Survival Of The Fittest

There wasn’t much to compare Survival of the Fittest to, all things considered.

Killing someone in self-defence occasionally happened out in the world, as every vocal second amendment supporter loved to point out. Implicit in the act of carrying a firearm to protect oneself, there was an admission that at some point they might kill someone if they felt threatened. The reality was, as far as Erika saw it, those situations were so few and far between that carrying a gun only introduced the possibility of something going terribly wrong with it. Even if something like that happened, it usually didn’t keep happening to the same person.

As far as she could remember, by definition, she was now a spree killer. Serial killers killed over a longer period of time. Out in the world, people who did what she had were the type to shoot up schools, or public places. They were the reason metal detectors were so common in public buildings, much as SOTF had created a whole security industry around protecting buses and planes from hijacking. Neither stopped the people they were supposed to.

That didn’t really seem right, either. She wasn’t like a school shooter. She didn’t feel any kind of malice towards anyone else here. Even the people she supposed she truly hated, she didn’t think they deserved to die. Nobody deserved to die in a place like this. It wasn’t as if she wanted to absolve herself of what she was doing, or to claim as if the moments and methods weren’t her fault; she just didn’t see any other way. To claim she shouldn’t have done this would’ve been asking her to die. No school shooter did so because they were in sincere mortal danger from their classmates. That was deranged, premeditated mass murder. This was different.

How?

The only thing that made sense as a comparison was war.

It was what she’d told Michael, or at least alluded to when they were speaking. They’d studied Hobbes briefly in philosophy, and at the time she really didn’t vibe with what he was saying. The State of Nature, without a government or society holding people to some kind of order, was a perpetual war of all against all, bellum omnium contra omnes. Everyone does what’s best for themselves, for they have no reason to believe that anyone else will be compelled to do otherwise. Overcoming the state of nature was the foundation for his political philosophy, a pretty heavy handed sort of authoritarian monarchy.

It wasn’t totally bogus, but Erika had always assumed people were better than that. In a world without bomb collars, she figured people naturally wanted to cooperate. Human beings were social creatures, more or less programmed to help one another. People could be awful, but it wasn’t as if in twelve thousand years of civilization there weren’t myriad ways to resolve conflict that didn’t involve being an authoritarian shithead.

That was, in a world without bomb collars. The Arthro Taskforce had drawn the lines clearly enough as to what kind of world this was; a state of nature, with no means of overcoming it except the key they possessed.

So that was what was left. A war, each one of them an army unto themselves. As things stood, this particular one-woman army was doing well, at least by the numbers. She had enough food and water to last the next few days, and enough ammunition to fight off more than her share of the opposition.

Erika paused, looking down to see the dirt of the forest floor give way to sand. Ahead, she saw waves crashing on the beach. The sand was still wet from the rain, and she could see more than a few sets of footprints crisscrossing it. Stopping to catch her breath, she felt the muscles in her calves ache. Her shoulders joined the chorus, followed by her lower back.

The army was well-equipped, but morale was definitely low. Erika looked through the thinning treeline, and saw a patch of what looked like a mix of deadfall, shoes, and driftwood that washed up at high tide. She traipsed over and set her bag down on the sand, kneeling next to it and looking out at the sea.

The logical thing to do would be to wait and see how many would kill each other, but that was too passive a solution to a problem with a little over a hundred moving parts, last she counted. Every person on the island was a threat, and each one was issued a weapon. Some of the weapons were useless, others were of limited utility, and a decent number were guns.

Not everyone was going to put a knife or blunt object to good use, but any frightened teenager with an automatic rifle could squeeze the trigger and potentially hit something. The people who were so lucky as to be armed had to be the primary targets, as she’d assumed. If the weapons weren’t of any use to her, she’d have to disable them. Most guns could be disassembled with a spare cartridge, unless they were old like the Martini-Henry. In that case, hiding or destroying the ammunition would work just as well.

Prioritizing her targets didn't mean she had the luxury of sparing anyone, at this point. At least four people had died because of-

Over a hundred and fifty are going to die because of the Arthro Taskforce.

There were at least four deaths to her name, five depending on what happened to Julien. There wasn't a word out of any of her classmates' mouths she could trust, and even the people who hadn't accepted the reality of this situation might be inclined to try to kill her. Focusing on the situation, the threat they might pose, had to take precedence over who they had been to Erika. Otherwise...

I'll collapse like I did halfway here with a panic attack, thinking about what I did to-

She wouldn't find shelter with the likes of Connor or Juliette anymore. Any smart person would disarm or kill her the moment the opportunity presented itself, regardless of who she might've been to them. Now she registered differently in folks' minds, a group she felt nauseated to be a part of. The category of People Who it is Totally Okay to Kill wasn't exactly good company, and not just those who'd taken the opportunity of SOTF to settle scores. Thinking about it introduced to Erika junk thoughts that asked her repeatedly if she was really any different from her great-grandfather who totally didn't have a choice but to join the Wehrmacht in the late thirties.

"Goddamnit, it's nothing like that."

It wasn't at all the same, but it did cast the war comparison in an uncomfortable light. Maybe there wasn't any making sense of what she was doing; she just had to do it. Despite the vain hope that she didn't have to see another face until this was all over, Erika desperately wanted someone to talk to. Though, even wishing for that carried with it more guilt than she knew what to do with.

Erika buried her head in her hands, and tried to imagine the sound of a helicopter flying towards the island.

((Oliver Lacroix continued from Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay))

Oliver raised a hand to shield his eyes from the sun as he exited a thicket of trees to immediately find himself, yet again, at the beach. The scenery was just as nice as ever, but for some reason, he wasn't feeling very impressed this time around, or feeling anything good, for that matter. His bag of supplies was feeling lighter and lighter with every passing hour, in contrast with the weight of his missed opportunity to fix that issue the previous day weighing down on his mind.

Speaking of missed opportunities...he never did get a chance to talk to his mother before he left for the trip. Not that he was planning to ignore her, but, well, you know, he was staying with his dad before he left, and giving her a call just slipped his mind. The thought of her sitting home, alone, watching him and his classmates go through all this... it just made him sick to be just thinking about it. If he had actually managed to swipe something back then, would she have understood? Obviously, she wanted him to live, but...

Oliver swallowed hard. Regardless of how she would feel, he knew that the most important thing would be for him to get home in one piece. If he could manage that, he'd at least have the opportunity to explain himself, to justify what he was doing. She'd be disappointed, sure, but she always forgave him in the end. This would just be more of that, right?

A few more moments passed of stewing on this before he looked away from the ocean to notice that he was in fact, not alone on this beach. Just a short distance away stood a tall girl with her head in her hands, a girl who he quickly recognized to be Erika, a name that he had heard on the announcements several times before. His heart sank as he stood frozen, wondering if she had noticed his presence, and more importantly, wondering if he'd be able to take her on if she came for him, just like she had come for all the others...

With her eyes closed, it was easier to focus on the sounds around her. Mostly it was the comforting white noise of the wind, but after a few minutes she started to hear seabirds. Gulls, screeching in the same way they seemed to just about everywhere else. She might’ve ignored it before, but now the so-called “flying rats” were just another tenuous connection to the outside world. The island was no prison to them. Nowhere was. It took a particularly dire situation to envy a seagull, didn’t it?

The sound of water splattering onto some rocks cut through the rhythm of waves steadily lapping at the shore. The storm might’ve passed, but the sea was still unruly. If the terrorists were offshore somehow, she wondered how they might’ve fared. If they had patrols out there, or a ship, what would’ve happened if it had capsized in the storm? More than a bit of wounded pride, she supposed, followed by the detonation of every collar on the island.

Her throat itched. She opened her eyes, and pulled a bottle of water from her duffel bag. Despite quenching her thirst, the bitter taste of iodine wasn’t something she was ever going to get used to. It probably wouldn’t make her sick. Filtering running water through a legging and dosing it with iodine was the best she could do under the circumstances, until she could scavenge more. Even still, she assumed most people were probably running low by this point. She still had the spare soda, but opted to save the calories for when she really needed them.

Wouldn’t that be, well, right now?

Capping the bottle, she had nearly reached for the can in her bag when she did a double-take, only now noticing the figure who had been walking up the beach towards her. He’d stopped, which meant he noticed her. She couldn’t immediately tell if his facial expression came from recognizing her, or just taking note of the gun slung over her shoulder.

Quickly rising to her feet, Erika shouldered the rifle and pointed it squarely at him. It was too close to aim through the scope, but that also meant she didn’t really have to. Shooting targets had made it all muscle memory, for the most part. All she had to do was pull the trigger.

She hesitated.

Shooting people, she wasn’t entirely used to. Not yet. Not when they were this close, and their eyes met. It was a kind of intimacy she never wanted to know. Oliver Lacroix. She’d seen him at parties, back in the world. He’d existed, was a presence in a few lives other than his own.

Staring with a pained expression, barely blinking, she opened her mouth to speak before realizing she wasn’t even sure what to say to him. Did anything she have to say have any value to someone in his position, facing down the end of the path he’d been walking for his entire life? Probably not.

Erika waited, without really knowing what it was she was waiting for.

A bead of sweat rolled slowly down the back of Oliver's neck as his eyes focused down the barrel of the gun pointed directly at him. So, this was how it was gonna be. How many others had this girl killed already? Three? Four? Five? He had already lost count. Whatever the number was, there was no doubt that she intended to add him to her list of victims.

What felt like hours passed as he stood there, staring into the familiar face as the wind rushed past his ears. He had seen her around at school, and at parties, and he was sure they even shared some mutual friends. In another world, perhaps they might have gotten along pretty well if they actually took the time to get to know each other. However, in this world, there was no friendship to be had. The only possible outcome here was one of them leaving alive, and the other dead.

It would be ridiculous to try to run away at this distance, all it would take was one shot in the back to put him down, and Oliver wasn't going to go down kneeling and begging for mercy. His heart pounded as his hand reached for his pocket, closing around the handle of the knife. The odds were against him, sure, but things were going to end here, they were going to end with him fighting for his life.

The loud crack of a wave hitting the beach reverberated through the air like the firing of a starting gun, and with that, he was off, the metal of his knife glinting in the air. He tried his best to weave as he ran the short distance, hoping that he could throw off her aim just a little bit in order to buy enough time to get on top of her and wrestle the gun away from her.

It was crazy, but potentially just crazy enough to work.

The rifle weighed a lot more than the SIG 551 she was used to, and faltered slightly in her grip. It wasn’t an issue when she had been lying prone. There, the weight absorbed the recoil, made it easier to take accurate shots at a distance. That was what it was designed for. It had been so easy when they weren’t so close. Her arms didn’t hurt like they did now. Katie, Saffron - they couldn’t see her. The sight picture was so crisp through the scope, but she didn’t have to meet their eyes.

Life. She still saw it, looking into Oliver’s eyes. It shimmered when the sun briefly cut through the clouds, and continued even as the light faded to a dull grey. The sunlight was warm, a different kind of heat than the stifling humidity they’d languished in. She’d wanted it to stay. That was the sight of another person right now; warm, and comforting. She wanted him to stay, even if that didn’t make any sense.

It was the kind of thing she was supposed to feel. When everything was terrifying, it felt good to not be alone. Even if it wasn’t the logical thing to do, there was some hard-coded instinct to band together. People were social, they wanted to cooperate. Doing the smart thing meant killing that part of her. Looking at him now, she couldn’t honestly tell herself she really wanted to. Instinctually, she felt it wasn’t right, even if she knew it was the only path forward.

The barrel lowered, slightly. He could just turn back. Find another path. Leave her alone. Her finger gently lifted off, but not away from the trigger. Erika had nearly found the words to convince herself of it, when their stalemate was broken by a loud crash coming from the sea. Instead of the glimmer of his eyes, her focus went immediately to the glint of a knife emerging from his pocket.

Crying out in surprise, Erika nearly tumbled backwards before regaining her footing, and a firm grip on the rifle. Oliver was only a step or two away from her when she squeezed the trigger. The hand carrying the knife had only been inches from the muzzle; Erika flinched, as she felt blood spatter onto her face. Catching her heel on the loose sand, she fell backwards. She’d only begun to scramble back to her feet when she saw that Oliver wasn’t standing anymore.

Once again, she opened her mouth to speak. Once again, she couldn’t find the words. She could still see his eyes. He was still alive.

He shouldn’t have been.

The next thing Oliver knew, he was lying down on the sand, his ears ringing and his vision blurred. Most importantly though, was that he was in pain - a lot of pain, to be perfectly honest. His entire body seemed to be felt as if it was wrapped in white-hot flame, the agony almost unendurable. He could feel a scream building up in his lungs, bubbling up through his throat and out of his mouth. Much to his surprise, the only sound that came out was a subdued gurgle.

It was at the moment that he became acutely aware that his lower jaw was no longer attached to his face.

His entire world froze as the realization finally began to sink in. This couldn't be happening. He had to be dreaming, hallucinating somehow. The whole situation felt completely unreal. His heart raced as he began to hyperventilate, gasping for air for a few painful seconds before a gush of blood filled his throat. The sound of his breathing was quickly replaced by a wet, guttural choking noise, sounding more like a monster from a horror movie than a something coming out of the mouth of an actual human being.

This was it. There was no getting around the fact that he was completely and utterly screwed. He never was going to go home. He was never going to see his parents or his friends ever again. He'd never be able to sit in his car with the window rolled down, the wind rushing through his hair. All of those things were forever taken from him, all because of... her.

His eyes narrowed as his mind focused around one single thought. If he was going down here, at least he was going to take Erika with him, somehow. He scrabbled around with his hand, desperately trying to find the knife that he had dropped in the commotion. A sudden spike of pain flashed through his hand as he attempted to move his fingers, leading him to instinctively bring it to his face to get a look at it, revealing a shattered mess of meat and bone which wouldn't be holding anything any time soon. His arm soon flopped back to the ground, a defeated sigh making its way out of the bloodied wreck that was once his mouth.

Fuck.

Still alive. Breathing, through the ragged mess of the lower half of his face. Desperately trying to take in air, the sound was sickeningly reminiscent of someone loudly sucking down the last of a drink through a straw. Erika could only stand by, mouth agape, as she watched him reach in vain for his knife. Watching him realize there wasn’t much left of his hand. Oliver didn’t have much of a face left to emote, but she could see the resignation in his eyes as he looked up at her. She could only stammer in response.

“I… I’m s… I don’t… I… I’m sorry… You… This didn’t have to… I just... ”

The barrel of the rifle pointed towards the sand as Erika let it hang around her neck. She put a hand up to her face, only to draw it back and find it smeared with blood. Bright crimson, in contrast to the deep red that was pouring from what was left of Oliver’s jaw. She tried to look anywhere else. To the sea, to the wilderness she’d taken shelter in. A few unsteady steps backward, and she’d tried to turn and leave.

Leaving him alone to fade out, to bleed to death on the beach, she couldn’t. For all she’d wanted to be, before her she saw what she was now. The kind of person he knew he had to kill before she killed him. Something worth being afraid of. She wanted to be more than this, yet she knew the most significant actions she’d taken in this world left people bleeding and dying, cold and alone.

At least with Desiree and Katie and Saffron it had been quick. Erika hoped it had been quick. At this point she - well, she couldn’t really know, could she? After all, she hadn’t been close enough to tell with Katie and Saffron. Did they suffer like this?

“I can’t… I’m not…”

This isn't right or wrong, it's not good or evil. It just is.

That was what she had to keep telling herself. If she didn’t do this, she’d end up like Oliver. This place made corpses, and it made monsters. Not dying left options, at least. No one came back from the other side. There was no other side. Monsters could at least get better.

Couldn’t she?

Erika turned back to face him, to watch as she’d done before, but found herself unable to. He was hanging on, with a strength she knew she didn’t have. Facing down his end in a way she knew she never could. Oliver didn’t deserve this, but now that he was here - there wasn’t any other option now, was there?

The gleam of the brass shell casing stood out against the damp sand. Something else caught her eye, scattered in the other direction on the beach.

Teeth.

Her expression hardened. She nodded, accepting the reality bleeding to death in front of her. She took short, sharp breaths through her nose, as if she was psyching herself up for a great deal of pain. In a way, she was. Erika turned back to face Oliver, rifle raised and steady. She didn’t need to look through the optic. From this vantage point, she saw everything very clearly.

The recoil barely registered to Erika after the first shot, nor did the guttural cry she let out as she fired the next eight. Bright gouts of flame erupted in millisecond-long flashes as the report of the rifle thundered out across the beach. Brass cases sprung far from the rapidly cycling action of the PSG-1, as each round tore through Oliver and dug blood-soaked holes in the sand beneath him.

Oliver turned his head back, looking up at the figure of a girl framed by the bright light of the sunset. His heart pounded in his chest as his eyes deliriously attempted to focus on the scene in front of him. It was obvious what was going to happen next. This was the end of the road.

The next few moments were a blur as he briefly faded out of consciousness, coming to just as Erika began stammering out some pathetic excuse for an apology. Not like it mattered. She wasn't getting any forgiveness from him, and even if he was so inclined, there was no way he could respond. In fact, she was lucky that he wasn't able to talk back, because anything she had to say would definitely have been drowned out by a cluster of insults.

Strangely enough, facing death like this didn't have Oliver feeling scared. If anything, it just pissed him off. If he had been only a couple seconds faster, maybe she would have been on the ground here instead of him. For that matter, if he had been given a better weapon, he wouldn't have been forced into this position in the first place. Of all the times in his life for Lady Luck to forsake him, he couldn't have picked a worse one.

His next sigh was interrupted by a coughing fit as yet more blood found its way into his windpipe. The pain was getting worse and worse with every passing second. Why was Erika just standing there? Was she getting some sort of sick pleasure out of extending his misery? His eyes narrowed as he stared at the gun in her hands. They both knew there was only one way this could end. It was time to end the suspense and just get this over with.

He quickly got his wish.

B061: Oliver Lacroix - DECEASED

Smoke curled out of the end of the barrel, a curious silence falling over the area as Erika readjusted to the sounds of the wind and sea. Her eyes drawn to the wisps of smoke, she became acutely aware of just how heavily she was breathing as she watched it waver up and down.

Once more had probably been enough. Twice would’ve been enough to be absolutely sure. Nine times, with two in the head, and there wasn’t a whole lot left of Oliver that wasn’t entirely caked in sand and blood. It was hard to even recognize who it had been. The bullets had only carved circular holes going in, before ripping ragged canyons through flesh before what was left of them ended up in the sand. Among the mass of red she could see jagged, off-white splinters sticking out of his back where a bullet had annihilated one of his ribs. Only a quarter of his face was even recognizably part of a face anymore, with the rest caved in or blasted across the beach.

Erika looked towards the waves encroaching closer and closer to the shore. It might’ve been close enough for the tides to carry him away from here, but she couldn’t be sure. Either way, it was too appetizing for scavengers to ignore. As soon as she left, those birds she’d heard earlier would descend. They’d descend just like they would on any carrion and tear away whatever they could. They’d fight over it. If there were any crabs here, they’d be next. If the tides pulled in far enough, sea life would do the rest. In a multitude of efficient, grisly, and highly adapted ways, Oliver’s body would be returned to the planet. The debt would be paid.

Death begot life.

When it came to conceptualizing all of this, that thought was at least a little bit comforting. Only a little bit.

Near her feett, Erika noticed something shiny and red sticking out of the sand. Gingerly, she picked it up and wiped the blood off on her jacket. The blood and sand made the hinges stick, and there was a curious dent in one side of the handle, but it seemed to be a perfectly serviceable butterfly knife. If she ever found herself in a situation with someone like Blake again, it would come in handy. Oliver’s duffel bag came free from his body rather easily, but Erika found only the limited supplies she expected to find after four days on the island. Every little bit helped, she supposed.

The blood didn’t wipe easily off of her hands, and she had to briefly step to the sea to rinse it off. The briny water did the job well enough, though given the sickness she felt in her stomach she half-expected to experience the common delusion of the blood just not going away no matter how hard she scrubbed at it.

In her pocket, the knife was something of a presence. It meant more now that she’d had to defend herself. Thinking about things like that weren’t just just flippant “what if” scenarios anymore. In her hands, she knew she’d understand how warm blood flowing from a fresh would would be. She’d know the sound a person makes when they felt cold, sharp metal enter their body. Once or twice would probably not be enough. Eight times might actually be what she’d need with something like that.

Without remembering all the steps she’d taken to get there, Erika found herself back at the pile of driftwood, her duffel bag sitting just where she’d left it. Leaving it there had been careless, and she quickly checked the pockets to ensure that no one had gone through it before stowing the meagre supplies she scavenged from Oliver’s bag.

So the beach isn’t an ideal spot. Where to next?

Focusing on the path ahead was ideal; the path behind her was littered with bodies, which her mind’s eye didn’t know how to turn away from.

It had to be somewhere that was easy to funnel targets into, but wasn’t putting her back against a wall in case it became a danger zone. Erika pulled the map of the island from her bag, and began trying to trace her position.

(Tom Swift concluding from when you hurt me, you hurt yourself)

He ran.

One moment, he was following Tanisha, talking to her, learning from her. The next there was a gunshot, and Tom ran. He ran until his heart pounded, until cracks of pain radiated out from his dry throat, until icicles stabbed his sides and the base of his lungs. And when the moment passed, and no bullet shattered him, he stood where he was, half-blind with fear, with doubt, with guilt.

Leaping like a startled dog again, Tom. Leaping like an animal, all fear and instinct. Just like you did before.

Don't fear the

Don't sing the fucking song, Tom, it's a lie, just like it's always been a lie. Or maybe it's a prayer, but whatever the fuck it is, it's a lie, and you know it's a lie, and you need to stop. Fucking. Lying.

God, he wanted a drink. God, he wanted a pill. God, he wanted anything, other than to feel.

He hid in what shelter he could find. He drank the last of his water, and ate the last of his food. He sheltered, cold and tired and dirty and alone, and in the corner of his eye he kept seeing that fucking reaper. Crazy. He was fucking crazy.

I don't want to die.

But he would die, just like his grandfather, and the legions of the faceless dead that had come before.

He made his way to the ocean, because he didn't know what else to do. He had been there on family vacations, and had always loved it: the pounding of the surf, and the smell of the salt air. His favorite thing was the ocean at night, when you could no longer tell where sea ended and sky began. But he couldn't go there by night. Too many nightmares in his head. Too many fears of every shadow, potential reapers around every corner.

Numb numb I just want to be numb.

Numb but alive? What a way to fucking live, Tom. What a fucking joke.

Lost in his wild thoughts, he staggered to the ocean, and over a line of dunes. He hadn't slept, all through the long, cold, miserable night. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing; to make sense of the shattered body one one side, and the woman with the gun kneeling over a pile of driftwood not too far away.

"Oh, God," he breathed.

The lighthouse wasn’t a bad idea, depending on just how ruined it really was, and how many people had thought the same thing. There was only one obvious route by land towards it, and it was relatively free of available cover. A decent enough place to lay low, at least until it became a danger zone.

That presented something of a problem. It wasn’t obvious on the map exactly where the zones began and ended, and Erika hadn’t seen any clear boundary when she entered and left the “Cliffs” zone. If the area was called as a zone and she was still in it, that meant leaving as quickly as possible. With only one route elsewhere, it was more likely than not that she’d be backing herself into a corner. Plus, leaving the area around the docks meant running either up the open ground of the beach, into the village, or towards the thick brush and rice paddies to the south.

Still, nowhere else was quite as secluded. If she saw someone coming, she’d have the advantage.

A blur in her peripheral vision made her start, quickly jamming the map into her jacket pocket and raising her rifle. A short distance away stood a familiar figure. An acquaintance, in another life.

Tom. You poor soul.

He sat in front of her in English. She’d sold him a couple grams of weed here and there, at a discount for proofreading some of her writing. Over the course of the year it was clear something had gone very wrong for him. From his appearance, his experience with drugs didn’t end with what she’d sold him. Questions over whether it had begun there had kept her awake more than a few nights.

She wondered how much sleep she’d ever get, again.

His chest dead center of the rifle’s crosshair, Erika squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

One to Julien, one to Saffron, one to Katie, seven after that, nine at Oliver. Twenty.

“Fuck!”

Dropping the magazine, she practically tore another from her jacket and jammed it into the magwell. G3-style rifles didn’t hold open on an empty magazine; she’d been too used to that. Too caught up in her own head to catch such a stupid mistake. Erika reached forward and charged a fresh round into the waiting chamber, and shouldered the rifle again.

The girl with the gun looked up at him, and there was a lurching, surreal, uncertain moment. Tom stared at her in disbelief. He smelled weed, saw the thick of a Destiny raid with enemies thick around them as their guns blazed, and now there was a real gun, now there was Erika with a body close to her.

"Eri-" he started, and then the gun had snapped up towards him. "-ka?" Tom finished, his voice rising into a squeal of terror, his eyes wide, his arms snapping up in front of his face (as though the bullet won't tear through your skin and bones, shatter you and leave you broken on the beach with your blood spilling out into the sea). He felt his fingers twitch, as though he could summon a spell to protect him, as though magic were real, as though miracles were real, as though-

No gunshot. No bullet. No pain. Tom blinked through his raised arms, saw Erika scrambling for another bullet. Tom stared in disbelief, his stomach (his soul) giving another of those sickening lurches. It didn't feel real. It felt like a videogame. She'd miscalculated, reloading to take out a troublesome enemy.

The nightmare he'd been running from loomed in front of him. The shadow loomed over him. Corpse faces crashed through Tom's mind.

Run run run go she'll shoot you go get out go you have to run

Charge her take her kill her reap her

The kami was in Tom's hand.

Tom tossed the kami to the sand, and slumped down onto his butt, his arms braced across his knees, staring at her as she shouldered her gun and aimed it back at him. "Erika?" he called again, his voice cracking. "I'm so...fucking tired." He buried his head in his hands and his eyes started to burn.

Her finger quivered near the trigger, before letting go and settling just above it. Erika kept the rifle trained on him, but her posture and expression softened. At first she’d lost sight of him, before seeing that he’d tossed his weapon aside and curled into the fetal position. She was reminded initially of Michael entering the Temple with a gun to his head - a gesture so strange and counterintuitive she couldn’t help but hesitate.

There wasn’t any looming threat here though. It wasn’t the same. Tom seemed like someone who had trouble keeping his head above water even back home. He didn’t talk about it much, but bits and pieces of conversations and his writing made it easy to guess. Whatever demons hounded him were kin to her own.

With the names tied to her own and Oliver’s body lying not all that far away, Erika didn’t have to guess what had taken the wind out of Tom’s sails this time. That wasn’t to say she understood - in fact, the reason she hadn’t yet pulled the trigger was precisely because she felt so confused.

Maybe it was selfish, but so was almost everything else she’d done since waking up. It wasn’t enough to have ammunition and supplies, and a will to live. A little voice in the back of her head relentlessly questioned every step she made, in light of everything she’d done. Survival motivated her to places she never thought she’d go. Doing things that were against everything she’d wanted to be and everything she thought she believed in.

It mattered that she didn’t feel there was a choice, because everything was what she knew fought for. What kind of a choice was sitting down and waiting to die?

Erika strode over to Tom, setting her foot on his weapon - some kind of sickle - and kicking it back behind her. She then stepped back, slowly kneeling down while she kept the rifle trained on him.

"You're... tired?"

Eyes wide, she waited for him to look up. A stray few strands of hair lingered at the corner of her vision, and she could only guess what she might’ve looked like to him with minute dots of blood spattered across her jacket.

"Tom, I made a mistake. You could have just run away, or fought back. Fight or flight, right? Why not?"

Her voice wavered.

"Why didn’t you just try?"

Her footsteps crunched slowly in the sand, closer and closer. Tom did not have to lift his head to feel the lethal weight of the gun, the shadow as heavy as any imagined reaper.

She was standing over him. He could feel that weight, just like he could feel that gun. His reaper, come at last. Erika fucking Stieglitz, of all fucking people.

"You're... tired?"

Tom looked up briefly enough to take in her ragged appearance, hollow with grief and violence, tinged with dirt and blood. The gun was still in her hands, so he buried his face again as she asked her questions. His eyes were burning, and he didn't want her to see. Christ, what the fuck did that matter? She'd kill him before this was over, and he knew he'd spill tears as well as blood.

But his head was still buried in his hands as he shook it slowly in denial. "What's the point?" he asked, and hated the fragile shaking in his voice. He felt that shaking down to his bones. Christ, he'd felt it for so long, all his substance spread out to the surface, leaving nothing beneath. He was raw with pain, raw with grief, raw with fear. He didn't want to die, but living like this felt fucking unbearable.

"I've been trying, Erika," he whispered. "I've been trying. Trying to be more, trying to listen, trying to be there, trying to be like something out of fiction, trying not be so fucking scared all the fucking time Erika it never stops it never stops it never..."

He remembered when he'd first awoken, laughing mad and cocky, aspirations of collecting his friend's stories before they died, like he tried to weave meaning from his grandfather's agony, like he tried to make meaning from his sister's depression and his mother's pale, tear-strewn face and his grandmother's angry denial, always trying to make meaning from the chaos around him. But there was no fucking meaning anymore. There was a bomb on his neck, and Erika Stieglitz, who he'd yelled at over PSN, who he'd workshopped with, who he'd fought weed and two Tramedol from, was bloodstained and monstrous and standing over him with a fucking gun, unable to understand why he didn't want to run anymore, he just wanted to be numb, he just wanted not to fell.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do, Erika?" Tom demanded, jerking his hands down, staring up at her. "What if I ran? I get away from you until the next psycho shoots me? Or I...I kill you, and..."

His eyes flickered to the kami she'd kicked away, and waved vaguely at it. "I don't...wanna do that." He said, staring at it. "I don't wanna imagine what you...what you look like when..." He shuddered violently, wrapping his arms around himself against a revulsion like ice in his veins. "For what?" he whispered. "How could I..." His eyes darted up towards her. "How can you?"

She listened to Tom go on, bristling at the word psycho. Erika didn’t interrupt him, didn’t correct him on that point. Nothing would’ve sounded more hollow than to claim otherwise with a fresh, bullet-ridden corpse lying in the background.

Tom almost didn’t seem to know why he’d failed to save himself, he only knew what it was he didn’t want to do. Apparently that didn't include dying.

He spoke as if she’d wanted any of this. Erika shook her head, a tinge of anger in her voice as she spoke from behind the barrel of her rifle. The air in the yard or two between them seemed entirely too still, unmoved by the words passing through it. Time seemed to slow down a bit. They both knew how this would end. What use were words?

“How can’t you? You’re supposed keep going, because there isn’t anything else. If you ran you’d have an option. There’d be something. If you wanted the chance to be different, man…”

She narrowed her eyes, almost straining to see what part of him didn’t understand this.

“This isn’t an escape. It won’t make the fear stop, it just makes you stop. It’s not anything. It’s not relief, it’s not freedom. It’s just the end, Tom. I’ve seen Death from a few different angles now. It’s all the same. It doesn’t matter how it happens, you’re just gone. Like before you were born. Life is… delaying that. Spiting it. No matter how bad things get.”

A tremor started in her leg, and she shifted onto that knee so it would stop. The gun remained steady. Speaking her fears out loud, even after facing them, still wasn’t easy.

“I can do it because no matter how bad it gets, it’s still less scary to me than facing that. It’s the only thing that I can do. Just giving up, it’s not right. I… I have to, Tom.”

Only a few minutes ago she was staring down Oliver’s bullet-ravaged face. That had happened too quickly to really take it all in. Somehow, staring at Tom and waiting for the inevitable almost seemed worse.

Waiting for the inevitable?

Erika’s lower lip quivered, as she held back tears. She didn’t want her vision to blur; eyedrops were in short supply, as were her spare contacts. It wasn’t right to seem sad when she wasn’t the one who was about to die. Something she heard earlier in the day came to mind, back in the Temple.

“It was assisted suicide, nominally, but really it was like... I talked her into letting me shoot her."

...

"I held her hand and I told her it was okay”

What she just told him wouldn’t bear him any comfort, and she knew there was no room to change her mind. People like Quinn might not be quick about it. The island, if it was what killed him, certainly wouldn’t. In no way did she feel like it was a kindness, what she was thinking of; maybe for someone in Tom's position, it might've been.

Maybe that was what Camila had been thinking when Michael shot her.

“I can make this easier. It doesn’t have to be like Oliver, over there.”