Stuck in battle with The Mother

I've never asked for help with Sims before because I can usually google answers, but this time it's different. To start with, I have absolutely NO custom content or mods in my game. I am playing on a Mac laptop, and have had no issues with TS4 since installing it. I sent my sim to battle the Mother, with some allies. He died. He leaves a wife and 3 kids at home. No problem. Decide to switch to the household and have one of the kids pick up where he left off. Can't switch to the household - battle in progress. Ok. Decide to wait it out. Now both of the bars (mother's health, allies' help) are blank, but the allies are still spraying the mother and fighting off the mother's zombies. For HOURS. can't save the game, can't switch to the household, nothing. It only gets worse. I finally exit out, lose all my progress and restart the game. I did NOT delete the cache, because I'm an idiot. Anyway I thought the problem was that the only active sim died, so I redo the whole thing, bring his eldest daughter with him into battle. She hangs out above ground. He dies again (I suck at this but that's another story). Now I'm back in the exact same position. Stuck in battle, forever. HOW do I end the battle???