Survival Of The Fittest

((Darlene Silva continued from That's When I Reach For My Revolver))

It was hard for Darlene to decide which was the strongest of the pains that rolled through her body on the long, slow descent from the waterfall cave, but what was not at all difficult was to pick which she hated with the greatest passion. Forget about the stinging of her scalp, the throb of her bruised and slashed shoulder, the burning of her ear. No, the most intolerable agony came from her glasses. Darlene was pretty sensitive to change, and she'd had the same pair of glasses for a really long time, since maybe eighth grade. She'd even gotten the lenses changed when her prescription got worse. The glasses were so much her norm that they might as well have actually been part of her head.

When mustache hit her with the bat and sent them flying, he'd also bent one of the arms real bad. Darlene had twisted it back into shape, and had at the time considered herself lucky it didn't snap or come off. But what was not lucky was that even a little thing like that entirely changed how the glasses sat on her face, where the pressure was and how they felt, and the result was that they were suddenly all pinchy, digging into the left side of her head exactly at the same spot they rubbed her poor mangled ear, so she had this little pinpoint of soreness and headache and she couldn't even rub at it without making everything a whole lot worse by upsetting her more severe injuries. And besides, rubbing didn't even help. She'd tried! Twice!

The early morning was dark and murky and Darlene was in the trees by the edge of the lake, looking and lurking. She didn't even really expect to find Jonah. She never had, and she especially didn't now that it was clear nothing was going to go right ever again, but there was nothing else to do so she was just following the plan still, with a few penciled-in changes like going solo and with a whole lot less hope. It was something to do, and besides, she couldn't sleep. She hadn't even tried.

Her eyes burned. Her head felt just a little like it was on fire, and even with the blood to contrast her whole body felt grosser than ever primarily because it was hot and she was still sticky and sweaty. She might've just gone and jumped in the lake a day ago, but now she had all these cuts and she knew lakes were full of bacteria and parasites and she was going to die no matter what probably but if she had any say she'd pick something besides swelling up from infection and melting into a puddle of pus.

She didn't really expect to find anything at this time of day, so when she did hear words, it took her off-guard. It took a moment for them to filter through the thick, soupy haze that had settled over her mind when it came to things like verbal communication. The last person she had talked to was the dog. She missed it quite a lot. The last person who'd talked to her was Stephanie, who she didn't miss at all.

The voice was uttering a goodbye. Darlene was standing in a thicket, looking out, and she didn't know the boy whose silhouette was just a person-shaped shadow in black but what else was new? He was saying goodbye but there wasn't anyone to bid farewell to, just a...

Just a patch of recently-disturbed earth.

He had a chainsaw. Darlene didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the announcements, but she knew absolutely one hundred percent for certain that people got killed with a chainsaw, because it was like an especially horrible movie. The bike by his side was actually weirder, but at the same time less scary. But one thing being pleasantly befuddling did nothing to burn off the overall sensation of terror. Darlene's heart hammered so hard she could feel it throbbing in her temple in the spot her glasses pushed on, each beat piercing through her skull.

By her side, her hand squeezed the gun as tight as she'd ever squeezed anything, trembling terribly.

((Jonathan Meyers continued from Where You Are))

Jonathan was trying to think of where to go first. Where would the best places be for him to find Emmett or Ivy or Myles or even Garren? Honestly he knew that deep down he would be avoiding people for as long as he could.... But now he definitely couldn't just sit back from all the carnage around him and the fact that there were not that many people left around. It really did feel like he was powerless. He was going to do the right thing by taking Emmett out and then he was going to do something bad. He knew that he shouldn't but revenge was on his mind and he couldn't stop thinking about how Myles had taken Declyn's life. It hurt still to even think about Declyn who was a few inches underground away from him.

Jonathan continued to move forward and he realized that it felt so odd for him to be all alone again. He never thought it was felt so lonely to be alone again and he knew that he could be at a disadvantage by himself. He let out a small sigh and he stopped walking for a few moments, making sure to take in his surroundings. It really was too quiet. He never thought that he would be missing company, but now he was.

"Damn...." He muttered softly to himself and he shook his head, feeling already exhausted and he knew that he would have to find somewhere to rest sooner or later. "What am I even supposed to do now?"

He sighed once more and he took a brief step forward, not noticing a presence watching over him.

The boy stopped and said something to himself, but even though it wasn't that much quieter than anything he'd uttered before, Darlene couldn't make out the words. It wasn't just the pounding of her heart reverberating through her body; her focus was also affected. Contradictory impulses and memories pulled her in all different directions, and there was nobody to help her parse them or decide on the right choice. She didn't even have the morale boost of consulting the dog.

The trees shivered and shifted against each other, almost imperceptibly because there was no discernible breeze, just a settled humidity that weighed down everything, but the leaves rasped together still. The only light came from the stars and moon and the distant glow of oncoming sunrise, and that was faint. Darlene was still not used to how the world looked without the touch of electricity.

Maybe this was like at the caves again. No, probably it was. This guy had the chainsaw. Darlene was almost totally sure they didn't double people up. That meant that was the saw that had torn through people like in a midnight movie, and that had to be a grave he was near. If there was light she would see the blood spray splashed across the weapon, the faint scraps of skin and hair caught in its teeth, maybe a loose vein or tendon caught like speckles of food unnoticed in a fat man's mustache. She was drawn to it, to bathe the boy in illumination and reveal the horrible truth to the universe, to shine the light that she had failed to at the caves and in so doing somehow reverse the flow on fate and undo her mistake. But there would be no light. Darlene had pitched the flashlight over the edge of the waterfall, for all the good it had done her.

And really, it wasn't seeing that would make things different. If all she had done was seen the boy lurking in the caves, but everything else had been the same, that would be no better. It was the result that was so wrong, not the process.

She took two steps closer. The undergrowth rustled, but it blurred together with the scrape of the leaves all around. Darlene was kind of clumsy, but she was quiet. Sometimes it felt like she could step out of the world for a moment or two and pass unseen by everyone. Sometimes it wasn't even a choice—she'd sit there in the corner of class with her hand up because for once she had something clever to say, and the teacher would just skip right past her again and again, only noticing after Darlene got fed up and started to let her arm wave back and forth like a cattail in the wind, wiggling her fingers just a bit. And of course by the time that worked she'd always forgotten what she wanted to contribute.

There was a chance that she was wrong.

She'd learned that at the cave, too. The boy who attacked them thought that both she and Max were other people, which was why he struck to begin with, maybe, or maybe he was crazy and that was just his crazy excuse. Darlene didn't know the name of the guy who'd killed with the chainsaw, and she didn't know the name of the guy in front of her, in fact she didn't even know the face of this guy, couldn't place him in school because it was too dark.

But Darlene knew who he wasn't. He wasn't Jonah. He didn't sound like Jonah and he was taller and wispier. He wasn't Max, because Max was gone. He was built a little like Lucas, but he held himself differently, and if he was Lucas then where was Kelly? And also, if he was Lucas Darlene wasn't bothered quite the same way.

So, she wasn't wrong in the only way that still counted.

Darlene's breath was slowing, deepening. Her arms snapped up, holding the revolver in front of her the way Beryl had showed her, with both hands. The barrel pointed at the back of the figure, making a line between her eye and the spot smack dab between his shoulders. Her intentions were steady and true, but the nose of the gun made loops and squiggles. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter. She'd decided.

She'd already pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened, of course, because the revolver had not been cocked. But the pull was enough. It sealed the intention, and from there everything was inevitable.

Darlene's thumbs found the hammer, pulled it back, and let it snap forward, never releasing the trigger.

She'd seen something like this before in movies, except in movies it was smooth and quick, a whole hand dedicated to flicking it, almost like a machine gun, while in real life the gun jerked crazily and she had a way harder time absorbing the kick like Beryl had taught her, but it didn't matter because she was already thumbing the hammer again even as the echoing of the first shot split the predawn still and sent birds launching abruptly from their perches, some large animal crashing unseen through the undergrowth, a shower of leaves from somewhere above and ahead, and the gun jumped and spat three, four, five, six times in semi-rapid succession and only as it quieted did Darlene realize she'd somewhere in there started yelling, a wordless inarticulate howl as she emptied the cylinder at the boy from behind.

There was no time to take in what had happened, what she'd done. No time to see the results, or lack thereof. She could imagine the roar of a chainsaw, the screams of pain or rage or protest louder than her own—was she imagining them? No, she thought, no, they were real. Weren't they?—and already the pounding pain of her heartbeat was setting a pace as she turned and bolted into the woods once more, the gun held now only in her right hand because she needed her left free for balance, crashing through the plants and kicking up puffs of dead leaves and dry grass and dirt, unsure if she'd just killed someone and unsure if he was coming now to kill her but for just this moment unconcerned either way.

It hadn't been like the caves again. She'd made sure of that, and that was what she'd needed.

((Darlene Silva continued in Phantasm))

Jonathan heard the gunshots going off and he instantly found himself ducking and he dropped the bike without a second thought while trying to rush for cover. He felt a sharp stinging on the tip of his ear and all he could hear was a long flash of static, a screaming noise - a girl screaming...? - and footsteps fading away. He smashed his back against a tree and he was panting a little out of hysteria, his chest was heaving up and down at a fast succession. Praying to the gods that he was not in the line of fire of the person who had shot at him and.... and....

….

Someone-someone really shot at me. I could have really died....

"What the fuck...?" He said at first in pure confusion and then it took him a second and a half to feel the frustration and anger setting in at the stupidity of it all. He was getting sick and tired of being useless and he didn't want to die yet until he could do what he wanted to do. "Goddamn.... Goddammit...!"

He was sneering now and he reached up to his ear, feeling a bit of stickiness and he hissed inwardly. A bit of his left ear was missing and he realized that he had been inches away from getting a bullet in the back of his skull. That would have been such a waste if he had died like that and he was glad that he had been quick enough to even react to whomever that had been. Well, he knew that it had been a girl who wanted to backstab him-

"Backstab, huh?" He murmured softly to him with a slight smirk forming on his face.

Teresa....

He wasn't sure if she had a gun or not now, but he wasn't going to take any chance and he knew that he had to keep on moving with new goals in his mind. He moved over to the bike cautiously after a few minutes and he picked it up with a look of distain, getting himself ready to move onward.

1) Find Emmett and stop him from going down a murder-suicide path.
2) Kill Ivy to get revenge on Myles.
3) Find Teresa and see if I can find out if it was her who tried to kill me.
4) Find Declyn and Drew's friends and... and...
5) ….

((Jonathan Meyers continued in Die Walküre))