Reflections

[Applesintime]

((Matthew Bell continued from The Day After))

It was kind of funny. Matthew didn’t like being alone with his thoughts, so you’d think that he’d gravitate to other people, but no. If his thoughts were bad, having to endure everyone else was worse. They didn’t say anything, but he could feel it. The stares boring into his back every time he popped up to go eat something or watch football in the rec room, the atmosphere chilling every time he walked in on a discussion… he could tell a lot of them were pissed at him, and it wasn’t like they were just pissed at him because he ate their lunch or something. He’d shot their buddies, shot them, made his presence known on the island, to put it lightly. If Katelyn had lived, Matthew knew full well he’d be giving her the same treatment.

Hell, the army’d probably have to give her a guard to stop him.

But she was dead and rotting, probably scooped up by the search party so they could return the bodies home. He’d given them directions for Shawn as best as he could, but it was kinda hard to tell one patch of forest from the other eighty thousand patches of forest that the island offered. They’d find him eventually, though. They’d bury him for good. And then Matthew could stop by and pay his respects one last time to the buddy who watched his back.

…it kinda felt like he was just choosing to ignore the last few moments of their friendship. The part where he’d been cuffed to a post and left for dead. It was a sneaky little bastard move. Matthew could almost respect it if he hadn’t been on the receiving end of it. He’d just shot June, Kai and Marshall’s buddy, and he’d have been left for them to pick over. Anyone reasonable would have hated Shawn.

But.

He just couldn’t. Shawn had watched his back, and even off the island they’d had a lot of fun shooting the shit together. Maybe it made him naive, but fuck it. He hated enough people. It wouldn’t hurt for Matthew to hate one less person, to focus on the positive shit rather than the negative.

Sighing, he leaned back on the bed. He stuck to his room mostly. Easier than having to deal with the other kids. The soldiers and nurses were nice, but they didn’t know what had happened on the island. As far as they were concerned, he was one of the lucky few and that was all they needed to know.

His mom and dad had called recently. Obviously his iPhone was gone now, shattered somewhere or stolen by Danya to play games on or whatever the hell they did with people’s phones. He didn’t have a new one either, so he’d taken the call from a honest-to-god landline bolted onto the wall of an office somewhere like it was the 90s. Or like a prison call. That was probably a better comparison.

Mom had cried, and Dad had to take over. He sounded like he was gonna start crying too, and then Matthew started crying and then they all just wept for a moment. For everything that had happened, for everything they’d lost, for the version of him that stepped onto that bus and died in a fiery wreck. That was the part that really stuck with him the most. The government had just told them that he had died. The bus had burnt down or whatever, and all they’d get was an empty coffin. Their son was alive, fighting for his life, and for nearly two weeks they had mourned him. Fuck, they’d ‘buried’ him! Some fucking empty coffin was lying under a stone with his name on it.

Something about that just made him feel sick. It was… he didn’t even know. Just plain wrong. He was living and breathing and yet for two weeks, he was dead.

Then underneath that nauseous feeling was a fury. What the hell did the government get out of faking their deaths? They knew this had happened, they knew that everyone was alive and fighting for their lives, and yet they’d looked their families in the eyes and told them to grieve in advance. Matthew just couldn’t imagine why. Was a fatal bus crash with no bodies that much better than just saying that shit had happened? Was the government that afraid of losing face? Maybe he was just taking it personally because he was alive. If someone was dead, it’s not like anything had changed. There was just a body to bury now.

Maybe it was a matter of principle, that the government shouldn’t be lying to people’s faces. It wasn’t like Matthew could do anything about it. It wasn’t like he could march into Kirby’s office and tell him to apologise.

It was something that left him simmering in a frustrated haze nonetheless.

Exhaling again, he turned his attention to the little TV in his room. It was on… MSNBC, and the topic of choice today, as it had been for the past few days, was the rescue, V8, the kids who had survived, everything except those who had died. Maybe you’d get a mention of how 120 kids had died, and how this stacked up to the previous attacks, but they never delved into it deeper. Never gave a name to any of those dead kids. All they did was talk about the ones who had survived, about how well Kirby had done (pfft) and how the military response had been. Nothing but endless goddamn speculation.

It was still surreal to hear his name on national goddamn TV, though. NBC, CNN, Fox News, even in all the other international channels that he couldn’t understand, probably. Even the conspiracy freaks who were gonna be talking about how they were all Chinese robots or some shit. They were the talk of the whole goddamn country - hell, probably the whole goddamn world. Once they were out of here, they were all gonna have microphones shoved in their faces the second they got back to Salem.

An idea popped into his head. Maybe he could do something with that. Everyone was going to be looking for someone amenable with the media, to be the face of the survivors, and look at Matthew. Football player, JROTC, all-American. What better way to get answers than to become the media darling?

It was like that one guy from Parkland. Uhh… fuck, what was his name. David? David something? David Miller? Matthew was certain that he was wrong, but that didn’t really matter much. What mattered was that this David guy was the first one his mind jumped to when he thought of Parkland. Even when he was like, one of maybe a dozen people who’d jumped up on stage to express their views, he was the one that everyone thought of as the ‘leader’.

JEM needed a leader like that. Someone to push for whatever the survivors wanted to be done, although that was something he still needed to think about, because what else could be done? The ATs were dead. Wasn’t like they were gonna be waltzing into like, Kentucky or some shit in a few years and taking another busload of kids. He could ask the other kids but they sure as shit weren’t gonna want him to lead. It’d be Fitz or June or some shit, one of those assholes.

But fuck them.

If he wanted to, he could have the ear of the entire country.

He’d make good use of it.

((Matthew Bell continued in First Mover Advantage))