As the bonfire of soulless corpses died down, I still heard some scuffling in the basement. The occasional voice would ring out as Camden, Anna, and Antoine took out the remaining zombies.

I took the thin pole I had been carrying and pushed the charred bodies from the door. I wasn’t sure how much help I could be, but I couldn’t just stand around.

The bodies had strangely fused in the fire—maybe that’s something normal bodies do, I don’t know. It took some poking and prying, but I got the door clear enough that I could step inside. Silently, I hoped that the zombie ash in my shoes would disappear when The End came.

As I stepped inside the secret laboratory, the source of the sounds became clear.

There were still four or five zombies running around. Antoine couldn’t move well, but as the zombies came in his direction, he would give them a good smack and Anna would splash some of the remaining alcohol on them.

Of the few stragglers that remained, one of them was Anastasia Halle, dragging her wedding dress back and forth across the floor chasing after whoever was running nearby. Her legs had been broken at some point in time, so she wasn’t much of a threat. She crawled through the ash and dirt on the floor.

“Anastasia, my love, come to me,” Dr. Halle said through Judy’s mouth.

Anastasia, of course, ignored his pleas. She wasn’t really there. Halle had to have known that, he was the one who reanimated her corpse. Still, he persisted.

“My love reaches to you across the universe,” he said, “Come to me.”

As soon as I had made it ten steps into the basement, all of the remaining zombies turned, stopped bothering my friends, and instead pursued me.

“Thanks,” Anna said, as she brought her table-leg club down on one of the zombies that had turned away from her. She pushed it to the ground and drowned it in a couple of glugs of absinthe.

Camden ran up to it holding a lit Bunsen burner. He got the flame near the absinthe fumes and the zombie lit up.

“Works even better than I expected,” he said.

He was right. These zombies burned better than they should, even after having been dried out.

“It’s your Savvy,” I said. “Catching them on fire was your plan so it works really well.”

Camden’s Savvy was currently at nine—his original five points, plus three from his Right Tool For The Job trope activating when he used the silver solution, and an additional point from my Cinema Seer—Survive trope having buffed him when I predicted the rise of the zombies.

When he came up with the plan to burn the zombies, that plan worked even better than it should have because it was made by someone with a huge Savvy advantage.

I mean, after all, in a horror movie, even ridiculous plans work out if they are made by the main characters.

“This is the last one,” Anna said as she poured the remaining absinthe on Anastasia Halle’s crawling body.

“Not the last one,” a voice said from the door. It was Kimberly. She had come back down. Her wound had stopped bleeding, but she was pale and sickly. Her Incapacitated status still blinked on and off sporadically.

“What?” Anna asked. “Oh right.”

Judy/Dr. Halle still sat in the metal chair, bound and unable to move.

“Release me,” he said. “Anastasia, darling…”

“What do we do about him?” Anna asked.

Camden approached Anastasia Halle and lit her up with the Bunsen burner. “Leave him,” he said. “We can’t burn him.”

Dr. Halle screamed in agony at the sight of his wife’s corpse igniting.

Camden was right. As we all stared at the pitiful form of Judy possessed by Dr. Halle’s spirit, we had the same realization that Camden had.

“Won’t burn,” he said. “Won’t die.”

Judy’s body was fresh—for lack of a better term. It wasn’t dried out and mummified like the others. It would not burn even if there was more absinthe. Even with Camden’s elevated Savvy, a plan has to be plausible and this wasn’t.

“If the machine was still working, we could probably use it on him,” I said, “But….”

The machine was completely out of commission. There were parts of it lying on the floor all over the lab. There would be no Deus Ex-Terminator for Dr. Halle.

“So we go?” Anna asked.

We all looked at each other but no one said anything. We all turned to leave.

This time, I helped Antoine to walk. Lord knows, he had put his injured foot through enough already today. Anna helped to guide Kimberly.

As we walked from the castle, I could still hear Dr. Halle’s mournful cries in the basement. No one spoke as we each watched the needle on the plot cycle tick forward.

When we stepped out onto the cloudy courtyard, it happened.

The End

Finally.

My head and shoulder instantly ceased aching. A look at Kimberly showed that she was back to being runway ready. Antoine’s foot was healed. He even had his shoe back.

I reached my hand into my pocket. Success. The sunglasses I had snatched from the Hawaiian shirt-clad zombie, Chuck, were still there.

Try seeing my eyes next time.

If a monster couldn’t see where I was looking, how could it know that I had seen it? These sunglasses breathed new life into the Oblivious Bystander trope strategy.

I started to laugh. Everyone joined me.

We had done it. We had squared off against a mad scientist with ghost powers and come out on top. Not to mention, we killed a lot of zombies.

"Morse code in the lights?" Camden exclaimed. "That was so clutch!"

"It was Riley's idea," Kimberly said. “He noticed that the lights flickered whenever a new one was turned on.”

Aww, shucks.

"I couldn't have done it without you," I said. "You were the one who actually knew how to do Morse code."

"Not really," Kimberly said. "I've already forgotten—"

"Step right up!" a voice said from the center of the courtyard. "You've won a ticket!"

Of course, Silas the Showman was there. He moved his mechanical limbs and opened and closed his mechanical mouth. His lights flashed into the dark, overcast sky.

We looked to each other.

"Let's do it," Anna said.

We each took turns pressing the red button, but when we did, something strange happened. You see, up until that point, all we had gotten from Silas the Showman were archetype tickets and tropes, but this time, when we pressed the button, we got some surprises.

As we lined up one after another, we were each given two normal-sized tickets and two tickets that were much smaller, more like raffle tickets.

We also got money. Around twenty bucks each in coins. They looked like the little commemorative coins you might get at Disneyland except with scary creatures on them. We hadn’t needed money up until then, but we knew there were places you could spend it as we heard people at the lodge talk about buying things all the time.

After I got over the excitement of getting paid, I examined the small tickets because I had never seen those before.

"Claim this ticket for a boost in one stat: Moxie, Hustle, Mettle, Savvy, or Grit. Just say it aloud and give it a rip," Silas said, answering the question we all had.

That explained a lot. Up until that point, we didn't actually know how to increase our stats. We just knew that our allies back at Dyer's Lodge had way more Plot Armor than we did.

"Hey, we leveled up!" I said, “Twice!”

"Oh, thank God," Camden said.

We took turns discussing what we would like to improve. For the most part, everybody ended up getting the stats that they felt they were missing during the Astralist storyline.

I wanted to improve Moxie and Hustle. The Oblivious Bystander trope used the Moxie stat, and a little extra Hustle would put me in a better position to pull it off as well. At the end of the day, if the strategy failed, I needed to be able to run back to the group and report what I had learned.

I grabbed the two smallest tickets. "Moxie," I said, and I ripped one. Just like that, my Moxie stat went up by one and my total Plot Armor jumped up to twelve.

"Hustle," I said. I ripped the second ticket. Success! I now had thirteen Plot Armor, and with a little extra Hustle, I might actually be able to maneuver.

“Still want to try the Oblivious thing?” Camden asked. He must have put together what my stat choices meant.

I nodded my head. I had been worried about how the others would react after the strategy failed the first time.

There was a silence in the group for a moment. I thought there was about to be an argument. To them, I just disappeared without a word. They might not have seen the potential.

Or maybe they did.

“Better get it working,” Anna said. She gave me a reassuring smile. “If they can’t kill you, they can’t kill the rest of us.”

I nodded my head again.

After a little discussion, we all used our stat tickets. Here are the changes to everyone’s stats:

Player Stats

Riley

Antoine

Anna

Kimberly

Camden

Archetype

Film Buff

Athlete

Final Girl

Eye Candy

Scholar

Plot Armor

Mettle

+ 1

+ 1

+ 1

Moxie

+ 1

+ 1

Hustle

+ 1

+ 1

Savvy

+ 1

+ 1

Grit

+ 1