Survival Of The Fittest

((Corbin Azinger continued from Dirty Harry))

Corbin hadn't budged. He'd gone from silently weeping on the floor to falling asleep in the same position. His stuff was still littered all over the floor and his face was still encrusted with dried blood, now coming from his eye and nose in addition to the ragged cut on his forehead. He wasn't quite awake enough to care how it looked, though. His head hurt like God had punched him in the face, and it was massively slowing down any effort to get up. He could fret over his scattered supplies and missing shoe and fucked up face and busted ankle when he was done having his head split open.

Eventually, the silence was broken by the sound of a door creaking open, shortly followed by a hushed gasp.

((Lillian Larsen continued from Puppet Girl))

It'd been several hours since Lily and Amaryllis buried Piper, the two having spent most of that time travelling eastwards along the old road, save for a brief stop at Richard's campsite. Despite promising to arrive before sunrise, Lily still clung onto the hope that Richard and Iris were waiting for them, that she could keep the group together despite Liya's death.

Unfortunately, it was almost noon by the time they finally returned to find an empty campsite. She couldn't blame them really, or expect them to linger in the cold when they had their own friends they needed to seek out. A part of her couldn't help but wonder if they would've made it back in time if they hadn't opted to bury Piper as well, though she was quick to quash that thought. Mulling over what could have beens wasn't going to help anyone, especially now that it was just her and Amaryllis.

Still, from the look of things Dickie had left a trail of sorts for them to follow, which was a good sign. There was no guarantee that it wouldn't get disturbed or that they'd be able to follow it correctly, but it at least gave them some sense of direction to take.

Regardless of how well they were able to follow it, one way or another they found themselves heading further east until they ended up at the research station. Lily figured it was Dickie's most likely destination, especially since they likely would have crossed paths had they gone the other way back to town. That still begged the question as to where in that station Dickie and Iris would be most likely to hold up, not to mention who else they were likely to bump into there. She held little doubt that there would be a fair few of their classmates taking shelter there, some of whom may be less willing to share it than others.

The fact that the entire station gave her strong John Carpenter vibes didn't exactly help either.

After being out in the cold for so long, she wasn't in the mood for lingering around. As such, she and Amaryllis made their way towards the nearest building they could find, cautiously opening the door to see what shelter was on offer...

In this case, what they found was another body, laying there with a bloodied head in the middle of a gymnasium with their things strewn across the floor.

"Oh you gotta be fuckin' kidding..." Lily gasped, not thinking twice before rushing in to check the boy's pulse. "Please - PLEASE - don't be another dead body!"

Amaryllis could hardly care anymore if this was another dead body or not. Especially when she recognized who that potential corpse belonged to. Nevermind the fact that ROTC in general, conceptually, was a blight on education, a bona-fide Hitler Youth program for the American Empire—Corbin in particular was just the kind of mentally inconsistent ambivalently political white Christian man ripe for recruitment into the fold of cryptofascist state religion. All of this made him an acceptable target, morally, but from a pragmatic standpoint such allowances were unnecessary. He was a meathead with firearm experience—it was good for them both that he was incapacitated, or dead, and ready to be looted.

The more they were vultures, the less they needed to be wolves.

[Amaryllis Peszek-Byrne continued from Puppet Girl]

She lingered at the door to the gym as Lily went over to check on Corbin. The thought crossed her mind that this could be a trap, that he could be feigning injury. Amaryllis looked around the emptied weight room, but found nowhere for an ambush to hide. Only then did she move after Lily, spurred on by a warming feeling of shame in her chest.

"Is he..." Amaryllis started to ask, and trailed off.

Something moved finally in the corner of the room. Amaryllis turned to face it, and found her own reflection staring back, caught in a mirror across from the vacant weight rack.

The boy on the floor curled in on himself, clutching his head and groaning. Someone had hurried to his side and started loudly fretting over him; a kind gesture if not for how badly the noise exacerbated his aching head.

"Not so... loud."

Lily let out a sigh of relief, turning her head to Amaryllis. "He's alive..." she said quietly, before turning back to check in on Corbin.

Given the unpleasant experiences she'd had with the Worship and Prayer crowd, she wasn't exactly enthused about bumping into a guy like him. They were far from friends, what with Corbin being your classic All-American conservative religious type, whilst she was a dirty liberal Satanist who probably ate babies. The fact that he was friends with asshats like Matthew and Bellamy didn't exactly help either.

However, given that they had bigger things to worry about, she was quick to put those intrusive thoughts aside. Like it or not they were all stuck in this mess together, and she wasn't going to refuse a help a guy in need just because they didn't see eye to eye.

"Eeeeasy there soldier, you're in safe hands..." said Lily in a hushed tone, quickly unzipping her duffle bag to start rummaging for her medkit. "What happened here?" she asked, briefly turning back to Amaryllis.

Amaryllis could mask it to the others, but there was no lying to herself about what she was, and that was disappointed.

Lily looked back, and Amaryllis felt something expectant in her gaze. Exhaling from her nose, Amaryllis crouched down beside Lily and started looking over Corbin. The Vanguard had gone to a field medicine training camp, once, and Amaryllis had paid halfway attention. Something else was on her mind that day; a bike ride she took the weekend before into the city, an errand for turntable repair equipment to a music store, and the diversion that followed. She waved the thought from her head like a bad smell, in this case cow shit.

But it didn't take a reverie to see what was probably going on here.

"From the noise sensitivity and blow to the head, I'd say concussion," she said, "at the very least. Maybe broken nose, and blackened eye. He's been hit, badly. Do we... we don't have ice, no."

She bit her lower lip, picking at a bit of dead skin hanging off the side.

"We should get him to drink some water first."

Paging Doctor Obvious to the Emergency Room.

"Hurts..."

Corbin managed to weakly raise his head, looking through his one good eye at the new arrivals. The two were a blur through the fog clouding his brain; their voices were vaguely familiar, but he was struggling to put two and two together on why that was. He hoped maybe they'd say each others names and he wouldn't have to ask for them.

"F-Fell off a roof. Fucked up my ankle. Then I..."

His voice caught a bit. He wasn't sure he'd ever felt as low as he did right now. Losing the fight against Abhishek and needing all this tending to made him feel incredibly pathetic and helpless.

"I found Abhishek, a-and we... fought. And he won."

They didn't need the details of why they'd fought. Embarrassment aside, it'd just make him look like an asshole. Much as he hated needing the help, the truth is that he did need it, and he couldn't jeopardize it with honesty - even if lying like that lay bitter on his tongue.

"I..."

He lowered his head again, eyes averted from the girls - all the better to hide the tears of humiliation threatening to form. With his eye swollen shut and his head spinning the way it was, it's not like he could even really make them out, anyway.

"... I do need help, so... thank you."

Lily nodded her head, turning back to the emergency exit they arrived via. "Well, if ice would help, I doubt there's any shortage of it outside..."

Truth be told she wasn't sure if snow would really suffice, granted from what she knew about concussions there wasn't much else you can do other than make sure it didn’t get any worse. She reached down into her bag for her bottled water, only to stop and look around to see if any of Corbin's bottles were amongst the items strew across the floor. Sure enough there was one laying not far from his bag, Lily crawling over to grab it before returning to Corbin, unscrewing the lid and placing it into the injured boy's hand so that he could help himself to a chug.

She chewed over Corbin's account of what had happened to him, listening with both care and caution in her eyes. After their encounter with Janice she was a little hesitant to take the words of her classmates at face value, not wanting to make that same mistake twice in a row.

Abishek being the apparent assailant surprised her more than she thought it would, after all from what she knew of the guy he was more of a provocateur than the kind of person who would attack someone. Granted, assuming he was still up to his usual antics, she could easily picture him pressing the wrong buttons and instigating a fight. Maybe even intentionally? Who knows, after the announcement she had to accept that potentially any of her classmates could resort to violence, unprovoked or otherwise.

That included the very boy she was tending to of course, Lily unable to help but think back to the fable about the scorpion and the frog. She always hated that one in particular.

Regardless, one part of Corbin's story made her pause for thought, something about it making her raise a brow in confusion.

"Don't mention it..." she replied, brows furrowing as she pondered his words. "I'm sorry, but... Did you say you fell off a roof?"

Abhishek was, in the most charitable terms, a fellow traveler, an ideological ally on the leftward path. Though he could be a bit of a shithead a lot of the time, he was more agreeable than the boy before her. That he had come to blows with Corbin was not a surprise; his victory, however, was. It was a victory likely owed to Corbin's incapacitation via roof plummeting, but a victory nonetheless. Was it a contradiction, then, to take care of an enemy defeated by an ally? Would Abhishek want the job finished instead? It was likely. But proper conduct prevailed; he was, for all intents and purposes, a prisoner of war, and he was owed what a prisoner was owed. On the more pragmatic, less idealistic side, an indebted Corbin was more useful than a murdered one. Especially since Amaryllis, if she decided it was her duty to mete out corporal punishment, could likely not justify her actions to Lily.

Lily who had a good point; there would be ice outside, and plenty of it. Some snow in a bag would do as well. What to put it in, though? At a nurse's office, the ice would come in a small plastic bag, tightly wound. The closest analogue that Amaryllis could conceive of was a water bottle which, if left out in the cold, could freeze on its own. They had some surplus bottles, too. Yes, that would do. She would go and put a bottle out in the cold, wait a few minutes, and then go back for it.

But then Lily asked a question. A clarification was called for. Truth be told, Amaryllis had raised an eyebrow at the falling off of the roof part, but she figured it could have happened for any reason. Now that it was being returned to, however...

"I'm curious about that too," she said, "did you fall or were you pushed?"

Amaryllis could go outside after he explained. Now, she wanted to hear his answer.

He managed to tilt his head towards the other girl, a look of mild confusion on his battered face.

"I just... fell. I woke up on a roof with no obvious way down, so I tried to climb it. Got a gash in my head and a sprained ankle for the trouble."

He attempted to sit up straight, but quickly lowered himself again, clutching his head as it pounded from the motion.

"Aaaaaaooooowww..."

"You... Woke up on the..."

Lily blinked, before rubbing her brow as she let out an audible groan. She was about to say something when Corbin let out an even louder one, reaching out for his bag to pull it over so that he had something relatively soft to lay his head on. "Careful there..." she says quietly, before turning to her comrade. "Am, could you fetch some snow or something from outside?"

She let out a sigh, an irked look on her face as she chewed over Corbin's words, turning back to him. "I'm sorry to hear that. Like... That's just ridiculous" she says, trying to stay quiet despite the growing anger in voice. "I mean, I can't believe the... The GALL of these people. Like, I woke up stuffed into a coffin, my friend woke up in a ditch... I heard in one of the older runs someone once woke up on top of a roller coaster, fell off and broke his neck right off the bat! Like, how the hell is any of that supposed to be fair?"

Lily rubbed her brow some more. "These... These fucking hypocrites going on about their pseudo-darwinist bullshit, and how they're making some big political statement, and yadda yadda... They're just fucking around, aren't they? Making us start in bizarre places where we get hurt through no fault of our own, assigning us joke weapons like dildos and condoms... This isn't Survival of the Fittest, it's Survival of the Luckiest! Our lives are in the hands of..."

She buried her face into her hands and groaned, frustrated and disappointed at the sheer audacity of her situation. "Oh my god, we've been kidnapped by a bunch of shitposters..."

Lily took a deep breath, running her hand through her hair before turning back. "Sorry, I'm ranting, it's just... It all just makes me so ffffucking..." she continues, biting her lip, before exhaling. "Like, if they're gonna force us all to muderise each other, they could at least be consistent about their dogma y'know?"

Corbin's story tracked. Amaryllis nodded along as Lily attested to their own experience so far, and went on a tirade about just how unfitting the name of this grand experiment was given its own set-up. That they were shit-posters—pranksters, really—Amaryllis couldn't really agree with; for if this was true, she would expect more absurdity, as an ongoing influence, something that would intrude from time to time. No, that couldn't be it—she still believed that the terrorists were making some sort of point, and that highlighting the absurdity of life itself could not be it, that it was disqualified as a potential point. Because if that was the point, why repeat the event so often? Why make the same point eight times if that point boiled down to 'life is absurd and unfair,' something any teenager would at least think they were intimately familiar with?

But then again, the point was not, could not be for the participants; it was for the audience. Amaryllis and all of the others were only a means to an end for these people. Whatever end that was—that was the question.

So Amaryllis stood and nodded, agreeing with Lily about how she wished she knew a little more about what was going on.

"Right," Amaryllis said, "I'll go get some snow for your, uh, everything."

Her bag was hanging off her shoulder; there was no need to get the bottle out now. She simply turned, walked a few paces away, and tripped over something in the middle of Corbin's clutter.

It wasn't a bad fall—she caught herself on her hands, not entirely making it all the way to the ground. But it did startle her. Had she missed a dumbbell, moved out of place? No, this was underfoot, not at ankle level, all the way on the ground. A broom, then? It rolled, sort of, but not all the way. Amaryllis picked herself up and looked down, ready to take whatever horrid cleaning implement and split it in two over her knee.

What she saw made her gasp. She did not know how she missed it earlier—it must have blended in with all of the clutter, and Corbin and Lily must have distracted her. Just when she stopped looking for a weapon, too (did she manifest it herself?). Amaryllis tossed her lacrosse stick away like a crumpled piece of paper. She had no use for that now except as memento, and she would keep it with her, likely—but this was a game changer, quite literally, and as she knelt down to pick it up off of the ground she could not help but smirk.

Thanks, Abhi.

"Is this yours?" Amaryllis said, holding it aloft.

But, well, no. She already knew the answer to that question.

It was her trident now.

He looked her way again, squinting a bit, face still bearing a pained grimace.

"Is that... oh yeah."

He sighed, relieved. Thank God Abhishek or some other piece of crap hadn't gone and stolen it. He was already so battered he couldn't fathom trying to walk anywhere without the thing.

"Been using it to get around. Can barely put weight on my ankle without it."

He turned his head down, looking at the busted ankle. He groaned in annoyance; he'd only just remembered he hadn't retrieved his shoe.

"Hey... y'all know where my boot is? I took it off when Abhi was tending to me, but the little freak beaned me in the eye with it."

The sudden thud behind her caught Lily off-guard, jolting and turning back to check that Amaryllis hadn't hurt herself. "You alright, Am?"

Fortunately she appeared to be fine, though as it turned out she'd quite literally stumbled across a trident of all things hidden amidst the clutter. Corbin's trident to be precise, the hint of elation in Amaryllis' voice prompting Lily to raise her brow. She looked up at Amaryllis in much the same way a concerned parent would, watching as their child eagerly showed off the magnum they found hidden in a bedside cabinet. Whilst she didn't think Amaryllis would do anything untoward with Corbin's weapon, she couldn't deny that she would have felt a lot more relieved if her comrade put it back down.

For the moment however she said nothing, her thoughts derailed when Corbin asked about his boot, pausing for the briefest of seconds before looking around. "Uh, yeah, I think I saw it right..." she replied, her eyes scanning the clutter around them before spotting his discarded footwear laying a couple feet away. "...here!"

She crawled over to pick it up, looking it over before glancing back at Corbin, trying to picture the scenario that unfolded less than 24 hours earlier. She imagined Abhi squaring off with Corbin, the two circling each other before Abhi pulled back and yeeted that boot like a baseball right at the other boy's head, clocking him hard enough to send him crashing to the ground. The sheer audacity of it all was almost comedic, were it not for Corbin's likely concussion and the thought that other similar exchanges were going on across the entire island, some potentially ending with deadly consequences.

Trying to shake the troubling thought off, Lily brought the boot over and returned it to Corbin, looking back up at Amaryllis as she possessively held onto that trident...

Why would Corbin admit that? Did he honestly think he'd get the trident back?

"Here," Amaryllis said, picking her lacrosse stick off the ground and tossing it over to Corbin, "you can use this for now. I'm going to get you some ice, and I'm taking this, for protection."

She waved over her shoulder, not turning to see if it was returned, and walked out of the gym. It was a brief jaunt through the hallway to find an emergency exit door, unwired and unhooked from the unpowered alarm system. A gust of wind buffeted the research complex; if her hair was down, it would be all over her face by now. From her shoulder bag she removed a water bottle, unscrewed the top, and stuck it top-up in the snow.

This was a fool's errand. It wasn't cold enough outside for the water to freeze. She'd have to pick up some already-melting snow and find a way to carry it inside. The question was, in what? Any of the extra bags (looted or her own) were too big and too thick to really act as an effective ice-bag. Ideally there'd be some plastic, a returning, recycled thought—Amaryllis took the bag off her shoulder and fished out her First Aid Kit, rummaging through for anything worth stuffing with snow.

In a few minutes, she returned holding one of the latex gloves, filled with melting slush.

"Catch!"

She tossed it across the room, and watched it fall short of either Corbin or Lily.