Arc II, Chapters 97 and 98 (Patreon)

I could hear footsteps and Ted screaming as someone dragged him along the floor. I had a gun that Antoine had given me and enough Hustle to be able to use it.

I climbed out of the treehouse in what probably looked like a very clumsy crawl. I managed to land on my feet and point the gun in the direction of the open door, where I could see a mysterious figure standing.

He still held Ted's foot as he dragged him.

I took a shot.

And I missed.

I couldn't have missed. I had devoted so many points to Hustle that I should have been able to pick up a firearm and hit anything in a storyline, but somehow, I had missed.

That either meant that the figure had higher Hustle than I did, or he had a trope that protected him from gunfire.

I shot again. All I saw were the sparks that flew in the distance as my bullet hit something other than my target.

"Let go of him!" I screamed.

The figure didn't care. I couldn't see his face; he was just a silhouette, but I could tell he was taller than me. At that moment, I was afraid to unfocus my eyes so I could look at him on the red wallpaper.

Luckily, for a reason that I didn't understand at the moment, the dark silhouette of his head turned, and in the blink of an eye, he was out the door, which he slammed behind him loudly.

He left Ted screaming and hollering on the floor.

Kimberly and Dina were down from the car lift treehouse.

"I need a flashlight," I said. "That was definitely the killer."

I had left mine up in the treehouse. Dina grabbed it for me.

I did the thing that I often saw in action movies where cops put a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other so that they could shine the light wherever their gun was pointed.

"We need to go outside," I said.

"With the killer?" Kimberly asked.

"It's where the story is going," I said, which, of course, was pretty much the only reason we ever did anything, but in this storyline, it was something my character would care about, too.

Kimberly prepared her gun and flashlight similarly to how I did.

"I didn't take all those self-defense and firearms training courses because I thought I was going to be running after killers," she said. "It was for when the killers ran after me."

Her Hustle jumped up two points, as did her Mettle and Grit. Her hand, which held her firearm, steadied.

"Let's go," she said.

"Ted, grab the camera and follow us," I added.

"He grabbed me," Ted said. "I thought he was going to kill me."

"Well, he didn't, so it's time to work," I replied. I had to have earned that promotion somehow; being a hardass was a good reason.

We crossed the garage toward the door we had entered in the direction the killer had gone, and as we did, we heard someone outside yelling. It wasn't a scared yell.

Kimberly started to say "Antoine" but disguised it as a gasp and then said, "It's Sheriff Stone."

Outside, he was yelling, "Hello, Miss Madison, are you here?"

If he was in character outside, that meant that he was On-Screen, and we were also On-Screen, which meant that something was about to happen that involved all of us.

Kimberly rushed out the door.

Dina and I were right behind her, and Ted had found the courage to get his camera and follow us lightning-quick.

Antoine stood at the edge of the field and continued screaming.

"Sheriff Stone!" Kimberly cried out.

Antoine turned to us, and that's when we saw the killer.

He stepped out of the shadows like he was coming out of thin air.

He stepped up behind Antoine.

"No!" Kimberly screamed, and we all ran in that direction.

"Get down!" I screamed and raised my gun.

Antoine had good reflexes and was already on edge, perhaps more so than might be expected. As we got closer, I could see in the moonlight that he was sweating and gaunt.

He rolled out of the way before the killer could get behind him.

And there, by the light of the night sky, I got my first look at Benny.

Not Benny the Haunted Scarecrow that I would know from the sequel, not a ghost or magical thing at first glance.

The red wallpaper just called him Benny.

Benny

Plot Armor: 28

__________

Tropes

Vigilante Justice: This villain is an anti-hero who seeks to dole out justice with their own hands.

Soft Magic is Confusing: The enemy’s lore is vague and broad and offers little insight into the specifics of how the enemy operates.

Convenient Spirituality: Does this enemy have powers beyond its physical body? It must, even if it doesn’t often show them.

Gun to a Knife Fight: In this story, bladed weapons will be made equal to firearms in terms of effectiveness in some manner.

Slasher Teleportation: The villain is able to disappear or reappear without the characters noticing during Chase and Fight Scenes.

The Immortal Mask: This villain cannot be defeated, captured, or unmasked until their identity and motive have been deduced.

Where I had expected some sort of supernatural flying creature, he was just a man. He held a sickle and wore the head of the scarecrow that had been hanging in the fields. He had gardening gloves on and heavy work boots. Of course, he wore Benny Harless' coveralls with the name tag that I recognized.

Antoine managed to run away over toward us. He had his gun drawn, and he was ready to fill the supposed Benny with lead. Benny was quick, however, and ran immediately into the cornfield, disappearing quickly.

"We have to get out of here," Kimberly said.

Something that I couldn't tell her because we were On-Screen was that this Benny did not have the same trope that had prevented the previous one from killing her and me. That had been called Judgment Call, and it was conspicuously absent from his loadout here.

We had always wondered whether or not we could die in this storyline. We wondered whether the Judgment Call made by Benny, the haunted scarecrow we knew, would apply to this story.

It appeared we were wrong. That trope would not protect us.

This Benny was not the mysterious god of the cornfield. This Benny was a slasher, and we could be next.

~-~

"Where is your car?" Antoine said.

"It's down the road at the trailhead," I said. "With him out here, we'll never make it."

"Then we make a stand," Antoine said.

As he said that, the wind started to blow and howl, and the sunflowers, corn, and wheat became dancers in the moonlight. Was Benny waiting to attack us from within them, or had he used his Slasher Teleportation, and was he waiting behind us right now?

"Over there!" Dina yelled. Her outsider's perspective was great for this; it allowed her to notice anything new or unusual immediately.

As soon as I could turn my head, he was gone.

"No, over there!" Dina said, pointing to the complete opposite side of the cornfield.

This time, he stuck around for a while. All I could see was the scarecrow's fabric head that he had used as a mask. I could see now that he had cut two slits where the eyes were so that he could see. Behind those slits were dark, button-like eyes I recognized.

Kimberly must have recognized them, too.

In an instant, he was back in the cornfield, and we were running back toward the garage. Despite our considerable hustle, he beat us there. He was impossibly quick.

He stood between us and the garage, menacing, his sickle poised to slice.

"Rustle?" Kimberly asked softly.

Benny the slasher took a step back and tilted his head in the way that Michael Myers always did.

"You don't want to kill us," Kimberly said. "We were not the ones who did this."

He had the Immortal Mask trope, which meant we needed to identify him and his motive. That was one of the primary reasons I could rule out him actually being a ghost. Surely, we wouldn't be asked to solve the mystery of who the killer was if his name really was Benny.

"Your dad saw something, didn't he?" I said. "He saw that ponytail holder when he was fixing a car. He called it into the police, and then the Patchers came, and they killed him to cover it up, right? They even got hydraulic fluid on the elastic when they sabotaged his lift, right?"

There had been dried, crystalized good on the ponytail holder, too, which I assumed came from the stuff that had leaked out of the broken lift.

Benny, or should I say Rustle, just stood and stared. It took long enough for me to start wondering if we were actually correct, but as I stared into those eyes, I knew that they belonged to the child I had met before, now all grown up.

At that, Benny ran off into the cornfield again. The chase scene indicator turned off.

We all started looking at each other, expecting to go Off-Screen any moment, but we didn't.

"Rustle!" a woman screamed from back in the direction of the garage. "Rustle, where are you, honey?"

It wasn't coming from the garage; it was coming from the building next to it, the farmhouse. Rose was wearing a nightgown and a quilted jacket as she ran out into the darkness holding a shotgun.

"Who are you?" she screamed at us, training the gun at us.

"Miss Harless," Kimberly said, raising her hand, "it's Kimberly Madison with Carousel News 9. Do you remember me?"

"Yes, I do," Rose said, keeping the gun trained on us. "Dina, is that you?"

"Yes, Rose, it's me," Dina said.

"Well, what are you doing out here in the middle of the night, bringing reporters?"

She finally lifted her shotgun.

Dina walked forward and said, "We were searching for a killer. We thought he might be connected to my daughter."

Rose changed temperament at that. She was neither the hard, dangerous woman with a shotgun nor the kind, evasive woman we had first met.

She started to cry.

"Why would you be looking for a killer here?" she asked, sobbing.

"Ma'am," Antoine said, "I tracked the killer back here. Tall male, wearing blue coveralls and a mask that looked like a scarecrow's head."

Rose continued to sob.

"I don't know anything about that," she said, not able to look us in the eye, just as she was never able to look us in the eye when she talked about her son.

"You know something, don't you?" I said.

She would not look at us and she didn't respond.

I was willing to get a little greedy. I didn't feel like I was going too far out on a limb, but I wasn't sure about what can of worms I was about to open.

"There's something strange about him, something supernatural. I can feel it," I said. "I can feel it in the wind. I can feel it when I look at him. Now more than ever."

Rose turned her head and looked at me. She was about to speak; I could feel it.

Antoine's radio started to go off.

"Sheriff, are you hearing me? Sheriff, can you respond? Did you find anything over at Hidden Gorge?"

Antoine took out his radio, which was large and unwieldy.

"Yeah, I found something," Antoine said. "Gonna need you to send in all units."

Off-Screen.

"You found something?" I asked.

"Yeah, he killed two Patchers. They had shovels. I didn't get time to investigate because I pursued him over here."

Something in the way he said that was odd like he was sick to his stomach or dizzy.

I decided to ignore it.

"Let's get there now," Kimberly said.

We practically ran two miles up the road to the trailhead where our car was. We all piled in and quickly made our way to the campgrounds at Hidden Gorge.

We were there before any of the other police.

"It's this way," Antoine said.

The campgrounds were very nice. They were well laid out, with an established trail between them. They all centered around a small area where the gorge was wide enough and its water was still enough for a small swim beach to be made, though it was quite a climb down.

"It's over here," Antoine said, leading us past that place.

Luckily, we had our flashlights because the forest was thick. Antoine started to feel uneasy. Kimberly walked up ahead and grabbed his arm, and he didn't push her away.

It just dawned on me that we had sent Antoine into the woods alone. I had thought the campgrounds would be populated enough that he wouldn't have a problem. It would seem he had lost the benefits of his Play It Cool trope at some point in time. We needed to get to the end of the movie soon.

He led us through the forest along what was not an established trail but was clearly trodden before.

On-Screen.

"Over here," he said.

It took about half a mile of hiking into the woods before we found the small clearing filled with moonlight.

A headless Patcher lay on the ground. It was one I didn't recognize, but there were so many that it was possible I had already seen him.

But there was another Patcher, Woody Patcher, whom we definitely recognized as being the gas station attendant.

He was babbling to himself.

I could see his lips moving and I could see blood coming out from his mouth, but I couldn't hear what he was saying, not until I got really close. And what he said made no sense.

"Couldn't finish. Send help."

That's all he said over and over again.

"Couldn't finish. Send help."

"Couldn't finish. Send help."

And then, finally, when his eyes acknowledged us for the first time, he said, "People here. Couldn't finish. Send help."

As Antoine had said, shovels lay on the ground, and they began digging a hole in the moonlight.

"Oh my God," Dina said.

I grabbed one of the shovels from the ground. The hole was not yet complete, but its size and shape made me fear I knew exactly what was in it.

Quickly, Kimberly and I began digging while Dina stayed at the edge and talked to her daughter as if she were there.

"It's you. I finally found you," she said. "I had a feeling... maybe now I can be at peace too."

Sure enough, a couple more feet down, I struck a trunk, like the kind people would pack their clothes into in the olden days when they traveled by train. It was just big enough for the remains of a young girl.

Antoine was incensed. He went to Woody Patcher, ignoring whatever wounds he might have had, grabbed him, and asked, "What were you doing here? What happened to her?"

Woody barely acknowledged what was going on, but he did answer more or less.

"Tugg might have talked. Need to move her again. People are here. Couldn't finish. Send help," was all he said.

~-~

Morning came, a relief to all of us. We didn’t get time to sleep. We had a plan to enact.

"Alright, folks," Antoine said as we stood in the town hall, "I'm just gonna cut straight to the point. We got a killer on the loose, and he's coming after Patchers."

Whispers went through the crowd. We had invited about thirty of the Patchers along with as many non-Patchers as we could find. Being alone in a room with a bunch of Patchers didn't seem wise.

"If he's coming after us, then it's our business, not yours," Merle Patcher said. It was clear that he was seen as a sort of leader among the family.

We tried to invite all the Patchers that we had met, including Corduroy Patcher, who owned the general store. We needed to keep him involved because we planned on robbing him blind, and that would be easier to do if… something were to happen to him.

"Why can't you tell us more than this?" one of the Patchers screamed. "I'm a mother with children at home, and if I'm going to pull them out of school, I need to know why you think he is after us."

They really wanted to know how we knew they were the target, even more than they wanted to know why they were the target.

Others called out in agreement.

"Listen," Antoine said, "I understand your frustration, I really do, but this guy has taken out three of your kin, and one more looks like he's on the way out at the clinic. We need to coordinate efforts to help keep you all safe."

"We don't need your help to coordinate efforts," Merle said again. The ten years since we had last seen him had not diminished the man; he was a thunderstorm in human form. In fact, he was so notable in the presence of the other Patchers that I started to believe we had messed up by not getting to know him better in the Party Phase.

He seemed to be a key player.

"We cannot just sit around while more innocent people are slaughtered," Antoine said.

"Nobody ever said nothing about just sitting around," another Patcher said.

"I don't understand," one of the citizens who we knew for sure was not related to the Patchers said. "How do we know that this person is only attacking people of the Patcher bloodline? Why would they do that?"

The Patchers got real quiet.

"We're not making any inferences about that at this juncture," Antoine said. "If any of the Patchers have any idea why your family might be targeted, you can contact my office anonymously and feel free to let us in on that."

"None of us are going to tell you anything in secret," Merle said, taking offense at the very notion. "We are a family. Family is where we find our purpose. We don't need your help."

The other Patchers agreed vehemently. The man that I assumed was Merle's son, Joshua, said, "We have our own ways of solving problems around here."

Perhaps that was a bit too far; Merle looked at him with a scolding expression.

"The fact is," Merle said, "we just are not impressed with the current leadership of the Sheriff's Department. I have no reason to believe that you would be able to protect us, so we are going to protect ourselves."

~-~

The meeting went on like that for another hour, with different Patchers throwing out one-liners for Carousel to pick through. We had been up all night, ensuring that no one came and stole Tamara Cano's body. We needed to make sure that it got back to a medical examiner who wasn't a Patcher, married to a Patcher, or the secret love child of a Patcher.

We weren't sure if this was the right course of action, but we did know that the Patchers were all involved.

The best thing we could do was get them On-Screen and talking about it. We even managed to hide our cameraman in the room, his camera concealed under a pile of old sheets and rugs.

We were getting nearer and nearer to Second Blood, and we weren't sure which direction the plot would take. There were so many potential Patchers to be killed; how were we supposed to know which ones were next?

Just as the conversation started to wind down, the final Patcher showed up and made a loud entrance as he ran into the room, nursing a wound on his hand and hollering to the heavens.

He was a Patcher by marriage; his name was Jeffrey Fields, the representative of Eastern Carousel. The years had not been so kind to him.

"He got Della," was all Jeffrey could say. "He got Della. I tried to stop him, but he shot me here in the hand."

Rustle shot him?

Antoine quickly rushed to the man and looked at his wound. He looked over at us and then back at the wound.

"He shot you, huh?" Antoine asked, holding up the wound. It was a bleeder, alright, a small bullet hole on the skin between the thumb and pointer finger. It was apparent upon close inspection that the gunpowder residue, which was always visible in movies, was on the inside of his palm.

"What are you trying to say?" Jeffrey said.

"Our suspect doesn't use firearms," Antoine said. "He uses a blade."

Jeffrey went white.

"You let that man take my sister!" Merle screamed from across the room. He rushed toward Jeffrey and took his own look at the man's wound.

"I should have never let you marry her. I knew you couldn't protect her. Tell me that wound doesn't look like it came from that little girl gun that you got," Merle said.

"Merle, I swear," Jeffrey said. "I did everything I could. I just didn't want you to think…"

"How many times do I gotta tell you, boy? You can't hide anything from family," Merle said in a hushed and frankly terrifying voice.

"We gotta find her," Merle said. "Everybody, go pray. We need to finish this."

Off-screen.

Go pray?

The Patchers poured out of the town hall and found their way to the gas station and the general store. I stood and watched outside, having no clue what was going on.

"She's at Hidden Gorge!" one of them screamed. "She's on her way to Hidden Gorge."

None of this happened On-Screen, but it did happen in front of us, which meant we were supposed to see it.

NPCs would often guide us toward the next scene, and it was clear the next scene was back at Hidden Gorge, where we had found Tamara’s body. It wasn't unusual to get directions like that, but the manner in which we had gotten them was confusing.

We all piled into Antoine's police cruiser.

On-Screen.

We had played this game for a while now, and I knew exactly what we needed.

"You interrupted him when he was searching at Hidden Gorge," I said. "Maybe that's where he went. He might think her body is still there."

Antoine nodded.

"That's the best clue we have," Antoine said as he put the car in gear.

Off-screen.

The needle on the plot cycle was on the precipice of Second Blood. Whatever was about to happen, it was about to happen soon.

~-~

For the second time, we arrived at Hidden Gorge before anyone who left before us did, despite all logic.

On-Screen.

Others were there already. Benny, his captive Della, and his mother Rose were a little way down the trail in a field next to the gorge.

Rustle must have already found that Tamara’s body was gone. He had brought Della here to see it, I had to infer.

"Rustle," Rose cried out, "what have you done? It's not too late, baby; just don't do this."

Rustle stood at the edge of the gorge. This wasn't anywhere near the swimming area; if they fell from there, they would not survive.

"Rustle, baby, I know you're angry, but revenge is not the answer. This is not what your father would have wanted."

Benny held his sickle against Della's neck. It was clear he was deeply troubled by his own actions.

"Why does he have her?" Kimberly asked.

"Don't you remember?" I asked. "She got a new car around the time that Tamara Cano went missing. People were gossiping about it. You have to ask: what happened to her old car?"

Kimberly's eyes widened. "Tugg Montgomery," she said.

"Yep," I replied.

"Put your hands up," Antoine said, finally figuring out what he thought his character would do at that moment. "Let the woman go. There are better ways to resolve this. She can go to prison. We know what happened now."

This was not an effective argument to Rustle.

"Tugg Montgomery was supposed to tear down her old car, I imagine, after she hit Tamara on the road while walking home from the Harless place. But he got greedy; that was his reputation, being greedy. He decided to sell the car for cheap to Margaret Petty. Then, when it was handling funny, probably because of the accident, she brought it to Benny Harless, the best mechanic in town."

Della had accidentally killed Tamara, and to get away with it, she had called upon her family to help cover up the crime, which they had done, even when that meant killing Benny Harless.

There was a chance she was drunk when it happened. She had been flushed and had trouble standing the last time I saw her. I couldn’t say.

"Did they just tell their entire family about it?" Dina asked. "How did it seem like everyone was in on it? Everyone was acting so suspicious, the entire Patcher family."

I shrugged. "Maybe they just are that close of a family," I said, not really sure why they would tell everyone in their family about a murder.

"There she is!" someone screamed in the distance.

Suddenly, footsteps were coming from everywhere. I turned around and looked, and I saw no fewer than fifty Patchers, all toting guns and pointing them at Rustle.

"Hold on, everybody!" Antoine screamed. "That's not how we're going to handle this. Rustle here is going to let her go, and then I'm going to arrest him; you got that?"

Throughout everything, Rose continued to sob. Now she called out, "Rustle, sweetheart, you were not meant to do these things. Please, please, for the love of your own mother, let her go. Revenge isn't worth it. Revenge will consume you, and if it consumes you, what will you become?"

Was that a line from the trailer?

Rustle seemed to consider this.

"Let her go now!" Merle screamed. "If anything happens to her, we are gonna fill you so full of bullet holes that your Mama here will have nothing left to bury."

Rose cried out.

It was a classic scenario.

Talking down the killer, telling them how revenge was not the answer, and then, of course, the killer is always persuaded to set aside the vendetta that they've been working on for years and let everything go because revenge is evil and in a movie, you can't have a sympathetic character be evil.

Of course, that's the way it usually went.

In a slash, Rustle cut Della's head almost completely off, stopping only at her spine as he swiped. She fell to the ground, gurgling and bleeding.

"Della!" Merle screamed. "You dumb son—”

I couldn't hear what else he said because the entire area came alive with gunfire. The bullets penetrated Rustle's torso, tearing through and leaving spatters of blood. Some of the guns were very powerful and left entire holes in his torso.

They shot him at least twenty times.

Rose screamed out, "No!"

It was abundantly clear that the hail of bullets was designed to be lethal by the script. They hit every square inch of his body, including his head and chest. Still, he stood for a moment long enough to stumble backward and fall into the abyss behind him.

Just as he did, Second Blood struck on the plot cycle.

Well, that would certainly explain why no one had to die in this movie. First Blood was Benny Harless; Second Blood was his son, Rustle.

Several of the Patchers ran to Della's aid, but she was a lost cause. Other than a few miserable gasps, she was finished. Benny had killed everyone apparently involved in his father's murder and the death of his childhood friend.

"Rustle," Rose cried out. Kimberly immediately grabbed onto her, as did Dina, and they helped stop her from falling further to the ground.

"I always prayed for a child," Rose said. "I prayed at the church in town. I prayed to the gods of foreign religions. I prayed and I prayed, and I never got my answer." She looked up to the sky and around at the trees and the wind that blew their leaves rapidly. "Then I prayed to the trees and the fields and the forest and to the gods that have no names. And they gave me him," she said, looking up at Kimberly. "I heard him crying in the field. He was born from a gourd, his umbilical cord attached to the plant itself. But he was my boy. He was mine to look after. A child of the fields, the spirit of the harvest in human form. Such a special boy. Until they did this to him," she said. "When they killed his father, I saw darkness form inside him, an anger that was unnatural, and… now he is free."

I was so distracted by her confession of Rustle's supernatural origin that I hardly noticed the Patchers were all standing perfectly upright and still, their weapons at the ready.

We were in the finale, and it was time to meet the real enemy.

The Patchers

Plot Armor: 15-28

__________

Tropes

Twist Villain: This villain may have initially appeared to play a more minor part in the story, even appearing as an NPC, but when the film’s apparent villain falls, this villain’s true nature is revealed.

Hidden In Plain Sight: This villain cannot be attacked On-Screen until it attacks the player or is otherwise identified as hostile. Attacking it will not be effective, nor will it change the story. It will cause the player to go Off-Screen for a time.

Pattern Killer: Before the finale, the villain will only kill victims chosen according to a pre-established motive.

No Neighborhood Watch: The villain will not be seen by NPC witnesses when off-screen.

Hive Mind: This villain's mind is linked to that of similar villains.

The Unseen Hand: This enemy is guided by a greater force. This guidance may be a part of the lore or the meta.

Strength In Numbers: The enemy is at its strongest in groups. Singling its members out will weaken them substantially.

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.

Skeletons in the Closet: Once the players discover this enemy’s dark secret, the Win Condition is Get the Truth Out.

Hive mind? I started to question in my mind.

Then the question was answered.

"In family, we find purpose," Merle said.

Then, they all said it with him. "In family, we find purpose!"

It just occurred to me that we had inadvertently done the thing we were so careful not to do earlier, the thing about being alone with a bunch of Patchers.

"Oh damn," I said as they all spoke and moved in unison. "Run!"