Survival Of The Fittest

She was staring down at him, distant and judgmental, no understanding in his voice. Tom shook his head frantically side to side, so fast and violently his neck ached with it. He wanted that pain, that clarity that release. "There is no escape, Erika!" he exclaimed. "There's...no relief. Staying alive like this, I...I fucking hate it, I hate feeling this scared, this sad, I keep seeing my grandad, I keep seeing me, I keep...keep imagining..." His voice was as choked as his mind, ghosts and things half-glimpsed (fought-off as long as he could but fought no more he wanted a drink he wanted a pill he didn't want to feel he didn't want to feel) swarming him, full and terrible in the light of day as the drizzle soaked him.

"For WHAT?" Tom demanded thrusting his hands into the sand at his sides. "Out there I could...I could pretend it could be different, it wasn't gonna end this way, it wasn't gonna be all..." His voice broke again, and he lifted sandy hands back to his face, scratching his skin.He trailed his fingers down after a moment, clutching at the bomb around his neck. He almost wanted to squeeze his fingers around his throat. "Everyone dies, everyone's alone, nothing makes sense, my stories don't fit, I can't..." He was losing his words. He hated losing his words. He never lost his words. But it happened more and more in this island. The shadow was gone. Or maybe it was Erika. Maybe it had always been Erika.

“I can make this easier."

Tom looked up. Erika's eyes were feverishly bright, though there were no tears on her cheeks. "It doesn’t have to be like Oliver, over there.”

Tom was silent, looking up at Erika.

"I don't want to die," he said. "I don't...I'm so scared of it, I...even before my Grandad..." He felt his absence the same way you feel a missing tooth, an emptiness you almost forget until you probe the hole, until something reminds you and then it's all you can feel. If he stopped moving, stopped playing, stopped writing, stopped numbing, the pain came flooding back. He was gone. Just like Tom would be gone.

"I agree with you," he whispered. "I...agreed with you. I didn't want to stop. I wanted to live. I wanted..."

But he had lived, over and over. He had run, over and over. He had terrified. His fear had made his soul raw. He was so tired of being afraid.

"But this...isn't any better." He huddled in on himself. "Please, just..." He closed his eyes. "Please."

She felt a kind of terror in seeing what was left of Tom after he’d unraveled. The fear he felt, what he was describing - she knew it. The kind of thing you never really told anyone else, because it felt so pervasive. The possibility that it might infect and ruin someone else seemed so realistic. That made it such a fundamentally lonely fear. It was one of the reasons Ty always made her feel safe; he seemed so immune to it.

Did most people feel what she felt? Tom certainly seemed to. Erika always figured they just didn’t think of it, or maybe everyone was just in denial. For all she wanted to believe in some kind of spirituality, it was so difficult to convince herself there was anything else. It all just seemed like denial.

So too with the idea of somehow making it easier, enough that she could barely believe she’d even suggested it. She wasn’t lying to herself in knowing it was the best she could do, maybe the best he’d get. It worked for him.Tom was so worn down, he couldn’t come back.. Some people found more grace in accepting defeat. That going peacefully was somehow better than going down fighting. They thought the end could be a sort of quieting, a gentle fade-out.

Fuck that.

Erika could never accept something like that. There were no good ways to kill another person, not to them. It was why she always balked at people defending so-called humane methods of capital punishment. Dead was dead. There was no scenario where she went down with anything other than defiance and as much resistance as she could muster.

But this wasn’t her. She wouldn’t let it ever get this far. It wasn’t an option, not now. Not after what she’d done. It had to be seen through. There were definitely more cruel ways to kill someone. This was better.

There’s nothing wrong with better, is there?

Erika stood up slowly, nodding as Tom acquiesced.

“Okay. I’ll talk you through this. I’m going to step behind you now. I don’t want to be the last thing you see, but I’ll be here.”

She spoke slowly, calmly. As if she was walking him through something much more mundane. It was the same tone she used when trip-sitting people, to try and calm them down. Supposedly the body released hallucinogenic chemicals at the point of death, if it wasn’t something quick like this.

“The bullet will sever your brain stem. It’s the part of the body that’s responsible for involuntary actions. That means your breathing, your heart, everything - it stops. Instantly. You won’t feel any pain, and you won’t know it before it’s over. I want you to try and push that out of your mind, it’s not something you have to think about right now. There’s no more reason to be afraid, because there’s no pain from here on out. This moment is going to be what you make it. If… if you can, try and think of a good memory. A time when you really felt complete. Focus on the little details, sounds, smells, feelings. Really put yourself there, find a place that feels like somewhere you can belong. That’s where you’re going to be.”

Erika stood a short distance away, far enough in case she missed and hit his collar. She brass-checked the action of the PSG, and aimed at the back of Tom’s head. Just above the base of the spine. Tom looked back at her, seeming to understand what she was getting at.

I hope he has a happy memory.

“When you’re ready, just give me some kind of signal. Whatever’s comfortable.”

This felt no better than what she did to Oliver. It was the worst sort of denial. At least he fought. At least they understood one another. Erika didn’t understand this, even if it seemed to be working.

There was no kind way to kill someone.

“Okay. I’ll talk you through this. I’m going to step behind you now. I don’t want to be the last thing you see, but I’ll be here.”

Tom nodded, his eyes still closed, wet with tears and grating with sand. He heard her footsteps as she circled around behind him, and felt that awful cold radiating out from his bones again. Was this the moment? Was this...

She started talking again, with a thin pretense of calm. Tom almost smiled. It felt surreal, that she should try to be soothing him as she lined up a shot on his brainstem. A shot to snuff out his thoughts, end his breathing, send him painlessly sliding into oblivion, into that numb blackness. No, nothing numb, and nothing black. Just nothing. Nothing, for now and forever.

Tap-tap-tap tap, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-taptaptaptaptaptap
Tap-tap-tap tap, tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-taptaptaptaptaptap

His figners were on his knees, drumming out the calming rhythm. It was habit, a mantra devoid of meaning: no calm came. How could, it with the reaper looming behind him, her gun in hand as she tried to soothe him, asked him to call up good memories, something he could cling to as he slid into the black.

I'll follow you into the dark.

A sweet song, and an empty one, too. There was no following. There was no company or comfort. There was just that bleak, horrible nothing, like a wave roaring towards him across the sea, to wash away all he'd been.

“When you’re ready, just give me some kind of signal. Whatever’s comfortable.”

Tom gave another jerking nod, his eyes still closed, his fingers still drumming. He could feel the reverberation of that drumming in the bones of his hands, a soft quivering spreading up his thighs and down his calves. Those feelings would be gone, too. Every feeling would be gone. Gone like Tom.

This was wrong. Stand up, Tom. Fight for it, tooth and nail. Keep running. Keep hurting. Hurt and hurt, over and over, and then die anyways, and it would all be for nothing.

His drumming stopped. He sat with the cold inside him, with the fear and terror. He didn't want to die. He couldn't stand to live.

He turned his head very slowly, until he could just make Erika out from the corner of his eye. He stopped there. He didn't want to see the gun.

He tried to smile. He tried to grin. He wanted to look like a Shonen Hero. There was a moment in One Piece, a chapter he'd read a little bit before his grandad's diagnosis: the hero is unexpectedly captured by enemies, who have him dead to rights, staging his execution in front of a crowd. And as his friends look on with horror, he simply grins, and apologizes.

He wanted to be like that. Utterly at ease with how far he'd come. Just a little apologetic.

"Shoot when you're ready," he said, trying to stop his voice from shaking. "Just make it...swift." He made a short sound, an attempt at a laugh. "And...thanks, Erika."

Idiot. Why make a pun with the gun pointed at you? Why thank your killer? Why put on a show? You're choosing to die, what the fuck does it matter how you go out?

When the fall is all that's left

But Henry, his wife, and his sons were all long gone, all ignominous in death, lost to the same void that Tom was letting swallow him up. The fall was all that was left. The fall had always been what was left. And Tom was tired of limping on with the reaper breathing down his neck.

Like the Hallows, then, greeting death like a friend?

He didn't want to greet death like a friend, he didn't want to die at all, but he didn't want to live with this endless fear, either, terrified of the trigger he wouldn't see coming. Wasn't this better? To greet it willingly? So maybe that was right, he was accepting it, accepting death, trying to do it like Harry like-

Idiot, idiot, idiot, one trigger-pull away from dying and you're still clinging to stories. You're not a shonen hero, you're not a YA protagonist, you're not larger than life, you're Tom Swift and you're choosing to die and for what?

I'm so tired

His finger traced the healed cut on his finger, from where he had clutched too tightly at his kami. He remembered the jokes he'd thrown at Richard. He'd remembered singing, pretending he wasn't scared. All part of the same lie, the one he'd told himself over and over from the first moment he'd woken up on this island. He would collect the stories of the other students. He had wanted to be...what? A nexus, a knot of different threads, all their stories united in him.

A single life is worthless, but people lose more in death than life itself. Threads of memory, accomplishment, and potential are severed. It's a delicate but valuable prize. I collect them.

The same premise, just more cowardly. He didn't have the balls to kill to live, so he would collect the stories of the dying. He would be the repository of their stories, weaving his thread with theirs. Something of him would endure, even past death.

There was an image he'd seen in History class,, a vision of a king whose body was made of the people he ruled. He had tried to make himself something like that, some huge gestalt of other stories, other memories. What matter if one part died, while the others lived? The king would endure, as a human body endured minus a few cells.

But that image was a lie. A comforting pretense. He had never been something so titanic. And even he had, that wasn't immortality. It was a Ship of Theseus, and one day all those parts would be lost, and with it, any memory of him. He would die, just like everyone would die.

Don't fear the reaper

Always writing, always gaming, always playing, always running. A hamster on a wheel, frantically going nowhere. Running because standing still made him aware of the cage. And of the thing outside the cage, that would claim him anytime it pleased.

He'd never really forgotten. Not since that night when he realized that no one new what waited past death. That terrible loneliness, haunting him in every idle moment if he ever let his mind rest long enough. Never numb enough to forget, no matter what he drank or what he smoked or what pills he took. But grandad's death had brought it home with a vengeance. In that hospital room, standing over his withered body, holding his sobbing mother, staring at his shrieking grandmother. Grandad was dead, and all his stories with him. Then grandma. Then mom. Then him.

Well. He'd gotten the order a little bit wrong.

He almost smiled, and couldn't manage it. He would be lost, and all his stories with him. The knot would come undone, as everything came undone.

All this will be lost, like tears in rain.

There was nothing he could do to stop it.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Like Erika? Fighting, killing, hurting, and for what? Even if she made it off this island, survived its crop of psychos and killers and desperate souls fighting every bit as hard as her, it didn't matter. It had never mattered. There were hamsters on their wheels, thinking if they ran a little farther, they'd break the cage. And Tom was so fucking tired of running.

There were no good memories. There were just stories, denials, and justifications. There was just Tom, and this awful cold.

He didn't want to die. He didn't want to live like this. He just wanted

BANG




















It didn't matter what he wanted anymore.

TOM SWIFT: ELIMINATED

Keeping a gun in the meat of one’s shoulder is the key to not really feeling recoil. Distributing the force, not allowing it to concentrate into one spot. When she had time to prepare, it was a whole lot easier. What didn’t feel easy was seeing Tom tremor slightly, knowing what was coming. Even if he’d convinced himself this was an easy way out, his body had to have known what was up. Human beings were hardwired to do their best not to die, at least for the most part. She didn’t understand why anyone would go against that instinct. She couldn’t.

She didn’t like that he put the decision back on her. To shoot when she was ready. Mechanically, practically speaking she had been ready the moment she saw him. Marksmanship was second nature; shooting at people registered on an entirely different level. If she could only see targets instead of people, she knew this would be easier.

Tom made that impossible. He thanked her. For what? She didn’t give him anything, and she was taking everything from him. It made her wonder what it was she had that he didn’t. Something that prevented a collapse so complete death seemed like some kind of option.

Bullets, if nothing else.

Erika counted down from thirty in her mind. It was less for him than it was for her; a space to help make the decision feel less callous. She didn’t want to be good at this. Ruthlessness didn’t come naturally, despite a sense of self-preservation being the most natural thing there was.

Zero.

She was good at this. The bullet struck true, hitting just above the base of his skull. Tom fell forward, landing on the bloody stain blasted over the sand. With all of the time to prepare, the only thing she really felt as she killed him was the gentle thump into her shoulder. It wasn’t as messy as Oliver, but she was thankful he fell onto his face. As far as she could tell, the bullet exited from his nose. There was no reason to look.

Erika stood still for a moment, transfixed as the whining in her ears slowly subsided. Something was bothering her. Something she thought she missed at first.

Make it swift…

“Make it… Swift?”

She lowered the rifle, smoke still curling from the end of the barrel. Tom’s last words were a pun, and she was so focused on getting the shot right, she only caught it now. Reaching up to rub her eyes, she couldn’t help but chuckle.

“Oh my fuck, really?”

The chuckle turned into a laugh. An uneven, manic sound that she knew she couldn’t help. This was so fucking absurd. What was the appropriate reaction to that? Should she have known? Did anyone?

Catching the shiny blackened lens of a camera out of the corner of her eye, Erika stifled the broken noises she made with some difficulty. Something about laughing at a corpse, at the person she killed felt so wrong. There was no way to make light of that kind of darkness. Yet he tried.

Erika shook her head, speaking directly into the camera as she continued to suppress the odd giggle. They came more out of nerves than any genuine feeling of amusement.

“I hate this. I hate everything about this.”

Swallowing a lump in her throat, Erika shouldered her rifle and began to sift through Tom’s bags. By this point he’d ran through most of his supplies, and so there wasn’t much to make use of. Still, she took everything she could. After a momentary pause, she reached down and removed the laces from his shoes. There wasn’t much daylight left, and she’d have to find a way to secure some kind of shelter while she slept. An idea was slowly forming in her head, one that demanded some unorthodox supplies.

She took the sickle-like weapon Tom had carried, if only to deprive others of it. It might be useful, but using it meant getting closer than she ever intended to get to someone from this point on. There was no harm in hedging her bets, though.

Picking up her bag, she jogged over towards Oliver’s broken body and removed his shoelaces as well, stowing them in her pockets. Her destination - the broken lighthouse - beckoned in the distance. Isolated, standing out only because it was set so far from everything else.

Like her.

Gritting her teeth, she turned away and headed deeper into the island, away from the coast. Four, maybe five deaths to her name in one day was going to create its own kind of isolation, more than she’d felt before. With the equipment, knowledge, and now experience she possessed, the best move was to find somewhere she could barricade, and wait.

A smile turned to a tight frown, a quivering lip, and then a blank slate.

Find somewhere to wait.

Find myself again.

If she could be found.