The V8 Rescue

[decoy73]

((David Worth continued from If Walls Could Talk))

This was it. He was at the finish line. He had been running on and off for … some amount of time. He looked at the approaching horizon to see boats. Functional, working boats with people crewing them. People that were going to take him home. His gait changed. It wasn’t just putting one foot in front of the other. There was purpose, there was intent.

“Drop your weapons where they are, then approach.”

His gun fell and his sword slid off, as he approached the boat. They patted him down, but all he could really do was breathe the breath he didn’t realize he had…

David …

“Before I finish this off, I just wanted to thank everyone … the prod members and the players. This has been an amazing season, and I want to congratulate you all. From the moment this game started, even when I revealed the contestants, I knew that this season was going to be special. You came here to play as hard and as well as you possibly could, and I personally applaud seeing Survivors from all the seasons merged together and playing as they did. I saw a bunch of different alliances and plays that I could never have thought of seeing happen. So thank you to everyone that came back for their second chance, and I hope that we here have given you the best game possible … and I’m glad to see what you’ve done with it. There was so much spontaneous emotion and strategy, all of you putting everything you had into this, and I think that you should be proud of being a part of this, wild, insane season. To the Final Three, congratulations, this kind of a season is especially a challenge to fight through, and …” David sniffed. “I’m just … so grateful to have met all of you and share these last two and a half years with you …” he sniffed again before regaining his composure. “But in the end, there can only be one winner, and so for the last time, I’ll read the votes …”


STUDENT #129: DAVID WORTH – ELIMINATED

2 STUDENTS REMAIN

[Carlisle]

[S119 - Julia Guercio - continued from hope is smashable, realism is not.]

Each step felt a little more exhaustive than the last. Her lungs hurt as she panted desperately, her face blotchy and painted crimson not just from the blood of Salem. The ringing in her ears was unrelenting, the pain in her joints tender, and her guts churning like a twisted washing machine. But she knew she had to run if she stood a chance of making it on time. It was during this sprint to the shoreline that she imagined the production company slowing down the reel to slow-motion for extra drama. The will she, won't she moment, that clung to her gallop like that of a blockbuster cliffhanger. But in reality there was no slow motion, there was just adrenaline. The panic coursing through her veins, the prospect of being left behind worsening with every leap and canter.

As she broke out from behind the treeline she saw the other survivors on a small boat waiting in the waves, a group of military men that a week ago probably would've scared her armed with guns.

Julia slid to a halt as she heaved balefully, gasping from the shortness of breath. Her lungs burned with the cold of the air rapturing with the exasperated choking.

"W-WAIT FOR ME."

She screamed those words as loud as she physically could. She had never been the loudest voice in the room, always more of a listener than a participant. Plenty of her class probably wouldn't even recognise her on the beach, through all of their individual trauma and unexpected relief, nevermind recognise her voice. Julia was done being the wallflower, the quiet one that was afraid of disturbing the peace. The desperation manifested itself in the sheer hysterical nature of her greeting the group. The military guys had noticed her, and called out in response for her to be quick as they needed to leave.

"PLEASE."

Julia struggled to breathe, never mind speak actual words that made actual sense, but she was bordering on hysterical.

Seeing the boats had made all of this rescue talk real. The hopeful optimism that Lily has bestowed upon her when they had met over that fire, that overwhelming flood of emotion she felt when she had heard the loud voices shouting through the speakerphones about the rescue attempt. The hope it brought, yet the cascading fear that those hopes were going to be dashed and it was all too good to be true. Julia was pretty sure she wouldn't have been able to survive those hopeful illusions being shattered. Her whole story felt like stab after stab against her confidence, her hopes, her dreams. One more blow and it really was going to be the end, it was impossible to stomach anymore.

"PLEASE DON'T LEAVE M-ME!"

There was no more teetering towards the edge, the hysteria had been fully unleashed. Her cries were offputtingly loud, the type of thunderous sobs that a frenzied goat would make during a certain Taylor Swift song. Coupled with her frantic, the song of desperation was crystal clear. The ugliest of ugly cries.

She threw her hands up in the air and begged their saviours to help her get on the boat. Without any mirrors, Julia could only imagine what an absolute state she looked. Painted head to toe in the blood of her peers, hair and skin dyed scarlet.
"JU-JULIA GUERCIO. PLEASE. PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE."

Julia shrieked in disbelief, that she really was going to get out of this. That she actually was going to go home.

"I DON'T WANT TO DIE."

[S119 - Julia Guercio - continued in the aftermath.]

[Dogs231]

[+] A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

https://docs.google.com/document/d/120v ... sp=sharing

The eighth version (Version 8 / V8) of Survival of the Fittest consisted of a cast of one hundred and thirty-four (134) students. Of all these one hundred and thirty-four (134) students, one hundred and twenty (120) students died; a total of fourteen (14) students were rescued during an international operation that resulted in the immediate conclusion of the version's events. Its participants were drawn from John Endecott Memorial Academy in Salem, Massachusetts. In the end, there was no winner.

Fourteen (14) survivors were confirmed in the aftermath. These included eighteen (18) year-old Juanita Reid (S014), eighteen (18) year-old Russell Fitzroy (S047), eighteen (18) year-old Leslie Romero (S077), eighteen (18) year-old Aracelis Fuentes (S083), eighteen (18) year-old Connie Toda (S108), eighteen (18) year-old Jacob Winters (S057), eighteen (18) year-old Marshall West (S010), eighteen (18) year-old Matthew Bell (S078), eighteen (18) year-old Evie McKown (S004), seventeen (17) year-old June Madison (S050), eighteen (18) year-old Amy Chen (S125), eighteen (18) year-old David Worth (S129), seventeen (17) year-old Julia Guercio (S119), and eighteen (18) year-old—

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — CONTINUED FROM "Saga"

One can draw these simple conclusions henceforth:

1. Across every version of Survival of the Fittest to date (03/21/2024), approximately one thousand two hundred people have died, between students and others alike. Conventional estimates place the number of victims between one-thousand two-hundred and twenty-one (1,221) and one-thousand two-hundred and twenty-seven casualties. There is no adequate consensus or confirmation on the actual number of victims.

2. Across every version of Survival of the Fittest to date (03/21/2024)—all eight (8) versions in total—approximately 33.3333334% of these versions—Versions Three (3), Four (4), and Eight (8)— have had notable rescue or escape attempts occur during the version. Furthermore, approximately 50% of these versions—Versions One (1), Three (3), Four (4), and Eight (8)—have had version-disrupting incidents occur during the version.

3. The chances of any individual student having survived Version Eight (V8) of Survival of the Fittest, in the purest mathematical sense, were previously thought to be approximately 0.007462686567%. More recent estimates place the chances of any individual student having survived Version Eight (V8) of Survival of the Fittest, in the purest mathematical sense, at approximately 10.4477612%—a small consolation to the families.

...

Survival of the Fittest.

A name of twenty-four letters, as many as there were hours in a day. Four words; in some cultures, that number meant death. It fit—suited the game well. There was no better title for a game like this—a horrid ritual, an affair that began and ended with death, the wanton slaughter of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of innocent people, of innocent children, a castle built on the foundations of so many broken souls and broken dreams. But, for all the death—for all the killing and the strife, the blood and gore that instilled in so many a righteous, indignant, impotent fury—there was more.

The living left their island, she knew, their souls and dreams as broken as those of the dead and the damned; on that forsaken isle of bones and sinew, they left behind their past lives, those innocent children who they were before. Any traces of those past people were long gone, annihilated, eviscerated—reduced to ashes in the wind of history, burnt to cinder by the cauldron's fire. None—not a single one—of those young men and women—or the boys and girls they had once been—left that island alive. All of them—every last one of them—died on the island. All of them died.

But they came back home anyway.

...

Claire Haig stood on the precipice of life and death. Her blue eyes stared out through the dirty, mud-and-dust-slicked four-panel windows of the hovel—though, to her, it seemed an elaborate word for coffin now. In the sky, there still hung that false promise of life—that Satan, that red Polaris, which sang a siren song of hope and freedom, but one that felt, in her soul, rotten and hollow at its core, dissonant in all the ways that made it matter. There was no escape from this island. How had it taken her so long to come to grips with that? There was no way to leave this place.

Because, in the end, this island—it wasn't a real place. The island wasn't something you could leave behind simply by going somewhere else. The actual island—the place of the island—had no relevance over any of this. It was no magic circle, no dimensional plane with its own governing rules; it had no power over them. The island was a concept, a metaphor, an idea. The island was them; they were the island. The actual island was not the place, but the fact that this could happen at all—that, left to their own devices, these ordinary children of men could become these monsters.

So many people had died. And all because someone said they had to.

"I don't understand it. Why did this happen to us? Why did we listen?"

Katelyn Graves answered; Janice Cresner answered; Przemyslaw Ziemiak answered; Betty Quinn answered; Jacob Lang answered; Jessica Romero answered; Aracelis Fuentes answered;

Jezzie Stark answered; Shu Hawthorne answered; Daenerys Todd answered; Joshua James answered; Russell Fitzroy answered; Dawn Montogomery answered; Letitia May answered;

Demarcus Miller answered; Juanita Reid answered; Meena Lalita Kumar answered; Colm Forsyth answered; Karin Han answered; Bethany Lyon answered; Rebekah Hayes answered;

Matthew Bell answered; Salem Fox answered; Donovan Lauer answered; Crystal Henderson answered; Derek Caldwell answered; Daniel Ozanne answered; Chiara Masina answered;

Julie Guercio answered; Karen Nguyen answered; Kai Rosado-Prince answered; Molly Oliveira answered; Madeleine Molliqaj answered; Richard Buster Jr. answered; Trinity Ashmore answered.

Alpha.

Alex Avanesian answered.

Omega.

Evie McKown answered.

This happened to them because it was meant to happen from the start. It happened to them because, from the moment of their births, regardless of their nature or nurture, this was their destiny and fate. That was, she now realized, the strangest and most insidious thing about the island. It didn't change people; it brought out their truest selves. It happened to them because, beneath that smoothed-over surface, that glass façade—beneath the shattered masks, caricatures of skin and teeth they wore to school every day—they were all monsters inside. It happened to them.

It was a call; they answered.

Claire looked out again across the room. It was a dilapidated place, a hodgepodge of architectural styles never meant to go together, a crude, roughshod construction that should never have been. It reminded her of herself. A ceiling fan hung from the room's baldachin, dangling only by the gutted cables trailing out from the space above. The windows were slick and caked with dirt, grease, and blood. Alex's headless corpse rotted on the ground, devoid of anything that made him what he was; the bones of a dragon draped across the ruins, a testament to monsters greater than he.

"Everything ends. 'This too shall pass.' Īn nīz bogzarad."

Claire stood.

"Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust."

Claire stared.

"Everything ends."

Through the frosted window pane, stained like a church's by the browns of dirt and reds of blood, light streamed forth, the burning glow of dawn-into-day. A deafening sound echoed from behind the dwelling's bolted-shut front door—like a symbolic running of the bulls down the town's alleyways and boulevards—a symphonic stampede of heavy footsteps against the pavement and the clatter of metal at one's side. A red dot shone through the glass, scattered crystals of ruby gleaming as it darted, scattered, and diffused, glistening like new-drawn blood across the floor.

They called.

Claire answered.

And, with hitching breaths—each one caught in her throat as if it did not want to leave her—she turned to her left, moving from her place of not-so-rest towards the door. A hesitant hand moved towards the brass of the doorknob, the other moving to unlatch the bolt with a ginger uncertainty. A shiver ran down her spine, each segment hooking it a second longer as if ice water had just run down her back, but she steeled herself again and opened the door. All that remained of the darkness—exorcized, plunged as it was into the light of day; swept into the night, she left it behind her.

"Dusk turns to dawn. Dawn turns to day. Day turns to night."

Claire raised a hand—in supplication or surrender, she knew not which. Across from her—staring her dead in the face with looks strong enough to kill—was a figure of unknown provenance, cloaked within a camouflaged shroud of black fractals and multi-scale. She held to her gun, M4A1 rifles clutched tightly within their gloved hands, a burst of white vapor escaping from the cloth covering her mouth. For all she knew, that could be the end of things. A soldier or a soldier of fortune, such things were beyond her ken. There were no markings on her uniform, no signs of king or country.

Claire stood still, almost possible to mistake for a statue were it not for the fact that she existed in living color. Amidst her were the crumbling ruins that were once the island's primary civilization, made a monument of human cruelty and barbarity. Her gaze fixed itself solely on some empty, indeterminable point in the distance, her eyes vacant and expressionless, like blue marbles. Her skin—at least on her face—was reddened, a flush of blood in her cheeks, and the drying remains of salt and water lingering streaked across it as if she had just finished crying over something.

"Aren't you supposed to feel happy? This is your liberation."

Her posture was rigid, unmoving—as if she was frozen still in that spot. The girl's right arm, beside her torso, still clutched the khopesh tightly, as someone had sown it to her hand with medical sutures; her chest moved to and fro, but only a little, as if she could barely manage to breathe. Lingering on her head was a piece of military-grade equipment, as like as not, black and slightly scratched, but otherwise in perfectly functional condition—even its remaining battery life was more-or-less exemplary, having been left mostly unused across her entire time on the island.

"Approaching," the soldier said into their radio as if a secret poorly kept; though Claire knew not of their allegiance, their assignation—to save or to slaughter, to liberate or to liberate—the soldier's eyes, soft, glistening in the sunlight like polished green tourmalines, promised her no harm but quarter. One step, two steps, the black-garbed figure approached her, carbine still hanging at her front but lowered; its reflex sight no longer pointed at her head, laser shunted with the click of a button. The soldier's determined posture held, but the tension in each step betrayed a truth.

Soon enough, the soldier had closed the distance, now just a few arm's lengths away from Claire, who stood still and silent. The wind howled like a looming demon; that howl became a cruel whistle, heckling and phony. "Hey," the soldier said, as calmly as one could expect, though Claire could hear the traces of nerves in her voice—could see how her eyes darted and traced her outline. Claire stared at her, blinking like the words had come to her in Greek. The soldier merely cleared her throat. "I'm with the Navy SEALs. We're here to get you home. It's safe now. You're free."

"Free? Is that what I am? Freedom? Is that what this is?"

Claire did not react; she only turned her head away, looking back to that everlasting point somewhere in the nebulous distance. Out there, where she was looking, the sun had begun to rise above the faded, fleeing storm clouds, and the whistling wind blew sheets of snow off the shingled roofs of the town's suburban shanties, sending them crashing down to earth in thick, heavy clumps. It reminded her, in a way, of torn-up, spat-out skin—it reminded her of Alex, of the many maggots that festered in his corpse. Shylock, she once was—no pound of flesh worthy, no revenge to gain.

There was a silence. A cold, dead silence—the confessions of a ghost.

"I'm a ghost and I'm still here."

"Oh," Claire said. There was no surprise in her voice, no hints of doubt—just a monotone drone, going through the motions of speaking without actually managing to say anything. For a moment, her grip tightened on the khopesh, the tip of her scabbed finger pulsing and throbbing with the pain of unhealed cuts, memories of a wound that she couldn't leave well enough alone. She turned back to the soldier, and, for a moment, her eyes gauged the distance between them, calculating the math of her blade's trajectory—wondering if she could cut the soldier down in one swing.

"Humans are monsters. And monsters, by their nature, are born to kill.

"Am I a monster?"

Her fingers tightened around the grip. She held it, her lifeline—her tether.

"I don't know the answer. And that, more than anything—it scares me."

For a moment in time—for that briefest of junctures, as the dark thoughts dragged themselves to the surface, rising above the roily waters of her mind and beaching themselves in her skull—she considered bringing the blade to her neck and pressing it down as hard as she could, driving it into the flesh like a vampire's fangs. Could she, she wondered, lop off her head in one fell swing? If not, would she die before she hit the ground? Would she bleed to death before they dragged her away? Maybe that was an option—maybe her death could still mean something, even in futility.

"Do I still want to live? Do I still want to die?

"I don't know."

Claire was silent. Directly across from her, the black-clad Valkyrie started the radio on her shoulder, rolling her scapula to place it in the crook of her neck. "Confirmed: another one located. A—" the soldier said, with a pause and a double take, her eyes moving up and down Claire's features in a way that made the girl feel distinctly uncomfortable—pried into. "—a girl, I think. I'm bringing her back." No words came, her silence a vain protest. For a long second, her gaze turned to one of the cameras secured onto a nearby streetlight, blinded and affixed to the post like Argus Panoptes.

"So," Claire murmured, barely audible—as if specter or spirit, shade or soul, had stolen her voice. There was another pause. She blinked once, then twice, then held her eyes on one spot in the interminable distance, unblinking and unseeing. She turned the khopesh over in her fingers, and her left hand moved to tug at the canvas bag slung over her shoulder like the cast of a broken third arm. The wind swept through the town again, whistling through passages like the holes of an ocarina; its talons were cold as ice, digging into her nerves like fallen icicles. "This is how it ends."

"There has to be a moral in it somewhere."

There was another distinct pause. The soldier stared at the girl before her for the quickest instant of measurable time. To Claire, it was yet another uncomfortable reminder of how far gone she was—how broken her mind felt. It was an act of judgment, and of punishment, or, at least, such was how she interpreted it. She steeled herself, forcing the mantra she'd lived by for many days. Caution, not paranoia. Her grip tightened on the khopesh, her broken half-nails digging into the flesh of her fingers as she pressed them against the handle with enough force to whiten the skin.

"Everyone's waiting," the soldier said in a voice almost half-way to a reassurance. "Let's go back to the boats."

"Why, though?" she muttered, not to the soldier—said it to someone or something else, a dimension the soldier didn't understand. Something different that—maybe, maybe, maybe—maybe Claire didn't understand either. Life itself had locked her out of the loop, tangling her soul into knots and wrapping her story into circles that led only unto themselves; no process, no progress, only the loop; endless cycles of mental death and rebirth, saṃsāra. Claire wanted to say something—needed to say something—but the words caught, died in her throat, hunter and hunted.

"It's not safe to stay. We've bought some time, but—we can't stay here forever." The soldier pulled the verbal trigger first, sending the bullets flying into her heart. Bang, bang—shot Claire down. "Please, come with me. We're already pushing our limit by stalling as long as we are." A new demand framed as a request; something about that felt familiar by now, didn't it? But none of that mattered to the corpse of the girl before the soldier, rotting inside her breathing flesh, baring her inside-out skeleton soul to a world that could care less about her trials and her tribulations.

Claire stood.

Claire stared.

"You're going to die if you stay here," the soldier said, like Simon Says.

"Okay." Claire's voice was ethereal, dream-like—as if speaking in spells.

"It's going to be okay," the soldier's words said, lying to the girl through her shining sets of teeth. Caution, not paranoia. Paranoia, not caution. Of a different volition, without a question or an answer, the soldier held Claire's arm, gingerly wrenching the khopesh from her hand's cadaveric clasping. Then, once the soldier had done so, securing it—and, by proxy, Claire herself, held almost by the scruff, like an animal too young to bear their growing fangs—she talked into the radio again. "Alright. I've secured another survivor. We're returning to the evacuation point now."

For Claire's part, all she did was nod. She could not bring herself to smile.

And, just as had happened so many times before, she was guided by the hand, swiftly whisked in some unknown direction: not one of her desire, not one of her deciding, but a direction nevertheless. She was spirited away, on and onward, towards a future whose vague contours eluded her imagination. And so they marched, onwards and onwards, through paved streets and cobbled paths, through dirt roads and beaten trails, onwards and onwards, and so they marched. Towards the future, towards her fate, towards finality. And so they marched, on and on and on and on, forward.

Anywhere else was better than here. Anything else was better than this.

The sound of footsteps echoed in a staccato rhythm, the last two people alive still marching across the island; all others, unknown to her, had, before now, either fled the wide, bloodstained jaws of the island's livid maw or, in their attempt, been consumed by its yawning hatred. Soon, they reached the sector where they had established the evacuation zone. One of the Zodiac dinghies came into view, a grotesque jet-black monstrosity of elastomer and allotropes, far too small for an operation of this caliber, anchored where the tide came to take a toll, meeting the land.

Deep within the contours of the murky horizon—over the wartorn, bloody hills and past the rolling, frothing waves that enclosed the island like a blue cage—Claire saw the rising steeples of a cruiser in the distance, its metal edifices like a monument to military-industrial decay. As the two came onto the beach, their feet pounding recklessly into the loamy shore and hitting against the rocks, approaching that monstrous sight promoted as freedom, Claire stopped, eyes captured on the vast frame, its dense scaffolding rising endlessly into the skies. Her breath caught in her throat.

Claire stood.

Claire stared.

Just barely, through the clearing in a vast cloud of gray smoke, she could see the bulk of the ship in the distance, its make buoyed up against the ocean's fierce wrath. And, through that window in the cloud, she could make out, in the barest detail, the white-stenciled letters and numbers that rolled across the bow of USS Atlanta (CG-73), the last of the nation's Ticonderoga-class cruisers. Claire gazed upon it, planted utterly still—as if chained to the ground beneath her feet—wondering where the ship would take her: to her fortune or fate. She didn't know.

A fierce tug at Claire's arm uprooted her from pondering—to bring her before her judge, jury, and executioner. Another soldier, whose insignia foretold a status greater and whose posture and expression told a story of stern severity, stared at the two as they came into view. He glanced at the list and said something, though Claire could not make out any words. The accompanying soldier addressed her superior as was appropriate for her station and her circumstances and then said something to him quietly—something about a "fugue state" or "mental illness" or "head trauma."

The officer turned away from his subordinate towards Claire and stared at her with a look she couldn't quite settle—was it derision or pity? Neither one sat well with her, leaving a revolting, stomach-churning feeling in her torso that made her want to retch. Taller than her, he looked down on her in every sense of that meaning. Then, after a moment, he spoke: "What's your name?" Claire tilted her head to the left, staring at him like she never had one. After a moment, the subordinate pulled her superior aside, and they spoke. After that, the questions stopped. The marching did not.

"The world isn't fair.

"It doesn't care about people like you or me."

The island's shore, the invisible barrier at the far edge of its map—the end of the world as Claire knew it—disappeared into the gradient of the deep blue sea. Its titan waves rose and then fell, collapsing on the shore with thunderous crashes that rang in her ears like legato gunshots. After a point, the soldiers brought her bodily aboard the Zodiac, the last of the ships still there, stranded on the rocky shore like a beached leviathan. Across the ocean, the sea roared like a great and awful beast, screaming even as the twilight darkness of the island fell behind them into yore.

"Everything ends."

Once upon a time, Claire had determined that her life would end on this island. It made her wonder: why, then, was she still here? Why her? Why was she still here, still standing, still living, in this place where all others before her had fallen and met their end? What was the meaning of that?

Once upon a time, Claire decided—she had resolved to live despite it all. It made her wonder: why, then, did the idea fill her with such dread? Why did the thought of the future fill her with an uncontrollable fear like a wildfire within, stricken with such terror? What was the meaning of that?

"Survival of the Fittest, or so we like to believe."

For a moment, there was something—something there, amidst the bleak miasma and the darkness that had enveloped her in those last moments on the island, a burning feeling that struggled against the darkness like the wick of a candle in a dark house, insignificant in the grand scheme, but bright enough to light a room, destroying the darkness wherever it found it, except at those corners furthest from it. She almost recognized it; then, she finally realized it. A single sentence burned itself into her mind like a brand upon her skin, marking her for all her dying days:

"I want to go home."

S091: CLAIRE HAIG — ALIVE
0 STUDENTS REMAIN