Nothing is Permanent but Change

[Dr Adjective]

[Evie McKown stayed up til Dawn and beyond.]

Evie rose before the sun did. No time to wait on the pale light to illuminate the grimy little room and rouse Claire for her, the two of them had to be up and alert. People were out there trying to kill each other, and Evie had had a more-than-close-enough brush with that already. So she wanted to be prepared. Perhaps not actively get the drop on anyone, but at least avoid being gotten-the-drop-on. Was that a real phrase? Fuck’s sake, even in a situation like hers, Evie couldn’t stop her mind wandering. Would have to rein that in.

She crossed the small space, and gave Claire a gentle shake. Then slightly harder. Repeat until results.

As it turned out, her timing was rather impeccable. Just in time for her to have gotten bored of imagining ever more elaborate scenes of her revenge on Alex and woken her new ally, Mr. Danya’s clock struck 9am, and it was time to wake up anyone who wasn’t already lucid. The amiable presentation clashed with the grisly content in a way that didn’t even anger Evie, so much as irritate her. She felt that she should be angry at this Tracen guy for how cheerfully matter-of-fact he was being about their situation, but more than anything she just found it to be grating. Right up until names started dropping.

Heh. Dropping. Like flies?

Evie grimaced. She should be angry at herself for that one.

Front and centre was Kitty Graves. Ash’s weird sister. Part of Evie told her that she shouldn’t be surprised, but nonetheless, she still was. Kitty was odd, sure, but it wasn’t like she had Killer Energy or anything. Hadn’t she had some kind of falling out with Robin not long before the trip, though? But was that really enough to drive someone to murder? No time to dwell on it, however, as the list kept on rolling. Ethan three in. That one hurt, but still the list went on, no time to process, no time to grieve. There were names she knew in passing. She could put faces to them, surface details. She felt guilty for that. Those names should’ve hit her like bricks, but the impact felt dull somehow. Maybe because someone had already tried to stab her dead, or her mind was trying to dwell just on Ethan? But the handful of acquaintances that followed Robin didn’t quite affect Evie as strongly as she felt that they should. She faintly remembered Janice having been sort of rude to her and Beatrice recently, being kind of abrasive in general. Now she got to remember Janice as having murdered Tristana, that nice girl who was into ghosts and stuff. And she could feel bad for not really knowing either of them.

There was a pause. Evie had just a moment to reflect. To regret growing distant from Ethan in recent months. She could've been a better friend over lockdown. Too late now.

The impact was anything but dull when Kitty came up again. Two people in one day? And rapidly enough to only have three others between that and her first? Moreover, Iliya. Evie definitely knew her. There was video evidence of it, the two of them Skateballing with Steve and Mitch and the others. Evie had shot a gun at that girl. That girl was now dead. Weird feeling. Next up Janice joined her as a second double-killer. Then some more people she didn’t really know that well. The phrase “a million is a statistic” came to mind: it was hard to fully appreciate the horror when there was just so fucking much of it. If she’d been told on a regular school day that Constance Blanchet had died, Evie wouldn’t exactly have been devastated, but it would’ve hit her harder than it did when it followed eight other classmates that had also been killed the very same day.

No, what devastated her was the very next one. Steven Dodds. Nobody called him that. Tracen didn’t know the boy. Evie knew him. She knew his name was EXTREME STEVE.

Evie fell back into her chair.

She sat in silence as the eleventh and final killing was reported. As Tracen explained that apparently Betty’s particular rock-based bludgeoning of Oakley had earned her a prize, tucked away in the otherwise off-limits cave. It washed over her. Steve was dead. That dumbass was supposed to live forever. He got hurt all the time, and it never kept him down, because he was going to live forever.

Didn’t even get to make himself immortal with his YouTube channel.

Or maybe he would now? Maybe years from now, morbid curiosity would draw kids like Alex fucking Avanesian to watch he and her playing skateball, and wonder if they were even real, or if it was all a government psyop to scare them into voting a certain way.

Tears welled in the pits of her eyes.

Fuck him.

Her leg whipped out and kicked over the desk in front of her.

Fuck his bullshit conspiracy club.

Just, fuck.

Evie immediately regretted it as the awkward motion and its recoil shot daggers of pain into her half-healed midriff. She stood, clutched at the bandages with one hand, tossed the chair aside with the other. Finally screamed “FUCK!” at the top of her lungs. Regretted that too, immediately feared drawing unwanted attention. They’d have to move soon.

In a lower voice, she continued. Kicked the fallen chair out of her way, paced around muttering.

“Fuck you, Alex. Fuck you Zemmyslav! Fuck you Jezzie! Fuck you, Tracen! Fuck kind of name is fucking Tracen anyway? Fuck! FUCK!”

She kicked the chair again. Something about the cold made the impact hurt even more. A dull ache permeated through her foot, and Evie was laden with yet more regret.

“What the fuck are we gonna do, Claire? It’s… it’s fucking… it’s for fucking real, isn’t it?”

Evie rarely cursed. She didn’t like to present herself that way: she was likeable, she was inoffensive. She hoped her family wasn’t watching her, but it didn’t stop her. What more eloquent word was there for her situation than “fucked”? How else to present herself but devastated, angry, screaming through tears? Her whole life she’d been insulated from death. All four grandparents alive, all eight of their parents dead before Evie’s birth. No lost uncles or aunts, no tragic cousins gone too early. She even chose to keep death off of her plate, chose to set her sights on veterinary medicine rather than think about non-humans dying. How else was a girl like Evie to respond to eleven of her peers killed in a single day?

She’d modulated who she was for other people her whole life. Could at least have the decency to die as herself, right?

It was that, or live forever or die trying.

[Evie McKown heads out with Claire thereafter, it's playtime.]