ᴡʜᴀᴛ ʟιᴇs ᴀʜᴇᴀᴅ ● ● ● [ closed. ]
It hadn’t taken Carl very long to decide he was dreaming.
Electricity. Clean water. Food. —— And not a walker in sight.
Of course, in a dream his stomach wouldn’t contort and gurgle with the near ceaseless hunger he felt awake. His cheeks and neck and hands wouldn’t feel the chilled bite of the evening breeze. Goosebumps wouldn’t prickle uncomfortably along his flesh. He wouldn’t be able to smell the enticing scent of grilling meat or the moist air of fall. And he wouldn’t cringe away from anyone that bumped his shoulder. His heart wouldn’t jump with an instinctive urge to defend himself.
Maybe he’d been bitten. Maybe this was what walkers dreamed of. But he couldn’t remember being bitten… he couldn’t remember anything of significance. It was a mystery that he wasn’t sure how to crack.
He meandered the park without any sort of destination. He watched the rides with muted curiosity and faint longing. He kept an ocean of distance between him and any milling crowds. People weren’t trustworthy and he didn’t have his gun to protect himself. He considered stealing from a food stand before his dragged himself away. Money was of no importance to him —— to be entirely honest, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to count it anymore.
Eventually, Carl stood outside the Haunted Escape. He wasn’t quite sure how or why he made his way to the labyrinth so few seemed interested in trying. It didn’t seem that bad from a distance. Could it compare to the paralyzing terror he felt when he’d been cornered by a walker? He remembered the leathery hands that grasped his ankle. He was lucky nothing broke in the hard fall. He remembered the stench of decay, the way the hands clawed at his jeans to get a better hold, the weight of a once dead body on his feet and the sound of gnashing, grinding, gnawing teeth.
He blinked gray eyes and his vision cleared of the memory. The teenager inhaled a deep breath he’d forgotten to take. The presence of another at his side caught his attention. He shot the stranger a wary, suspicious glance. His lips pursed into an unreadable line and his hand wandered to the empty holster at his side.
“… What?” His response, cracked and gravely from his age, was unnecessarily hostile. He didn’t care as he continued, "Are you going in there?”
With no wristwatch to gauge however many minutes — hours, even — he'd spent aimlessly roaming the campus, he'd kept his expectations low-key in wait for the reveal of one of Arbitro's grandiose plans spun into full fruition, or at least some semblance of sanity to calmly rejoin the rest of his psyche in single-file queue as a constellation prize. Fervently praying that he was under a particularly vivid hallucination hadn't done any favors for his higher mental faculties, either. While Keisuke wasn't a viable candidate for a bout of frantic hysterics (yet), dejection miserably rode shotgun on the one-way trip to unequivocal despondency. Akira, Rin, Motomi — even encountering the Executioners might've been marginally preferable to isolation in some desolate expanse of hulking park structures with not so much as a rationale or sense of chronological normalcy to smooth out his accruing doubts.
Fear rippled in the same manner as paranoia, so it'd taken more than a double-take to assure himself that the impassive boy remaining stock-still at the perimeter of one of the park's various attractions wasn't actually a homicidal killer in disguise (as he'd learned, Toshima as a municipal city was legitimately a cautionary tale for rampant mass-murderers, and old habits died hard). "Nothing, I was just — ... sorry. Did I scare you? I was only checking it out, since I haven't gone through any of them yet." Unlike Carl, his features are scotch-free of any level of duplicity or subterfuge — after a minutely placid appraisal of the young boy, he keeps his gaze rigidly fixated on the termite-bitten wood of the gaping sign merely reading 'Haunted Escape' in kitschy smears, the fingers of his left hand curling inward on impulse.
"Yeah, I am. Or I will. I figure at least one of these places leads to the exit, and this one looks like the best place to start," Keisuke hastily answers, narrowly biting down on his tongue as he retracts his scrutiny of the marker post to redirect his attention to his companion. "I'd personally advise against it, but if you're planning on going in as well, we should probably stick together. Two's better than one, right?" His cowardice is painfully transparent, frigidly encapsulating the latter half of his admission, but his grin is genuine enough to merit some ounce of reputability. At any rate, Keisuke already determined his own course of action long, towards any possible exit out of the park, long before deciding to tackle Haunted Escape head on — it's just a matter of ascertaining whether or not he'll have a plus-one for the plunge. "What do you say?"
