to the very back. “It goes back to 1989.”

Players had been in Carousel since 1989?

He sat and read through the book.

Something he read was quite sobering. “I think Riley might be onto something,” he said.

There were all kinds of things in this past version of the Atlas that ours didn’t have. Entire sections. Ticket types I had never heard of were discussed in detail.

Camden pointed to a section of text.

“We’ve discovered a new exploit for Rescue Tickets,” Camden read aloud. “Our ‘Insider’ tells us to be cautious because he cannot keep Carousel distracted for too long, but the more we experiment, the more confident I am that we have found a way to increase our levels dramatically in the coming months. Testing continues. We must not tell the other players until we are sure it is safe.”

"An exploit?" I asked. "Like cheating?"

"Not necessarily. I wonder if Adeline knows about it? I don't see where she's written anything in here. Arthur either."

----

“What if Carousel recreates Dyer’s Lodge exactly as it was in 2010. What if it recreated the Carousel Atlas before it had so many of its pages torn out? Maybe a lot of information would still be there?”

“Whoa,” I said. Seeing the Atlas before it was defaced was huge. “But how does it help? How do we get it to our friends?”

“Oh, I have an idea,” Camden said with a weak smirk.

----

He flipped to a part that discussed player aspects. Then he flipped further to the Final Girl Section, and then the general section.

“This should work nicely,” he said.

“Which aspect do I need to pick?” I asked.

“Doesn’t much matter,” he said. “Pick whatever you like. Just follow the plan."