the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream

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Salem, are you awake?

Get dressed. We’re going to the hos pit al

((Salem Fox continued from And the universe said 'I love you'))

He had known this was coming eventually.

Salem was a logical person. He was intelligent and mature for his age; basically every parent-teacher conference since the dawn of time had seen his teachers taking care to make that point. He was a joy to have in class and very insightful in discussion, all that jazz. Language arts and social studies were obviously where he excelled, but he was still pretty good at math.

What’s one-hundred-and-thirty-four minus one-hundred-and-thirty-three? One.

One times one? One divided by one? Still one.

There were some other, fancier calculations you could do, but you get the point. One was one was one, and Salem had processed the math as soon as he was awake enough to understand that yes, this was real and he was here. Day one, just to throw another number on the pile.

Logic wasn’t everything, but if anyone was able to calculate that cold equation, it was him. He knew that it was him.

The trolley problem changed a bit if you were looking at it with a different end goal, and if you knew that your hand was stuck to the lever either way, and probably if you applied it to real life nobody involved would be thinking anything related to moral philosophy.

Put yourself there. Are you tied to the track? Are you holding the lever? Or are you stuck on the trolley, just along for the ride?

The metaphor always broke down, no matter how often he turned it over in his mind, but the numbers never did. One was one was one.

The thing about math though was that it was just theory, really. Numbers could do anything on a page, but you had to add in stuff like physics or chemistry, something tangible, to make the numbers do anything. Complicating factors.

In a nice, clean, purely mathematical world, Salem shot Beatrice dead and then finished trudging up the path to the hot spring, clutching his bleeding arm and gritting his teeth against the pain. He made it to the alcove in the mountain where warm air misted out, where dirt and rocks became steps, became a whisper of civilization past, and then he could sit there and tend his wounds. Take a dip, and then for a little while he was clean, and warm, and safe.

In the real world, Salem shot Beatrice dead and finished trudging up the path to the hot spring, and he staggered up the steps and nearly slipped where condensation gathered on the stone, but he was there, he’d made it, and he had that moment of elation before he got all the way inside.

Freeze frame. Record scratch. And Salem stood there, chest heaving, hand and sleeve painted in his own blood (heart on his sleeve, ha ha ha), and he was staring at his sister’s corpse.

And he thought nothing, felt nothing. Nothing but ice and static. Nothing but his pulse in his ears.

He had known this was going to happen. He had known that it had to happen.

Just like with Ashlyn and Katelyn. Just like with Lúcio and Molly. Just like with everyone he’d ever shared a drink with, ever sent a stupid text to, ever waved at in the school hallway. Everything that had existed before the island had stopped mattering; their world had been restricted to here, to each other, and to the knowledge that sat on your back and whispered in your ear every. single. day. of how that world was going to end.

Knowing something, expecting it, and actually being ready for it were different things, it turned out.

California hadn’t been on that morning’s announcement, but as Salem took a few faltering steps towards her body, he could tell that this scene wasn’t fresh. There was a large smear of dried blood closer to the entrance that he’d ignored, and the blood around where the body lay was also dry. The lips were blue. It wasn’t hard to tell what had happened, and it had happened a while ago.

And someone else had been here when it happened. At least one someone, obviously. Maybe they’d been the one to move the body, though Salem doubted it. He couldn’t think of any of the names that had cropped up time and again and imagine them carrying it over, folding the arms and closing the eyes like that to give the illusion of peace.

He could come up with one name when considering who might have been the one to arrange the body like that, but-

Salem sucked in a shuddering breath and turned away, stumbling over to the edge of the hot spring itself and sitting down hard on the stone floor.

It wasn’t like speculation would do anything for him.

Instead, he counted in his head to measure his breaths as he struggled to undo the buttons of his coat. His hands were trembling violently, though he wasn’t sure when that had started, and he fumbled over each button before actually managing to open it. He shrugged the coat off and then yanked the zipper of his bag open hard enough that his hand slipped off of the pull and caught on the teeth. It didn’t break the skin, but he hissed and instinctively stuck his finger in his mouth, only to immediately remember that his hand was coated in blood. He jerked his hand away and spat onto the stone, trying not to gag.

“Nice, nice, nice,” Salem muttered to himself, wiping his hand a little spastically on his skirt before resuming the hunt for his first-aid kit. His voice came out high-pitched and strained.

He was running low on gauze. He should have taken Beatrice’s stuff. He might still have to make the trek back down to do just that; he wasn’t willing to turn back around and search the interior of the hot spring cave to see if there was a trove of supplies sitting around somewhere that he’d overlooked.

With what he did have, he gingerly swabbed the new hole in his arm and then wadded up as much gauze as he had left and pressed it over the still-bleeding wound. He stared hard into the bubbling water of the hot spring, unsure if he felt a little lightheaded from blood loss, or for another reason.

He ought to lay low for the rest of today. He also ought to head back to town sooner rather than later, to avoid getting stranded on the mountain when the new Danger Zones went up. Back to the housing area where he was used to prowling by now, to see if there was anything good to scavenge.

Based on what Danya had said that morning, the numbers were really dwindling. He could probably scrape by doing basically nothing for the next day or two while he waited for everyone else that was left to pick each other off.

The skin on the back of Salem’s neck prickled, and he pressed the gauze even harder against his arm, squeezing his bicep so tightly that it hurt in a different way than the constant throb that matched his pulse.

When he’d finally stemmed the bleeding, he peeled his shirt off and haphazardly bandaged the injury. The cold air stung the cut on his back; how long had it been since he’d changed the bandages on that one?

The past days ran together in his mind’s eye. The future was a blank.

“Hah-” A noise that Salem hadn’t intended to make escaped his throat; he wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or what. It didn’t feel like a laugh.

Almost frantically, he glanced over his shoulder. The body hadn’t moved, obviously. Salem grabbed his coat and threw it, and he only kept looking long enough to be sure that it had landed covering the upper half of the corpse before he turned back to the hot spring.

With the desperation of someone in the final throes of frostbite, he tore his clothes off and plunged nearly headlong into the hot water.

It stung, not just in his wounds, but everywhere. The shock of boiling water when he’d spent twelve days out in the cold. The same intrusive voice that told you to drive into oncoming traffic said that he should open his eyes and see how long it took for his eyeballs to boil, and how far into the boiling process it would be before he went blind.

Salem came up with a gasp.

Steam clouded his vision. All he could hear was the sound of his own gasping for breath.

With a low moan of agony, he closed his eyes again and sank back against the edge of the spring.

The countdown had ticked down one more number. That was all.

Salem brought his hands to his face and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes and his fingernails into his scalp.

That was all.

How do you prove you’re alive?

You prove what life is by proving what it isn’t. No Schrodinger’s box here. Everything is or isn’t, and you, the observer, are also the judge, jury, and executioner.

Maybe if this hadn’t taken so long to happen. Maybe then.

When he’d looked in the mirror after killing Greg, he’d seen her face looking back.

Salem stayed in the water for a long time. He ducked down more than once, let it surround him, let it promise.

He always came up for air.

((Salem Fox continued in my september))