Survival Of The Fittest

Kaede Tsurumi... That wasn't a name Lily was intimately familiar with.

Kaede was part of Dani's crowd, right? She'd seen them together a fair bit, but other than that Kaede wasn't someone Lily knew all that well. Well, that and the fact that her slate was clean, her name never coming up once on any of the announcements. That didn't exactly guarantee that she was harmless, but so far she hadn't done anything to warrant concern. She was more likely an innocent than Evie was at any rate, or herself for that matter.

That, however, was an issue. Because now that meant she couldn't walk away anymore, knowing that Kaede was in danger. It was one thing to avoid confrontation over a mutual threat, another to leave someone else's fate in the hands of a player. Besides, if she prioritised hunting Kitty down over protecting her former classmates... Well, then she'd be no better than Matthew fucking Bell.

She peeked her head out of cover, trying to suss out Evie's current position. She could just about glimpse Evie through the window, her body flat up against the wall, and a tacky golden magnum in her hands. Taking a shot at her would be tricky, if not outright impossible from this angle. If she wanted to pull this off with one bullet, she'd have to move out of cover, put herself out in the open.

It'd be a risky, especially with Kitty still on the prowl... But fortunately, she didn't have to take that risk just yet. Not when there was still a chance for everyone to walk away with their lives intact. Much as she wanted to warn Kaede directly, she suspected that she couldn't hear her all that well. Lily could barely make out what Kaede was saying herself, only clued in by Evie's response. So unless she started yelling, she only had one option to diffuse this situation quietly.

"Evie..." she whispered, gritting her teeth. "Tell her to get away from here... Now."

"You armed, Kaede Tsurumi?"

And now, the knocking had officially stopped. With that question, there was actually a moment of thought. At the start of the game, she would have said "no." Of course, there was the question, did pepper spray count as a "weapon?" Especially compared to the guns, and knives and such going around?

"No." At least, nothing that would be able to directly stand up to an actual weapon.

Despite everything, a little jolt of instinct almost saw Evie comply right away. Someone had asked her, emphatically, to do something that seemed kind of reasonable and not much of an imposition, if she didn’t think about it… at all, actually. But then the logic started to unfold, why should Lily want Kaede gone? To make her safe? From Evie herself, who was being asked to get rid of her? Or so she wouldn’t know Lily was there? Well how did that benefit Evie at all?

Unless she was the danger, but soon came the no.

Just a plain, unadorned negative. That was cause for concern. In retrospect it had been a stupid question: anyone who wished her ill could simply lie, and as good as Evie was at casually lying to be more likeable, she was no great judge of sincerity coming from others.

Ah well, no time to interrogate what Lily’s intentions were or to play twenty questions with Kaede. Evie had already decided before that she was done following other people’s lead and accommodating their petty wants at the expense of her own. Shed the chameleon skin, pick up the gun, make the fuckers deal with her shit for once.

But what did she want?

Killing Kaede would be a good thing. Another number closer to closing the game out, and a mercy besides, not making her find out what happened to Dani. But Lillian had a gun too. No sense antagonising a strong competitor without a strong upper-hand…

“Well… good to know you won’t come back in the night and shoot me, but,”

Evie considered how much she wanted to give away for a moment.

“I don’t think you wanna be here. I’m not good company any more.”

She left it to subtext that that was because she’d assumed the role of predator, and Kaede had just admitted to being prey.

And maybe if she appeased Lily for now, she might have the benefit of a temporary ally. That might be nice, if possible. Because appeasement always historically went so well when armed conflict was on the table…

Lily let out a sigh of relief, lowering her rifle ever so slightly.

Mere moments earlier, she was readying herself to intervene. Mentally preparing herself to dive out of cover and take a shot, do whatever it took to help Kaede escape, even if it meant scaring her away herself. It would've killed any chance she had of sneaking up on Kitty, but at least it'd alert Kaede to the danger she was in.

Fortunately, it wouldn't come to that. Not yet anyway, Evie passing on her warning without objection. It wasn't enough to prove she could be trusted, but it was a step in the right direction. At the very least it was a good indicator that she wasn't interested in escalating their predicament.

Tempting as it was to say something, Lily kept her mouth shut for now, giving Kaede a chance to respond. The last thing she wanted to do was push Evie too hard, antagonise her into making a bad decision. It was clear at this point that neither of them wanted a fight, not a fair one anyway, but they were far from pals just yet.

Now she just needed to wait on Kaede's response, praying that she'd taken Evie's advice to heart.

“I don’t think you wanna be here. I’m not good company any more.”

Okay, that was .. weird. Normally, it was Kaede that would be rejecting company outright, not the other way around. Kaede's eyebrows simply rose at that for a moment. She paused for a second before finding the words to say.

"O-kay." Kaede stepped back from the door. "I guess I'll be leaving, then."

((Kaede Tsurumi continued in Alpha Mike Foxtrot))

Evie mirrored Lily’s sigh when Kaede elected not to press the issue. She wouldn’t have blamed the other girl, it was bitterly cold outside and Evie hadn’t exactly given a clear reason not to come share the shelter. Then again, nine days in, maybe the threat was implicit enough without elaborating.

“Just you and me again, happy?”

Presumably all Lillian had wanted was to limit the collateral damage if the two of them started shooting. So now what? Did she really feel safe going into the tunnels knowing Evie was behind her? Well, that was Lily’s problem. As for Evie, now what did she want? To follow the intrepid hunter into the depths and start a fight where a handgun would be significantly more useful than a cumbersome rifle?

No, not really. Let her and Kitty kill each other, no sense taking a risk with two dangerous killers when the option to simply let them wear each other down was on the table. So what, the survivor got the other’s guns? They’d still only have one pair of hands to hold them. Nope. What would make Evie happy was if Lillian left, and she got to rest easy knowing that before long, the sun would be going down and nobody else would be fool enough to come looking for shelter so late in the day.

If they did? Evie’d be alone, it’d be dark, they’d be cold and weak.

So Evie left the ball in Lillian’s court. Just because she could force her own way, didn’t mean she had to at every opportunity.

"Yeah, I'm happy..." Lily replied once Kaede's exit was confirmed, carefully considering her next move.

A part of her didn't feel comfortable about leaving Evie alone. After all, if she was going through all this effort to take down Katelyn, then why should she take exception to another rising player? Evie didn't have as large a killcount, sure, but that didn't make her any less a risk to folk like Kaede. Could she really let Evie walk, after what happened with Janice and Kitty?

Well, unlike those two occasions, there wasn't another killer prowling nearby with a grenade launcher. She could start a firefight right there and then, draw Kitty's attention and risk getting them both blown to smithereens. Or she could pull back, focus on Kitty as originally planned, and hopefully live to fight another day. Much as she didn't want to let another killer go, at least this time it'd be more out of pragmatism than naivety.

"I'm going to walk away now..." she began, pausing for a moment as an intrusive thought flashed through her head. A once-comforting memory of the homecoming ball, when she caught a glimpse of Evie and Mitch dancing away like a pair of goofballs. It was hard to imagine that was the same girl who killed Chloe, that Lily came this close to trying to gun her down. She had to remind herself that Evie was just as much a victim in all this as she was, that in another world they might've gotten along, maybe even been friends.

But, she couldn't ignore what happened to Chloe. Or DeMarcus. Or Lara.

She wasn't even aware of the fresh body left abandoned in the quarters basement.

Still...

"I... I'm sorry about what happened to Mitch and Steve..." she says, swallowing a lump in her throat. "You've my condolences... Wish we could've met under different circumstances."

Unsure what else to say, Lily opted at that point to make her exit, slipping away along the wall to avoid presenting Evie with an easy shot.

((Lillian Larsen continued in Kick the Tragedy))

The infirmary’s last inhabitant let out a second sigh when Lillian finally announced she was walking away. Not of relief, not exactly. Relief was an element, the rest was more release. A pause to the macabre dance, a chance to rest her body and her mind. Assuming Lily was telling the truth; she hasn’t actually left yet.

And indeed, before she did, before the soft crunch of snow faded into the distance, Lily had one last thing to add.

She was sorry about Evie’s friends.

A small part of her wanted to call out, ask why she’d thought to say that, if she’d had something to do with their deaths, if she’d so much as seen them, been able to give them comfort or companionship before the end. But Evie didn’t. She didn’t because she couldn’t bear not to be numb to it any more. She’d mourned them, she’d let them go, she’d convinced herself she had no right to be angry at their literal killers now that she was just like them, and that even her anger at their real murderers would have to wait until it was decided that Evie was to be the only victim they didn’t manage to kill.

So Evie didn’t answer. She stood in silence, straining to hear the footsteps until they were absolutely gone.

Only then did she let the tension out. She slumped against the wall, slid back down to sit on the floor, and she cried. For her friends who’d died, for her acquaintances whose deaths she’d let wash over her lest the immensity of the crime overwhelm her entirely, for those still yet to die, and for the death of her own innocence.



The rest of the afternoon passed without incident. Evie rested. She ate. She drank. She breathed in and out, metabolised nutrients, expelled waste. All the usual functions of life. At least of survival. She tried to think of happier times, yet when she closed her eyes, she saw flashes in the dark, the gruesome ruin of Dani Bird, of Chloé Delacroix, of DeMarcus Miller. She saw the pale, pained face of Lara Bullock before Evie turned her eyes away for the last time, sparing herself a fourth gory spectacle.

Turned out Lily leaving didn’t make Evie happy. It made her safe, but it made her miserable. It made her bored, isolated, cold, lonely, left with nothing but memory and imagination to fill the empty hours until another day of solitude and occasional violence. What would’ve made her happy was company. But she’d killed Lara, Claire seemed to be stringing her along rather than definitively rejecting her, and Kelsey was nowhere to be found. Maybe if she hadn’t shot Dani, but… no, no she had to. She needed to. If Evie was going to survive, she couldn’t do it as Evie the sweetheart, the friend to all living things, the doormat. It had to be Evie the competitor, the fiercest swimmer on the North Shore, the Killer. And that killer had to stop clinging to her paper-thin justifications, and accept that she needed to be a murderer. So Dani had to die too. So Evie could live on… alone.

Loneliness was a price she had expected to pay, and one she regretted. Evie wished that Kelsey were with her, or failing that, anyone friendly to distract her from her own conscious mind.

Eventually, exhaustion took hold. On an infirmary bed wrapped in winter clothes and a first-aider’s blanket, a girl of 18 years, 8 months, and 27 days fell asleep. Mercifully, her subconscious mind did not subject her to dreams.

[Evie McKown takes to the road again.]