Survival Of The Fittest

"I believe you," Rebekah said. It seemed like the right thing to say.

People often thought that Rebekah wasn't very perceptive, mostly because of the things Rebekah did and said. But Rebekah often understood a lot more than she let on. For instance, she understood that Mallory Valdez, who was lying dead on the floor, had said the words "you and my freaking dyke sister." The way she'd said "you," and the way Jess paused before the words "my best friend," like she'd had to choose them instead of letting them come naturally, filled in the rest of the story.

She left the matter alone, out of respect.

The flashlight was still lying on the ground. Rebekah picked it up, and made out the contours of Jess' body. The other girl was slumped back against the wall.

"You, uh... you don't look so good," Rebekah said. "I think there might be meds in the bag, and... if you need to lay down and rest for a while, you can. You can even borrow my Snuggie if you want! It's super comfy. I can keep watch to make sure that nobody else comes, until you're feeling better."

"But, um... after that... I think we should probably leave."

Rebekah said she believed her and Jessica in turn was relieved. After all, if Rebekah hadn't thought she was being truthful and tried to do something about it then Jessica was in no position to defend herself. She scrunched her eyes shut as Rebekah picked up the flashlight and turned it towards her, the light itself bringing as much pain as the initial blows seemed to have.

If she looked as bad as she felt Jessica wasn't surprised that Rebekah offered her the chance to lie down. It was a tempting offer.

She could forgive Rebekah for being suckered in by Mallory, a lot of people had been in the past. They'd all been burned in time though. Jessica was fairly sure if Mallory had managed to kill her thanks to Rebekah's help there would have come a point where Mallory would have turned on her.

"Yeah," Jessica said, nodding her head a little. "Some medicine and rest would help."

With aching bones she pushed herself to her feet and gave her head a little shake, trying to clear away some of the static.

"Do you know where my stuff is?"

Rebekah's light swept the floor, revealing a bag, a bag, a corpse, and another bag. She got up and approached the first bag, running her sleeve across her eyes to dry them. She checked the first bag, and found the small camping stove Jess had mentioned earlier.

"Yeah, this one's yours."

She brought it over to Jess, being careful not to shine the flashlight directly at her. "Let me take a look in here, there's got to be something..." She put the bag down and dug through it, pushing aside some water bottles and food to reveal an army-green medical box. She popped the lid, and blinked in surprise at the sheer number of things inside of it.

"Let's see... There's bandages, and some alcohol pads to patch up your head wound... we, ah, should probably wait until we get outside to do that, though. I can't really do it with one hand holding the flashlight. You've got a choice between ibuprofen or aspirin for the pain. I wouldn't take them at the same time, though, it'll make you sick."

She pushed the kit towards Jess with the relevant items displayed, and let her take whatever she liked. Then she shrugged off the Snuggie and offered that too, making sure to dab away a few pesky spots of blood. It'd be a comfort on the cold cave floor, and served as an unspoken, tangible promise that Rebekah wasn't about to just take off and leave her during the night.

Once she'd gotten Jess started on patching herself, Rebekah investigated a few other things. First, the pack belonging to the late Mallory Valdez - known as Mal to her friends and murderer. Rebekah didn't qualify for Mal privileges on either account, but gave them to herself anyway because she'd saved the girl's life. It hadn't stayed saved, mind you, but that still had to count for something. Mal's bag had more of the food and water, and another medkit. A small slip of paper identified the gun as a Winchester Model 1895 (lever-action rifle). Good grief, it was an antique. No wonder Mal had missed the first shot.

She hauled Mal's duffel over to where Jess was, along with her own bag, then started to silently divvy up the food and water. No sense letting it go to waste. She gave Jess the whole medkit, wagering that she'd have more need of it. That left a decent amount of bullets rolling around in the bottom. Right. The gun... well, that was still lying on the floor somewhere, probably. Rebekah found it after a few seconds of searching, and picked it up. She made a show of clicking the safety on.

"Just in case," she said. "You know, if someone comes and I need to scare them off. Or if whatever picked all these bones clean comes back and is feeling hungry."

She settled down, turning her flashlight towards what the assumed to be the mouth of the cave, giving Jess some privacy to rest. Rebekah had no problem with guard duty. She was used to spending long periods of time in the woods, watching absolutely nothing happen. There was a dark thing at the edge of her flashlight. She gently adjusted the light, and saw that it was the dead girl's foot.

The dead girl. Mallory Valdez. Mal.

There were seven billion humans on the planet Earth, give or take a few astronauts. One hundred and twenty of them were going to die in the next sixty seconds. Two people were living their last second, every second. Rebekah wanted to think that it didn't matter that one of those seconds had happened to Mal Valdez. She wanted to think of Mal Valdez as just another dead animal. Just an animal that lived and died because it crossed paths with something that it wasn't strong enough to overcome. That kind of thing happened in rainforests and jungles and tide pools, hundreds and thousands of times every second. It didn't matter if a crab got eaten by a seal, because there would always be more crabs coming along to replace them. And there were so many humans. More of them every day. It shouldn't have mattered that one individual in that great big human herd had dropped dead, and the rest had gone on without it.

But it did matter. Death always mattered. It had to, because life always mattered.

At least, that's what Rebekah wanted to believe. She wanted to believe that her own life mattered. And that when it came to a sudden and violent end in the next seven days, that that would matter, too. But before that happened, there was a whole island waiting for her out there. So many things to explore. She wanted to see trees and snow and sunsets and ice. She wanted to make a snow angel. She wanted to find a camera, so she could tell her dad to get Puki out of her car before it got towed from the school parking lot.

And after Jess woke up, she'd go out and do all of that. And anything else she felt like.

((Rebekah Hayes continued elsewhere.))

Rebekah started her off with medical attention and then left Jessica to her devices to finish things off. The bullet graze on her cheek was the first thing that came to Jessica's mind as it was the part that was openly bleeding but she found her knuckles and knees scraped up by the hard rock of the cave. At Rebekah's prompting, Jessica gulped down two aspirin. If only to muffle the ringing in her head, and the one in her ears. Meanwhile, Rebekah moved around the cave, performing clean-up.

She brought Mallory's pack over and started to split up the supplies unprompted. Jessica felt a sense of shame as Rebekah did so but didn't make any move to stop her. Instead, she wrapped the snuggie tighter around herself and turned away from the other girl so she didn't have to watch.

"Mmhm," She grumbled in agreement when Rebekah said something about safety, there was a clicking that sounded like the gun but Jessica didn't want to think about it.

Her mind turned to Maritza and what she would think of everything that had happened. How would she find out that Jessica had killed her sister? What reaction would she have had?

The image of Maritza's smiling face burned itself into Jessica's thoughts as she buried her face into the snuggie and silently started to weep.

((Jessica Romero continued elsewhere...))