Survival Of The Fittest

((Diego Larrosa continues from Silent Key))

Red explosions were imprinted on the back of Diego's eyelids.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw them. The same event replayed from different angles, at different speeds. There were details he picked out now and then that he hadn't noticed the first couple hundred times. Roughly an hour into his attempt at sleep, for example, while the sky behind the leaves above him was colored dark blue by the very last rays of sunlight, he noticed that the backpack had exploded separately from Henry's body. In the middle of the night, in the pitch black, he noticed that one of Henry's eyes, although sent flying sideways for several feet, had still been intact after the moment of explosion. Some time between these two recollections, he recalled seeing a flash of light ahead of the explosion, shining in its own way, and he realized that that must have been one of the shards of metal currently embedded in his cheek, currently twisting its edges somewhere deep in his flesh.

Sleep was difficult, notwithstanding the half-nightmares, half-waking memories. He'd tried, after minutes of crying, whimpering, hesitating, to remove the shrapnel from his face, and he failed. The shards remained in his face, ripping apart new strands of tissue every time he shifted. He would try again the next morning, when there was light. But, for now, he laid on his back, trying to ignore the pulsating stings emanating from his new wounds. He preferred sleeping on his side, but resting in that position would further disturb the wounds.

He was in his boxers only for the night, as had become the routine the past couple of nights. It was all he could do to lessen the chokehold of the muggy air. He would have shed off more, but he was aware that someone could always just kill him in his sleep if they were so inclined, if he were so unlucky, and there was some deep indignity, shame in dying naked he refused to allow become reality. He used his bloodied, muddied jeans as a sort of sleep mask. His bag, clunky, filled with hard, squared objects like first aid kits and cracker tins, was his pillow, the sole attempt he could make at providing neck support. Somewhere beneath his head was the shovel that had killed his best friend. The idea did not help him sleep.

Cricks developed in his neck, even with the pillow. He wrapped himself around the grenade launcher, the main form of protection he had right now, and its edges and corners jabbed into him, gave him bruises. He had hoped that these minor issues, small aches, would just subside in the background of it all, but they just compounded, added to the growing array of pains he was enduring. First world problems didn't stop being problems, even in crisis.

Despite the memories, despite the pains, he still tried to sleep. The night was one of those restless forever nights, one of those nights that seemed to stretch on without limit. He would shift his position as much as he could, given his condition, and the grenade launcher would push and shove against him.

He opened his eyes, and it was still dark. He could swear he saw explosions in the dark where the leaves should have been. He closed his eyes.

He opened his eyes. There had been a rustling in the leaves behind. He had learned to stay still after the last couple of encounters with nocturnal wildlife. If they were anything but, if they were a different kind of predator, then they would make themselves apparent in front of ostensibly asleep prey soon. The rustling being made a cooing sound. He didn't know the name of the bird, animals had never been his specialty. He knew the tree he laid under to be a mahogany tree. He closed his eyes.

He opened his eyes. He thought he'd heard a voice. Female. His eyes were wide open. He listened. It was another bird cooing, at roughly the same frequency of a human voice. He closed his eyes, felt something wet along the sides of his face. He missed Cam.

He opened his eyes. Saw the silhouette of the leaves against a dark blue sky.

He sat up. Behind him, the sky was lightening.

It was day. Inexplicably, miraculously, it was day.

In normal circumstances, he would have laid back down, tried to savor what little sleep he could salvage before the full light of day came upon him, and it was impressive that he could even remember what normal circumstances were like.

There was nothing to salvage anyways. His body refused to sleep, and he would just have to accept it. He stood up, his body swayed. His eyes felt heavy. He stretched, and the wounds on his arms stretched and tore along with him. It was a lighter stinging than before, more bearable. A fact of life now. He tugged on his jeans, tucked the gun in his waistband. Slung his grenade launcher around his neck, his bag around his shoulders. And he set off.

The direction didn't matter, he thought in a much more measured manner than yesterday. The depth of the woods made it difficult for players to find people to kill within, but it also meant that anyone could come from anywhere. Buildings were more well-trafficked, but at least he'd know where people could potentially come from.

A bed would be nice too. A cushioned surface, an actual pillow, a blanket. Some form of cover around his bare torso.

He walked at a snail's pace. His legs still burned from all the running he'd done yesterday. There was still the urge to sprint mindlessly. Literally run from his mistakes. But he didn't have the energy to do so. His rations were starting to run a bit low again. The idea made him worried. So he walked. The morning stretched on at first. Nothing but trees, the occasional noise made by the local fauna. One form of endless nothingness replaced by another. At least there were things to look at. At least the explosions were limited to half-second blinks.

Eventually, he saw glimmers of blue in the distance. His heart started beating slightly faster. It wasn't the ocean, because his collar wasn't beeping, because the air wasn't salty, because he'd forbidden it from showing up again.

He wondered if any of them were still there. The people he'd fired the grenade launcher upon first, the people by the lake shore. If some of them were still bleeding out.

His pace slowed. He dilated his pupils, waited to see any hints of movement. He detected none. Maybe some of them were just remains, as scattered as Henry had been.

He needed water. He was down to one and a half bottles. Supplies depleted fast in this climate. It hadn't rained for a week, he guessed.

Slowly, he approached the lake. He saw bodies off to the corner. They were paler than the people by the lakeside, and they were more numerous. He would approach them later. Something else had caught his eye, and he could attend to it now that he knew no one else was around.

This part of the lake was still enough so that, for the first time since he'd woken up on the island, he was finally able to lay eyes on his own face.

His eyes looked even more sunken into his face than usual, like white circles peering out from dark wells. Like the eye sockets of a skull. He'd liked that about himself, before. Thought it made him look dramatic, badass, under the right lighting, the right angles. He hadn't had much issue with his appearance, in all honesty. He thought he looked slightly handsome, if a bit too thin, a bit too small.

One of his favorite characters from any literary work was Nico from the Percy Jackson series, son of Hades. He too was a small, unassuming kid that had been through a lot, he too was a kid with black hair and deep eyebags. He had a nice little growth arc, he eventually become one of the big badass heroes, and he was gay. And, really, it was mostly just the latter thing that endeared Nico to Diego, because it was the first time Diego had seen a gay hero in any book, the first time he'd seen anyone like him acknowledged positively, and if Nico was gay and thin and gaunt like Diego, then maybe Diego could be like him eventually.

That had been too much to hope for. Nico hadn't ever really done anything like Diego had.

He looked into the lake, and saw another corpse. One of the things Nico would be fighting, probably.

The only difference between him and the other bodies by the lakeshore was the presence of coagulated streams of blood on his face, leaking from the three shrapnel wounds on his face. He'd wanted to scrape them off before, but that would have required moving the wounds, twisting the knives. But, if he let the shrapnel stay inside, his face would become infected, probably, and at best it would leave him some form of disfigured, at worst, it would leave him dead.

He dug his fingers into his face, and he screamed.

It was over with eventually. He'd disinfected the wounds on his face by pouring rubbing alcohol and betadine onto them, once the shrapnel had been removed, and that had also involved a lot of pain and tears, but it was done. The wounds were covered by bloody gauze pads taped onto his face. There was blood smeared onto his face and hands, but that could be rubbed off eventually.

He replenished his water bottles, disinfected them with iodine tablets, and washed his hands, in that order. He wanted to take a bath, but it felt odd stripping down in front of the corpses. They were all laid face-up, not sideways, but it felt like they were watching somehow.

He wandered over to them, swaying, walking on unsure footing. Morbid curiosity. The corpses were all rendered slightly less recognizable by days of decay, but they were recognizable, nonetheless. Cecil and Adonis were there, but they were irrelevant, to be frank.

It was the first time he'd seen Drew since they boarded the bus over eleven days ago. But, it wasn't really Drew, not in the sense he knew him. Not the baby-faced dog lover he'd been friends with. The curly black hair was still there, but it was attached to a too-rounded face, distorted by almost a week of decomposition. His arm in particular looked fucked, with flies and maggots feasting on what might have been a wound. Diego breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell, but it entered him regardless. Drew's corpse had been left out the longest, and Diego knew this because he specifically remembered hearing Drew's name before any of the others assembled here.

He felt an obligation to say something, some eulogy, some words of remembrance, but words escaped him at the moment. He hadn't spoken since the argument with Henry. Words felt alien to his mouth. And, all the bodies here were arranged, deliberately posed with their arms crossed over their chests. There were flowers around all the bodies. Whoever had done this had cared for them. They had said, done enough for them, he felt.

There was a game, a Japanese visual novel that Diego had played before, the name escaped him. The game also involved a bunch of doomed high schoolers trapped in some unreachable realm, although the premise was a lot more supernatural than whatever this was, whatever they were in. And, in that game, the spirits of those who died in that realm were bound to their corpses, doomed to endure the pain of their final moments, left to watch the world from wherever they passed.

He blinked. He winced.

Diego didn't know if that was based off of any element of Shintoism or Japanese folklore, he'd never bothered to research it. But, he wondered if that was how it was like here. If Drew was watching Diego watch him. He wondered what Drew had to think of Diego now. Maybe things would have been okay after Mike, still, if Cam and Theo were able to accept him, but what about after Cam? The people at the lake? Henry? Cam had said her love was unconditional, and maybe that went the same for the others, but at what point was there a limit, if any?

The back of his throat felt dry, even though he didn't feel thirsty. The question repeated itself in his mind, the urge to speak for Drew continued, but it all felt blocked by something else in the background, something in the furthest back away from Diego. He'd tried not to give it any notice, but it was hard not to.

Green had always been such a stupid hair color.

He walked past the other bodies, towards the body of Lorenzo Tavares.

His arms were also crossed, he too was surrounded by flowers. Lorenzo had died days after Drew. That meant these bodies were specifically collected and deposited here by someone. That meant that, just as someone had cared for Drew and Cecil and Adonis, someone had also cared for Lorenzo. Someone had crossed his arms, gone searching in the forest for flowers, placed these flowers around his body. Someone had paid Lorenzo proper respects. Someone had mourned him.

Diego didn't think he deserved that.

He'd set off after Lorenzo, followed him across the forest, stuck with him for days for several reasons. First was because he loved him, or the idea of him. Lorenzo's green hair, vibrant, unmistakable, had always gotten caught on the edge of Diego's vision, had always turned his gaze from elsewhere. His swagger, his audacity had always been something so unreachable for Diego, and maybe that was part of the appeal. Maybe that was what sealed the deal, what kept him walking through the rain all those days ago. Lorenzo had shown up at the church, and Diego had realized right then and there that the unattainable might just be attainable. He could be just as rogue and fearless as he'd always wanted to be.

To be fearless on this island was to be heartless. Diego thought he'd understood that after Chris' death. He knew that to survive this island was to numb yourself to its horrors, at least for a little while, and that was another reason why Diego had come with him. Lorenzo had killed already by that point, and despite that, because of that, Diego went off with him.

He knew what he needed to do, but he didn't understand it, just as he knew before that death was a horrific thing, but he hadn't understood it until he'd seen the blood dripping out of Ty's teeth, the bones splintering in Emil's face.

And, well, he'd gotten everything he ever wanted now. He was just as heartless as Lorenzo. He was just as feared as Lorenzo. He was just as monstrous as Lorenzo. He knew what he'd wanted, but he hadn't understood it.

Their clothes matched. They were both shirtless, wearing nothing but jeans, shoes, the collar. Ty would've said they were on the same team. Diego wanted to vomit.

There were several gay boys in Hunter High. All of the dead boys assembled in front of Diego, actually, had had boyfriends at one point or another. Funny, that. Lucky them, he almost thought. And yet, he'd chosen the single worst person out of everyone here to love. Declyn had always just been there, he could have longed after him instead. Drew had just been there, he'd been the nicest person Diego knew, he could have chosen him. Literally anyone else would have been fine. But, out of all the boys to long for, out of all the boys to want, he'd chosen the one person who didn't need the island to become a monster. Out of all the boys in Hunter High, he'd chosen the fucking rapist.

Lorenzo had gained more wounds after he'd abandoned Diego. There were various cuts across the upper half of his body, especially around his hands. There was the obvious one, right in the center of his chest, complete with a ceramic shard sticking out, he thought. It was difficult to tell, with the flies picking at it, engulfing the wound. If it wasn't that that had killed him, it was probably the bones in his neck, all bent wrong, all fucked. Lorenzo's body in general had been left worse for wear by time. His skin was mottled, bruised all over. He was slightly bloated. Less so than Drew, but enough that the lines that marked his abs weren't there anymore. His olive skin was now a lighter hue, with hints of green and yellow where the bruises weren't.

He'd wanted to be as hot as Lorenzo too, Diego remembered. He could finally say with absolute certainty that that was true, now. Another thing he'd asked for, granted.

He wasn't laughing. He'd tried.

There was pain on his face. Obvious, really, given the fatal injuries. But also his mouth was open, as if caught by surprise. His best friend had killed him, hadn't he? Betrayal wasn't anticipated often on this island, was it?

His eyes felt wet again. He held his eyes shut, explosions played out again. He wanted to scratch his eyes out.

Lorenzo was a rapist. He was a murderer. He was a monster. He'd hurt people even before the island. He'd hurt Diego, left him behind. He'd used Diego, and both of them knew it. Why did it still hurt looking at all the ways Lorenzo had been hurt? Why did it still hurt to see him dead? Why did Diego still mourn him after so many days, even after he knew everything?

Why did he still love him?

He was still thinking of those glimpses in the school hallway, those spare accidental glances he'd capture. He was still thinking of the time spent with Lorenzo, the nights spent together, even if they'd had no warmth traded between them, no conversations. He was still thinking of when Lorenzo saved his life, when he'd killed Dane for him, even though he didn't have to. He was thinking of each and every time, but it was all tainted, it was all ruined, it was all fucked. He knew, he knew, he knew this, and yet he was still thinking of those times. Why did it still matter to him? Why couldn't he just erase the memories? Why couldn't he only, solely, singularly hate Lorenzo, and just hate him?

Ty had tried consoling him. One act did not cancel the other, he'd claimed. Lorenzo had saved Diego's life because he'd mattered to Diego, in one way or another, and the fact that Diego valued that wasn't a bad thing, no matter what Lorenzo did. And, in hindsight, the words were coming from a biased place. Diego had loved a rapist, Ty had been best friends with one. So, the words didn't matter, they were to be disregarded. And, besides, despite all of Ty's positive feelings towards Lorenzo, he'd still been able to do the right thing in the end. He'd still been able to kill the fucker.

Diego was familiar with one of the bandages on Lorenzo's body. It was on his arm, it covered a gunshot wound. And, Diego knew that because he had wrapped it himself.

He could have easily killed Lorenzo several times. He'd been knocked down by Emil, and Emil had had allies in store. He could have helped them there. Lorenzo had slept while Diego had taken watch. He could've stabbed him with the shovel then. Diego had not known what Lorenzo had done then, but he was complicit in it anyways.

He'd been complicit in a lot lately, responsible for a lot. Explosions played out behind his eyes and bodies struggled beneath his grip and people screamed at the pull of his trigger and he felt bad for each and every one of those things, and he couldn't keep on doing that, he couldn't keep on feeling bad. He was so sick of it, he was so tired of it, but also he couldn't just keep doing bad things and feel bad for it. That wasn't how any of this worked. You didn't just get to be a bad person over and over again, feel sorry for it, and hope that it would even begin to make up for it. He would never be like Nico. He would never be a hero, he would never be redeemable.

Lorenzo had understood that. Again, that was why Diego had gone with him. Ty had mentioned that Lorenzo had had a lot of guilt bubbling beneath him, a lot of desire to be someone else, but he'd sure been good at hiding it. And, it was fucking disgusting that he had one more lesson to learn from Lorenzo, that he could be any more like Lorenzo, that he was going to be more like Lorenzo, but that was the answer right there. That was it. He couldn't fucking keep feeling sorry for himself. He didn't deserve to feel sorry for himself. He had to commit. If he was gonna be a monster, he was gonna be a monster. He had to lean into it.

He blinked. His eyes stayed closed. Bile collected in his throat. His chest felt tight. There was a sinking feeling in his gut every time, all the fucking time, whenever he closed his eyes whenever he breathed whenever he thought, and he wanted to tear at it he wanted it to be gone but it wouldn't be gone it wouldn't go away, so he just, he just had to dig into it, bury it deep with this shovel. He just had to lean into it.

He only needed to be a monster for a few more days. He only needed to be like Lorenzo for a few more days, and then he could spent the rest of his life making up for that. He would have all the time in the world to repent and cry and regret and try to redeem himself.

He forced his eyes open. His eyes settled on Lorenzo's face.

He'd loved him.

He'd learned so much from him.

Lean into it.

He fucking hated him.

He reached into his bag and got the shovel. This was not an impulse. This was not a reflex. He meant it this time. He meant every second devoted to this action. The gun was too loud, the grenade launcher was too impersonal. The shovel would be enough.

He weighed the shovel in his hand for a moment. It hadn't felt this light the first time he held it.

He pulled the shovel, the still-bloody shovel, from his bag, and he plunged it into Lorenzo's face. There was a sickening crack as his face caved in, like Emil's. Diego pulled the shovel out, it resisted slightly against the grip of flesh and bone, and he plunged it in again. And again. And again. He grunted and shouted and screamed each time. After the fifth or seventh or twentieth time, he plunged it into his guts, plunged the shard right in. The shovel pierced Lorenzo, destroyed him again, and again, and again, smooth bruised flesh giving way to the blade, dark brown clumps of blood falling out, flies scattering. And finally, finally, he aimed the shovel at Lorenzo's crotch, and twisted it in him, scraped and tore and ripped at him over and over and over, until there was nothing left to destroy.

Diego leaned on the shovel once he finished. Hung there for several moments. His eyes were open, settled on what was left of Lorenzo. He did that. He'd done it and he'd meant it.

He wiped tears and snot away from his face with his hand, the one he'd scarred. He meant it. He really did.

His eyes wandered back to Drew's body. He wondered if Drew was still watching him now. It didn't matter. It couldn't mattter.

Afterwards, he dipped the shovel in the lake, and he washed it clean of the blood and detritus. He noted to himself that he'd never get water from there again. He'd never be here again. And then he left.

((Diego Larrosa continues in life's alright in devil town))