Survival Of The Fittest

[Daniel Ozanne continued from Bro, I'm Straight Up Not Having A Good Time]

So far, no ladders or shovels. Their best bet was probably indoors somewhere, maybe in some tool shed or garage. Or a cabin campground thing, like the place Daniel and Taylor were currently approaching.

He expressed as much. "I mean, we're not gonna find ladders or a shovel lying around in the snow, right? Best to check around places like that," he gestured towards the cabin he was approaching, "first."

He sounded sure of himself - he hoped. He sounded like he had thought this through and had a plan of attack - not just for finding tools to help a guy out of a ditch, but for like, the day and the week and maybe the entire game? Who knows? Ooooh, dangerous.

Well, Daniel knew. And he knew he didn't know shit. But nobody else needed to know that. In truth, he was taking this not even day by day but moment by moment, putting down rails in front of him as he went. Once again, nobody else needed to know that. He just needed to keep himself occupied, keep doing something while he could do anything - eventually, inevitably, the game would come for him. Let it. He didn't control anything but his actions and his outward attitude.

And right now, he was keeping himself occupied by looking for ladders yeah, but also by looking after Taylor. Kinda. Maybe he just felt that good old Catholic guilt for accidentally triggering a panic attack in them, maybe it was just nice to have someone reasonable to talk to. And he finally got their pronouns along the way, so that bit of embarrassment on his part could be put to rest.

He stepped ahead, the really shitty gun still in hand as he approached the cabin door. One of the windows was broken, which was not a good sign - if anyone dangerous was in here, well, if nothing else, the gun could be good for a bluff.

"Alright, so I'm gonna look in here first and if there's anyone there, we can see if they're friendly or not," he explained, to Taylor, before turning to the door. It was hanging slightly ajar, and he couldn't hear any noise inside, so after a moment a moment of hesitation (though he would charitably spin it as assessment), he gently opened the door...

...and then slammed it shut again, with a gasp.

((Taylor Thorne continued from Bro, I'm Straight Up Not Having A Good Time))

Whenever Taylor got bent out of shape over something small, or even something serious, it almost always helped to have someone cool and rational nearby to talk them through things. Danny Boy was doing a good job of filling that role right now, talking reasonably about things as they tromped along through the snow. Tay nodded along as he explained the wisdom of searching places like buildings first. Which yeah, that made total sense and they could probably have worked it out on their own, but maybe with a much more meandering journey before getting to that conclusion, so they were going to give him credit for it.

They were also perfectly happy to hang back and let the guy with the big gun take point. Tay was never much for shooters, and they were feeling like, five thousand percent less in the mood for reenacting one in real life. Also, they didn't have a gun, so it would be more like a survival horror where they just walked into danger unarmed and ready to be devoured by zombies.

While Daniel approached the door, Taylor stood several paces behind, clutching the straps of their bag with both hands. They shot a nervous glance at the animal carcasses strung up across the camp; really making things lean much more towards the "Silent Hill" side of things than the "postcard landscape" side. When the door creaked further open, there was no answer that they could hear, and their gazed remained morbidly fixed on the dead wolves until Daniel jumped back and slammed the door shut again, causing Taylor's head to snap back towards him.

"Not, uh..." They tried to grin at him in a manner that was either reassuring or asking for reassurance, but they just ended up grimacing. "Not friendly?"

Shit, should they be running? All the trudging through snow had really caught up to them now that they had stopped. They didn't think they could start again on such short notice. But Daniel wasn't running for it just yet, so maybe things were somewhere in the neighborhood of "okay," or at least "not an immediate disaster."

He kept his hand on the door, and stared blankly ahead, as he stabilized his breath. It wasn't an immediate danger just... distressing! Extremely distressing! And it was very, very bad news, concerning their classmates. Weren't he and Marian discussing this possibility? That someone had already killed that is.

Well, at least he knew they weren't gonna all blow up tomorrow.

Another slow exhale, and he glanced back at Taylor, hand still on the door. "Not unfriendly. Dead."

There wasn't any sugarcoating it, and if they were gonna search this cabin (the thought kinda made Daniel's stomach churn but beggars couldn't be choosers), they'd have to face it eventually. Or, given the amount of blood Daniel saw, wade in it.

Dead wasn't telling the entire story, so Daniel continued. "It's pretty nasty, not gonna lie. The cabin floor's covered in blood. I don't know who it is, didn't get a good look at the face..."

His fingers on the door twitched, and he grimaced at the thought of having to identify the corpse.

"What." Taylor had heard Daniel perfectly, but they still looked at him in blank shock. "That's- I mean, you're joking right?" They tried to crack a smile but only ended up with a grimace.

"That's- dude. No."

One thing that Taylor hadn't yet done was the whole routine with sitting around and trying to convince themselves that this was all a bad dream. They loved the idea of lucid dreaming, for the most part. Dreamscapes were so weird and incredible in concept, and Tay loved to imagine freely exploring whatever psychedelic nonsense their sleeping brain came up with just like a video game. People had horror stories of course, real and fake. Stuff went wrong, dreams turned into nightmares. But you always woke up. The stories about people dying or summoning Satan and then dying or sleepwalking and turning into a serial killer (and then probably dying) were bullshit.

The point was, Tay had never had things go sideways like that. They'd never really succeeded in having an actual lucid dream that they remembered anyway, but dreams they could remember never really went off the rails like that. They never even dreamed about being late for class or anything, probably because they were late for class constantly in real life and it had stopped being nightmare material. As nice as it would have been to just sit and tell themselves this was all fake, crazy dumb shit that their mind had come up with because they ate a bunch of hot cheetos and then conked out on the bus, they couldn't.

"Who?" They asked Daniel through still-bared teeth. "Who- shit, how can you even be sure? They might have just- y'know, just fell down like Steve!"

(Wendy Kennedy, continued from Little Lost Bunny 2: Snow Job)

Wendy was tired and scared. She had been walking for hours since she left the research station. If she was going to find shelter somewhere else, hopefully it had a bed or a chair to rest on. These woods reminded Wendy of a horror movie. She kept expecting a monster or a crazed killer (student or not) to come out from behind one of the trees. As tired as she was, Wendy tried to keep an eye out for anything that could pose a threat.

In the distance was a cabin. As soon as Wendy noticed this, she hastened her pace. Finally, she could stop and rest. But upon closer inspection, she slowed her pace once more. She noticed that this cabin had dead wolf carcasses hanging from it. She stopped, taking in the grotesque scene. Wendy was about to puke, when she heard a door slam. It must have been the front door to the cabin. Someone, or maybe more, is here!

Wendy approached the cabin slowly. She could hear the voices of two people. From what she could make out, there was a dead body in the cabin. How did they know for sure it was a dead body? It could be someone playing dead like the last “dead” body she encountered. Regardless, Wendy wanted to sit down, and plopped a seat on one of those logs by the fire pit. This caused the one with green hair to turn around in surprise.

“Um, hi,” Wendy said, awkwardly waving her hand, “Don’t mind me. I’m just stopping to rest.”

"Yeah, sure, fell down and tore his throat open-"

Daniel stopped - and now that he thought of it, it was pretty lucky that Wendy (hah! Remembered her name!) arrived when she did, because he could feel himself getting just a touch irritated, when he had to keep his head cool. It wouldn't be right to go snapping at his traveling companion over denying something like that, but they did have to know the truth of the matter.

He looked away from Wendy, delaying greeting her for a moment to address something he felt was important.

"Just..." he took a deep breath, and stepped away from the door. "Just look for yourself if you wanna make sure. But don't say I didn't warn you," he said with a gesture towards it.

Looking back to Wendy, he returned her wave, the weariness on his face plain to see. There was no cheer in his greeting, like it was the silent version of mirthless laughter. He didn't mind her sticking around, maybe she'd even seen a shovel somewhere.

Tay's breath escaped back out through their clenched teeth in a hiss as Daniel snapped back at them. Their shoulders hunched in a little, defensive, because yeah okay that was probably stupid, they knew it was stupid, but they didn't always need to be told that something was stupid, you know? And Dan didn't have to go and illustrate the pretty picture waiting inside like that.

There was a momentary distraction though, a new arrival that Taylor turned to see, and the moment was all they needed for the fight to go out of them.

"Yeah, okay," they muttered, at both Wendy and Dan. What the heck did Wendy think she was up to, just parking it right there on a log while they were loudly arguing about a dead body, huh? Tay had poor situational awareness sometimes, but they were at least beating Wendy in that department, they guessed.

"Yeah," they repeated a little bit louder. "Fine, okay. I'm gonna go in." And they marched past Daniel and did just that, shoving the door open before they could stop and think about just what the hell they were really trying to prove.

Regret for their reckless actions had never sucker punched them so immediately, or so hard.

The blood, yeah, okay, horror movie shit. Taylor barely saw it. Or they saw it, but they didn't see it, you know, not as anything more than a color.

"Hey-" They tried to say. The words only came out in a choked whisper. "Hey, what do you mean-"

They didn't see any part of the cabin, really. They only saw the face, slack and pale.

"Robin-!" It was more of a dying gasp than a cry. The room was tilting.

Taylor registered the impact of their hands and knees hitting the cabin floor only faintly. There was no pausing and thinking about anything as they scrambled forward in the half-dried blood caking the area. "Robin- Robin, what-"

What are you doing? What happened? What? What do you mean? Desperate questions that would never reach their lips, demanding an explanation from the stupid idiot sprawled on the floor, unresponsive to Taylor's rapidly-approaching second panic attack of the day.

Wendy, curiosity overtaking her, got up from her spot near the fire pit, and approached the cabin. When she looked inside, Green Haired Person was on their hands and knees. Looks like the dead body in the cabin was the real deal. The green haired person sounded absolutely horrified. Wendy was also horrified by the site. She was getting flashbacks to what had happened in the research station. The vomit, the leg slashing. She covered her mouth, trying not to vomit herself.

“Was… was that your friend?,” she asked, swallowing hard.

The moment Taylor opened the cabin door, Daniel realized he fucked up.

He stared through the open door, wide-eyed, finally forcing himself to look at the bloodied face of the corpse. He knew him, he might not have liked him all that much but dear god, he didn't deserve this. None of them deserved this. Taylor didn't deserve this. He fucked it up for them again.

Wendy's voice faintly registered. "Not my friend, but Tay-"

"Taylor..."

He rushed into the cabin, and kneeled by them again, wracking his brain for something he could say. Just take this one step at a time like he did back in the woods, and they'd both get through this again. He took a deep breath, but his eyes fell on Robin's face, which had been leaking out all his blood through the head and neck for god knows how long, and he just couldn't say anything to push it away.

"Robin!" Tay felt like they were using every ounce of strength in their body to force the word out, but their voice was tiny and cracked on the last note. "Robin!"

They grabbed for his face, some devastated, panic-blind part of their brain fixated on the thought of forcing him to stop making that horrible expression, but his skin was ice-cold and waxy. His eyes were glazed over. It was honestly merciful when their vision started to blur with tears and took him out of focus. "Ro- who the fuck-" Taylor kept trying to talk, babbling out half-questions to Robin's body even as they began to sob.

"Who- who the fuck did this?"

Wendy watched Green Haired Person touch the corpse of their friend. It really was a sad sight. Wendy wondered if any of her friends were alright. The corpse was proof that one, if not more students had given in and started to play this game. Wendy also wondered if push came to shove, would she have to try and play the game too? She wanted to purge such a thought from her mind, but she couldn’t help but worry about it.

Wendy walked over to Green Haired Person, and put her hand on their shoulder.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Wendy said.

It wasn't that Daniel had nothing to say. He just knew that nothing he could say would make any of this easier. The next morning, the announcements would ring out and answer Taylor's question, but he had a hunch that it wouldn't give them the peace they wanted. Instead, he suspected, the announcements wanted to be a spark to the tinder the terrorists had been carefully arranging.

Wendy was coming over to comfort Taylor, and no matter how little faith Daniel had in her ability to do so, he stood up and looked around the cabin. He paced, glancing into corners. They were, after all, here for a purpose. If Taylor wasn't up for it, Daniel could keep himself occupied, and forge a path ahead for them to follow. He just had to focus on the mission, look for shovels and not at dead bodies.

Maybe his vision was getting worse, but he couldn't see a shovel or a ladder around here, so...

"T-Taylor," he whispered, walking back over. "We'll find out tomorrow morning."

He took another breath in. "I don't see any shovels or ladders around here. I think... we should leave."

Tay jerked away from Wendy's touch, but they were shaking too badly for it to really make a difference. "I'm not-" They choked out. "I- We ca-an't leave him like this!"

This was the part where they woke up, right? The part where everything was peak horrible, where you felt your heart stopping. That was when you woke up safe in bed, heart in your throat, but unharmed. Okay. You woke up and everything was okay.

So why the fuck was Taylor still sitting here in Robin's tacky half-dried blood? Why was he still laying there exactly as cold and stiff and awful as a haunted house mannequin?

Stupid questions, obviously. Just questions that they didn't want to answer. If all it took to wake themselves up in a different reality was pinching, Tay could have gone the extra mile and peeled all their fucking skin off right now to get there. But they couldn't really. They didn't try. They couldn't make themselves move off the floor.

"We've gotta- gotta- Dan, we have to- cover him. We've gotta. I can't-" They were crying too hard to be really coherent. Fuck, it didn't really matter who. Tay was barely processing what came out of their mouth. Just- there were things you did in situations with dead people, right, motions you had to go through. Cover them, show them some respect. Say a few words about how they always lit up the room and shit.

Robin was always so lively.

Green Haired Person didn't want to be touched. It was understandable, they were going through a lot of grief. They said they didn't want to leave their dead friend like this. Exposed to the elements, without a proper burial.

Wendy got an idea. She exited the cabin and rummaged through her duffle bag. She found her first aid kit and pulled out the emergency blanket. She returned inside the cabin and held out the blanket.

"Here," said Wendy, "We could cover him with this."

Daniel didn't say anything to Taylor. Maybe he wasn't as good at this as he thought. Actually, no, could you even blame him for not being prepared for this? Like shit, comforting someone at a funeral or through a breakup would be one thing, and when the body was right fucking there, still kind of bleeding, it was another thing, oh god, don't look at the body-

He looked to Wendy, holding the blanket that was in the first aid kids.

"That's pretty generous of you," he said. "You're sure you're not gonna miss it?"

Though he tried to keep Tay in the corner of his eye, it was kind of hard to do that and also keep the corpse out of sight. He never did like the idea of an open-casket funeral.