Survival Of The Fittest

Eventually, Taylor's sobbing died down into sniffling, and it was then that the horrible, freshly gut-wrenching realization hit them that since neither Dan nor Wendy had approached, they probably expected Taylor to move Robin's body.

They nearly gagged. Part of them wanted to burst into tears all over again, but their eyes were already swollen and sore and fuck, probably about to freeze too, because why not at this point? It felt like the rest of them was freezing in place already.

They were all out of tears. They couldn't summon the will to be angry about it, either. If nobody was going to help, then maybe Tay could just curl up into the fetal position right here and be done with it all.

...No. No, they'd just said- they'd just said, come the fuck on, Tay. They couldn't leave him here like a pile of garbage. Like the last person had.

Slowly and painfully, shaking violently with every move, Taylor got their legs underneath them enough to try to stand and drag Robin along with them. He was horribly stiff and heavy; the ghost of a ghost of a joke about him putting on weight breezed through their mind and was gone again as soon as it came. If he wasn't- wasn't really here to get mad at them poking fun, what was the point?

That was it. Robin wasn't really here. This wasn't Robin. It was just some leftovers that looked like him, and Tay had to get them out of sight. For his sake.

They weren't able to carry him, just barely able to catch him under the arms and pull him about halfway up off the floor. Their hands were trembling so badly that they almost lost their grip a few times, and their arms were already straining with the effort of just that. It was as good as it was going to get unless one of the other two stepped up.

"Okay-" They gasped out, even though absolutely nothing was o-fucking-kay. What else could they even say? "Okay- outside."

"I mean, unless there's a blanket in this cabin," Wendy said to Daniel, shrugging.

She then noticed Green Haired Person dragging the body of their friend. Wendy thought of helping them, but that would mean touching the corpse. Wendy cringed at the thought, but set aside the blanket and went over to help. She grabbed the legs of the body.

"Do you... you want me to carry his legs?," Wendy asked, "And you carry his arms?"

Fuck, they were moving the body now?

He might be a twig, never really good at sports or anything PE, but he couldn't believe he just... let these two carry a corpse. Still, whenever he tried to just look at the scene, the motion of his gaze skipped like a record. With a deep breath, he set his head down and looked right at him. It. It felt kind of degrading to call a corpse an "it" just because it - he - was dead, wasn't it? Looking at the corpse, Robin, meant looking at how Taylor shook as he tried to lift him up.

Could he hold open the door? He glanced over. It was still ajar, so no, he couldn't even do that.

A few more deep breaths. Touching a human corpse wasn't... that much worse than touching any other carcass, right? At the very least, Daniel didn't have any connection to this guy. It'd be easier for him.

So, he approached Taylor, tried to hide how his own hands shook, preparing to lay down the gun on the cabin floor. Maybe he'd become acclimated to the blood. "Do you want me to...?"

Oh, yeah, now they offered. Tay was already gritting their teeth through the effort, but they clenched their jaw a little harder.

"Just- outside," they said through their clenched teeth. "I'm just gonna. Cover him. In the snow."

No shovel to dig out Steve, no shovel to bury one of Taylor's best friends. The ground had to be frozen as hell anyway. They let Wendy and Daniel help as much as the two of them wanted, and tried and failed to not feel, just, bitter about it all. That was what the shock and pain had receded into for now. Bitterness about the whole situation, about how Tay cared about Robin and how they knew, knew that other people wouldn't care as much just because Robin was a dork who made himself look stupid in front of girls, because he'd made mistakes. He'd never meant to hurt anyone, but someone out there sure as hell had meant to hurt him, and they'd left him like this for someone who actually cared about him to find.

Painstakingly, they moved Robin's body out of the cabin and into the snow. Taylor exhaled a gust of relief when they were finally able to set him down, shaking between the exertion that they weren't used to and the cold seeping into every part of them. They stood bent over for a minute, hands braced on their knees, and then unceremoniously dropped into the snow and began to scoop it over Robin with their hands.

All of the blood wasn't showing up quite as much on their clothes, since Tay tended to dress mostly in dark colors, but it showed on their hands and rubbed off onto the snow, staining it pink. Even if they did the best job in the world of covering Robin, someone would only have to look at the pile next to the cabin to guess what had happened and what was under it. They kept scooping anyway, mechanically, until their hands were raw and red. When their fingers were too stiff to keep going, they just stopped and doubled over, half-hugging themselves.

In the end, maybe it didn't matter how much Daniel and Wendy cared, even if Tay was desperate and angry and devastated. They sat vigil for Robin for as long as they could, until someone pulled them away. It was starting to get darker out. They couldn't stay here. Steve was still out there, getting snowed on.

The person who carved Robin up like a piece of meat was still out there. Taylor hoped they froze.

---

They camped out, or something - honestly, everything after leaving the cabin was kind of a blur. Tay woke up the next morning more or less alive and mostly unfrozen, so they figured Dan had made some kind of call and it had been some kind of right. It wasn't a nice wake-up call or anything, coming out of what felt like a dreamless fog more than sleep and emerging into what Taylor could have described as their worst fucking nightmare if they wanted to be cliche about it. But they were alive.

The voice that came on over the speakers kind of made them wish they weren't, though. A lot of it washed over Tay as just noise that they didn't have the brainpower to process in the moment, but one thing snagged at them and wouldn't let go.

Steve. Steven Dodds. Stabbed- sorry, what? Forty fucking times? What, and also more importantly, how the hell?

Taylor looked blankly at Daniel. "Dude," they croaked. Any other words escaped them. Hopefully he could fill in the rest.

Surely there was something more, some kind of emotion that was going to hit them any second now, but for a few moments there was only blank shock, instead of the world-shattering revelation of finding Robin. They'd just seen and talked to Steve yesterday. They were on their way back with help, as soon as they found some.

The reality of the situation became heavier than a sack of bricks when Wendy woke up to the sound of the announcements that morning. She thought burying a body and camping out in the cold would be the worst part, but the announcements listing off her dead classmates and their killers was a huge reminder of the big picture on this island. Wendy could do nothing but quietly she’s tears over the course of the announcements.

“That could be me.”

That thought pierced her mind. It made her realize hopeless, how small her chances of survival were. All she could do was cover her face and silently cry some more.

After they (the three of them but honestly it was mostly Tay working like a person possessed) buried Robin, Daniel's first concern was making sure Taylor didn't freeze to death in the snow while unconscious. The cabin was out of the question was shelter, and not only because it was a horrific murder scene (though that was a big part of it), but because some fuck shot one of the windows and snow was trailing in through it. Wendy probably didn't know how to satisfactorily fix a window, and neither did Daniel, and it was highly unlikely that either of them would figure it out before their fingers were frostbitten in the process. So, one of the tents it was.

Second order of business was... he decided this on bit of a whim honestly, it would be gathering together the emergency blankets. They were too useful and too necessary in this weather to go to waste. In the meantime, he draped his own pack's blanket over Tay. When both his impromptu companions slept, ventured, shitty rifle in hand, back to the blood-soaked cabin.

Wendy's blanket, generously donated but ultimately unused, lay on the floor. If any blood had gotten on it, Daniel couldn't see it in this darkness. Despite that darkness, he caught sight of another pack. He crept closer, and leaned down.

It wasn't S062 (his), obviously. It also wasn't S059 or S015, the number on Tay or Wendy's bags respectively. The label read S019. There was a good chance it was Robin's, but he couldn't ignore the possibility that Robin's killer made off with the supplies he would have used, and some other schmuck left their bag here.

He knelt down and opened it up, rummaging through it. It wasn't that Daniel didn't have a sense of honour, back home he never staked anything that wasn't his and he always paid his debts, but like. If there was ever going to be a situation where a sense of honour should be negotiable, this was it. However, there wasn't much to loot even if he wanted to - which he half-expected. Unless you needed whatever Robin packed for the trip. Or an extra first aid kit...

Yeah, no, Taylor would probably freak out the moment they found out. Daniel decided to not take anything from that bag.

He left the cabin and returned to the tent. He shook Wendy awake, handed her blanket back to her, and went to bed using his own bag as a pillow.

---

And before he knew it, it was morning and everything he and Taylor were nominally here for came crashing down.

Daniel had to get up and keep going, but where to? Even the shortest of short term goals seemed as achievable and meaningful as building sandcastles as the tides came in.

His eyes darted over to Tay's face, as he rubbed his temples. There was nothing to say.

"...fuck," he said anyway.

At least they knew who Robin's killer was, as shitty a consolation prize that was.

Katelyn Graves, yeah. There was a name Tay wished they hadn’t heard in years. (Here was the part where they’d take a long drag on a cigarette, if they smoked. They had the staring blankly into the distance part down.)

They tried to summon something. Anger, outrage, horror. None of it came just yet. No shock or surprise either. Nah. Not for the fact that Robin’s psycho ex killed someone. Wendy was crying, but Tay was just numb.

Fuck. Yeah, okay, it was fucked up to think that about someone like- her. Someone with so many problems it made you impressed that she was still alive, give or take a bit for the times she’d tried to off herself. There was some kind of morbid fascination in it for some people, Taylor guessed, but they’d always found it super fucking uncomfortable even before the drama Katelyn and Robin had together, and they just tried not to think about it.

“People blamed him, y’know,” they said, voice crackling. “Like it was his fault she tried to- you know. Like he made her do it or something.”

No anger yet, no nothing. Just an awful aching at the core of their being, something like hunger. “Who, uh- who’s the bitch that killed Steve?” They were still stuck on that one as they circled back around to it. Jezzie Stark was a memorable name, but it was the kind of uncommon name that had gotten stuck to a forgettable person if the big “404 FILE NOT FOUND” Taylor’s brain was pulling up when they tried to picture her was any indication.

“Do you think- I mean-“

They chewed at their chapped, cracked lips. “If we go back, do you think she’s still down there?” They ping-ponged from one subject to the next without really thinking to specify who they were talking about either time.

Wendy kept thinking about her family back home. How she would never see them again unless she survived the game. But, if she were to be guaranteed freedom from the game, she’d have to take another student’s life. Wendy was stuck between a rock and a hard place.

She listened in on Green Hair’s conversation. She figured that Green Hair lost another friend over the announcement, as she mentioned a boy named Steve. Was the Steve they were talking Extreme Steve? She had seen a few videos of him on YouTube.

“Are you talking about Extreme Steve from YouTube?,” asked Wendy.

Wendy wasn’t necessarily an avid watcher of Steve’s content, but she did find him entertaining. She was just looking for something to keep her from considering taking the route the terrorists wanted.

All of a sudden, school drama became... uncomfortable. The whole thing with Robin and Kitty's disastrous breakup sat uneasily in his mind. He was glad that Taylor moved on from it quickly, and even kinda glad Wendy didn't decide to hound upon it.

"Yeah, that Steve." It was kinda useless to bring Wendy up to speed on a mission that had failed utterly, but considering the fact that he was rummaging through his bag for ammo, it would be a good idea to provide context. Dissuade any notions of wanton bloodlust.

"Last we saw him, he was stuck in a ditch, as in couldn't move," he explained, cupping a shotgun shell in his hand. "And I think his assigned weapon was like, a thing of bleach. There's no fucking way our culprit was acting in self defense."

He furrowed his brow at it. The myriad concerns about taking a life aside, shooting was just a fucking miserable experience with his assigned weapon, and he wouldn't know which one was worse until he, y'know. Tried it. Hardly a fun thought, even if the person in question had like a 90% chance of deserving it.

Still, what did he just think about last night? There's no honour here. There's no time for fretting about ethics. That's what the whole game was structured to be.

But just because that was what the game was structured to be, why should they play along? When he put it that way, it almost felt like an infinitely more fucked up version of that psych experiment with the electrical shocks.

As a compromise, Daniel slipped the shell into his pocket. Should be able to easily access from here, if he needed it. If.

"Well, I dunno if she's still down there. Might as well check," he said to Taylor as he opened up the tent. He stepped out, hauling the unwieldy gun with him, and rose to his feet. The sun still wasn't fully up, but the sky looked clear.

He turned back, and looked to Wendy. "You can follow us if you want, or not. I dunno. I'm not your dad."

Some dumb thought about Daniel and Taylor being Wendy's surrogate disaster dads floated through Tay's mind, and it brought the ghost of a smile to their face that floated away just as quickly as the thought.

Honestly? They didn't want to go back to the ditch. To see Steve laying there like- however he was gonna be laying there. Like Robin, only they'd have no way of burying him except kicking debris down onto him from the edge. Talk about insult to injury.

Almost more importantly, Tay knew on some distant, old, lizard-brain survival type of level that if they didn't get up and follow Dan, they wouldn't be getting up. They'd freeze here. Will to live wouldn't have anything to do with it. It was just too goddamn cold out. So they grabbed their bag and crawled out after him. "Ugh, fuck- y'know, I was just thinking how cold it is in the tent, and then we get out here, and it's just-" They made a sweeping, if floppy, gesture at the landscape around them, pointedly looking into the trees instead of back in the cabin's direction.

"Look, uh-" They shuffled closer to Daniel. "Not to get all weird, I mean, after- we just heard all that, and all. But like. Thanks. For not running off and stuff when I was being a mess." Trying to think clearly about yesterday in too much detail sent a stabbing pain through Taylor's chest still. They'd always figured that having a broken heart was just a metaphorical thing. Lame, right? Lame as hell that your body could decide to just hurt on top of all the hurt you were already feeling.

"So you know, what I'm saying is... I'm gonna go where you go for now, okay? But also, I'm gonna ask for us to find a real, like, shelter after, uh. Sorting stuff out." If they pretended they hadn't seen the way Daniel was handling the gun, they could pretend that whatever he was maybe possibly going to do with it wasn't a problem. They weren't going to stop and dwell on whether or not doing anything with it against a person who had stabbed a helpless dude 30 times even qualified as a problem, either.

Tay glanced back at Wendy through the tent flap. "If you wanna come... yeah." They were still sore about the way she'd just rolled up in time to witness the literal single worst moment of Taylor's life so far, but... it felt cruel to not say anything. "But, um. We're going to go back and see Steve."

Ooh, there we go. That was a nice, real sharp pang of dread right there, right in the pit of Taylor's stomach. Emotions are back on the menu, ladies and germs.

Shit. Taylor huddled deeper into their coat, shoving their hands into their pockets and balling them up against both the cold and their bruised-all-over feelings. "But yeah, uh..." They were trailing off into a mumble now, the more garbage words fell out of their mouth. "Let's get going."

So Steve had been murdered while stuck in a ditch. Poor guy. He was probably waiting for help, but instead, someone awful took advantage of the situation and eliminated him.

“That’s terrible. I’m sorry,” Wendy said.

Daniel and Taylor then offered Wendy the chance to follow them. They were going to head back and see what was left of Steve. As much as Wendy hated the idea of seeing another dead body, she didn’t want to be alone.

“Thank you,” said Wendy.

Daniel nodded as Taylor spoke, even though he wasn't sure what they were thanking him for. Like, he knew what, they said so, but he didn't get what was so special about it. Running off on his own for any reason seemed pretty dumb right now, and if the terrorists knew he was thinking that they'd probably be fuming. But they COULD betray you and I dunno stab you in the back for your rations any second now, they might have whispered into the collar if they wanted to (could they?). And if Daniel could talk back he'd say something like well yeah but there's a difference between something being hypothetically possible and practically possible. He somehow doubted Taylor "Panicked at all evidence of violence encountered thus far" Thorn(?) did not strike him as the type for whom it'd be practically possible. There were two-faced bitches in this class, but they weren't one of them.

(And like neither was Wendy maybe probably but this isn't about her.)

(This isn't about Him either. Or at least, it shouldn't be.)

"It's cool. And uh, yeah, sorry about the tent situation. It was the one nearby place that was," He zapped his brain for a one-second substitution. "Shielded. From incoming snow. Once we see if Jezzie's stuck down there or not we can head to the town or something. Somewhere with actual living quarters."

The snow crunched underneath his boots, and the rifle rested awkwardly under his arm. Honestly, he hoped they'd find nobody in that ditch, he hoped he'd only ever bluff with this gun.

[Daniel Ozanne, Taylor Thorne continued in Inland Empire]

As they began to leave, Wendy tucked the emergency blanket she’d offered to them yesterday and tucked it into her bag. Since it hadn’t been used to cover Robin’s body, she had used it to keep herself warm overnight. Wendy hoped they could find another, more accommodating shelter.

(Wendy Kennedy, continued elsewhere…)