Book Five, Chapters 15: The Reaper

It was harder to kill him than the first two because I saw his face and I had spoken to him.

I truly had difficulty attacking him.

He was a portly old man. He held in his hands the sawed-off shotgun from his shop. Its trope, the Hidden Barrel, was intact, though it wasn’t active because his gun wasn’t hidden, thankfully.

Still, he looked the most human out of all the Patchers we had seen since they went hive mind.

He looked scared.

Then he spoke and said, “In family we find purpose,” speaking with a hundred voices all at once, like he was possessed.

His face went blank, and he lifted his shotgun at me while his mouth continued to chant.

That made it a lot easier, actually.

He fired the shotgun at me, but I dodged to the left and ran into a patch of trees near the road. I expected to get peppered with lead. After all, that was what a sawed-off shotgun was for. Luckily, I was too far away for him to hit me. I also suspected he was using slugs as ammunition instead of something that would spread when shot because a huge hole appeared in a tree behind me as I fled into the woods.

I felt that was a poor choice, but I wasn’t going to argue.

He started to reload.

The trope that made bladed weapons equal to guns was very ambiguous about how it would work, but I suspected things like decreasing bullets’ accuracy and making guns have to reload more often were part of it.

Those little tweaks allowed a man wearing an oversized suit and holding hedge shears to beat a possessed man with a shotgun. It didn’t hurt that his Plot Armor was only eight.

I closed the distance, and as I removed him from the picture, his eyes began to glow.

I hadn’t seen the others do that because I hadn’t seen them up close when they died.

Perhaps Carousel wanted to confirm for the audience that these enemies were not exactly human. Typically, that would be done by showing how evil they were, but Corduroy hadn’t done much evil stuff.

The hundred voices in his mouth did not stop talking after he died, not for several minutes. His mouth wasn’t even moving, and the sounds came out.

Creepy.

I wondered if there was a non-supernatural version of this storyline buried inside the story where the Patchers were just normal people.

I grabbed his shotgun. I was really making a killing here with the trope weapons. A sawed-off shotgun, hedging shears–I was starting quite the collection.

I ran over to the garage after I saw there were no more Patchers around. I knocked on the garage door so they would know it was me.

They opened it, restarted the car, and they were off, leaving me behind.

The wind howled, and I stared out across the fields as people with glowing eyes began exiting the forest.

“They’re here!” I yelled back into the garage as I shut the door.

I wanted them to think Kimberly and the others were inside. How long that deception would last wasn’t important.

I assumed that the deception would work because Rose and I were here, and we had the lowest plot armor of anyone being targeted.

The deception gave cover to explain why we were being attacked and the others weren’t. At least they weren’t being attacked by these Patchers. They likely had their own problems to deal with.

Once the others left this scene, Carousel would have a challenge ready for them.

The deception worked, too.

We were getting good at this game.

Now, I had fifty or so armed attackers coming straight for me.

What a great plan I had made.

I went Off-Screen soon after Kimberly and the others left.

I was Off-Screen for quite a while.

Kimberly recording her report on everything that had happened was clearly more important than what was happening to me. I imagined they were dodging enemies as she recorded things.

The Patchers just stood and watched from a distance. Usually, enemies will attack you when you’re Off-Screen, just not with much enthusiasm, especially if you’re an important character. With what I had planned, it was obvious that Carousel wanted to make sure that my fate was captured in its entirety.

I remembered back to when we were scouting this storyline out.

Cassie had used her trope to try to find out the supernatural nature of the story.

She spoke of an angry entity upset over blood being spilled. A child of the earth had been killed.

At first, I thought that might have been Tamara Cano, but as I learned about Rustle and eventually saw him gunned down, I realized it must be him.

The ancient spirits that had given him life, that had answered Rose Harless’ prayer, were now angry that he had been killed.

I was going to give voice to that anger.

I had equipped my Raised by Television trope. When I stayed behind to let the others escape, it activated, and as I had hoped, it buffed my Moxie by five points.

It gave a bit of Mettle, too.

No Grit though.

Moxie and Mettle.

Moxie was used to interact with the supernatural and spiritual. It was also used for Improvisation. I needed it for both.

I couldn’t say what was about to happen or whether I would live, but if I was right, this would be a great conclusion for my character.

Of course, I really did hope that I would survive. It would be a bit embarrassing to die grocery shopping.

I knew things were about to start happening as Rose slowly limped out of the garage and joined me in the field as I stared at the Patchers.

We were Off-Screen, but she said, “If I had known all of this would happen, I wonder if I would have prayed for a child.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said. “If it wasn’t for them, things would have turned out fine.”

She didn’t look as confident.

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“You can never be surprised by what you get when you pray to a nameless thing, whether you’re praying for a child or for a second chance. A person willing to do that doesn’t deserve to plead ignorance. I did what I did, and now we’re here.”

“Now we’re here,” I repeated, staring at her, unsure of the full scope of what she was saying.

I didn’t have time to think about it.

On-Screen.

“Come to us,” the Patchers all spoke at once, hundreds of voices sounding out of dozens of mouths. “Come to us; we will make it quick.”

I had to wonder if a scholar or an occultist had done this story, would we have learned more about the Patchers and their supernatural nature? I supposed we could figure that out the next time we went food shopping.

If they were going to yell at me, I was going to yell back. It was showtime.

“You shouldn’t have come here!” I screamed.

“We have been here since the first war,” the voices said, “and we will be here at the last one.”

I didn’t know the history they were referencing, but it was a cool line, I thought.

“There were those that were here before you,” I screamed, “and they are angry.”

I got no response, but I noticed Merle Patcher had moved into the forefront of the group that was closing the distance toward me. That gave me confidence in my plan. It was nice to see the main Patcher.

“We will do whatever it takes to protect our family,” he said, except he didn’t say it with a hundred voices like the others; he was just talking himself.

His eyes were glowing, though. His plot armor was 28. He was the boss.

Or so he thought.

The wind started to howl even harder, and Patchers emerged from the woods holding torches, which they promptly used to catch the crops on fire.

“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

I tried to look panicked, afraid not of the Patchers but of the thing that they were insulting.

Rose started to call out, “Trees, sky, earth, hear me! These people have killed your child. They killed the child you gave me to protect. Please,” she said, “I implore you, let loose your vengeance on them.”

Thunder boomed with no lighting.

“You should go!” I screamed. “Something is happening.”

I tried to play it like I was so panicked that I just wanted it all to stop. I even shed a tear, though that could have been from the wind whipping my eyes.

Merle was unfazed. “We will do whatever it takes to protect our family name,” he said.

He lifted his gun and shot Rose. She fell to the ground; this wound was fatal.

“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “You already killed his father, and then you killed him. Now that you killed his mother, he’s really going to be angry.”

Fifty heads tilted in confusion.

“I don’t think so,” Merle said.

They lifted their firearms. I hoisted my reacquired scythe up and ran as they started to shoot at me.

Sure enough, the bullets whizzed past but never hit me. I ran into the nearest field of corn. It was on fire, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. There was plenty of room to hide there, and the fire wouldn’t get to me for some time.

They followed me into the corn.

The first one I saw, I swiped at with the scythe.

I wasn’t sure if the scythe was a good weapon in real life, but in this movie, heads rolled.

Literally.

There was a pitter-patter as corn fell to the ground, followed by a thud after my swing. I continued running and swiping and dodging for a long while as the fire spread.

Even with the buff to Mettle from Raised by Television, I wasn’t a combat build. Some of the Patchers were too tanky to be killed in one blow. With a scythe, you either kill in one hit or you don’t kill. It was too awkward as a weapon if you just got it hooked on a Patcher’s overall strap.

That was my strategy.

If I saw a low-level one, I swiped. They might die, they might run, but they were no longer a threat. When I killed them, they still had glowing eyes and talking mouths.

I ran through the corn in a panic. The world was closing in on me.

I tried running along the field to escape the fire, but a large Patcher stood in my way, and when I instinctively swung the scythe, he caught it.

That was the end of that weapon.

I ran out of the corn and back into the main clearing. I could still feel the fire on my skin. The smoke filled my nostrils.

I was out of room to run.

The fire ate away at the entire crop. As soon as I got out, I felt something stinging my shoulder.

I had been shot.

Perhaps the ride was over. I really was hoping for something more than a few good shots of me taking out Patchers.

They were closing in now, and I watched the Plot Cycle. It wasn’t moving. We were still firmly in the final battle.

I hoped that Kimberly and the others were well on their way to Carousel.

I didn’t have to kill these people.

I didn’t even have to survive.

I did have a show to put on, however, because I was the distraction.

I doubled over like I was sick to my stomach. The stinging bullet hole in my shoulder was only a mild annoyance as my plan started to come to fruition.

I puked on the ground.

I felt something in the wind, something that felt like battery acid on my skin. The red wallpaper showed my status changing to Infected.

So that was how it was going to play out.

“They won’t have any mercy on you,” I said, though I struggled to speak.

After that, I didn’t have control of my mouth. A wicked voice came out of my throat that didn’t sound human.

“You killed him,” the voice accused. “You spilled his blood on this land,” it continued. “Your blood will be spilled for it.”

Merle lifted his gun to shoot at me, and when he pulled the trigger.

At first, I thought that it had misfired.

He was only ten feet away, so that didn’t make a lot of sense, but I heard a bang, and I felt nothing.

It was only a moment later that I realized that my Grit was over a thirty.

Grit wasn’t even supposed to make you bulletproof, but then I wasn’t exactly human. I was a vessel, and while I didn’t have the presence of mind to read all of the new tropes I had on the red wallpaper, I could see that there were dozens of them.

A higher power possessed me, and mere guns could not stop me.

The other Patchers started to fire into me, and their bullets pierced right through my suit but bounced off my skin.

My hand moved to the sky, and my scythe, which had been taken from me in the corn, flew into my hand.

“The harvest is nigh,” I said in the voice of that terrible entity. “The grain is ripe, and the reaper awaits.”

Was I the reaper?

No…

Apparently not.

The Reaper flew in from above the trees in the distance. As my eyes looked in that direction, I could see that Benny, the Haunted Scarecrow, had arrived. He was more ragged than I recognized. Bullet holes and blood were still there.

The legs of his coveralls were not tied, so the straw stuffing continued to fall out, though it never seemed to deplete his size. Benny flew over the fields.

“He seeks his revenge,” I said in the voice of that terrible god.

And he got his revenge.

Benny was a quick and efficient killer, with his sickle firmly gripped in his gloved hand. He flew from Patcher to Patcher. Not one of them stood a chance.

This was the Benny from The Final Straw II.

This was the creature I recognized.

The Patchers began shooting at him. When they hit him as he flew overhead, a puff of straw would blow into the air, but it didn’t really matter.

He was there to reap, and the harvest was ready.

Rustle, or Benny rather, going with the moniker he seemed to have taken, wielded his sickle for ten minutes.

The Patchers didn’t run at first. They seemed unable to come to terms with what they were up against. They just kept shooting.

They only started to run after it was too late. A few of them broke out of their trance and started to flee. They screamed for their ancestor to save them, but he did not.

Benny had no mercy.

He flew past a group of three and they each fell headless after he passed.

He went in circles, taking out any Patcher who tried to leave.

The final Patcher to die in that field was Merle. Benny finished him off with a clean slice.

I imagined that Carousel would edit that down into a sleek montage of carnage.

Moments after the final Patcher fell, I was released from my possession.

Pretty much all of my statuses were blaring.

It was all I could do to kneel. My entire body ached.

Benny flew down in front of me. The slits that had been cut in the scarecrow’s head as eye holes were still open, but there was nothing behind them. Just straw. He looked me directly in the eye as best he could with the buttons sewn to the mask.

At that moment, I got a flash of images.

He was giving me a flashback.

I saw a little blonde kid talking to Tamara Cano. I saw her little ponytail holders with the plastic balls. They were walking through the fields toward the special sunflowers. Rustle took out a knife, cut off one of the sunflowers, and handed it to Tamara.

She smiled and thanked him, and then she said, “My mother loves these.”

Rustle looked at her, confused.

“I give them to my mother,” Tamara said. “She keeps them on the dining table.”

Rustle looked hurt.

He shook his head and then slapped the flower out of her hand.

I could feel what he was feeling. He was upset because he wanted Tamara to have the flower, not give it to her mother.

He was frustrated that he couldn’t explain that. In his frustration, he signaled for Tamara to leave.

She didn’t understand why, and she started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “What did I do?”

But he couldn’t answer her.

She walked off that day crying, upset, just as Benny Harless had claimed.

Then, on her way home, she was struck and killed by Della Fields (née Patcher).

Rustle blamed himself. If he hadn’t sent her away, she would still be alive. And he would have to live with that… if you could call what he did living.

The needle on the Plot Cycle struck The End not long after that.

The others must have made their way to Carousel proper, or at least far enough to get the victory.

Benny flew off.

I wouldn’t see him again until I watched the movie later to see where he had gone. The others had returned with lots of police from the big city, and the CBI was out in force.

Even though the needle was on The End, the movie was still going, just filming some final scenes. A denouement, as it were.

We had won; that was all that mattered.

Well, not all, because technically, I was still in tremendous pain until the movie was actually over.

The sun came up quickly. Carousel was getting it all prepared.

I watched the scene later.

Benny had gone and grabbed a sunflower and found Dina, who had apparently been directed to the cemetery where her daughter’s final resting place had been dug.

Carousel had set the scene in the future. Benny landed next to Dina and gave her the sunflower.

Dina, confused, simply said, “Thank you.”

Then Benny flew off into the distance.

And finally, it was over.

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