Survival Of The Fittest

((Continued from: Stand Up, Boy #53))

Duncan had clearly underestimated just how tall the lighthouse building was, but as he finally arrived there, it was obvious that he had underestimated its height, and size. Though undoubtedly, a lot of that would just be a stairwell.

Shortly after that girl had joined up with him, he beckoned her to be silent. The door of the building had been left wide open. But what was to say that somebody wans't lurking inside, waiting to pounce?

He entered the building, holding his frisbee like some kind of shield. Beckoning absolute silence, he listened carefully for any unfamiliar signs of life. Silence responded, the faint sound of the sea lapping over the shore far below.

"I think we're alone," he said. "But check the place just in case. If I get shot... then just run. If you die... then I'm sorry, and it's been nice knowing you, even for such a short length of time. I'll check this way."

Trying to keep silent, he turned to his right to investigate that direction, however, he let out a loud cry on finding the mutilated body of a boy off to one side, near the exit; the open door had clearly aired out the smell of the body. Vile. but how many more bodies would he find in his investigation of the building?

((Also coming from Open Field))

Angharad looked up at the immense building she found herself standing in front of. Pretty impressive. So they were to plan in here, eh? She gingerly stepped inside after Duncan. What a great shield he makes, she thought with a smile.

At his comment, Angharad raised her eyebrows slightly. Nice going, Major, way to rally the troops... Besides, she didn't plan on dying just yet, if at all. Shaking her head slightly, she walked inside, only to see a dead body, the first she'd seen since she'd gotten here.

So this is real then...

Resisting the urge to vomit, Angharad closed her eyes. Hoping that Duncan was right, and that they indeed were alone, she looked away from the body and back at the boy standing in front of her.

"Ok, I'll go over here then," she replied, chosing an area to search that was as far away from the body as possible.

Duncan was the first to find the stairs. Looking upward, he noticed another room was near the top. Carefully clambering up the steps, he noticed a familiar coppery stench eminating from up there. On seeing what was there, he felt an overwhelming urge to vomit.

The body of some girl was lying on the ground, her eyes glassy and dead. Her neck was ripped open, an enormous pool of blood staining her clothes and skin, matting her flesh, forming a clotted, crimson pool around the corpse.

Looking upward to avert his eyes, he spotted something lurking in the top corner of the room: a security camera. They had filmed this girl's neck explode. Bet that was a killer in the ratings.

Which is when Duncan's mind got back in gear. He needed something to use, something that would hopefully be better than the frisbee... isn't that the girl's bag over there? He carefully stepped over the body like it were some kind of mass of spiders that would leap up and grab him if he got too close to it, and then found the bag he was looking for. It was empty. Bugger.

He turned around. There was a lump in the girl's back. Maybe she had holstered her weapon upon her person? But that would mean... that would mean touching it... the body.

He touched it. The fabric collapsed limply against her back. There was a mark there. Something had clearly been resting against her back that had since been removed. Someone's robbed the corpse.

Just like you almost did, Duncan. It was irrelevant; he needed to get back to Angharad. He called her name and returned to the staircase.

Wincing slightly as she began to investigate the outside of the Lighthouse, Angharad gripped her cat claws tightly. What if someone did jump out and try and attack her? How would she be able to defend herself? Especially if her attacker was as big as her companion was... Angharad quietly thanked fate that Duncan wasn't playing, as she continued to creep along.

She stopped at the sight of two figures on the floor. Her hand clapped up to her mouth to stop herself from screaming as she saw them. One of them appeared to have had her throat ripped out, and the other had markings around his neck, suggesting suffocation. There were also some bloodstains on his chest... She lowered her hand and crept closer, kneeling down to inspect the damage.

So this was the end, the finished product. This was how she was intended to end up, and if she wasn't careful, how she would end up. It was the reason she was here.

She glanced them over to find nothing that could come of use to either her or Duncan. Obviously someone had seen to that, as well. She would never know that the person responsible for this mess was the person who had also intended to kill her back at the Lookout Point, or that would have made her hate him even more.

Hearing her name called out, she jumped up, never taking her eyes off the bodies.

"Yeah, I'm here," she called back.

"Right," Duncan said as he dashed down the stairs, meeting her at the base. "You haven't encountered anyone here, right?"
After a mumble of assent, Duncan scanned the room again. being in the situation was nothing compared to reading about it, or hearing about the terrors through archives, let alone the selected cuts one could watch on television. No, this was something extreme, a continuing nightmare that they had only began to endure.

"Should we head up to the lookout at the top? I haven't checked that yet. I got distracted by a... by another body in the bedroom upstairs. It looked like her collar had blown."
Duncan put his hand automatically to his neck and rubbed it. He knew that there must be some way of fighting the system, and that perhaps the girl could help him if he told her all he knew.

An exploding collar? Yeouch. That was a nasty way to die... not that there were many good ways to die in this situation, but...

Angharard nodded slowly. "There was no one there when I looked. No one alive, anyway..."

Her mind cast back to the two corpses she had found just seconds away from where she was stood. "Two dead bodies. Looked like someone had had a party..."

She shuddered slightly. It chilled her to think that there were people running around out there actually enjoying what they had been forced to do. It scared her even more to think what might happen should she run into one... shaking her head slightly, she looked up the stairs.

"Lookout sounds solid. Let's go."

Standing on the balcony at the top, Duncan could see the island bread before him. The wind whipped through his hair, and accross his clothes. The two of them truly were alone. Alone with the exception of another camera that was hanging from the inside, above where the lamp and rotating mirror should have been housed.

"It's a nice view," Duncan said in spite of himself. "Really nice island. Shame it's a mass grave."

He sighed miserably, then spoke again. "I'm not sure if I've said, but I've encountered this Survival of the Fittest thing during a research project at college. This is why I think they took me, but I'm guessing."

This was his biggest fear: curiosity was about to kill the cat. "Want to know what i know? It's not much, but maybe it'll help us do... something."

It would make for a perfect movie scene, Angharad thought with a smile. A pair of strangers, standing on a balcony, the wind whipping through their hair... the guy turns to the girl, the girl looks up... and the guy tells the girl exactly what he knows about all the horror and bloodshed that's going on around them, and how they can stop it.

Well, apart from the last part.... she thought dryly. Looking out over the island, she felt she had to agree with Duncan; the view was quite spectacular. She turned to look up at the boy, having listened to what he had just said.

"College, eh? Well, I didn't figure you were my age..." she briefly wondered if the rest of the people on this island were also older than her. Perhaps they were all different ages, perhaps pensioners had been thrown in as well, really get an interesting mix. She was just starting to imagine a situation where she was facing an OAP armed with a tommy gun when Duncan interrupted her vision.

Yeah, she wanted to know... nodding, she walked away from the edge of the balcony to lean on the wall. "If you think it'll help us out, then yeah, I'd like to know...anything to help me get my head around what the hell is happening."

Duncan also leaned back, against the edge of the lantern room and sighed once more. He took hold of his collar and thought how he was going to do this.

"Right, you've seen the cameras that are dotted around the island? They film everything that happens here, and relay it as a feed to television," Duncan began. "I'm not exactly sure about how they do it, as I checked two sources, but one of them said it was relayed from overseas, to be transmitted on national TV. The other said it was all done internally to the country. Whatever. The point is, we're on an island, where every single movement is being monitored."

He ignored Angharad's snort of distaste, and continued. "Now, for some reason I can't understand, the US government hasn't really tried to intervene in the running of SOTF. I don't know why, perhaps it's due to the fact they can't or something, but-- forgive me for saying this-- I'm cynical about that. The American government and its agencies can elbow their way into anything they put their mind to." Duncan paused, struck with a thought. "This is total speculation, but I think they either are going to do something about it, but not yet for some reason, or are trying to hunt down the source of the problem. Because this counts as terrorism, I think."

"Now, they say that these collars explode under certain circumstances, like staying in the wrong place too much or trying to remove them. A friend of mine, see, had this theory that that was a lie, just to make people do what they were told. But..." Duncan gestured toward the stairwell. He was clearly referring to the girl downstairs whose neck had been ripped apart. That was real, too.

"That's more or less all i know that we weren't told already. We really need to sit down and figure out how to go about this. My dad once said that there is no circumstance that you can't handle when you use your mind. I'm just hoping he's right. But we should eat; I don't see how we can think of a plan on an empty stomach. Let's just be careful of those cameras when we do, yeah?"

Angharad stared, trying to grasp what had just been said. It was a little bit too much for her to understand all at once, and the idea of sitting down to plan was welcomed in her mind. Sitting down would give her chance to absorb what had just been said, and to decide whether she should trust this guy, whether she should believe him, whether she should place her life almost in his hands.

She looked up at him, his tall frame towering over hers. Nibbling her lip, she nodded.

"Ok. Sure." Casting her mind to her food rations in her rucksack, she looked around. "Any ideas where we should make with the eating? I mean, here could be perfectly fine, but I don't know if we're in appropriate dining company..." she said, nodding in the same direction as Duncan had before, indicating the presence of several corpses.

Duncan was reminded of the bodies that were so nearby.

"I really don't think that moving somewhere else will be of any use. There are going to be bodies all over this island. We may as well stay here, find one of the rooms and stick it out for a while."

At any rate, Duncan took out his map... he needed to get a message to Angharad if any plan was going to work. But he needed to work out just how to manage it.

He was right. There would be bodies all over the island, she would just have to get used to the fact that people were dying here, similarly she'd have to get used to the smell. Gulping slightly, she looked around for a room for them to eat in.

Pushing open a door of a nearby room, she sighed with relief. There appeared to be no bodies in here.

"Hey," she called out to Duncan, who appeared to be opening up his map. "We can camp it out here."

The room appeared to be a store-room of some kind, as it had bits of lighthouse equipment in it, such as bulbs, mirror cleaner and various other gadgetry taht Duncan didn't understand. There was a small window that let in a ray of light, and... yep! Another camera in the top corner. There was what looked like a table in the corner, that could be used to sit down (presuming those chairs weren't as rotten and damp as they appeared to be) and eat. Eat bread. What the hell was filling about that?

"There was a gas stove in one room, wan't there? Maybe I could find a tin and get some food whipped up. Proper food, as this bread looks like it's made of cardboard. Want me to see if I can whip something up?"

As he said this, his hand subtly palmed a pencil from the table, and pulled it toward his person. He needed to get a message to Angharad, but had to be seriously careful about how he did so.

Angharad nodded silently. Her thoughts crept back to the bread in her rucksack; not the most appealling of foods. And she was kinda hungry.

She wasn't sure how this was going to go. Although she was more than keen to take out the bastards that had forced her into this situation, she was slightly cynical as to how they were going to go about it. If what Duncan had said was true (she caught a glimpse of the camera hanging overhead as she pondered), then it would be nearly impossible to stage something this big without being noticed, and as a result, killed. What exactly was the plan?

She turned to face Duncan, and was about to ask this very question when she noticed his hand move briefly across the table. She wasn't sure what he'd done, but his stealth jolted her back to her senses. If he did have a plan, a really good idea would be to ask him to tell her right in front of the cameras and microphones... Angharad scolded herself inwardly.

"Sure. I'll come help you find some food..." she answered.

Duncan jumped to his feet and proceeded to the small kitchen area, being careful to avoid looking at the bodies. All he needed to do was rummage into the cupboards and hope for the best.

Picking a low one, he saw a tin that was sitting at the back, fogotten about. Dog food. Chicken flavour, apparently. Whatever, it's not important. He carefully teased off the label with one hand, whilst putting his other hand into his pocket, withdrawing the pencil. The label teased free from the tin. He needed privacy right now, and if it meant sticking his head and shoulders into a cupboard, then so be it. He scribbled the note on the reverse side of the label, then straightened up, acting like nothing had happened, even though Angharad was giving him a strange look.