Not Coming Home

[midnight_twelve]

It had been a long time since Fred Hobbes had cared all that much about basketball.

He wondered whenever the memory came back to haunt him why he had bothered taking that last minute shot at homecoming. It had been pointless. Fred was never gonna win it for the Terriers.

He didn’t even really care about winning, anymore.

He just wanted his dad to clap him on the back the way he used to, back when Fred was one of the best players on the team. He wanted the cheerleaders to call his name. He wanted Richard to respect him the way he respected Darryl, who didn’t even play anymore. More than anything else though, he wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror and see something, anything other than a failure.

((Fred Hobbes concluded from Where We Go One))

Fred was alone. He’d abandoned DeMarcus in the dead of night, stolen off into the trees. He kept second guessing his decision now as he walked through the snow. He could have stuck around, followed DeMarcus to Marshall’s safehouse, stood by as anyone who got in his way got killed. Fred could have gotten a weapon out of it, if De kept to his word. Maybe he could have survived another week, if he was lucky. But Fred was never gonna win this shit.

The sound of a gunshot caught Fred’s attention. He stopped dead in his tracks. A girl cried out. Fred went to turn in the opposite direction, and a jolt of pain shot up his leg and stopped him again.

Fred stood there statue-still for ages, debating what to do. Only his eyes moved, open, shut. Fear versus guilt.

Finally, he took a limping step forward.

“Is- is everyone alright over there? Do you need help?”

[Gundham]

((Juanita Reid continued from The Book of Iscariot))

She recognized that voice. Whatsisname. Fred. One of the guys who'd hung around Ash a while back, when she was more of a bully. Juanita was used to hearing Fred in a more jeering tone; he was one of those guys, the goony kind you'd see in old cartoons hanging off a bully saying stuff like "You sure told him, boss!" and "You heard him! Scram!"

Fred's go-to move was to parrot whatever nasty thing somebody else said, to really drive the meanness home. One time in middle a girl had looked at Juanita and remarked, "Last time I saw a body like that, someone was inflating it with a bicycle pump," and Fred had gone "Ha! Yeah! A bicycle pump!" That was back before she'd started wearing baggy clothes. Of course, after that, they started accusing her of wanting to be a guy. "Juan the Mon," someone said. "Juanita? More like MAN-ita, am I right?" Fred had said in reply. Then someone cleverer had called her "Man-ita the Maneater" and it had been a whole thing. Fun times.

So, yeah. Fred, that Fred, was nearby. Wanted to know if everybody was all right. Presumably because if they were all right, he wanted to make sure that they wouldn't be for very long. Just the thought of him set her teeth on edge. Fred had backed off a bit after the started high school, but she wouldn't have trusted the guy for an instant back home. In a situation like this? She'd rather squad up with Judas Iscariot.

Besides, it wasn't gonna matter. Truth was, nothing about this scene had an "all right" vibe to it. Daniel was lying there with a hole in him, and she was here, with blood Jackson Pollock-ed all over her face and chest, pawing through his bag for salvageables. It'd be hard enough to explain that tableau to somebody like Colm, even if he'd been there for the prologue. Trying to explain it to someone like Fred, or anybody else who'd heard her blasted all over the announcements as a murderer? No chance. He wasn't gonna walk in here and see an ally, he'd see a murderer. And if he had any sense, he'd run for his life. Or he'd see the girl with the bad leg, the one that'd been such an easy target in middle school. And he'd see this as an opportunity to snag a few weapons.

Her heart started to beat faster. She grabbed the last few shells from Daniel's bag and crammed them into her sweater pocket, nearly cutting herself on the parachute knife she'd hastily shoved in there earlier.

She wasn't gonna outrun him, even with adrenaline numbing the pain. She'd have to be ready to both start and end this fight - and to do both of them as quickly as possible.

[midnight_twelve]

Fred wanted to turn and walk briskly away. There was no point. No response. Someone was probably dead. If anyone was alive over there it was probably the one who killed them. Fred swallowed. He wasn’t the hero. What did he really think was gonna happen? He was unarmed and injured. Nothing good would come of trying to save the day. It would be homecoming all over again, only this time he wouldn’t just sprain his ankle.

He could do what he should have done then. Stood aside. The Terriers would have lost either way. Whoever was out there would die either way.

And either way, Fred wasn’t going to win.

What was the point?

He bit his lip so hard it bled. He swallowed again, tasted the bloodshed to come. Then, Fred put his good foot forward and walked towards the gunshot. No cheerleaders to cheer him on this time.

“Ah… fuck,” he muttered, when the scene emerged through the trees.

Juanita was someone they used to pick on back in middle school. It was the girls mostly, but Fred had joined in, trying to impress them. They were probably jealous she’d hit puberty earlier or whatever. Fred didn’t really get it at the time. Of course, he hit puberty early himself, but it just made him gangly and awkward and gave him pimples. That was another benefit of picking on people like Juanita; it distracted people from picking on him.

Juanita was the one who killed Eden and John. Fred was pretty sure she went to homecoming with John, so if she was killing the people she actually liked, he didn’t like his own chances. She’d killed that Daniel guy too, by the looks of things. The gun that must have done it lay in the snow nearby.

“H-hey, man.”

[Gundham]

(Content warning, allusions to transphobic bullying)

Her hackles rose.

Man.

Man-ita the Man-eater. Man-ita the Manly Man.

Yeah, could have been innocuous. Maybe he called everybody "man."

But it hadn't been that innocent. Not back in ninth grade.

It hadn't been innocent when someone (probably Marcie Linehan but it wasn't like Juanita could ever prove it) gave Juanita's cell number to a dozen guys like Fred and got them to anonymously spam text her a conglomeration of eights and equals signs and D's. Not when some of them followed up by asking her for pictures of herself topless, of her in a bra, of her feet. Not when she had to make people who'd known her since childhood stop calling her Juan because she was sick of having to explain that it was just a nickname and didn't signify any hidden desires.

Yeah, she didn't know if any of those anonymous texters had been Fred. But that was the whole point. Because if she didn't know who did it, she also didn't know who didn't do it, and she'd have to assume that it could have been any guy. She didn't know who was thinking about her like that, who was in on the taunting and who wasn't.

Fred might not have been behind the texts. But he was definitely behind the people who'd been behind them. So, no. She wasn't feeling charitable about "man" as a greeting. Not one bit.

Besides, Fred's presence was threatening in another way. He was a sidekick, a hanger-on. Guys like that got by by leeching onto someone stronger. So in a situation like this, he'd never go it alone. So who was he clinging onto? Basketball guys like Victor Grail or Richard Buster? Cliques like Dani Bird? Or someone like Kitty Graves, who was stronger on the island than off of it?

"Hey Fred," she said back, a bit more tersely than she meant to. She looked down at Daniel, and then herself. No real way to explain this as anything other than what it was.

"I... He asked me to."

She looked cautiously at him, gauging his reaction. Evaluating. She noted his lack of a threatening weapon, the way he was standing sort of off-kilter. Oh, yeah. He'd messed up his leg a while back, hadn't he? Juanita didn't follow JEM athletics much these days, but she tried to make a point of being sympathetic whenever another athlete suffered an injury. In Fred's case, she'd made an exception. His injury was relatively minor, anyway. He'd probably have been back on the court in a few weeks.

So was that it? He couldn't keep up, so the pack had left him behind? Or maybe his gang had sent him ahead, unarmed, as a decoy. Yeah, it'd be something like that. Exactly the kind of tactic the legion would have used, if they'd been smarter. Her heart started to beat faster, detecting the presence of a threat. Inside her pocket, her hand crept towards the knife handle. If he wasn't alone, she'd have to put him down quick. Before he could warn the others.

She looked back down at Daniel. "This island, it... it gets to people, you know?"

She stayed looking downwards. But in her peripheral vision, she plotted out the exact distance between her and Fred, and how quickly she could close it.

[midnight_twelve]

Supposedly Daniel had wanted to die. Fred wondered if the same was true of the others, of Eden and John. He wondered if it was really true of Daniel. It would be a pretty shit excuse if it wasn't true, she could have just said he attacked first or whatever. Fred would have believed that more easily. All the shit that had happened on this island wasn’t people wanting to die, it was people wanting to go home, and doing whatever it took to get there.

He heard the venom in Juanita’s voice when she finally spoke to him. Fred was getting a pretty good idea of where this conversation was going. He nodded.

“Gets to us, yeah. Maybe.”

Fred shuffled on the spot.

“Do you think we were bad people, before we came here? Or just like, weak? Are we just doing what the terrorists want because we’re pussies?”

It was easier to be a piece of shit, that was what this whole game was about. Survival of the Shittest. Take a bunch of innocent kids, put them all in mortal peril, see who they really are in the dark.

“I mean, he killed someone too, right?” He gestured down at Daniel. “And we've seen some shit, DeMarcus and me.”

[Gundham]

“Do you think we were bad people, before we came here? Or just like, weak? Are we just doing what the terrorists want because we’re pussies?”

Juanita shuffled her feet a bit, trying to retain some warmth. Getting loose. Readying.

“I mean, he killed someone too, right?”

Yeah, and it ate him up inside. Gutted him so badly that a bullet was the most optimistic route left. That didn't make him a pussy. It made him a victim.


“And we've seen some shit, DeMarcus and me.”

Ah. So that was who Fred was shacked up with. DeMarcus Miller. One of the most obnoxious jerks in the whole school. His full name was fresh in her memory, because she'd heard it on the announcements while listening for her own. DeMarcus Miller had shot Dominiqua Ashmore, and probably done a Fortnite Dance afterwards. For all she knew, he was creeping out there somewhere right now, just waiting for Fred's signal.

Her heartbeat was a roar now. Her fingers clenched around the knife.

"I wasn't a bad person before this," she said, waspishly declining to say that she didn't think Fred had been either. "And I'm not weak, or a..." She pursued her lips, choosing not to say the word. "Well, I'm not weak."

"But here, I'll show you what weak looks like." She stepped forward, closer to Fred, and pointed down at Daniel's body. "See him? Now he was wea-"

-this-

As he turned to look at Daniel, she brought her good leg up, mid-sentence, and half-stomped-half-kicked his injured leg, hard. The knife was already out of her pocket, and she swung it at his throat.

Yeah, that was what weak looked like.

[midnight_twelve]

“I’m… I’m sorry. I’m so, so fucking sorry.”

He said it to Donovan and Dominiqua and Dick and all his dead and dying friends. He said it to Juanita, and everyone else he’d treated like shit all those years. He said it to his dad and to his mom and to himself and to everyone else he’d ever let down. He didn’t say it like it would make things right, because it wouldn’t. He said it because he could. He said it because Fred regretted not doing a whole lot more than he ever regretted doing.

Fred winced when his leg gave way and the knife slid into his throat. He didn’t scream; a single tear became another snowflake falling to the ground, and then it was gone, lost in a flood of red. His good leg sent him backwards, up against a tree. He planted both feet on the ground and pushed himself up, draping his arms over a couple of low branches. His eyes glazed over, but stayed open.

There was a dream waiting for him. He was ready for it now.

-

“Go, Terriers, Go! Go, Terriers, g-”

The basketball flew through the air in slow motion, carried on bated breath. For a second you could hear a pin drop. Then the ball hit the backboard and bounced off.

Fred watched the game play on. Then he limped to the benches, sat himself down. Looked out at his teammates on the court. A cold numbness was spreading over him.

Seconds on the clock.

Fred smiled.

He could barely feel his ankle anymore.

((S096 Fred Hobbes - End))

[Gundham]

Juanita didn't stick around to see the aftermath of her slice. The spray across her arm and chest told her everything she needed to know about Fred's chances of survival. DeMarcus was probably out there, and for all she knew she was already in his sights.

She ran off into the forest, as fast as she could.

((Juanita Reid continued elsewhere))